Experimental Writing Aims

I am studying experimental writing methods because I want to find out what it means to experimentally write since it is just; as if not more controversial than the question in what academic writing is. I want to help my reader understand what experimental writing is and it’s various interpretations but at the same time helping them mold their own concept about what experimental writing is. I want to employ experimental essay techniques in the writing of the essay to give it this sort of self reflexive property and perhaps inject humor through contradictions.

The Dialectics of Type (Final DRAFT)

Writing has become increasingly tied down to speed, whether it is because of ease of use or psychological pressure due to some avenues of typing on QWERTY keyboard. It is for those who take full advantage of the new forms of writing the Internet age, they will find themselves perched upon a long and fragile tightrope hundreds of feet above the streets and if one moves too hastily they will fall down, far to far to survive. Two connotations comprise the verb “Typing” the struggle for those yearn to write on the Internet, one is conventional writing and is merely replacing paper with a word processor or a blog with an array of tools for enhancing and distributing ones writing. This connotation has streamlined the way the writing process and one’s ease of conveying opinions and thoughts. , the other much less pronounced connotation is the erosion of written language through the new speedy venues of writing (which did not exist before the computer) such as e-mail (Social Networking Messaging Included although it is more a hybrid of instant messaging and e-mailing), instant messaging, text messaging and twittering. The definition of this second type of typing is constantly being revised to encompass the widespread vandalism of centuries of rich advancement in the writing process.

Instant messaging is an subtle yet serious threat to the future development of the written and spoken word. It is the possible interlude to an Orwellian newspeak at a global scale. It erodes the barriers that separate casual and written word. With instant messaging people are writing more than they ever have, however this type of writing can be better characterized as speaking within the façade of writing. The idea behind instant messaging is you can send messages at will at the speed of light, so there is a certain pressure to type quickly, so as to not get submerged in the deluge of messages from your “buddies”, if you talk to quickly in too many directions, you will mix yourself up, this also occurs in the world of ims, where you could be berating someone and accidently im it to them and just like that apparatus you have relied on has pushed you off into the streets below. Speaking (and I must emphasize this as speaking as opposed to writing) to multiple friends using instant messaging increases the pressure to use increasingly shorter words and abbreviations. Punctuation is phased out of the equation entirely except to emphasize excitement or confusion. Terms such as lol, rofl and brb have entered the modern lexicon and sometimes leak out into the world of speech in oftentimes-sardonic witticisms that take nihilistic potshots at language conventions.
This does not even take into account the social alienation effect inherently infused with instant messaging, especially with the use of chat rooms. Rather than meeting several friends in reality where you can share a milkshake and/or experience, you meet online in these chat rooms that censor your faces with blurs typically given to the sexual predators in cop shows; then you are given a set of 16 emoticon masks to express yourself, as if human beings only had 16 different emotions. Sometimes I have found myself talking to a friend for 5 hours on this messaging service and can’t help but think “why didn’t I just meet her at some café in Park Slope”?

E-mail at least, is in the same phylum as conventional letter writing, there is some sense of formalism within it. Obviously there are exceptions like spam and chain letters, which merely aim to make you fantastically rich or laugh out loud and these are the rule in terms of sheer volume, but are often ignored which make them exceptions. However, I think the ability to save on postage and time with the emphasis in trying to clearly articulate what you want to say since you cannot exchange e-mails instantaneously to clarify something you said (at the very least it takes a minute) that led to confusion. E-mail also has the added benefit of saving all sent and received e-mails so you can easily go back and review when a business or personal dispute arises. With normal letters you typically won’t have a copy of what you sent (unless you typed it) and this could lead to confusion when you receive a response; especially if this response is belated.

Blogging on the other hand has completely reshaped how ones thinks in a manner that I think is beneficial. Rather than just reading the news or a story and musing carefully over it and possibly discussing it with a friend, I can with the use of blogging, write my opinion and commentary on social events, a book or even film I just finished ingesting. Blogging is the next logical step to take in the field of writing, the destination of this particular tightrope so to speak. It firstly has the ability to publish anyone’s writing for the every human being connected to the Internet to see. The rules of the game have changed entirely because of this development; we are merely at the beginning of the century of blogging. Writing will become ever more stream of consciousness since blogs tend to take on a more contemplative observer style and considering a great deal of serious bloggers are would-be writers, prose will begin to adopt many of bloggings nuances. Blogging actively converses with the more traditional venues of writing, it can be likened to a novelist being inspired by the visual style of a film, blogging is writing and so is traditional prose, but one has to imagine how varied writing is to fully comprehend the repricocity that exists between blogging and the other forms. The big draw of blogging is it’s speed, a simple press of the button gets your opinions out to others and you can constantly revise and go back to the old drafts even. You could add a contributor to your blog and two or even more people can work on fine tuning a single blog post. This doesn’t even have to be with friends, this could be across the globe with a Hungarian writer, and it is all done almost instantly if the will is there to move it forward. Blogging is a lot like filmmaking in so much that a great deal of media convergence is occurring, in fact blogging can be like filmmaking or even like breaking news reports on tv, more often than not the first people to break a story these days are bloggers (or twitterers).

Typing using online applications has sped up writing, for both good and bad. Some like instant messaging merely aim to set up a wall of facades, that conceal the crumbling world of letters, human relationships and time that do indeed exist. Others like blogging have sped up the spreading of information

Pinker Inkshed

Pinker asserts that language is an instinct, that a universal grammar exists that children visibly express without formal instruction in language; that they have the ability to learn all or any language but they happen to adapt to the language their parents speak, those being the portions of the universal grammar that move forward. He goes back to Darwin’s concepts of language to paint it as a natural phenomenon, an instinct developed overtime not unlike songbird’s learning songs to sing or a bat and it’s Doppler effect. He is right, one can just observe how one speaks or uses language to realize it is more instinctual rather than a carefully crafted skill. Just in a simple spoken sentence, hundreds of things are occurring; Yet we usually speak without comprehending everything we are doing with that simple sentence. This whole concept as of now undisputed fact that not one civilization or tribe in the world were found living as mutes help attest to the biological nature of human language. Pinker provides a passage from Michael Leahy’s diary in when he talks about the natives were jabbering weird barbaric sounds but it was actually a comprehensible form of communication…a language even. You see this in sci fi and fantasy films, whether they be Orcs in Lord of the Rings speaking in grunts which allow for coordination for attack or alien’s who speak in sonic beam sounds to rely in a higher realm of psychology their own language…language doesn’t even have to be aural based either, but still the means for communication exist between human beings.

Eva Hoffman Inkshed

As someone who grew up speaking English and living in a predominately English speaking society, I cannot say I am able to empathize fully with Eva Hoffman. However the meaning she attributes to her first language really gives you a sense of how she feels, that in and of itself is empathy enough. She relates English with the present and Polish with her past, something that someone who only speaks one language would obviously never associate with language. I cannot even understand what she is talking about when she mentions the riverness in the polish word for river, I am inclined to think she is either associating it with earliest memories of a river and thus cannot put a new name on it, at the same time river in Polish could have an actual riverness to it; this makes me questions if such anomalies occur in the English language as well but I simply don’t notice it because I don’t contemplate the words I say as Eva does. The way she talks about language shows quite clearly that the nuances of her Native Polish language are coalesced with her English, like she has this hidden knowledge that someone who doesn’t know both polish and English wouldn’t understand, I don’t think it is lost in translation at all, I think it is merely infused with her English, making them ever more meaningful. She thinks in terms of societal class and language, this distinction exists in America as well but it is more defined along ethnic lines (a touchy subject).

Helen Keller Inkshed #1

I recall one trip back to New York from California, I was stricken by an awful cold.  I heard terrible stories from family and friends when they learned of my defective nose that had me blowing my nose in motion and force, the sound of it was not unlike the old videos on youtube of Dizzy Gillespie playing his trumpet. My grandmother’s story was the most frightening of them all, I say this because I had always loved her story’s and mediated on them long after they were said to get a sense of who my grandmother is and why she would tell that specific story at that specific time. She related to me about the time, she had a cold and went abroad to Europe. She lost her hearing completely for 2 or 3 days and didn’t think it would come back.

So with these stories and the snot in my nose leaking out every now and then I sat in the plane anxiously awaiting take off. I took in sounds and savored them; I felt deep down that I would lose my beloved hearing because of this common cold. We took off I felt the pressure bearing down on my ears; their will to repel true silence was waning as they cracked and popped. The true malaise occurred upon arrival in JFK airport, when my ears popped again. My fears of not hearing were met with reality.
I felt quite helpless; I could not call my mother or my lover at the time, to tell one that I was safe and the other to meet me later on. Most of all I could not inform my driver that I had arrived and that he should come to the terminal. I tried of course, but I couldn’t hear a word he said, I just kept repeating I can’t hear, please come pick me up I am Patrick Romo.  He did not come, I kept trying to pop my ears and  my cheeks would inflate to the legendary explosive visage of Dizzy Gillespie’s cheeks when he blew into his trumpet. Eventually I got a faint sense of hearing and was able to call the driver again…I made it home with my hearing slowing coming back to me on the ride back. When I got home I put on an old Dizzy Gillespie album and drifted slowly to sleep with the sound.

Inkshed #1

There was not really 5 minutes left to write a blog but rather 3 minutes because the clock on the wall is off by 2 minutes.  This would not bother me so much had I not the fear that I may be let out of class 2 minutes late….My anxiety of possibly losing two minutes is causing me to swerve in my chair nervously.  I really wish we had chosen conversation 8 and I feel as if I predicted it wouldn’t be picked with my paper that I uploaded to the wiki page…the last paragraph was written within a melancholic haze for I had a premonition about not being able to polish up any of my essays to perfection because we weren’t going to choose conversation 8…