ENDLESS ROLL // SITE ARCHIVE

in descending chronological order

Search

Beyond the Vocal Track

(Field, Underscore, Foley, Sound Bed, Overlay) Taking a speaking voice as the most common guiding element of an audio walk, a question opens: what sounds

Fields and Field Recording

Key parameters of the field Field recording is recording the world as spacetime field, microphone as proxy for a roving, roaming ear. Field recordings might

what is walking (2)

An exercise for tuning into the differences between listening while walking and listening while doing other things.

Site Mapping: Paths & Points

A practical site research exercise. For a research into a particular site or as a research practice for a way of moving through a site.

Psychogeography

A practice of walking that tunes to the drift of psychological response to an environment.

Saint Cards 30

To end this series, some fragments of notes I took somewhere between giving the series a name, and trying to figure out what I actually

Saint Cards 29

In each of the three sources that have fed this series of prompts, there has been an emphasis on the surround in which an individual

Saint Cards 28

I was reading a passage in the Book of Disquiet, one of many that survey with both wonder and sadness the weather system of Pessoa/Soares’

Saint Cards 27

Following on yesterday’s prompt, embrace the term emergence as a way to relieve the endpoint-oriented pressure of direction implied by development, and instead consider the

Saint Cards 26

The literature around how to write character tends to assume progressive, teleological directions. Development and transformation suggest that the change one undergoes holds steady, and

Saint Cards 25

Carry the form forward.  Either repeat a focus from the last few days, or, if you wish, take today to take a measure of sadness

Saint Cards 24

Carry the form forward as with the last several days.  Today, let the name under which you write bestow some kind of belonging upon you.

Saint Cards 23

Carry the form forward, as established over the last two days.  Summon a name for the you who is writing today. Listen to that voice

Saint Cards 22

What is the effect of a name? If I sign a different name to my writing, is a different persona automatically available? What permissions arise

Saint Cards 21

The last third of this series draws from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet — a very different kind of source text than the first

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?