Category: Tenets

Classtegorification is a tenant of collage. It is pivotal to classify things, categorize them and then, to cross-categorize them. It is through the surprising connections that come about in this cross categorization process that create the juxtapositions in collage that make it interesting and true to life. This is a fluid, and continuous process. It is like a surrealist math problem: the connection and juxtaposition can be completely impossible but will be essentially and crucially true if the justification is valid. Show your work, people! 

The tenant laid bare: Classtegorification, being a perpetual process, creates the necessary conditions for connections to be made that surprise and reveal glimpses of the absolute, spiritual truth. Through continual cross-classification, categorization and recategorization processes these surprising and insightful truths come about via juxtaposition. This is how the mind works, through associations it enlarges and enriches itself. Art is thus continuing in its long tradition of imitating life. 

It is the expressed goal of collage as literature to recreate the truths not as they are or as they appear, but as they manifest themselves in the human experience. All three of these are different and it would take too much time to explore them all properly. Through intensive, hyper-focused portrayals of the human experience the successful literary collage creates juxtaposing realities that are so true that they cannot not exist - thus, reflecting the essential fractured nature of alienation in this unprecedentedly connected age. Ha! How's that for arrogant?

I will never use the term, Classtegorification anywhere else or ever again. The common tongue is sufficient for my purposes. I will use classification and categorization interchangeably. It would be cleaner if I didn't; but, I am a realist. Just remember that within collage as literature, classifying, classification and classified, category, categorized and catogorizing are all the same tense. It is perpetual and constant. 

This story appears elsewhere. At the risk of going to the well one too many times I will endeavor to share it here in bare bones fashion. Whether or not I tear it out from this blogpost to put into some other form of writing is my right. It does not diminish its value; it only proves my aesthetic idea. That's a bit of a logical error, but I will show my work throughout to give it the necessary grounding in truth. Besides, the story seems to have had a fundamental impact on my life, creating and fostering an obsessive need to classify and sort the collected things in my life. This in turn has become a foundational piece of the type of literature I'm trying to write. Ha! How's that for arrogant?

The year, 1988. The place, Friendly's Restaurant & Ice Cream. Crofton, MD. Given that I haven't lived in Maryland for a quarter of a century I wanted to check that I spelled, "Crofton" correctly. I did. In the process of unnecessarily spell-checking myself Google informed me that the Friendly's Restaurant & Ice Cream in Crofton, MD is permanently closed. The last Foursquare review (that should tell you something already) was from 2015. My heart is broken. Still I crave a Fishamajig Sandwich and a Banana Split. 

I received my first baseball cards with a kid's meal at the now closed Friendly's in Crofton, MD. My God! Is Red, Hot and Blue in Laurel still open? Thank God! It is. I live 1,287 miles from this restaurant. Why do I feel such a relief? Baseball cards were my everything for a few years. From 1987 (the cards I got in 1988 were 1987 Topps) to 1994 Series One, I couldn't get enough of them. Quantity over quality at times, verging on the insane. I would sort them all by team. Then, I would sort them all by last name. Then, I would put them back into teams, but by name. Then, I would keep them sorted by team, but then subsort them by year. Every categorization was glorious to me. The act of classification was fulfilling, enriching and enlarging. I found connections I wouldn't have ever known. There were an astonishing number of baseball players born in 1961 when I was in the middle of my collecting. 

I have stopped collecting baseball cards. The first time because of the strike. I switched to basketball cards for a bit. It helped that Joe Smith had just been drafted number one overall out of Maryland. Then, I outgrew them. They stopped being important. The obsessive categorization and recategorization, the perpetual classification continued to this day. I have a vinyl collection - occasionally quantity over quality, but I'm working on that. It keeps me sane. Without it, this perpetual habit would invade all kinds of inconvenient areas in my life. It is safe with the records and will keep me occupied when I have nothing to write about. 

A continuation of the hazy concept method writing

I wrote two poems today. I'm in the process of reviewing a very strange jazz album that I picked up at a record store in Minneapolis. It was one of those shopping trips where I didn't know exactly what I was looking for - I've been listening to a lot of jazz recently, so I was in a jazz mood. I walked out with a Coltrane record and this other one. It's so experimental I had to split my listening into two sessions. I'm only halfway through.

After listening to side A, we went for a walk. I thought about the Fourth of July fireworks we went to the night before, about the walk back to the car after the show. There was a group of four kids, early twenties, had been rowdy the whole show walking up ahead of us by about a hundred yards. They were loud and obnoxious, mildly inappropriate for a setting with children present, but harmless. In between us and this crowd was a drunken, top-heavy redneck mountain stumbling back and forth with his two young children, possibly grandchildren, two steps ahead of him. 

Something had transpired between the rowdy boys and the cantankerous old drunk, but I had missed it. They were jawing at the drunk, loudly and the drunk was (loudly) yelling "Let's Go Brandon. Let's Go Brandon", over and over again, trying to talk over the youngsters who probably deserved a comeuppance that this old man was too drunk and, let's face it, too incoherent to provide. 

Earlier in that day, Erin and I had jogged through the same park where we had just watched the fireworks display. We spotted a bald eagle on our jog and after I pointed it out Erin said something to the effect of, "Ain't that America? Something to see, baby? A bald eagle on Independence Day! It's the perfect American metaphor. 

As we unsuccessfully tried to overtake the drunken idiot waddling and wailing, "Let's Go Brandon", I came to realize that a bald eagle on Independence Day was not the perfect American metaphor. In addition to the two poems I wrote, having been inspired by the insufferable wailing of the experimental jazz record and the drunken idiot, I wrote the beginnings of a story (or something) with the working title of Allegory No. 1. It's rough right now, but I enjoyed banging it out on the typewriter. America may have just celebrated its birthday in a way that estranged families celebrate Thanksgiving, potentially fraught and actually violently, but my mind has been rather preoccupied with Russia.

On today's walk, in that same park I might add, I began to think about Nikolai Gogol's Diary of A Madman. The dots are there if you care to connect them. As it is nearly midnight I don't particularly care to - I want to get to the point of this rambling post. Allegory No. 1 will undoubtedly become something entirely different by the time it's done. What it is now is a bit of method writing.

Method writing is a key component of Literature as Collage. In the beginning the collage was formless and void. Unlike God, I can't just conjure the light ex nihilo. Method writing is still a pretty hazy concept. Here's the principle that I'm trying to get at in a nutshell, because Allegory No. 1 is a perfect example of it as it stands right now. Russia, for better or worse, has a bit of real estate in my head right now. I have a feeling that this isn't too strange given the current state of the world. For whatever reason, I was walking in the same spot where I told Erin that, "this is America and it is embarrassing", I thought about an insane asylum and Nikolai Gogol's A Diary of A Madman.

Method writing has a lot to it (I think). One component completely steals from automatic writing. It's a mystical practice, for sure. There's some of that ineffability that makes descriptions a bit tough (and some of the nonsensical stuff that makes reading it a bit tough). With that comes the delusions of grandeur and associated arrogance, the pompousness bordering upon presumption. I confess! I like to dip my toes in that pool. Sometimes I even skinny dip. My goal is to keep from being baptized in it. 

The only way I know how to achieve that negative goal is to humbly accept that when I write, I do not have an omnipotent foreknowledge. I don't know where the story goes. That makes it exciting for me. It also means that sometimes I end up somewhere like Sylvania, GA. You know what's in Sylvania, GA? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. What truly gets me excited about this concept though isn't the potential for satiated curiosity at the end of a dirt road between Augusta and Savannah (or peril). The gambling- like quality to writing stories without knowing the ending has some appeal to me, of course. I'm compulsive; gambling is exhilarating. As an aspiring adventurist the thrill of the gamble catches my attention. But, the thing that really jumps out at me in this whole method writing endeavor is the power it has to blur the lines between author and reader.

If I as an author of a story come to the ending, the twists and the turns as they come then in essence, I come to them at the same time as any reader would come to them. Actual spacetime be damned; its reliance on relativity makes it just as questionable as my own inner reality. I come to the end of a story (as an author) as any reader does. I may have an inkling, but there might be a twist. The point is to get there to find out. Since the spacetime reality no longer has the moral high ground - and, since its claims to real reality are just as shaky as this esoteric solipsistic reality I am conjuring up as we speak and, - since I am coming to this end in the same way as you (as a reader) are, we might as well say we're coming together at it at the same time, relatively speaking, (of course). Thus, through this aspect of method writing we arrive together at a deeper reality, a truer truth. Which in my opinion, is the entire purpose of art. 

If this sounds like bullshit to you and you find yourself saying something to the effect of "there can't be more truer truths than others", take a moment and look around you. The world abounds with truths that are more or less true than other truths. There's a whole cottage industry based upon it. Isn't that the American Dream, though? We see someone become wildly successful, enriching himself at the expense of all others and we try and emulate it. It is the gambling aspect that drives us on, boom or bust, baby. 

Exceptional artists create the zeitgeist of an age. I am content with portraying it. *The asterisk at the top has no purpose other than ornament. I happened to like the way that it looked. That is all. As I said, I am content with portraying rather than creating... 

There are many reasons I write. Above all the reasons that I won't bore you with at this juncture is to relieve myself of an idea or a story that has been growing restless in the dungeons of my mind. I get a lot of these ideas in that mind of mine, most of which either don't warrant or won't conform to the paper I would consign them to. Those that don't warrant the paper treatment get sent down to the dungeon where they can either grow strong enough to rise or die - it's totally in their hands once their unfair punishment is meted out. Those that are so abstract and obscure they refuse to be put on paper are likewise thrown into the dungeon. 

The punishment of these obscurities is not only warranted, but necessary. Obscure and abstract thoughts tend to be the loudest in the room (which if you have forgotten through my tortured metaphor, signifies my mind). I have no fear that they will die in the dungeon like some of their quieter and weaker kin. What I fear is that if they aren't confined they will make such a racket that I won't be able to think on anything else. I will be unable to function in both the world that I am making and the one that I am actively trying to graft said world into. Have you ever tried to make feijoda while pondering Pythagoras' prohibition of beans? That prohibition has haunted me for twenty years. I'm convinced it has something to do with air, spirit and flatulence. It's very distracting to think about and I have thrice burned a perfectly good feijoda while pondering such nonsense. I fear that if I don't banish them to the dungeon for a time that I will end up putting their nonsense to paper, like the three times I burned the feijoda.

There is a part of Collage as Literature that I call, method writing. It is the process through which I hope good, readable stories will come about. At the moment it is so obscure and so abstract that it defies my paltry ability to make it concrete, let alone good or readable! I confined it to the dungeon months ago with the hope that it would take the confinement to do some soul searching, maybe so yoga and find clarity, if not conciseness. Instead, it has screamed bloody murder and riled up all its fellow inmates. The whole prison complex is in an uproar. 

Eventually the guards are going to have to let it out. By the content of its screaming I doubt it has reflected one iota. Unfortunately, that means that at some point I will write something very unintelligible (not to mention borderline megalomaniacal). I will derive conflicting feelings in making concrete this abstract notion, relief and guilt. The reader will probably not see either of those. I have a premonition that the reader will wade into that abstraction only to find that concrete is still wet. Who knows? Maybe that's the entire point, to entrap the reader.

Now that you know what's going on in the bowels of my brain, now that the prisoner called method writing has a promised release, now that I have preconfessed my sin of future obscurities we can talk about the more concrete part of that idea we call process. Let us proceed with caution. There is a delightful aroma wafting through my apartment at the moment. It isn't feijoda, but a delicious and intoxicating arrogance.

This is a tenet of Collage as Literature that proceeds from another tenet mentioned already. It is a little hazy and I ought to give it some times down in the bowels, but my judgments are at times (as I have already confessed) unfairly meted out. Technically speaking, all of the tenets proceed from one another. There isn't a core that all are attached to and there isn't really a distinction between the individual tenets. Collage as Literature is pantheistic. That isn't a core tenet, but it may turn out to be a meta-tenet. See, this is what happens when you don't let an idea cool out in the dungeon for a bit - the arrogance just oozes out doesn't it?

Collage as Literature is pantheistic in nature. We'll leave that as it is for now, whatever it means. At the moment let us focus on the truth that every thing has the potential to become paradoxical and that a thing's utility to literature depends upon how much it gives into becoming paradoxical. The physical process of writing for me begins handwritten in a notebook [1st draft], moves from handwritten to typed on the typewriter [2nd - penultimate draft] and eventually to the mac, either on a blog or word document [presentable work, hopefully].

The handwritten notebook allows me to see the former prisoner in the full light of day, so to speak. I think that if I had good handwriting there would be no need for the typewriter. The notebook would have been sufficient to make words flesh. I don't have good handwriting, in fact it is atrocious. Often I can't even read it. The typewriter is the necessary artifice for the ideas to become free. That was my justification when I bought it and I'm going to stick to it.

The physicality of the typewriter (a writer with good handwriting might not need this step) makes concrete the freedom for the abstraction that was hitherto imprisoned in dark, dank cells in the belly of my mind. I'm sure that the abstractions are much happier in their freedom than they were in bondage. I know I am at peace when I can expel the unruly concepts. It's a win-win situation. That would be the end of it if it weren't for my ego. Hmm, if it weren't for my ego would I be at perpetual peace? TO THE DUNGEON, DAMN YOU! 

Here is where the paradox plays into the tenet that Collage as Literature necessarily expresses itself most completely through a physical component. The concretizing of the abstract is paramount to the whole thing. Unless you are me, you are likely reading this on the Internet, a virtual reality that is by design antithetical to concreteness. It is a minor paradox, for sure, but paradox, all the same. 

This blog serves two purposes: to be the repository of the cutouts necessary to write novels in the style of Collage as Literature; and, to stroke my ego. I like to imagine that one day the posts here will some day constitute a body of work interesting enough to a person with the right literary connections to sign me to a book deal. I'll publish a story, get an advance and go write in Paris - there is an idea (he is in the dungeon, of course) concerning every single metro stop in Paris. (Part satire, part memoir, part travel book, in case you are the person with the right literary connections to sign me to a book deal). Then, we shall all live happily ever after. I like to imagine...

A midlife crisis? Yes, that is where we shall begin. It seems as good a place as any. 

Paradox. A statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth. I have always been a bit of late bloomer. I also was an early embracer of middle age and the accompanying crisis. I have no ill-will for the cosmos – I have come to accept my part within it. I mask my masochism with humor. Turning 30 was difficult for me. At 35 I started to get tattoos of the places in the world that I have traveled to, an artistic passport as a leg sleeve. I figured, if I can show off leg tattoos in a professional setting then I have won at life. I currently adhere to a business casual dress code as a salesman. At 36 I decided that I wanted to be a writer. After a year and a half of struggling, I have only a few short stories and the struggle to show for it. But that struggle has led me to an idea: Collage as Literature. This voice, style, aesthetic theory or whatever it will become will eventually develop on its own. If you’ll indulge my narcissism for a moment, I’m very excited about the whole shebang: learning how to write while developing an entirely different methodology? I told you the truth when I said I was a masochist.

Collage as Literature Principle Number 1: I believe that you should always tell the truth when you write – except for when it behooves you to do the opposite.

While I am wildly optimistic and (for the moment) extremely motivated, I am also a realist. Somewhere in the fog of my memories lies an amalgamation of the various History Channel specials. I can vaguely hear Peter Weller telling me that one of the Pharaohs (I forget which one) built his pyramid atop a high place, thus giving him the same or greater height than Khufu’s monument to overcompensation. Given that I have achieved, if that is what you would like to call it, middle age, I’m going to employ the aforementioned pharaoh’s stratagem and build atop a hill with what I call Collage as Literature. Not Khufu’s, but the one whose name I can’t remember. Speak up, Peter! For heaven’s sake.

The idea of Collage as Literature came to me nearly fifteen years ago. It is one of the many ideas that have not progressed into something more tangible. Unlike its many brothers and sisters sitting in a purgatory of waiting, it has not suffered in silence. The idea is as loud as it is undefined. It is my intention to define that idea, if for no other reason to end my suffering and silence it. Maybe there is a correlation between the loudness of an idea and its lack of definition. The only way to tell is to test the hypothesis. There’s probably a principle behind this, but I think it comes into play with method writing. It is currently 11:45 pm and I will need to be in business casual dress and sitting at my desk in a little more than eight hours. Getting into method writing will hamper my ability to make that (for the time being) necessary appointment. 

A note about these principles and their appearance in this manifesto – I’m developing them as I write. I have a general idea of where it might take me, but also have a hunch that it will provide plenty of surprises along the path to where it will take me (a completely different place than my general idea). Given the nature of Collage, that should be expected. Paradox. A self-contradictory and false proposition. As far as definitions go, I like the opening one better than this one. That’s the one we are going to go with.

Collage as Literature Principle Number 1: Every person, place and situation has the potential to participate in paradox. There is a correlation between level of participation in paradox (definition one, not that nasty definition number two) and the interestingness of that particular person, place or situation; and, thus, its utility to literary intentions.

The principles will continue to be numbered irrationally until I can impose some sort of rationality upon them. Thank you, and good night.