"How to Write" is a perverse Coles Notes: a paradigm of prosody
where writing as sampling, borrowing, cutting-and-pasting and
mash-up meets literature. This collection of conceptual short
?ction takes inspiration from Lautreamont's decree that "plagiarism
is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the
author's sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false
idea, replaces it with the right idea."
Already early in the twentieth century, the modernist Ezra Pound
asserted that poets should "make it new," and of course by "it" he
meant "the tradition" the materiality of pre-existent writing. The
assertion is by no means original, much less post-modern: John
Donne, for example, argued centuries ago that "all mankind is of
one author, and is one volume."
"How to Write" is an instruction manual for the demise of
ownership. A multitudinous dialogue of writers and subjects, words
and contexts, it unleashes a cacophony of voices where authors
don't own their words, they merely rent them from other authors.
Containing ten pieces of conceptual prose ranging from the purely
appropriated through the entirely recomposed, and covering a range
of texts from the anonymous to the famous, it includes samplings
from, among many others: Lawrence Sterne; Agatha Christie; Bob
Kane; Roy Lichtenstein; and every piece of text within one block of
the author's home. Its title story is an exhaustive record of every
incidence of the words "write" or "writes" in forty different
English-language texts picked aesthetically to represent a
disparate number of genres.
With "How to Write," beaulieu suggests writers and artists would be
better served to "make it reframed, make it borrowed, make it
re-contextualized." By recasting the canon with cut-up directions
for successful writing, catalogues of events, and lists of
vocabulary, he gleefully illustrates Picasso's dictum that "Good
artists copy. Great artists steal."
General
| Imprint: |
Talonbooks
|
| Country of origin: |
Canada |
| Release date: |
May 2010 |
| First published: |
April 2010 |
| Authors: |
derek beaulieu beaulieu
|
| Dimensions: |
177 x 107 x 5mm (L x W x T) |
| Format: |
Paperback
|
| Pages: |
72 |
| ISBN-13: |
978-0-88922-629-6 |
| Categories: |
Books >
Language & Literature >
General
|
| LSN: |
0-88922-629-6 |
| Barcode: |
9780889226296 |
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