Set Piece (Flowage Rebellion)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Flowage Rebellion ++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Muratorian Fragment contains a list of the extant histories of the Midwestern Water Wars. The most interesting witness to the formative stages of the rebellions was a woman known only as Sister Pulcheria, who, in either tribute or “penance of the spectrum”, added mysteriously potent dye concentrations to water sources, inadvertently creating the first Flowage Rebellion according to the Chronologies of the Water Wars. Bright spectral coloration became synonymous with covert insurrection, which led to both the Forbidden Palette Act, and the sweeping Pigment Prohibition Laws of the mid-century. Color attacks, characterized by their vehemence and violence, were frequent, and their punishment swift and brutal. Words such as tone, green, yellow, hue, blush, crimson, blench, redden, color, colour, colorize, discolor, discolour, emblazon, people of color, people of colour, vividness, chromaticity and tinge were forbidden in public use, creating the Covert Lexical Movement, often subsequently associated with baroque and poetic syntactical style. “Lexical” thus became shorthand for “one who brings color-to-water” and has since been used as both rebuke and honorific.

First Email Invitation from Lane

Craig, Trent and Mike,

I have been interested in experimenting with collaborative authorship, and wanted to run this idea by you for feedback. Inspired by Waxweb (multimedia project, kind of hermetic, that came from early muds), House of Leaves (allegedly began on a wiki), alt-history projects, and a lifetime of addiction to collaboration, I propose trying to develop a disjointed "novel" titled The Flowage Rebellion, centered upon the apocryphal histories of The Midwestern Water Wars. Below is the set-piece for the project, and I have no expectations other than 1) it deal with this history, 2) be open in form 3) inhabit an ethos of ecology, pseudo science and ficto-history.

Here are my first concerns:

1) do you perceive this as interesting?
2) would you have time to devote a bit of development to it as an ongoing piece (not too demanding, but needs to develop over duration)
3) how would authorship "product" be constructed? (a collective? a ghost-author?)

My concern is that I wouldn't want this to distract anyone from their primary work, but on the other hand, it might be an exciting exercises in creative authorship and form that could be useful in both pedagogical and formal arenas, and who knows, it might lead to an exciting piece!

If a core group of you signs on, I'd propose a viral structure (what's a little virus among friends!) where we then each invite participants based upon a collective invitational narrative that The Core develops. Off hand, I would certainly invite others from our Obstructions class, as well as various grads in the CW program. Because this is (would be) a ficto history, I see that form could easily be adapted, as different people would be interested in developing different modes, narratives, reviews, exerpts, tangeants. I would also expect a lot of genre cross-over.

I have been busy developing my website, (check out little embedded videos in recent posts - ) and would be interested in using some content for that, and using all content as "found text" for further sausage-grinding. Others could do whatever they wanted with the text: that would be another "rule".

Thoughts?

(be honest: if this is merely a distraction, or not an esthetic interest, please feel free to express!)

Lane

An Innaugural Address

AMONG the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions all I dare aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the partiality in which they originated. Besides the ordinary objects submitted to your care, it will remain with your judgment to decide how far an exercise of the occasional power is rendered expedient at the present juncture by the nature of objections which have been urged against the system, or by the degree of inquietude which has given birth to them. Instead of undertaking particular recommendations on this subject, in which I could be guided by no lights derived from official opportunities, I shall again give way to my entire confidence in your discernment and pursuit of the public good; for I assure myself that whilst you carefully avoid every alteration which might endanger the benefits of an united and effective government, or which ought to await the future lessons of experience, a reverence for the characteristic rights of freemen and a regard for the public harmony will sufficiently influence your deliberations on the question how far the former can be impregnably fortified or the latter be safely and advantageously promoted.

After The Opening of the Field

First there is the light emitted from the corner as if to control the shadow. Drawn lines multiply their imperfection until each blade moves as if caught in the current of breeze. Lately, money can buy love off the clearance rack, but why buy when you can steal for free. Outside the coffee shop the sun is done playing good cop. Time to brace for the severity of Fall. October is the cruelest month. We're shouting our criticisms because the last piece of the puzzle doesn't fit. "I'm not coming back until we get a cleaning service in here," she said. The grinder grumbles an answer, but we can't make it out over the steam. We drink iced coffee to practice coldness in waterless air, but we must be careful not to take the edges for granted, leap out of the fishbowl. Fall-back will arrive two weeks later so that we can grasp the energy a bit longer. Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow as if it were a scene made up by the mind. Hanging on the wall, but opening the stone. The Eye of the Needle is a trail cut between large rocks. I Miss the Rockies, their redwoods so tall they could extinguish the light of day. It seems I'm always looking for a forest in the least likely places. Crease the page until the paper takes shape, ever finding phylum: its lively limbs. If you blink you might miss the most amazing transformations. Leaves bending over your ear, "Look closer and see. See into the trees. Find the girl….if you can."

John Bruce Stump Speech #4: Darkness on the Edge of Town

You better get it straight, darlin'. By the end of Darkness, I'd found my adult voice. Poor man wanna be rich. Rich man wanna be linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. Songs like the Animal's "It's My Life" and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" were infused with class consciousness. You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past indignations, and I know that many of them are sitting in front of me. The country seems to have lain down and shrugged off something as serious as Laos, just as we calmly shrugged off the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all times.

I had a reaction to my own good fortune. I asked myself new questions. I felt a sense of accountability to the people I'd grown up alongside of. I began to wonder how to address that feeling. And I tore into the guts of something in the night. We're born with nothing and better off wiping away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more and so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

I was searching for a tone somewhere between spiritual hopefulness and 70's cynicism. She says, "Baby, if you wanna be wild, you've got a lot to learn." For ending such a war, I have personally advocated that this is the best procedure. It is a traditional rather classic procedure of how to end a war that could be called a stalemate, that neither side apparently has the capacity to end by military victory, and which apparently is going to go on for a long time. The possibility of transcendence or any sort of personal redemption felt a lot harder to come by.

From the fire roads to the interstate, some guys they just give up living and start dying little by little, pieces in the record, and someone who actually does something, so that they can recognize it in an election, if they are interested. This was the tone I wanted to sustain. 'Cause they understand if I could take one moment into my hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

I intentionally steered away from any hint of escapism and set my characters down in the middle of a community under siege. And you better believe, boy, somebody's gonna get hurt tonight. And will our children and grandchildren ever live in a world as safe and secure as the world in which we grew up? Weeks, even months went by before I had something that felt right. 'Cause in the darkness I hear somebody call my name and when you realize how they tricked you this time. And it's all lies but I'm strung out on the taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals with turned up power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies.

Darkness on the Edge of Town dealt with the idea that the setting for personal transformation is often found at the end your rope. I've been working real hard trying to get my hands to clean the mucous out of his tube and he suffocated to death. If you don't do that your characters ring hollow and you're left with rhetoric, words without meaning. Everybody's got a secret, sonny, something they just can't face with a very sickening situation in this country, because there is no moral indignation and, if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by their past indignations.I was twenty-seven and the product of Top 40 radio.

John Bruce Stump Speech #3: Born to Run

In '70's New Jersey, the car was still a powerful image. All the redemption I can offer is beneath this dirty hood with a chance to make it. That somehow resolutions and failed inspections would make this world a more peaceful place. He was hoping we'd turn away. But now I was appreciating their craft and power.

I walked into a Tenth Avenue freeze without Saddam Hussein. At first I thought it was the name of a movie or something I'd seen on a car spinning around the Circuit, but I couldn't be certain. And the world is busting at its seams and you're just a prisoner of your American dream. And if we did that, we'd have more consumption ability in America, which is what we need right now in order to kick our economy into gear. I liked the phrase because it suggested a cinematic drama I thought would work with the music I was hearing in my head. At night sometimes it seemed you could hear the whole damn city crying. Blame it on the lies that were killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

And here's what she wrote to you, "That gave me an opportunity to feel out the arrangement. Baby, this town rips the bones from your back, it's a death trap, a suicide." Some 27 percent have tried, and they try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care, that doesn't really care. Born to Run was released in a post-Vietnam America. And tonight you'll try just one more time to leave it all behind and break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings" with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using.

Were we fighting in the European theater? People were contemplating a country that was finite, where resources and life had limits. And the word's been passed this would increase the chances of the U.S. being hit by another 9/11-type terrorist attack. Slowly, the dread that I had managed to keep out of Rosalita squeezed its way into the lives of the people. Outside, the street's on fire in a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy. And the poets down here don't write nothing at all. They just stand back and let it all be. And in the quick of a knife they reach for their moment. But I want to come back to where I began, on homeland security. When the screen door slams on Thunder Road you're not necessarily on the Jersey shore anymore. You could be anywhere in America.