I finally managed to get to the poetry bookshop in Hay over the Christmas break. I’d tried before, always arriving when it was closed — or rather — when it wasn’t meant to be open anyway. This time however, I was lucky enough to get in and work my way around the various section of the shop — in the relative silence of it.

I joked about the silence with the proprietor. It was funny, we thought, that the art of the oral tradition would inspire such tombly quiet for the average visitor.

Not that the visitors were average, they should be people interested in poetry, so should be a little bit strange. You’d expect them to kick the tyres and try reading out loud, a test drive of the verse. That doesn’t go on very much, apparently.

They’d not managed or bothered to do many reading, despite the festival — because it’s not a literature festival, it’s a book festival. And it happens in a field, miles away, so the Hay festival was in fact not really in Hay at all.

I asked if there was any Anne Carson hidden away. It seems she doesn’t hang around when they have her in. And, really, a second hand book shop — which relies on the cycle of wanting and unwanting of books — is defined as much by what it doesn’t have as what it does.

A really well trodden second hand bookshop should probably only contain the worst books — between replenishings donated through death and the shame of illiterate children.

“The people who pick up Anne Carson seem not not be letting her go.” Which is clearly the right sort of book to write, I know I won’t be giving away my copies of her work — but then, I don’t give anything away.

And, as Anne Carson has been teaching me in the The Economy Of The Unlost, giving is about putting yourself in debt, so an equal debt can be returned by the other person. Exchange for money unmoors us from the social bonds traditionally fostered through gift giving and exchange.

Hey. Remember when poets were paid as much as Doctors?

It makes sense in a world where Doctor’s aren’t going to prolong your life, making sure people remember you in verse for a little while after you’re gone may have a higher value.

Let me know if you need an ode, elegy, or just a quick couplet off the cuff. My rates are reasonable and may be covered by your health insurance.

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I have recently subscribed to A Public Space, and it’s wonderful, as this is, especially:

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Today’s song:

Thanks for reading issue #1 of Etch To Their Own and, more importantly, getting all the way down here. This email is written by @CJEggett and proofed by no one. I’d love to hear from you — even if it’s only to correct my spelling — @ me, reply to this, or rope me in to your ARG, secretly.

Sign up to this occasional newsletter here.

I’m in print. My poem, The Mud Month, as been published in The City Quill.

You can buy The City Quill Issue #2 it over here!

2018 Edit: I am not sure what happened to this fun little poetry magazine. As I can’t seem to find it online anywhere “proper” for the moment, here is my poem as they published it:

lit.cat is a small, scroll-able magazine which promises under 30 minutes of flash fiction, poetry, word jumbles, and other such jolly collections of words in orders.

I have a small piece in issue two, here.

It was originally written for Synesthesia Magazine for some completely forgotten contest or theme. This might explain why it’s quite concerned with texture, feeling, senses (and all that). I don’t remember whether it got submitted or not!

Anyway, I am glad it found its way somewhere.

UPDATE: Lit.Cat has just been redesigned, and is worth having a secondary poke around. The archive is especially good, as it includes my favourite metric for online words: reading time. My piece can also be reached, all by itself, over here.

This is a very strange way to recommend you some books

How do you feel about good words? Spread out on a page, arranged as a perfect length of rope to make a map, a knot, a snare for your heel to drag you along?

I sometimes explain how I feel about poetry by saying that, after reading something good, the top of my head (on the inside) would bubble and fizz, as if everything was working harder; as if it were hotter in there. Were the top of my brain a lake, it would be bubbling up dead carp by now — fat heavy things flaking in the roiling heat. Emily Dickinson said the same thing, a bit earlier:

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

Emily Dickinson

Very close, I think. A big build up of energy, a click, a cool sense of space left afterwards. It’s a violent idea — one where you’re not in control — or rather, where someone else is guiding your thoughts places they wouldn’t normally go to.

And as Emily asks, is there any other way to know it?

I think this is the taste I am always trying to track down when cracking a spine. But where can one find this kind of literary treepanning and pressurecooking?

I’d like to take a little bit of time to explore what I like about some of my favourite writers — the ones who do remove the top of my head each time I read them, or present a burning map, or make me feel like I am having a long sip of hot tar.

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Reading Yourself Free

What I like most, what gives me the biggest buzz, a kind of internal shining crown in the skull — its leaves and arches pointing in — is best explained as a kind of jolly classicism, an integration of a grand system into another, through fragmented views and narration.

And this set of ideas hangs around in doorways at parties thrown by modernism and post-modernism.

Like a lot of people, I read for myself a lot when I was younger because it seemed to arm me against the world — and taught me how to connect ideas through context. You could learn things through reading fiction which were broadly true, if specifically lies.

Before then I read a lot of books about dragons being a nuisance to the locality, and some high fantasy nonsense. But I already knew that I was looking for something that felt more free. I didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about playing with form, but that was the kind of story I wanted to write.

My first real experience of this was when, at a more tender age, I bought Number 9 Dream by David Mitchell from a Virgin Music Store. I bought it based on nothing other than the fact I had to try to find something that wasn’t a classic or school taught, and couldn’t be a dull holiday novel.

It was perfect — it had a non linear structure, it played with form and it was referential to some things I vaguely understood; John Lennon, Tokyo — and thing I did understand: computer games, being a young confused man desperate to be in love, flights of fantasy.

It was probably the first time I bumped into magical realism (the narrative acceptance of magic and the fantastic without comment). This was ideal for someone who has thought of their fantasy habit as a little bit dirty, not because of the content, but because of the rigid set of expectations within it. Fantasy writing always felt like someone standing up very straight and using the right cutlery, while dressed as a furby.

And it was modern.

Again, not that I knew what modern writing really was. Clearly they were great because they were of a world which was worth exploring.

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I Want To See All Of It, From Blossom To Root-tip

Readers often confirm that they desire what I often did, as a TV-watching child: wanting to know what the other characters were doing while off-screen. You knew it would be boring, but you wanted to be able to experience the wholeness of a TV show, or film. You wanted the rest of the world these character existed within.

This kind of demand for the wholeness of a world might come from playing videogames and accepting them as a legitimate medium. The promise in (many) games is that you can experience a whole space/narrative entirely under your own terms. Obviously you experience broken version of complete world more than not — and while you can turn your back on the narrative, it’s rare for a game to present you with anything as equally as interesting.

This sense of choice creates a taste for the “what if?” and the unlikely voyeurism that is often presented in modern texts. When a writer or poet re-imagines a known, shared text or reference, you get the opportunity to peek at Hercules between scenes.

So with classics we get the footnotes — and it’s even better if the source is working on something shared in the first place. The Divine Comedy for example, is a structure and system of hell presented in Inferno (a shared set of ideas being formed into a novel physical structure), which then has editorial footnotes sprinkled on top to aid the modern reader. It’s a kind of elegant greenhouse surrounding a narrative which explains another architecture inside.

And in the modern novel, like Number9Dream you’re introduced to our hero, building his courage up to approach a lawyer to find out who his father is, and imagining different scenarios. You’re treated to all of the different versions of his daydreams — including: death by freak flood, meeting his father within a videogame, and even success. Later, you find yourself in the house of a short story writer — and you’re not just told this, you’re treated to the warm up stories that she writes before getting to her real work — there’s a goat character who keep eating the stories within, a little like the way each minor diversion in the novel nibbles at its surrounding to inform it’s own architecture.

Speaking of architecture, in House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski, you’ll find a storm of footnotes, narratives within narratives, essays crossed out, appendices and cross-referenced ideas which blend between each formal delivery method. House of Leaves is a wonderful example of a book which wants a little bit more from you as the reader — while also playing notes from songs we all know. The way the notes on Midas/the Minotaur (struck through if I remember correctly) mirror the Navidson Records, and a father doing something drastic to hide his shame, which then gestates in the pool of Truant’s own familial issues. This is a great example of a linking of hands between Greek myth and Freud, with a shift in narrative position between allowing both to exist happily.

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1908 and News That Stays News

In 1908 Ezra Pound turned up in London and gave the British their modernist movement. The outcome was, in part, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s The Cantos — both are world-nearly-complete poems which gives me lots of roots to scratch my nails between.

Let me describe Ezra Pound’s The Cantos to you as I have always seen it (no, please don’t leave, I won’t take long). The Cantos is a kind of great work of abstract stained glass — each canto it’s own piece in it’s own right, but part of a great system. You shine a light through the first and see what you see, and then you place the second canto behind it — this change not only the canto you’re reading but the canto you read, and the overall tone of the piece. Then you add a third. You continue to do this and the image gets more complex — and the light you need to shine through it has a need to become brighter and brighter… Which naturally you can’t apply all at once

This is the complex arrangement of fragments — sometimes lifted and borrowed fragments — is translated in front of you. Not only within the poem in individual lines, but your understanding from one canto to the next.

Because Pound seemed to be recording what could be described as a kind of cultural canon into this great epic poem, and much of it being translation and odd history lessons, you get this fragmented view of a particular kind system being built. Simultaneously this is a massive number of voices, but in it’s curation, composition and cutting together, contains his view of the world.

The Waste Land on the other hand is more free with it’s presentation of voice and fragments in one sense — and anxious in it’s peppering of footnotes in the other. Where Pound translates for us — directly after the foreign language line — Eliot leaves us with original. Knowing that Pound had a hand in the implementation of some of the footnotes asks us why he thought his work was so different.

Pound talked about poetry and literature being “news that stays news” — the idea that there is some ultimate truths expressed in the good stuff.

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Anne Carson and The Desert Of After Proust

The kind of news which stays news is those big meta-narratives we all know and endure. Whether it’s Odysseus’s boat trip, Hercules’ to-do list, or folk stories closer to home — the seven swans of Fenland folklore for example — there’s always room to retell them in new colours, clothes, locations.

Anne Carson is one of them. Between Red > Doc and Autobiography of Red, I’m in love with all her modernist, post-modernist, classicist wandering. Carson pursues smaller gaps than Eliot or Pound, and gives you a lot more texture for it in her stitches.

Tell me a meta-narrative any time, and then make is specific — and I’m yours.

In both Red Doc> and Autobiography of Red Carson is exploring the story of a red monster boy known as Geryon. In Autobiography Geryon is coming to terms with his sexuality, and the heartbreak which follows after falling in love with cool boy Herakles. Red Doc is a later life experience of regret — two old bachelors — one renamed as Sad with his PSTD and the other as G. They take a road trip to check themselves into a psychiatric ward.

Retelling Hercules’ trials as a broken love story is the perfect example of taking something we know and then reworking it into something joyfully specific. We accept as a kind of trunk narrative that we can build from in all our storytelling, and the specific give us our texture and flavour against the grain. It give you an appreciation of the shared knowledge, the known story, which provides the undercutting sadness, as you know how it has to go — in this context.

So this is how I get that buzz from reading — it’s the fact I have multiple things to play with within the writing I am consuming, all at once.

“Prose is a house, poetry a man in flames running quite fast through it.” *

I suppose, what I’m really saying is that the stuff I really like is the stuff that makes you want to go write some words about it.

Anne Carson also talks about that feeling of finishing something good, in her case Proust, and casting about for your next fix, coming up cold, and then trying to find a way to prolong the experience of the work. This is the experience of being lost in The Desert Of After Proust:

This is why we’re here. You’re reading this because I wrote something while wandering my own Desert After Carson.

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Reworking, Relayering, Translating Your Own Language

Re-layering and re-working of meaning through shared understanding is more or less what language is about. It’s the place where we can make commerce without having to meet each other entirely. Language is the neutral ground for trading of ideas and intent.

But you can re-layer and re-work meaning in a way which changes the context of something previously understood to mean something else.

Ben Marcus provides this kind of re-layering of concepts. For example, in The Age Of Wire And String — Marcus has the goal of reworking a concept into another through a tight expression of language and withholding of certain information. He show us that language is somewhat immutable/impossible to consider untrue as, while it’s something we strive to understand, it is also the tool we use for our understanding.

We are so used to the conventions of language, so ready for it to explain the truth of a situation, that we allow it to fictionalise another, existing concept.

In The Age Of Wire And String we are treated to various descriptions of structures, activities, objects — but each is folded in from other objects, structures etc. It is what Marcus describes as “fake non-fiction, seems like an essay, seems like a dictionary entry, but it’s completely made up.” It uses a register of authority — that of an encyclopedia or similar — and uses this view to provide weight to the complex descriptions because “the real problem for the fiction writer is being believed.” Marcus rebuilds from nothing other than our assumptions, the concepts which we know as completely solid.

Where Pound and Eliot made for connecting the existing parchments, the leftovers, Carson and Marcus both rewrite with their own language.

We accept that all thing can be all other things at once, because we accept that perspectives are changeable or multiple.

David Ohle — author of Motorman — runs the same game of changing language through forcefully constructing an understanding around the nouns and verbs of his world. In Motorman we join our hero on a Kafkaesque journey to escape his “home” and make it to somewhere more idyllic. It’s hard to explain the joys in it, but it has an attention to detail that is consistent in it’s weirdness. Usually, you would expect writing that spends time talking about the feeling in individual muscles of the body to be ponderous — but because this kind of writing in the novel is structured, and leans so well on itself, it becomes the way we view the world of the book. It’s much like watching someone build something before your eyes that you think might be a house, but ends up being a dog. You’re sure that you watched them write in the bathrooms and the kitchen, but no, it turns out to be a dog standing before you, wagging it’s tail.

C A Conrad creates systems for his somatic poetry (poetry created through physical exercises and rituals in combination with filter words), and a whole world in The Book Of Frank. In Frank the abused hero wanders through his childhood horrors and into a kind of peace of adulthood and draws in themes from and against Freud repeatedly — starting from the opening where Frank’s father asks where his daughter’s cunt is — and Frank’s expectations towards his masculinity are set in motion. This is explored throughout the multi-part poem where his envy of females is a central exploration.

In Conrad’s A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon we are treated to the outcomes of his somatic poetic exercises. Because we know the structure with which he’s approaching the writing of these poems there’s a great pleasure in tracing back the immediate sensations and feelings to the ones which may have been felt during the exercises themselves.

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Setting the rules

All of these writers spend time within their works setting out the rules within which it is interpreted. Whether that’s something discovered within the text, or through the implementation of another, separate text or story, we can be sure that there’s something for us to measure our understanding against — and compare our expectations to.

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Recommend Me Some Books

The best poetry for me is the one which is very loud in my head. As much as I know poetry must be read aloud to be understood and heard — the poems I love are simply the loudest inside my skull, even when they’re sitting on the page sensibly. Some kind of fire map: a clarity of a system which seems to burn bright and hot, wild data over a known shape which is supposed to inform you.

And I suppose, all of this is a very long winded way to ask for book recommendations! Know anything I should have read by now? I’d like to expand this ramble into something even more rambling, so comment your recommendations at me!

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If you’d like to tell me I’ve mucked this up somehow, littered it with typos or completely mis-remembered the entire premise of a story, please @ me.

If you want me to write a thing for you, email me on c at cjeggett dot co dot uk

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You know it’s a good meal when you’ve been thinking about it all week and, when you finally get round to eating it, you’re still excited about the prospect of it.

This non-dissipation of excitement must be the perfect version of any meal.

We sat in the perfectly adequate sushi restaurant in Oxfordshire and, while polishing off the first round of dragon rolls, spicy tuna maki, spider rolls and grilled eel nigiri, T swings his head sideways round to me and says:

I am no less excited about sushi now that I am eating it

Which is surely the definition of food bliss?

I’d spent all week watching interviews with sushi chefs, tours of very nice sushi bars, and sushi making demonstrations on YouTube. If you’ve decided to write a novel in which a character has this profession, it’s your first port of call.

Watching serious, dedicated people cut up beautiful flesh into lovely sliver’d jewels builds up an appetite.

It’s rare for a food craving to be sustained through the process of eating the food. Usually, when you crave a burger — or fish-sauce marinated chicken with sriracha, mayo and shredded lettuce in a brioche (for example) — you’re met with the slight disappointment of feeling gross, guilty or lazy afterwards.

But maybe because I’m old and now crave fresh, clean things — and sushi doesn’t slow you down at all — you only feel your love for it grow during the meal.

We carried on to the next round — grilled eel temaki, tuna sashimi, tobiko, omlette, a rainbow roll — and the joy didn’t leave. We took some home too. To eat in the garden, in the sun, with a cold beer and the bubbling, chaotic noises of families in other gardens arguing about starting the barbeque breaching over the gently rustling hedge-tops.

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In the future we will all be 80% cyborg, which means the remaining twenty percent human in the mix will be a tongue that lives in an amazing kitchen appliance.

I guess you might also be a mouth of sorts too — some kind of sensory area for experiencing textures and heat. Maybe you’d have some kind of teeth, but probably not.

Your robot body would be the perfect replacement in many ways, except the senses which are hard to give up — it’s fine to replace the bones, but not the flesh, not everywhere at least. Rather than needing to cook and eat your own food, you’d simply provide the ingredients, and the mechanisms in your new body would do all the work for you, providing your taste-buds with Michelin star food, for a body which barely needs it.

Good luck.

Previously: Dystopian Futures I Wouldn’t Mind At All #1: RunWorld

“Wouldn’t it be better if we all just ran everywhere.” I said.

RunWorld changed everything. Giving you the chance to build up healthcare credits by doing (and tracking) activities. Stay healthy and strong, and you can stay healthy and strong in your old age too.

Everyone is running all the time, and it’s great.

I wouldn’t say I ushered in the world of private healthcare, and the gamification of almost every aspect of our lives. It’s more like I was excited about the opportunity to run more.

The high-street is a world of lycra and running backpacks. Between shops we trot at a pace considerate to those around us. We take filter lanes into shops where we slow down to a walk, for browsing. We’re not savages after all.

The world is better place, tourists flock through old street soaking in history at speed while enjoying their own dopamine, we all rush across beautiful countryside because you can get more views in that way.

We live further away from things, but not driving distance, because we all know we want to run to the pub, and back. Not that we go to the pub to drink that much, as we all only have so many credits to spare, and naturally, these things are all connected.

At work, I walk or jog, on my treadmill desk — as does the developer I’m working with. The designer needs to sit down to do their job — a risk we’re all painfully aware of every time we ask her to do some revisions. But then, this is why she gets paid more — it’s the danger money of having to sit down, when instead you could be earning a trickle credits for your old age while you work.

Like most, I’ve been thinking about getting a new job, one that’s more active, and can let me accrue more healthcare credits as I go. When I was a boy my father wanted me to get away from the manual work he had done all his life. How blissfully he would have lived these days.

It’s not all good of course. There’s those who can’t quite manage, through some illness, disease or other genetic failure that the parent themselves failed to prevent through their own genetic grooming and pairing in. These people are a burden to their families. It’s like single mothers, who, nearly straight out of childbirth, ave to start running to keep their newborn alive — but they have to spend tokens while they do this.

That’s the weird thing, the way the healthcare tokens tick down for the treatment these people need — when you see a young carer running marathon after marathon, producing their own problems for old age while racking up healthcare tokens to keep their charge alive and well, you wonder if this really is the best way to do it.

Dystopian Futures I Wouldn’t Mind At All is a series about worrying sci-fi futures that I could probably come to peace with in some way.

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I’ve tried to write this lots of time in lots of different forms — but it is what it is: I am writing this entirely for a young cousin who has expressed that she would like to get into writing, professionally. I tried to dress it up, but it didn’t get done — so here it is, undressed!

Note: I am an unsuccessful writer, except in the sense of commercial writing and editing. In these areas I am adequate, but paid! I am probably the worst kind of person to be writing this kind of advice. If you’re reading this, and you’re the better sort who ought to be writing this instead — please add comments as it would be very helpful!

What to do to start being a writer today

• Get a Twitter account
• Get a Medium.com account
• Get a Tinyletter account (link to it from the bottom of all your articles)
• Write a thing every day
• Edit, publish, email, and Tweet it the next day.

Why do you need these accounts? Twitter is for distribution, talking to peers (other writers), and subjects. Medium is where you articles go. It looks nice, people are into it at the moment — you could do it anywhere, but medium.com is super quick and easy. Tinyletter is an email distribution platform, get people to sign up, and then send them your writing weekly, or whenever.

The important thing about all these platforms is that they provide you with a way to write publicly, and over time, build an audience who likes to read you.

This will make your life easier when you want to get paid!

But what do I write?

This is the fun bit! Try writing different sorts of things. Here’s some stuff to try writing:

• personal essay (it’s great if they intersect with something else, like tech humanism, health and personal experience, or, er health again?)
• gossip
• short stories (there’s millions of places to publish these, but you could write fun, moving and interesting stuff like this, this, this, or this)
• whatever it is that Sadie Stein does every day for the Paris Review — write as if you’re a correspondent.
• social commentary, in the form of an essay — it can be about anything!
• Satire/humour/funny lists or something
• data journalism (find, or take, some stats, or polls — work out what’s interesting about it, write about that)
• Reviews of things like books, tv, whatevs.

600 words would be a good length of these, but just go with what feels natural.

Make sure you write a good headline. Olgilvy knows about how to write something that people will want to read based on a headline. Maybe get into that.

Being Safe Writing Online

I know, I know you know. However:

• use a pseudonym — something catchy and interesting that means you won’t be identified as you. You can then write happily about anything without worrying about your family, friends, or (importantly) subjects reading it and getting you in trouble
• “isn’t this the opposite of what you do though?” — yes, but I am protected by a powerful deterrent of being not very interesting, and also coming from a time when we all thought we could all really live online. We couldn’t, it was a rubbish idea.
• don’t feed the trolls — and there will be some.

Getting Better

Practice forever, read lots, talk to other people writing, who you admire. Understand all the different kinds of writing out there, and how to do them. Practice by satirising these types — and then do a serious one at some other point.

Read everything, and understand what is good about it. Most of getting better is practice + reading + understanding context + understanding value, and then copying, emulating and internalising those parts that you want to keep.

You’ll find a voice once you have a craft.

Advice from a short story writer

I asked my friend who is a published short-story writer lady. Here’s some things she said:

Read lots of books and online stories, join different writing groups and classes (all different ones if possible where there’s a mix of ages).

Practice loads. Get brave and share and get feedback (you don’t have to listen to it all but it’s interesting).

Send creative stuff off as much as possible (I don’t do this much) but the more you send the more likely you are to get published and build your writer’s CV even if you’re not paid for it (which you probably won’t be).

So that’s good!?

Getting Paid

Getting paid is a tricky part.

Currently, the way that websites make money is that they charge advertisers to advertise on their site, based on thousands of impressions (in advertising this is CPM, a site might charge £1CPM, so if you have a million impressions might make the site £1000).

Writers often get paid per word, or a set amount. Or sometimes in a weird way like this. Young writers are often asked to churn through crap to make #content. If you’d like to be depressed about the state of writing online, then you can always read Carles.Buzz’s series “life on the content farm”!

But don’t worry, as writing online is always changing, so it will get worse or better — but certainly won’t be exactly like this forever.

It’s important you engage with the idea that writing can be a job you should get paid for, if you’re good at it. This means understanding a bit about the way the people paying you would make money from your words. You need an audience to have power in that relationship.

Writing for cool sites is often achieved through pitching. Gita Jackson wrote a thing about how to pitch properly. So read that.

There’s some great advice from Laura Snapes over here about the importance of good hydration and some other stuff about writing I guess.

Unrelated, but I love the sadly-probably-dead Today In Tabs newsletter, which you can read online here. This is a good example of someone who eventually got paid through sponsorship of their newsletter (like, probably not that much, and they are an established writer, but it’s the thought that counts!)

And then…

There’s loads of places to go in writing, and you can move between things more easily once you have a reputation. You could become an editor and run a whole magazine or publication, or start your own, or write a novel or 12, or move into screen writing, or take the business writing route and make some money!

Which is all very exciting… but you probably need to get started now, right?

I didn’t manage to finish Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan — as much as I wish I had. It’s simply very long and I grew a bit bored of it’s endless cheerful acceptance of everything — and I love magical realism, the genre this book probably best inhabits.

Or maybe I was just a little bored with the suffering under the Dutch colonialists. I really did like the book, I just ran out of steam. I am sure there is some really good stuff at the end.

It starts with a woman, Dewi Ayu, climbing out of her grave after 21 years, in search of the child she chose to never see because she is so bored of her daughters being beautiful. Between page one and 4 you’re treated to the best set up of a novel I’ve read in a long time.

It’s somewhat relentless in it’s cheerfulness towards terror, grief and hardship — as is the character of Dewi Ayu. This kind of easy acceptance of the horrors, and a half-smile from the narrative voice throughout makes it kind of bounding read, if you’ve got time for it! Maybe I will come back to it.

The other volume I read was a somewhat slimmer one in the for of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red. Having read RED DOC > last year, I know I am coming at this about-face — but nevermind. Carson’s poetry is some of the only poetry which still sticks the electrodes in. Give me a story about monsters and their suffering, mixed with classicism and a good dose of pathos and bathos and I’m all yours.

Carson is particularly good at these long, modern, narrative poems. Autobiography of Red follows the worried and bullied monster, Geryon. Worried very much about how hard it is to be red, and trying to find acceptance in the arms of a boy too cool for him, Herakles. Geryon is a boy who is also a monster with wings and long stalks with eyes on the end — and as a player in Hercules’ trials, seems desperately resigned to a defeated dark place. It’s a sad brace of pages.

I also read Carson’s If Not. Winter — a translation of Sappho beautifully laid out — each pair of pages showing the Greek and the translation, taking not only the fragments, but reported stories from Dionysius and others — bringing a little more perspective on the lost whole.

This is a ghost house of a translation. Many pages just containing the white space, and a single translated fragment against the Greek. Some of these pages are deeply haunting and will often stop you short. Joyusly short to dash through for it’s scarce use of language.

Finally, I returned to Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and polished off another essay. The book wanders through several version and views of giants and monster from the middle ages. It discusses, in part, how the mutated and unusual bodies which are nearly human but “perverted” and therefore more satisfying for a society’s hero to kill and return back to the status quo which is lauded as natural. It’s a really good crossover of identity politics and medieval literature with some excellent ideas on how giants are represented and used to re-enforce norms.

Thanks! I hope to manage to write up April’s reading without letting it slip into two months again! As always, please find me on the Twitter and sign up to my newsletter about process and ritual here and listen to some field recording here AND go read my lovely article on glitch art here.

You don’t have to be an artist any more.

I stopped painting and drawing a long time ago. I cannot remember when I last picked up a paint brush and mixed oils. I think I used to be good.

Good enough, anyway. Good enough to have to ignore encouragement by others to pursue further it in some way.

Recently I have been having fun with composition and colour again though — through these throwaway “glitch” pieces.

They’re very simple to create, and don’t require much input beyond a digit, and being trigger-happy enough to have raw material to process.

I would like to explore this strange involvement in glitched, layered, obscured art I began creating — and a little bit of the why as well.

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You don’t have to be good at art to make something that feels valid with these things, you just have to be good enough at knowing what you like.

These “glitches” are never going to be as wonderful as paining a Rothko, but then, why would you want to make a Rothko in the first place? It has been done. You can’t do abstract expressionism on a train anyway, or in a few moments before a meeting. I feel you might have to mean it more.

One of the reactions to my father’s death was to begin to take a lot of pictures. I think this is probably a cliché I put a great many patient people, who loved me very much, through. Sorry about that if you’re reading!

My weapon of choice for this was the terrible camera built into my phone at the time. It was 3 megapixels at best, but likely 1.3 megapixels.

It doesn’t take you long to learn to love the abstraction that come out of that kind of terrible piece of technology.

Later, at university, I snuck into the photo labs (it wasn’t my department, they weren’t my resources to use) and started developing medium format pictures taken in a box brownie camera. I found that you could mix images together during development, exposing the paper, swapping the film, covering and exposing again. It was obviously a bit kitsch — but also sometimes quite fun to break an image I’d taken of a place or person I love.

It is interesting how the original goal of recording everything as a direct action of losing something, mutated to being about breaking recordings of the things I love.

That degradation in image, that real glitch in a game, that rush of complete abstraction that is entirely from something 100% solid and real to you. It’s probably a bit of a perversion.

Pure abstract thought isn’t about the things of the world. It’s just a certain fetished form of wishthinking. Taking something you love and stretching it until it no longer fits within its original constraints (which might include agreed perception and reality) through ritualized reworking has a higher/more expensive to extract, intrinsic value.

I used that shitty (brilliant) camera phone to take pictures to help me remember although, of course, it was too late. Maybe I took them to never forget again. Or something.

Anyway, as I grow older and further away from the sources of my melancholy I find that remembering is the same as playing a tape over a million time, you start to break your memories. They go fuzzy, with crackle that starts as endearing, and soon become alarming as the real noise of loss.

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There’s something satisfying about removing the craft from the creation of art. You can focus instead on the process of picking the good versions generated by machines, or select an abstract degree of degradation.

You’re part of the process, adding something in like “taste” or at very least “preference”. The addition of your time to the process makes it slightly more valuable.

Your value in the process is only that you’re giving your time to it. Because your time can always be quantified into cash, there is an economic value too.

So, when we procrastinate we’re always burning cash as much as we’re burning valuable minutes of our lives. But, then, maybe they’re not valuable at all.

This means there is a higher cost of creation and abstraction on either side — from the viewer who has to work harder to find meaning, interest, joy, etc — and from the “artist” who has to accept that there will be a number of failures (and failed, non-craft minutes) before achieving a pleasing work.

This is probably the grossest way to quantify art.

It’s possible you’re interested in making these kind of “glitch” pictures yourself. Here’s my fool-proof guide to making this junk.

How I make glitch art

1. Take a picture, or several.
2. Run it through a series of “glitch” apps, photo manipulation apps and the occasional twitter bot. These are on my phone, it’s not even a great phone.
3. Choose the good first process information.
4. Layer up, collage, throw together. Reapply stage 2 if you like.
5. Repeat until something aesthetically interesting turns up

Really, it’s less of a skill and more of a meditative processing activity.

It usually happens somewhere boring: while the kettle is boiling in the work kitchen, while I’m running a bath, waiting for someone to do something or if I turn up a bit early and waiting in the car is the only appropriate thing.

It does feel like I’m getting better. And when I find a new shit photo filter/manipulation app for my phone, I get a bit excited. Usually the really naff ones are the ones which can abused to degrade the images the most.

I get better at it in the sense that I think some of these are actually good? — and it takes me less time to process through them.

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The stuff that works best, in my opinion, is the stuff with clear relics in them from the original works. They’re the shapes and objects with some symbolism and meaning that you can react to when you run your eyes of them.

And you do, mostly, run your eyes over them and shrug. You can spend some time with them if you like, but I don’t expect much more than a shuffle of the shoulder and maybe hitting the share button.

Dynamic shapes sees to give better composition. These are often developed with the rougher and more distortion orientated apps.

The more abstract final works are those where I have worked with very natural base pictures — reeds, broken branches, grass, moss, texture. This is because I struggle with finding a way to give the mess of nature any form in the messy composition.

Part of the process is reducing a memory into a single picture. I could just take the best picture and stick it on instagram. But it doesn’t seem to carry the condensing aspect, or the abstraction (or corruption) of memory

That might be a bit flimsy. I’ll have to nail it down at some point. But we know we forget things, we know we stretch out the tape every time we replay it and we know that we create false memories all the time.

These are the degraded false memories that I have chosen to curate. I don’t think I’ve nailed it down, it’s still flimsy. Maybe that’s the point I’m making.

Sometimes I like the obvious patterns which lend themselves to abstraction. A carpet in the family home, some strange wallpaper or tiling. You can fold these to form new landscapes.

The important thing is to remember that this isn’t an artistic/craft process. You could probably run code to do what I do manually, and then simply pick your favourites at the end.

That’s why I like the Glitchbots.

These tiny robots who live on twitter can do image processing for you. It’s better than you doing it youself as it’s purposefully unintentional. Here’s a few I have used before.

Badpng is probably one of the best examples of a glitch-bot. It takes a picture in some other file format and sends it through a broken png converter. The result, although intentional, is a series of glitches. Sometimes it’s pretty good.

I like lowpolybot especially. You can give it something like this:

and it will give you something like this back:

Then, you can use both together. Blending them. Because often you’re looking for individual items to “come through” on what might otherwise be a highly blended mess of colour and texture, the #edges that lowpolybot gives you allow you to provide focus and interest in a picture. Cheers robot!

Pixelsorter is also good fun. Here’s what happens when I put the above into Pixelsorter:

And I like it when they talk to each other. Which they do regularly.

I’d like it even better if they’d talk to each other with my images, but they seem to have been created to be non-abusive like that. Good code, bad for lazy processing.

Speaking of which, I once got caught in a chat between @wisdead_ebooks and the, now famous, @oliviataters. This was terrible and flattened my phone battery with notifications immediately.

Some of the bots talk to you when you RT them. Like @imgquilt, who gave me this:

Does this belong to me more than the others? Or does it belong to the bot more because I didn’t even supply the original image for it to work with.

Anyway, these processed images can get built into the layers of the glitchwork.

Here’s a few variations of the same image at different stages after passing through glitchbots, and a few edits of my own. Special thanks to @badquantizer for the text. That’s a new bot.

I’m saying this is all about bots, but it’s not really. It’s about code not working as human being expects.

When it comes to code not doing what you’d expect, we can look at game glitches. Often these aren’t quite as artistic, but they can be interesting! Games are such unwieldy things made by so many people with such variety in control inputs that there’s going to be an untested case where a game becomes broken. Especially now that developers expect to patch a game in the first week.

This is a really exciting idea as it shows the lack of agency huge companies like Nintendo, Ubisoft or Capcom have. With play-testing and QA so much part of the system, you’d expect to avoid most glitches in games, and yet, many games can be broken if forced in just the right way.

Is a glitch simply when a process goes wrong, but doesn’t break down entirely? The roots suggest so.

The entomology of “glitch” is unclear — but seems to be related to the computer science of 1960s America: an the unepexted surge of power in a system.

Another theory seems to take it to Yiddish — to slip is “glitshn”, in German “gleiten” is glide and it doesn’t take much to slide from one to the other. I have also seen a glitch referenced as a “momentary jiggle” in a system.

​A glitch is a short-lived fault in a system. It is often used to describe a transient fault that corrects itself, and is therefore difficult to troubleshoot. The term is particularly common in the computing and electronics​​ics​​

– Nick Fisher

That’s what we’re looking for — a momentary jiggle.

So here’s some momentary jiggles I have thrown together over the last year or so. Yes it’s about a craftless creation, and also about a degradation of memory, but also spending some time with that memory before it fade away without effort.

I’d love to do a gallery show of these, or something. What could we do with that? Project them very large? Make you put on a warm helmet which projects this stuff right into your retinas? Maybe just postcards or something. I don’t know if we’d manage to get past the shrug.

Generally, I think these might be a bit useless for helping me remember a place, or a time or a feeling. But I think it helps me think about a place or time while I am creating. I know I am going to forget everything anyway, but at least I made some fun pictures on the way — and thought well about it while I did.

Let me know if you like these at all. Or if you’d like to use them for a project. I can probably find higher quality versions, if you like. All I would need in return is a link to my twitter and my name written out in full.

And this is probably the end. If you like you could sign up for my newsletter, called “Etch To Their Own” in which I discover and discuss rituals, systems and process with cool people, or — failing that — just anyone who will talk to me.

You can sign up over here:

https://tinyletter.com/cjeggett

Oh, and follow me on Twitter @CjEggett

I may come back to this in the future an flesh it out a little. I am sure there are better things for me to say on the subject, so maybe I’ll just delete all the words?