NECK DEEP ToC

 

Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.

At one point, say, the late 1800s, just before Dr. Thaddeus Cahill invents (these things are fuzzy of course—often inventions are incremental increases in existing technologies just significant enough to be seen as something completely new) the electric typewriter, this would have meant more than it does today. That is, the 768 instances of "Me." above—and don't forget the single space after each period. which means another keystroke for each instance*—would have meant more in 1895 than it does today. Physically speaking, the work required to generate the 768 instances above on a manual typewriter, where you'd have to press each key hard enough to get the system of levers moving the type bar through an inked ribbon to hit the paper, was far greater than the work it required (work is equal to force times distance, remember) to generate this page on a computer. One reason people get carpal tunnel now is because the physical act of typing (itself lessened by about 95% in electric typewriters as compared to manuals) doesn't require as much work now as it did then, so it's easier for the hands to become lazy and just rest, and not for us to arch our fingers enough etc. It would have taken me, in eighth grade, when I typed 54 words per minute in our class just recently rechristened keyboarding instead of the older typing, approximately 14.2 minutes to generate that page, possibly longer when you think about the fatigue that sets in typing the same letters over and over—no variety of motion at all, just simple repetition—and of course this was on an electric typewriter, not even one of the old manual machines. For me it took less than thirty seconds. I typed "Me. Me. Me." on my Titanium 15" Powerbook keyboard, which isn't all that comfortable, really, though I've gotten used to it because of the ease it otherwise affords, and then highlighted in Dreamweaver, copy-and-pasted a few times until I had a few lines, then copy-and-pasted that a few times, and came up with a good solid page of text, all text about me with a capital M in front. It's almost nothing. I didn't have to think about it much. It's easy to do. You try it.

So how much does it mean? What work does it do given that it took vastly fewer minutes, calluses, and calories?

I make broadsides, mostly pretty artistic, fine-press sorts of productions, for poetry and fiction readings at Grand Valley State University, the college that currently employs me. I don't know if anyone really cares that these broadsides get made or not as a condition of my employment, so I do them out of a love of the artifact of the broadside, the mementos that they are, and the simple beauty of elegantly typeset lines of verse. Mostly I do these by offset printer (printing press) or by laser printer in my office. I don't handset the type for a Vandercook letterpress, though I have done that too. When you're handsetting every letter, pulling them out of the type cases, which are sort of strangely arranged, and setting them in lines, you have a lot of time to think about the process of production, and about the words you are laboring over. I do most of my design in Adobe InDesign which takes care of a lot for you. For instance it automatically kerns (spaces) prose, and handles line breaks and widows and orphans, mostly, and the sorts of details typographers love, like ligatures and old style figures, and all of that. I can turn on those options if I'm using a good OpenType typeface and let it do its thing. I print these broadsides, 50-500 normally, depending. Sometimes I'll finish them with a deckle or ragged edge, or by burning the edges of the broadsides for effect. I might use some spray-on fixer like hairspray to keep the toner from dusting off on hands and slacks. I have thrown red wine across broadsides for effect. And applied rubber stamps. Spray painted. The list goes on.

Ain't I fancy? Is this essay about me? Is all nonfiction about the me, the I, the eye trained in on the self?

I did one broadside for the writer Mark Ehling at the University of Alabama by laser-printing this fake reproduction letterhead on a nice cotton paper and then by hand-typing the text on one of the few coveted electric typewriters in the university. I did about 80 using this method. Each time I would make mistakes and either go back and XXX them out or just type over them, throw on some new line breaks (the piece was prose, so it didn't matter as much what the text block looked like), and make each broadside a completely different production. By the time I was halfway through I knew Mark's work, a couple short paragraphs, intimately. I began to hate them, to hate him for writing them, and to hate the inventor of the typewriter, an IBM Selectric I think I was using, for putting me in this position. There was also some self-loathing.

What I'm trying to say, though, is that each broadside I did that way meant more than the other ones I do. Maybe not to the average reader who sees it, says cool, and brings it home folded up, or leaves it there, but for me, for the act of production, of creation.

I have a lot of semi-thought-out theories about the mechanisms of production writers have used, and about how (or whether) the technologies they used (longhand, dictation, typewritten, Microsoft Word, Pagemaker, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Flash, etc.) affected the work they did. I'm a little too lazy to go very far with that conceit in terms of busting out my close reading and lit. crit. chops and such, but it's a salient point. I'm creating this in a program that specializes in bringing together these different formatted items (images: GIF, JPEG, PNG; interactive stuff like Flash and Shockwave buttons; sound; movie clips; text; hyperlinks; javascript and other programming elements) in a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get is how the acronym works, something not really possible until word processing programs like Microsoft Word, originally called "Multi-Tool Word", began to be able to display fonts onscreen as they would actually appear) format. I wonder how this affects the words I am writing—do they mean less, or more, or something different.

Especially weird is the thought that this is being created for the web only, not for the page, with no thought of 8.5" x 11" paper (or in Europe the A4 sheet) with the standard margins that Word thinks acceptable or the other constraints (or pleasures—this goes both ways, as many people don't like reading longer texts onscreen, and love the feeling of crisp new paper in their hands) of the page. I am also not editing it in the same way, given that it's there for free. You didn't pay for this. It's an extra. A promotional item, maybe. Or an attempt to extend the idea of what a book can do in an explicit way. And as it's here for you, it's like the opposite of solipsism, a piece of writing explicitly intended as communication. It's like getting your own personalized email from me to you, except that I don't have your email address, and you'd probably just delete it out of hand as spam anyhow.

Or maybe it's a bonus for the portion of readers who go online to get more out of a book, having been burned before by the lameness of promotional websites for books that should have great websites, like Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves—I am writing this for you, dear reader that just wants more. Or maybe it's like the bonus materials / special features you find on DVDs that mostly—let's admit it now—suck, are useless, in spite of the promises made by proponents of the technology.

Now DVDs have this space, and viewers do expect the extras. Sometimes they are great, like Peter Jackson's work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or in my awesome (and I mean that—it inspires awe, even in the packaging) Alien Quadrilogy DVD set (9 DVDs, 2 cuts of each movie plus a pile of bonus stuff, and amazing fold-out packaging—the artifact of it is sexy as all hell). And sometimes they are not. But consumers want those extras. And now CDs that come packaged with videos, multimedia stuff, some live tracks, an extra DVD for fans who care enough not to simply download them on the internet. So technology has created this space, a kind of vacuum that waits to be filled.

I am trying to fill it up with words, with words that make some kind of meaning.

I am trying to make this mean something to you, more than just the physical act of its creation, all these words being clicked out by my keyboard through electrical impulse to the screen.

You get to watch me shuck and jive.

I am putting the me back in memoir here for you. Not that I think of Neck Deep or this exactly as a memoir, but it is tied up in memoir, all writing is, in memory and starlight light and the chain links of our pasts.

Think this as performance, then, and not just my normal tendency to wrap myself up in myself. I remember first hearing the word solipsism in college, others applying it to my work on occasion—as a critique, probably, but I never understood the problem with being solipsistic. It seemed good—to make a world, though it was perhaps hermetic and overly-heady—and it sounded kind of sciency and nasty in the way that literary criticism has tried to bring other disciplines to bear on literature as if they were engineers applying new technologies to a particularly tricky mining problem.

I am taking advantage (sort of—note the dearth of multimedia crap on this page, no javascript kicking ass, no techy trickeration taking place) of the possibilities of the software. It allows me to generate more words and to try to metabolize the ways in which writing has meant in the past.

I type everything, though I have a set of journals, steno books mostly, not a moleskine or whatever, that I use when I can't have my laptop in my lap warming me like a cat. Occasionally I'll start something longhand in a steno pad and try to work it out on the page before transferring it to Word or Dreamweaver. And the work changes, almost immediately. It's really weird to watch if you watch closely. What if I was writing everything in InDesign, which lets you do a pile of amazing effects with type on the page? And at the same time, what is lost in this, in the technology that, in trying to make things easier, reduces your options (see the Word autocorrect and what it does to the first letters of lines in my poems when I try to work on it; just try to write a line and then write the next at a ten degree angle up, radiating from the center of the page). It's not that you can't do it, but the software doesn't anticipate it, doesn't encourage that sort of play, that particular kind of construction or creative impulse. Which is probably mostly fine. I mean, how much has the ideogram or concrete poetry really done for the world? I like Apollinaire as much as the next guy, but when it comes down to it I like my horizontal lines of text, running left to right across the page—those rules are complicated enough when it comes to language, to the way I think of writing. And most people appear to agree with this—we mostly like our poetry straight, at least the we of us who like poetry at all.

I suspect I am always going to be revisiting this question, re-solving (if not resolving) this problem. As a plus, since it's on the web, it is ephemeral—I can wipe this out at a later date and there will be no record of it here (aside from the ghostly trails in google or websites that archive all old sites, the secret memories of the world). Except with you, if you got here at all, if you got this far into the netherworld. Which makes this a bit of a risk, but not the usual risk associated with publishing, committing one's words to 5000 (if you're lucky) paperback copies forever.

I'm not sure what this says about me.

Thus far, 8 out of 17 paragraphs in the essay start with I. It is nonfiction. It is about the world, but the world reflected slash refracted in the lens. It is about the past tense and present tense, and maybe the future tense.

I've come a long way to here. And there's much left to do.

So, for now, enjoy.**

u    
 

__

* Many of us learned to type on typewriters, with two spaces after each period or terminal punctuation mark. With the advent of typing on computers, which mostly use proportional-space fonts (fixed-width fonts, like courier, use the same amount of space for an i as they do for an m, which is obviously much wider. So sentences tended to look more spread out, and were not as easy to read. As such, we were told to use two spaces between sentences so the sentence breaks would be more obvious. Proportional fonts like this one, Arial (or maybe Helvetica, or something else depending on what fonts are on your computer system—the web works in this way with a looser hold on typography), are better-formatted for ease of reading, and as such one should only use one space between sentences. Anything more makes the textblock look loose. A minor point to be sure, but important in typographical terms.

** So the best thing about this essay—and the website containing it that functions as its own venue for publication, which has both good and bad qualities—is that after being composed and published here (strand one), it was picked up by this great newish magazine The Pinch, being a cool magazine, formerly River City, out of University of Memphis. They did a great print version of it (strand two) with some serious design elements which make for a very interesting and provocative read. I find out today (04.16.08) that it will be reprinted in The Best American Essays 2008, being strand three of the same essay. Or perhaps strand is wrong. Maybe it is strain, like something viral and expanding. All of this brings up a number of interesting questions: one is how the design elements of the piece will be translated to the BAE format, and how much say I will get in the process. If design means, and in this essay (particularly in the version printed in The Pinch) it certainly does, then modifying the design means meaning changes. So I would hope that I will get to tinker.

I expect, realistically, that I will not, since The Best American Essays, and all the books in the Best American series, are monuments to the canon. BAE is likely the most venerable-seeming, if not the most venerable (that honor goes to the Best American Short Stories, published continually since 1915) of the BA series. It is the second oldest, dating back to 1986. Which makes it a bastion of conservatism...until, it would appear, now***. The conservative editorial approach is twinned with the conservative design. When the guest editor, Garrison Keillor no less!, picked one of Diane Schoemperlen's stories for the BASS (1998 I think) it was shocking because the story included images (a first in this series as far as I know). The font remains the same. The leading remains the same. The template is straightforward, reliable: it connotes authority and stability. The color changes. The guest editor changes. But that's about it.

Admittedly BAE doesn't include a favorite bit of BASS, being the excellent contributors' notes, often more interesting than the stories themselves, often including the stories' germination or the number of times ther story got rejected before being at last accepted and now semi-canonized, which is a feel-good moment for all of us. The contributors' notes in BAE are limited to biographical information. Nothing fancy. Nothing freaky. No good stories. No sexy germination. The essays are stolid, solid, sold, they sell themselves. They don't need the Behind the Music version to deck them out.

"Solipsism" is also such a weird essay to see in print because it was written for this space, to be revised in perpetuity if necessary, annotated and continually maxed out with footnotes and apparatus, not for publication. Not to mention that it can now reference itself, which is appropriate, which makes it recursive and thinky if not completely dorky. And if the BAE contains an essay made for flux and flex, it will freeze it in some readers' minds if not my own. So I will have to break it off, this version of my solipsism, this tributary, from the essay that expands here as I type sentence after sentence into Dreamweaver, which renders it as code, not as text, as if text isn't code for something else, an Invisalign brace scaffolding over it or propping it up so it can achieve a pleasing structure.

So this, strand one, continues to expand. Maybe the wayback machine can locate its earlier iteration for you if you like (check archive.org I believe for it). So this becomes strain one prime, while still retaining its interest in text, in strings of words pushing out into dataspace.

*** Well, this claim is a little bogus, approach polemic. One of Michael Martone's "Contributor's Notes" appeared a year or two ago. David Foster Wallace wedged his way in at least once, so that's something, too. But I definitely haven't seen anything typographically challenging, or anything approaching a complex design. Maybe this year, though, will suggest a shift in the focus of the series? Maybe this essay is a token nod to the Internet and the demise of the Best American tower? Doubtful, and grandiose, but fun to think about.