Perhaps not as a tool nor as a means to an end, but I have been listening to 'classes' from Joyce Carol Oates on Masterclass and, of course, there is never going to be something they're going to teach you that will open your eyes, but instead what happens here is that by someone speaking about writing to perhaps inspire and move you into the direction, to get you into the right mindset. In fact, it's nearly the opposite. This woman breaking down different paragraphs, and trying to explain what is happening in a paragraph makes EITHER her seem unintelligent or even worse, it makes her seem like she believes that WE the viewer is unintelligent. And at its worst, perhaps both are true.
She discusses a story in which we are at the funeral(?) of twin girls and she'll mention their names and she'll say something along the lines of "and here we see there are two girls."
Got it.
I also wonder, what would it be like to learn from someone younger, more dynamic. Danielewski. Eggers. Vandermeer. It isn't necessarily about the youth, but instead, perhaps, at the way they are able to view their audience. I believe that many from the older generation consider their 'students' as those who are coming to them for help like they need these fundamentals presented to them from the ground up. Whereas a younger teaching board would instead approach the students as peers, as exposed to similar resources (the main one of them being the process of trial and error) as they are/were and would spend more time refining than defining.
It reminds me of a time I finally dragged my ass out to a spoken word poetry night. And I parked, showed up, had my poems printed out. I knew I was going to take it on. I ordered a coffee and I stood outside the space for a moment. And in that moment, a man stood up and read a poem about his garden. And next, a girl stood up and read a poem about her room. And then the next man stood up and read a poem about the walk he took in a park beside his house. I packed up and left. I wonder:
Maybe these people do need help pulling out what makes critical and urgent art. What is/was the purpose of any of those things that they wrote. I thought about this yesterday while listening through ETID's discography. At what stage did these songs 'occur'? Are these songs that were written because they had to reach 12-16 tracks by August 2016? Or were they swirling in chaos in the practice space or recorded on an iphone voice recorder for weeks until they could finally get together, angrily refined until they eventually were complete enough to share? I hesitate to say this is the ONLY art that I want to consume, though I think it's the only type of consumption I'd consider art. Everything else is just output. Product.
