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Writing

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Mar 2, 2016

The network message can in effect be in the present

Writing, chirographic or typed, on the other hand, comes out of the past. Even if you write a memo to yourself, when you refer to it, it’s a memo which you wrote a few minutes ago, or maybe two weeks ago. But on a computer network, the…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 23, 2015

The spectral mimicry of things said to the mind

“The shabby-suited fellow at the front door was a Fuller Brush salesman.” The rhythm of the sentence not only propels the sentence forward, it helps to organize its significant units — its phrases and clauses. The reader is made, not merely to see…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 20, 2015

The essayist and the collector

This teeming or seething quality of the essay obtains both inside and out. The individual text may be worked up on the basis or pretext of anything at all. Michel de Montaigne jumpstarts the genre in the late 16th century by composing essays on the concept of experience, on…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 16, 2015

Moving information

[Poetry scholar] Marjorie Perloff has coined another term, “moving information,” to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today’s writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 6, 2015

Where stories come from

The tension is between finding ever more detail about atomic structure, and the story. It could be the equivalent of somebody looking at an old film, and realizing that the film came from a projector, and discovering that there is an image in the projector, and that it’s made of…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 6, 2015

He typed Zarathustra?

The other night out at the bars, I learned that Nietzsche wrote on a typewriter. It is unbelievable to me, and I no longer feel that his philosophy has the same validity or aura of truth that it formerly did. No other detail of his life situating him so squarely in the modern age could…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 5, 2015

Loops and digressions

As one thing follows another, so, very gradually, the narrative unfolds. Nevertheless, the language constantly checks itself, holding itself up in small loops and digressions and molding itself to that which it describes…

W.G. Sebald, “A Comet in the Heavens: On Johann Peter Hebel”

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 5, 2015

Renominalization

From the literary side, of course, the assumption has long been that poems are meant to be read, and so the mere idea of a poem made of words does not intervene in the discipline in the same way as conceptual art’s linguistic turn does. Indeed, the equivalent move for a poetry that wanted to model…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 5, 2015

The postmodern attitude

I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a…

Rob Giampietro in Quote Unquote

Dec 5, 2015

On sliminess

At this instant I suddenly understand the snare of the slimy: it is a fluidity which holds me and which comprises me; I can not slide on this slime, all its suction cups hold me back; it can not slide over me, it clings to me like a leech. The sliding however is not simply denied as in the case of the…