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Date: Wednesday, 25 Nov 1998, 13:33:32
From: William Gillespie
Organization: Spineless Books
To: Scott Rettberg, Frank Marquardt, Dirk Stratton
Subject: Re: Okay let’s talk aesthetics
Frank, the only thing that you wrote that I
can get a handle on is the issue of control. You
can ask for what you want. Scott’s “control” of
the project is, to me, the work he’s done. And if he didn’t do it, nobody
would have. Whenever I question his decisions, I remind myself that at
least he’s making decisions and acting on them, in which light my being
able to question those decisions is a pretty luxurious position.
You’re in a weird situation because you are working on the hypertext but
don’t hang out with us. The three of us hang out together, me and Scott
and Dirk, that’s how we got started doing
this. We like writing together, and we like the conversations that it
makes us have. We read each other’s stuff and we rip it apart and we get
in fights and then we forgive each other. We meet each other’s friends
and sleep on each other’s couches and drink each
other’s beer. So, because you have confessed to having mixed feelings,
in your case, I don’t know what the positive feelings are.
Because you called one of my pages “drivil” (sic)
I am kind of stalled as far as writing more stuff. If you’ve ever liked
a page I don’t know what it was. In other words, you have some idea of
what you want the Unknown to be that you aren’t telling me so I can’t
write it. I can chase myself around in my own head wielding the word “drivil”
and, through elaborate internal dialectics that last for hours, try to
figure out what you want me to write. But I’m not going to go through
that kind of trouble to let you off the hook of being the critic your
degree says you are. I’m not hurt by your insult, but I could have been.
It is drivil, I copied it off the program notes of the Arditti String
Quartet’s concert here last Friday. Writing about music,
like writing about art, is prone toward drivilish tendencies. I think
drivil is hilarious. I love the writing on the backs of wine
bottles that explains what the wine tastes
like.
I wrote it because I think more writing styles enrich the experience of
reading through an endless hypertext, and I think it’s too late to strive
for consistency of style or voice or plot or character or anything except
consistency of dissonance and discontinuity. And because The Unknown
reminds me of Beethoven’s “Grosse Fugue.” You guys should hear it. And
because I liked the phrase “700 bars of rhythmic violence
and almost ruthless density of thought” so much that I
wanted to make it our own.
So why is drivil bad? The hypertext is probably full of it, whatever it
is, since I think we’ve only erased one page since the day we started.
Tell me what to write.
Scott, good response. Put it in, put it all in.
But don’t put in our critique of Dirk’s poem
until he says so. I think he should write a critique of my critique.
Happy Thanksgiving Eve,
W
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