These are my summaries and thoughts of the Twitterives that were presented in class on February 28th.

1) WHO are the characters in your story?
I am the incidental character in my story, but I want other people to feel like they could be in it too.

2) WHAT is your story? WHAT genres/modes are you using for your story?
My story is about abandonment, loneliness, and disconnection. I am using photography, poetry, music performance, voicemail recordings, and drawings. The recordings of voicemails, for example, embody the spirit of missed connections, and the crackly, low-fi, far off sound hopefully evokes loneliness.

3) WHEN does your story take place?
My story takes place in the past. It is a place of memory.

4) WHERE is your place?
My place is the limbic system of the brain, which deals with memory and emotion.

5) WHY do you feel a connection/lack of connection to place?
I have a turbulent relationship with memory. I DO feel a connection to feelings of abandonment, but I am disconnected from the places where the memories exist.

6) HOW do you show your audience your connection/lack of connection to place?
The fragmented nature of the video shows a lack of connection.

Ahh, to reflect on the writing process. It seems like all I do is reflect. This post will discuss my writing process so far in this class.

Approaching Twitter to begin "making notes" was easy. I had no problem, at first, using text messages in lieu of a pen and paper to make observations. After a while, I noticed two things. First, a lot of my observations were internal. As much as I described the physical world I was experiencing, I tweeted about thoughts that occurred to me, revelations that appeared only in my head. Second, as I amassed a collection of followers, I became more and more aware of the people who were reading what I wrote. Gone were the carefree inaugural days of using a new social media platform. My notepad was now a glass slate with the world on the other side. My tweets became more focused on real things (promoting events, etc.) and less about ideas.

Writing on Weebly has had its own share of difficulties. I was initially scared to compose directly onto the internet. I try to be organized as much as possible, and I'm used to keeping Word documents in folders on a hard drive. It's a way of keeping everything central. But I don't really know what's more reliable: files scattered over an array of external hard drives that may someday stop working, or work scattered on the internet where I can find it always (probably). I suppose it's a wash, but it feels like I'm just adding to the digital noise. It feels like these words are cheaper per pound than Microsoft "Words."

Once it came to actually working on the twitterive, I didn't know where to "enter" the "story." I didn't know if it was a story, and I didn't know what form it could or should take. I needed restrictions, but I didn't want to limit myself before I knew what was possible. Finally, in distressed phone call to my girlfriend, I articulated that "if it was just a double-spaced thing on paper, I could do that, I could write a shitty draft." She replied, "Then do that. Start there. You can add things later." This now seems like the most obvious thing, which is usually how our conversations go.

Writing my micro fiction pieces was really kind of fun. I found a tweet I could work with, and then totally removed myself from the situation in which I tweeted it. It was like being forced into a backseat with a blind fold on, driven out of state, and left to fend for myself. I had to write myself out of it. Of course, familiar places crept back in. But I was able to keep them at an arm's length to avoid bogging down with unnecessary detail. After writing three such pieces, I didn't think it was helping me arrive at my twitterive. I thought maybe I was going the wrong way. I got discouraged and stopped working. This is the worst thing to do. Once I stop working, it allows for a whole host of unsubstantiated thoughts to creep in.

Finally, I told myself to just write something and go from there. I wrote a scene. I noticed rust on light poles. I noticed rust on coffee pots. I thought about what rust implies: neglect, desertion. I thought about the desert, and how nothing rests there. I thought about the necessity of water, how it functions in growth and decay. This was enough to convince me that maybe there was something to this. But I'm still not convinced.

So here are five questions to those who read my twitterive in progress:
1. Is this at all interesting to you, do you have a reason to care?
2. What does rust make you think of?
3. What are the implications of living in an emotional desert?
4. What do you do when you feel like no one cares?
5. What other kinds of modes or genres would work here?

P.S. Someone called me a deconstructionist. Part of me is hopeful that maybe there is a pattern to what I'm doing. And that the pattern reaches across modes. It's also kind of fun to think that maybe there is a name for it.

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As an experiment in collaborative writing, our class is putting on a mock wedding. I am playing the part of videographer. Here's a video I made in preparation for the event.

It's funny; it seems like everyone is talking about the idea of recombination this week.

I got the idea of cutting up my tweets from an exercise in high school. In order to form the final stanza of a paradelle in progress, I cut up the words of the first three. Here's what I ended up with:

Paradelle for Jennifer

I get confused when you play the piano of my soul
I get confused when you play the piano of my soul
And hide from me true melodies in your heart
And hide from me true melodies in your heart
I hide, confused, from your piano melodies
And when you play the true soul in me, you get my heart

In my dreams, the winds blow soft and caress your hair
In my dreams, the winds blow soft and caress your hair
It falls down as I kiss around your rosy cheek
It falls down as I kiss around your rosy cheek
I caress your cheek as winds blow down my dreams,
And the soft rosy kiss, it falls around in your hair

My vision fades when you walk down the road into the sun
My vision fades when you walk down the road into the sun
This unsure feeling rises blindly in my conscience
This unsure feeling rises blindly in my conscience
The sun rises unsure into this road
The vision blindly fades my conscience, when in you walk, my feeling down

The winds hide dreams as you blow your kiss in my cheek
I blindly play in your soft rosy hair
You get this unsure feeling of me when I walk around the piano
When true vision rises and falls from my confused conscience
Your melodies caress the sun down in my soul
It fades down the road and into my heart

Of course, one of the pioneers of cut and paste writing was William Burroughs. See it here, along with the copy and paste stylings of Led Zeppelin:

And the idea of playfully reappropriating words immediately brings to mind Dylan, in all his poetic glory:

But you don't have to go back to the 1960s to find examples of remix. It's everywhere! Mark Hosler has been doing this sort of work with the band/artist collective Negativland since the late 70s. And he's coming to Rowan this week! Hosler will present a multimedia lecture titled "Adventures in Illegal Art: Creative Media Resistance and Negativland" on Wednesday, February 15, at 7pm in Boyd Recital Hall. And he was kind enough to agree to meet me for a brief television interview! If you have any questions you'd like me to ask, feel free to post them below.

The poem on the left was inspired by my twitter feed. It consists solely of portions of the tweets on the right.

I'm not saying anything, but I might try to do one of these every day to get going. Just trying to sneak up on it. This microfiction is inspired by the tweet "Instead of showing me, they just told me where to go. Fake wood paneling."

I didn't even know if the film existed anymore. I had heard rumors, and when Lars Ellsworth from the Herald mentioned to me that he knew a guy at the police station who was cousins with the man who shot it, I was interested. We arranged a meeting on a Saturday. Lars would pick me up at 9 and we'd drive to the south side to this house somewhere in Parkview.

"Don't bring the camera," Lars said when I got in the car.
"I'm not," I said.

The air outside was cold, but inside the car I had to take off my overcoat. The violent glare of parked cars assaulted us in the enclosed space. The further south we drove, the shorter the houses became. They seemed to sink into the earth here, deflated by years of neglect. The brick walls grew darker, but the bright blue sky seemed oblivious. A woman with curlers in her hair was walking her dog. She stared as she crossed in front of us.

We arrived and two men met us on the steps. Instead of showing me, they just told me where to go. Fake wood paneling. A narrow stair case. Down, down, down. We got to the bottom and I froze. Not only was there a whole wall of film canisters, but there on the table, in a single pool of light from above, was a rifle that looked exactly like the murder weapon.

I just had so much fun writing that last micro fiction piece that I'm back to write another. (And because it's required for class.) Oh, did that sound sarcastic? It wasn't meant to! The tweet that inspired this story is "If i ever got a chance to go to the moon, i would go for the month of december."

It was two in the afternoon and I was called up to the registers again for cashier assistance. Why on earth does anyone go shopping at this time on a Sunday, I thought. I turned the corner and saw that the lines were all the way back to the jewelry counter. "What the fuck?" said Rob, my articulate co-worker. I met him where cosmetics join stationary, and we stood there a moment, just staring at the absurd veneer of suburban consumerism. He was wearing a name tag that said "Dick" and his red polo shirt was untucked from his khaki pants. What he lacked in tact he made up for in honesty. "I'm going down to the express lanes," I said. "I gochu," he replied, heading for register 13.

After ringing up a sagging woman in yoga pants buying 10,000 double A batteries and an armful of lean cuisines, I had a man who wore a tie and leaned in when he talked. "It's for my daughter," he volunteered, smiling. I looked down at the conveyer and picked up a box emblazoned "Moon Scapez! Create your own world!"

"Aww that's nice," I said, and he relaxed his shoulders. But as he fumbled for his Visa, I added "If I ever got a chance to go to the moon, I would go for the month of December."

"And why's that?" he asked. I gazed down toward register 13 where a cluster of red shirts had gathered around a stout woman pointing wildly at a Fisher-Price Mickey Mouse Hot Dog Dancer. I surrendered. "Did you want a gift receipt?"

This is the first micro fiction piece I've ever written. The goal was to produce something less than 250 words an include a "tweet" from my twitter feed. I used the following tweet: "Is it so hard to clean off your car?"

Roy was lying on the backseat but hadn't stirred for hours. We were driving north on some highway on the way to Ithaca. I don't remember the number, and I don't think we knew it at the time, either. All the road signs were frozen over, coated with ice. We were pretty much driving blind, but Walter had found a big truck to square up behind. Just stay in his tracks I thought. When we came to a railroad crossing, the truck (a dump truck as it was, probably filled with salt) made a right and left us idling at the crossroads, wondering what to do. Walter eased on the gas, we spun for half a second, and then grabbed a patch of unfrozen snow, hurling us over the tracks. I noticed a gas station. It was like noticing the light through a keyhole in a dark room. At first, the room is invisible. Then, the limitations of architecture become apparent and light leaks in where it cannot be denied entrance. "Let's go in and ask them," I said.

I knew then we weren't going to get Roy to his show in time to play. We pulled out behind a minivan just as a sheet of ice slid off its roof and smashed into a million pieces right in front of our bumper. "Jesus!" Walt said. "Is it so hard to clean off your car? Gonna get us killed!" By that time, I knew Roy was probably already dead.

This piece was inspired by my twitter feed, my own personal driving adventures, and the story of Hank Williams' death.