http://thejoycetravesty.hostrator.com/ac_vs_lindsey.mp3
First, let me say how grateful I am to Lindsey for reading the original essay and finding a DJ to “remix” her reading. I think the real magic of this piece comes the process that brought it where it is now; a place that has nearly nothing to do with the original work, and is better because it isn’t burdened with trying to capture the original meaning.
The original piece, which is still in draft form, is a list essay of apologies that I owe, but have not given, to people from my past. So, in its original form, the piece is still an aggregate of smaller pieces that hang together without a larger context. The only connection they have with one another is that they are were all written by me, all come from my life. The original idea behind the essay was to bring persona into the writing through the back door; to show the reader a life told only through unmade apologies.
I chose this piece because it relies so heavily on authorship for it’s coherence, and I wanted to see what would happen if it lost that mooring.
The result surprised me on several levels. The opening was lovely and absurdist… “As I’m sure you guessed halfway through the last sentence, I’m sorry for hiding your favorite box of tampons in the bottom of the grandmother of a friend, but that may have been someone else, but you looked poisonous, and I needed to get into the shower.” The cut-up, in this section, is almost slapstick, and although it’s funny, it didn’t really lend much to my understanding of either the original piece or of the soundscape. Again, I’m grateful to Lindsay and her DJ friend, but the opening felt a little like going for the obvious joke.
Other pieces of the cut-up, though, elevated the original text and showed me where passages had particular power—or failed to deliver. For instance, listening to Lindsay read, “I remember pulling you leg first into the room while you stole panties from the wet pile of leaves…” evokes the tone of the three sections from which those words come, though none of the meaning. Hearing the phrases stripped of meaning, it was possible to hear in them a way that they couldn’t be heard in context.
The same is true of the phrase, “Who would from then on be a piss-soaked dead body in the living room.” Although the piss-soaked person and the dead body are not, in the essay, the same person, in the cut-up they become one… and, since I know the narrative, I am suddenly given a composite—my father and my stepfather, now both implicated and both dead on the floor of the living room—in a way that is unexpectedly lovely.
At the same time, I find myself repelled by the juxtaposition of the phrasing “and raped—with a chicken—almost daily.” The “with a chicken” is the bit pulled from another section, the “raped almost daily” part of an apology to a boy in my elementary school who was the victim of a pedophilic Scout master. There is a way—although I expect it’s a way I should simply get over—in which that one smash-up seems to be a violation of something in the text. Of course, only I would have the context to know that; does that make it unimportant? Forgivable? Is my reaction a holding-on to an outdated sense of authorial right, or is it just the squeamishness of making rape—a bad enough thing to begin with—even more hideous and absurd by mashing it up with a section about feeding chicken soup to a vegetarian? And what would every other listener make of it, since for her this is the piece itself?
It is, of course, impossible for me to imagine how this piece works for someone who does not see the fragments as pieces of a larger hole. There is something compelling about the rhythm of it, and the individual images taken fully out of context, but is it nonsense or has the collaborative process created something new that has value? I can’t tell.
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