Kenneth Goldsmith (c) Oscar Turco
Not only is writing melting into everything, but everything is melting into writing.
Non-interventionist writing. The need to do less.
There’s something delectable about taking a dense book and turning it into bite-sized chunks.
When one selects parts of a text, one non-narrativizes it. When one removes context and explanatory notes, the text morphs from the utilitarian into the poetic.
Without knowing, I reread a book and took new notes. When I went to file the notes, I discovered that I had already read this book four years ago, but selected entirely different sections this time around. It’s just that today, for whatever reasons, I was struck by an entirely different set of texts.
In the future, the best information managers will be the best poets.
After the reading, a young woman came up to me and told me that she had seen me lecture in a large MFA fiction writing class at Columbia. She said that everything I told the class went in one ear and out the other. All they cared about, including herself she said, was getting a half-million book contract when they graduated.
The idea of whether the book will survive is an uninteresting one, perhaps best left to the industry. What is crucial, though, is the idea that the effects of the digital are apparent in the writing, whether on paper or in pixels.
An emerging poet just put out what I feel to be perhaps the most important book of his generation. In the old days, this one book alone would’ve put him on the map. Now it’s just another in a sea of Lulu publications and Facebook likes.
One night I found myself at a small dinner, surrounded by million-dollar novelists, their editors, publishers, and publicists. The conversation was mostly polite and forgettable. Toward the end of the evening, the conversation came around to me. “So you’re the guy who does the uncreative writing, right? What’s that all about?” As I began to answer, I noticed their attention flagging. An editor began checking his cellphone, one novelist glanced at her watch, the PR guy started yawning. Before long, my explanation was drowned out by, “Got an early morning meeting” and “Oh, it’s really been fun.” A few minutes later, I was alone at the table.
Upon returning home, I was dismayed, to say the least. Cheryl sympathetically listened and said, “Look at it this way. It’s as if Adam Sandler and a bunch of guys who produce his movies were at the dinner table with Godard and conversation came around to him, ‘. . . and what do you do again?’ . . . ‘Oh yeah. Right. Gotta go.’“
Misunderstanding as understanding.
Misinterpretation as interpretation.
The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something “meaningful,” we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience.
The world is transformed: suddenly, the newspaper is détourned into a novel; the stock tables become list poems.
Over lunch, Sheila Heti asked me, if I really wanted to, whether I could write a narrative short story or traditional book of fiction. I had to admit that, no, I could not.
Being empty of any meaning or intention other than fulfilling the instructions that it’s a fulfillment of, the work is perfect by default.
It’s a favorite method of encryption: chunking revolutionary documents inside a mess of JPEG or MP3 code and emailing it off as an “image” or a “song.”
After a semester of studying uncreative writing, I never want to hear a student say that they have writer’s block again.
Don’t bookmark. Download.
Why I don’t trust the cloud.
I’m interested in ideas of writing that are so simple that they verge on stupidity and absurdity.
It’s often been said that a writer writes the books that she wishes were in the world, but are not.
Displacement is modernism for the 21st century, a child of montage, psychogeography, and the objet trouvé.
I’m interested in ideas of writing that are so simple that they verge on stupidity and absurdity.
It’s often been said that a writer writes the books that she wishes were in the world, but are not.
Goldsmith_Kenneth_-_Zuknfte_der_Dichtung_Keynote.pdf