Archive for the ‘Modern Meta’ Category
Ruddy
My name, taut as an old skin, constricts my breath.
I’ll scratch it off, let it flake in the dust, so new
skin may grow, ruddy, fresh and new.
My heart, hard as a scab, still aches,
but no longer bleeds; it shies from any touch.
I’ll cut it from my chest, let fresh blood flow.
My head, thick as a scar, picks at itself
until the tissue is dull and hard, too thick
to speak or laugh. Better to walk headless.
by Ronosaurus Rex
The Danger of Meta: Pompidou and David Foster Wallace’s “Octet”
Centre Georges Pompidou demonstrates the danger of meta:
The Parisian art museum built in 1977 is meta-architecture because it exposes elements of a building that are usually hidden, placing them on the exterior. It teaches us to see a building as a material object made up of structure, support, pipes, wires. In the picture below some pipes are painted different colors, suggesting different systems, thus “exposing the device,” showing us how the building works. Very interesting, no doubt. So what’s the problem?
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The Expository Curse in Agnes the Barbarian (by Jason Harding)
The Thunderbird Theatre Company has been producing wacky original comedies in San Francisco for 13 years, many with meta elements. For example in The Gloved Fist of Satan, a character starts the show by treating the audience as house guests, serving them cookies and forcing them to watch a slideshow. In Los 7 Magnificos, the character El Bandito, dressed like Pancho Villa, sits in the audience and heckles the performers: “Thees ees sooo stupid!” (I played a bad ass reverend in that play, head of the evil Quakers.) In Las Vega-nauts, Stan Schuster not only narrated but drunkenly engaged the audience. (I was a member of the Swiss Mafia.) Pride and Succubus also had a Jane Austin character, who not only narrated but then intervened with the plot ultimately to become the villain.
inside gertrude stein: A Meta-Prose Poem by Lynn Emanuel
inside gertrude stein
Right now as I am talking to you and as you are being talked to, without letup, it is becoming clear that gertrude stein has hijacked me and that this feeling that you are having now as you read this, that this is what it feels like to be inside gertrude stein. This is what it feels like to be a huge typewriter in a dress. Yes, I feel we have gotten inside gertrude stein, and of course it is dark inside the enormous gertrude, it is like being locked up in a refrigerator lit only by a smiling rind of cheese. Being inside gertrude is like being inside a monument made of a cloud which is always moving across the sky which is also moving. Gertrude is a huge galleon of cloud anchored to the ground by one small tether, yes, I see it down there, do you see that tiny snail glued to the tackboard of the landscape? That is alice . . .
Because someone must be gertrude stein, someone must save us from the literalists and realists, and narratives of the beginning and end, someone must be a river that can type. And why not I?
(Quoted in David Bartholomae’s Writing in the Margins (Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2005).
Preface to an Introduction to Donald Barthelme and “The School”
Before I begin — I haven’t begun yet — I would like to assert that the introduction I am going to give to Donald Barthelme’s short story “The School” is non-fiction. Non-fiction means “not fiction.” Fiction, as you have learned, is a story that is “not true.” In other words non-fiction, on a linguistic level, is “not not-true.” This means, logically, when you cancel out the negatives, that the non-fictional information I am about to give you, is — I am very pleased to say — true.
Grover and the Monster at the End of The Book (with a Surprise Ending)
On the cover of The Monster at the End of This Book Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover, Grover breaks the narrative fourth wall and smiles and waves at the readers, a bit shyly, saying “Hello, everybodeee!” No mistaking that voice! Then the title page, which readers always turn past quickly, like Grover, who is already peeling back one corner of the illustrated page (drawn on the real paper), saying, “This is a very dull page. What is on the next page?”
Zemblan Pizza Rezembles Nabokov
This Zemblan pizza rezembles pizza, yet the meaty balls are not meaty sausage but date rolls, the peppers are dried mango, the parsley, green apple skin! The crust is a pancake, the sauce raspberry-strawberry and the cheese — oh, the cheese! — Moscarpone-frosting.
The pizzza is a vegetarian dessert, created by Erica Eller and Kayvon Ghashghai for the metaclass, in honor of vegetarian Dr. Charles Kinbote, who edited the poem “Pale Fire.” In the preface and commentary, Kinbote reveals more about himself, an eccentric, homosexual professor, and more about the colorful, gay king of Zembla, Charles the Beloved, than the writer of the poem, American writer John Francis Shade, whom Kinbote stalks and spies on. Kinbote hopes to impregnate Shade with his own history, which he hopes Shade will turn into great poetry.
The Wacky Poem Writer: Young Michelle Okafo
The Limits of Language: Seuss Beyond Zebra
In On Beyond Zebra by Dr. Seuss, Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell, who is just learning to spell, writes out the alphabet on a chalkboard and says, “The A is for Ape. And the B is for Bear. / The C is for Camel. The H is for Hare.” He knows all the letters through to Z for Zebra. “So now I know everything anyone knows / From beginning to end. From the start to the close. Because Z is as far as the alphabet goes.” In other words, the alphabet allows him to learn about the known animals of the world, the implication being that without the alphabet he may never have known about hares or zebras.
A Poem Dangerously About Itself
word
Isn’t “word” a weird word,
something blind and burrowing?
Where’s it going? Why so blunt?
What’s it looking for? Itself?
