Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age

Earlier, I focused on the enormity of the Internet, the amount of the language it produces, and what impact this has upon writers. In this chapter I’d like to extend that idea and propose that, because of this new environment, a certain type of book is being written that’s not meant to be read as much as it’s meant to be thought about. I’ll give some examples of books that, in their construction, seem to be both mimicking and commenting on our engagement with digital words and, by so doing, propose new strategies for reading—or not reading. The Web functions both as a site for reading and writing: for writers it’s a vast supply text from which to construct literature; readers function in the same way, hacking a path through the morass of information, ultimately working as much at filtering as reading.

The Internet challenges readers not because of the way it is written (mostly normative expository syntax at the top level) but because of its enormous size.¹ Just as new reading strategies had to be developed in order to read difficult modernist works of literature, so new reading strategies are emerging on the Web: skimming, data aggregating, RSS feeds, to name a few. Our reading habits seem to be imitating the way machines work by grazing dense texts for keywords. We could even say that, online, we parse text—a binary process of sorting language—more than we read it to comprehend all the information passing before our eyes. And there is an increasing number of texts being written by machines to be read specifically by other machines rather than people, as evidenced by the untold number of spoof pages set up for page views or ad clickthroughs, lexicons of password code cracks, and so forth. While there is still a tremendous amount of human intervention, the future of literature will be increasingly mechanical. Geneticist Susan Blackmore affirms this: “Think of programs that write original poetry or cobble together new student essays, or programs that store information about your shopping preferences and suggest books or clothes you might like next. They may be limited in scope, dependent on human input and send their output to human brains, but they copy, select and recombine the information they handle.”²

The roots of this reading/not reading dichotomy can be found on paper. There have been many books published that challenged the reader not so much by their content but by their scope. Trying to read Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans linearly is like trying to read the Web linearly. It’s mostly possible in small doses, dipped in and out of. At nearly one thousand pages, its heft is intimidating, but the biggest deterrent to reading the book is its scope, having begun small as “a history of a family to being a history of everybody the family knew and then it became the history of every kind and of every individual human being,”³ thus rendering it a conceptual work, a beautiful proposal that’s hard to fulfill. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”⁴ says Beckett, a sentiment that could easily apply to uncreative writing.

The Making of Americans is one in a long line of impossibly scoped projects. The anonymously penned My Secret Life, a twenty-five-hundred-page nonstop Victorian work of pornography is another. No matter how titillating any given page may be—and every single page is—there’s no way of ingesting it straight through. It’s a concept as much as anything, a mad work of language to counter the moral repression of the day both by means of content and sheer bulk. It had to be big: It is surplus text at its most erotic.

Or take Douglas Huebler’s Variable Piece #70 (1971), where he attempts to: “photographically document, to the extent of his capacity, the existence of everyone alive in order to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled in that manner.”⁵ Like Stein, Huebler began locally, photographing everyone he passed by on the street. Later, he would go to huge rallies and sporting events, photographing the crowds. Finally, realizing the futility of his efforts, he began rephotographing existing photos of large gatherings of people in order to attempt to accomplish his goal. Of course, he too, “failed better.”

Another instance is Joe Gould’s An Oral History of Our Time, which was purported in June of 1942 to be “approximately nine million two hundred and fifty-five thousand words long, or about a dozen times as long as the Bible,”⁶ written out in longhand on both sides of the page so illegibly that only Gould could read it:

Gould puts into the Oral History only things he has seen or heard. At least half of it is made up on conversations taken down verbatim or summarized; hence the title. “What people say is history,” Gould says. “What we used to think was history—kings and queens, treaties, inventions, big battles, beheadings, Caesar, Napoleon, Pontius Pilate, Columbus, William Jennings Bryan—is only formal history and largely false. I’ll put down the informal history of the shirt-sleeved multitude—what they had to say about their jobs, love affairs, vittles, sprees, scrapes, and sorrows—or I’ll perish in the attempt.”⁷

The scope was enormous: included is everything from transcriptions of soliloquies of park bench bums to rhymes transcribed from restroom stalls:

Hundred of thousands of words are devoted to the drunken behavior and sexual adventures of various professional Greenwich Villagers, in the twenties. There are hundreds of reports of ginny Village parties, including gossip about the guests and faithful reports of their arguments on subjects such as reincarnation, birth control, free love, psychoanalysis, Christian Science, Swedenborgianism, vegeterianism, alcoholism, and different political and art isms. “I have fully covered what might be termed the intellectual underworld of my time,” Gould says.⁸

Gould’s project, too, ended in failure: No manuscript was ever written. It was an enormous hoax, so convincing that it fooled Joseph Mitchell, a reporter for the New Yorker, who wrote a small book about him, ending up being Gould’s de facto biographer.

Although there was no Oral History, there is The Making of Americans. What, then, are we supposed to do with it if not read it? The scholar Ulla Dydo proposes a radical solution: don’t read it at all. She remarked that much of Stein’s work was never meant to be read closely, rather, Strein was deploying visual means of reading. What appeared to be densely unreadable and repetitive was, in fact, designed to be skimmed and to delight the eye, in a visual sense, while holding the book: “These constructions have an astonishing visual result. The limited vocabulary, parallel phrasing, and equivalent sentences create a visual pattern that fills the page.… We read this page until the words no longer cumulatively build meanings but make a visual pattern that does not require understanding, like a decorative wallpaper that we see not as details but only as design.” Here’s an excerpt from the “Mrs. Hersland and the Hersland Children” chapter:

There are then always many millions being made of women who have in them servant girl nature always in them, there are always then there are always being made then many millions who have a little attacking and mostly scared dependent weakness in them, there are always being made then many millions of them who have a scared timid submission in them with a resisting somewhere sometime in them. There are always some then of the many millions of this first kind of them the independent dependent kind of them who never have it in them to have any such attacking in them, there are more of them of the many millions of this first kind of them, who have very little in them of the scared weekness in them, there are some of them who have in them such a weakness as meekness in them, some of them have this in them as gentle pretty young innocence inside them, there are all kinds of mixtures in them then in the many millions of this kind of them in the many kinds of living they have in them.⁹

This quoted passage proves Dydo’s thesis to be correct. It’s an extremely visual text, with the rhythm being propelled by the roundness of the letter m and the verticality of the architectural letter formation illi of million. The word million is the driving semantic unit, with the visual correlatives—m and on—framing the illi, in an almost palindromatic way, as the on visually glues the two round humps into another m. The negative spaces of the o and n echo the negative spaces of the m. The result is the visual construction of a new word, millim, a gorgeously rhythmic, palindromic unit. The ms lead the eye up a step to the is, which then step you up to the twin ls, the apogee of the unit, and then step back down the way you came. This visual sequence is echoed by the words sometimes and them. The connective tissue is the repeated use of the conjunctions more of them/ little in them/have in them/some of them/kind of them/many of them. which permeate the passage and give it its basic rhythm and flow.

Stein’s words, then, when viewed this way, don’t really function as words normally do. We can read them to be transparent or visual entities or we can read them to be signifiers of language constructed entirely of language. The latter is the approach Craig Dworkin has taken in his book Parse, where he’s parsed an entire grammar book by its own rules, resulting in a 284-page book. The writing is almost an abstraction—a schema—of Stein’s repetitions:

Preparatory Subject third person singular intransitive present tense verb adjective of negation Noun conjunction of alternation Noun locative relative pronoun auxiliary infinitive and incomplete participle used together in a passive verbal phrase definite article Noun genitive preposition relative pronoun period Relative Pronoun third person singular indicative present tense verb and required adverb forming a transitive verbal phrase marks of quotation definite article singular possessive noun verbal noun preposition of the infinitive intransitive infinitive verb comma marks of quotation all taken as a direct object conjunction marks of quotation definite article verbal noun genitive preposition definite article singular noun comma marks of quotation all taken as a direct object conjunction adjective adjective plural direct objective case noun preposition of the infinitive intransitive infinitive verb and passive incomplete participle used as a complex compound passive verbal construction adverb definite article adjective noun period Preposition active participle relative pronoun second person subjective case pronoun modal auxiliary second person transitive verb comma marks of quotation relative pronoun third person third person singular indicative present tense verb and required adverb forming a transitive verbal phrase indefinite article Noun preposition of the infinitive intransitive infinitive verb and passive incomplete participle used as a complex compound passive verbal construction comma abbreviation of an old french imperative period single quotation mark definite article verbal noun genitive preposition definite article noun period single quotation mark marks of quotation¹⁰

The source text, Edwin A. Abbott’s How to Parse: An Attempt to Apply the Principles of Scholarship to English Grammar, was first published in 1874 and played a leading role in the pedagogical debate over whether English should be analyzed as if it were Latin. Thousands of copies were printed as textbooks in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Dworkin says, “When I first came across the book I was reminded of a confession by Gertrude Stein (another product of 1874): ‘I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.’ And so, of course, I parsed Abbott’s book into its own idiosyncratic system of analysis.” The process was slow, taking over five years to complete. Dworkin called it “EXCRUCIATINGLY slow” when he started, but, by the end, he could sit down with the source text and parse-type at “full speed.”¹¹ But parse-typing at full speed requires little inspiration, tons of perspiration, and an acute knowledge of the rules of grammar. This couldn’t be more different to the famously hypnotic all-night writing sessions of Gertrude Stein, where inspiration was inseparable from process: “When you write a thing it is perfectly clear and then you begin to be doubtful about it, but then you read it again and you lose yourself in it again as when you wrote it.”¹² What Dworkin gives us is structure as literature, plain and simple. It’s purposefully lacks the play of rhythmic visuality and orality that Stein worked so hard to achieve. This is not to say that there’s not visual interest in Dworkin’s text, rather it’s asking different questions of us.¹³

What does it mean “to parse”? The verb to parse comes from the Latin pars, referring to parts of speech. In the vernacular to parse means to understand or comprehend. In literature it’s a method of breaking a sentence down into its component parts of speech, analyzing the form, function, and syntactical relationship of each part to the whole. In computing it means to analyze or separate parts of code so that the computer can process it more efficiently. In computing, parsing is done by a parser, a program that assembles all the bits of code so it can build fluid data structures. But here’s where it gets interesting: computational parsing language was based on the rules of English as set forth by the likes of Abbott. Now, the rules of English are notoriously complicated, idiosyncratic, and ambiguous—just ask anyone trying to learn it—and those vagaries have been carried over into computing. In other words, the compiler can get pretty confused pretty easily. It likes repetition and predictable structures; every ambiguity it must parse will ultimately result in slowing down the program. At his most programmatic, the most logical and least ambiguous part of Dworkin’s book is when he parsed the complete index of Abbott’s book. It’s so simple that even I can parse it. Here’s the index entry for the word colon: