How DOUBT was written
Tue, Jan 12, 2016, 10:26 PM
to me
As I read the text I am continually and joyfully surprised and I try to imagine how each line was written. Were you sitting at your computer/typewriter/blank page just making it up? Were you using some cut ups or other similar techniques? How much editing was done on the spot or later on?
Jim Leftwich
Jan 12, 2016, 11:23 PM
to erik
i tore pages out of old lit mags like Boundary 2 that i bought at a used book sale and cut them into thin strips, so each strip would have maybe 10 letters and spaces per line. i did the same with listserv postings that i printed out for the Alchemy list, the Journal of Consciousness Studies list and a list on homeopathic medicine. then i shuffled the strips of paper and stacked them on the desk beside my keyboard. i worked off of one strip at a time, associating and improvising off of the fragmented words.
much of the process was a kind of homeophonic improvisation, building sentences by moving among words with sounds similar to what i was seeing on the strips of paper. some of the process was visual association, riffing on letterstrings. the process provided a way of writing sentences that i wouldn't have written on my own, if i had been just making it all up in my head. at the same time, it was still very much involved with my own thoughts and tastes and skills. it wasn't a way of getting away from my own ego or subjectivity so much as it was a way of making that subjectivity do things it wouldn't normally do. the thinking came from Cage and Mac Low, of course, but i was deliberately mutating their thinking into something else, a kind of hybrid poetics, i suppose, mixing some of the contemporary aleatory practices with some of the old lyrical Romantic traditions.
remember, i was writing this in 1996/97, so i couldn't just do a google search for anything that crossed my mind. i worked in a room full of books. often i would have a stack of books on my desk as well, so associating off of the strips could lead to further reading. i worked on what became Doubt every night for a year. each night produced 2 or 3 pages. i had one file for the complete, accumulating text, and another for each night's writing. at the end of each session i would proof everything before copying and pasting it into the full-text file. after that, there was no more editing.
