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**
How to Write
is a
perverse Coles Notes: a paradigm of prosody where writing as sampling,
borrowing, cutting and pasting and mash-up meets literature. This collection
of conceptual short fiction takes inspiration from Lautréamont’s decree that
“plagiarism is necessary. It is implied in the idea of progress. It clasps the
author’s sentence tight, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, replaces
it with the right idea.”
Already early
in the twentieth century, the modernist Ezra Pound asserted that poets should
“make it new,” and of course by “it” he meant “the tradition”: the materiality
of pre-existent writing. The assertion is by no means original, much less
post-modern: John Donne, for example, argued centuries ago that “all mankind is
of one author, and is one volume.”
How to Write
is an
instruction manual for the demise of ownership. A multitudinous dialogue of
writers and subjects, words and contexts, it unleashes a cacophony of voices
where authors don’t own their words, they merely rent them from other authors.
Containing ten pieces of conceptual prose ranging from the purely appropriated
through the entirely recomposed, and covering a range of texts from the
anonymous to the famous, it includes samplings from, among many others: Lawrence
Sterne; Agatha Christie; Bob Kane; Roy Lichtenstein; and every piece of text
within one block of the author’s home. Its title story is an exhaustive record
of every incidence of the words “write” or “writes” in forty different English
language texts picked aesthetically to represent a disparate number of genres.
With
How to
Write,
beaulieu suggests writers and artists would be better served to “make it
reframed, make it borrowed, make it recontextualized.” By recasting the canon
with cutup directions for successful writing, catalogues of events, and lists
of vocabulary, he gleefully illustrates Picasso’s dictum that “Good artists
copy. Great artists steal.”
ISBN
9780889226296
Nonfiction / Language Arts / Creative Writing
4.25" x 7"; 72pp.; trade paper, $16.95
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