Thu, 19 May 2005

the richter goldberg psychiatric institute: an introduction
[This was my second Process Engine article, which was basically a bit of turd-polishing as to my Richter-Goldberg project and the rules behind it. I’m not sure if this one even made it online.]

“Cursed be the one who makes a carved or molten image, the work of the hands of an artisan, and sets it up in secret.” -Rabbi Shim’on, Zohar 3:127b-128a

I’ve been putting this off, mostly because I’ve been lazy and haven’t really gotten the project in shape, haven’t slogged through the backend work and pulled together money and moved to Iowa City and set up the server and all the things standing between today and that long-distant point where (I tell myself, now) the project will have taken form, an empty box (kara-bakos) which will be ready to fill. I started this website at the very end of 1994, at which point it was basically a place to put up stories I had written. Unfortunately, I’m of a mindset where I constantly add little miniature pieces to a general locus rather than develop a standard narrative-arc novel, which means I’m basically fucked as far as publishing goes. As time went on, it became clear to me there was a soft taxonomy by which I could arrange the pieces I was writing. One was a semi-realistic storyline about a group of characters in a midsize Midwestern town dealing with memory and forgetfulness and one’s inability to change. There’s a few primary stories which snake through here, including the story of the rerisen, which I tried to shoehorn into a book. This stuff varies from hijinx stuff to rural depressionism pieces, and is usually the stuff people like, if they like any at all. The other stuff I call the Biomorphic Abstraction stuff. This is the stuff I have the most fun writing, and which I feel is technically my best work, even though it’s hard to get into. It’s the work where all my interests find a place: puppetry, automatons, cryptography, game-structures, butoh, false histories, symbolic alphabets, experimental technologies, and more than anything what Ballard called the externalization of the human nervous system. I sat out to build Richter-Goldberg as a means of organizing and facilitating this material. My first experience with mnemonics as a discipline (and not just the Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge kind) came from Borges, and like everything I learned from Borges, the idea stuck in my skull and crystallized, taking on an unearthly glow. In 1993 (I think, it was around then) I read Douglas Cooper’s excellent first novel Amnesia, in which he credits Frances Yates’s book The Art of Memory. I tracked down a copy a couple years later and was hooked. This, I realized, was the skeleton for my Biomorphic Abstraction device, as I began thinking of it. I did research on museums, on wunderkammern, on architecture, all the while collecting notes on this building where this group of people desperately connected research in order to avert some distant event, some hidden current seeping unseen through history.

The building is three stories high. Each story has 25 rooms. Each level has a hidden room which is not accessible by standard entrances, forming a hidden spine. If we read the rooms as letters of the English alphabet, that means each level is a lipogram. This makes for a total of 78 rooms. At least one symbolic reading should be immediately apparent (and yes, there are cards to match). The Kabbalah is based on the Hebrew alphabet, which consists of 22 letters, all of which double as numbers allowing for gematria; attempts to translate this material into English fail at their source as they lack the specific structure necessary to make such conjectures relevant. The influence of Kabbalistic practice is readily apparent all over RG, but I’ve deliberately strayed away from any literal readings, instead finding translations of the actual constraints in English and perverting them to my own ends, the idea of a core text being in essence a starting point for extrapolations outward into strange secret places. I’ve made attempts to learn Hebrew, just as I’ve tried to learn everything else, but so far I have fallen so short as to make any gain a pittance. Certain characters see divinity as a nemesis to humanity in RG, and from that I can understand why certain readers have felt offended by my treatment of certain concepts. Anyway. In the Kabbalah, there are ten Sefirot, which are numbers as living entities, emanations which, when combined with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, form the elements of all creation, (In this sense, English can be seen as a corrupt language, which is certainly how some of the characters feel about it.) RG is designed according to a base 5 system, as each of the three floors are 5x5 panmagic associative squares (the sums of each playing a pivotal role deep in the text), so that here there are five Sefirot, only that’s bad terminology, as they are here absences, voids, collectively known as The Cult of the Yellow Sign, practicioners of the Fivefold Erasure System. That the appearance of the five absences on each floor, when joined directly, form the five points of a star, and that the hidden spine of the building is located in the center of the inner pentagrams of these stars, is worth some, but not too much, consideration. That the absences mirror the vowels in the alphabet of rooms is far more suggestive.

The plans for the RG backend have developed as my abilities have grown; initially it was little more than a collection of pages-as-rooms loaded with goofy javascript. For reasons I no longer understand, I ended up separating the script/noise into its own thing as the Infernal Salt Codex, which is a retranslation of the core materials by an AI named Aqaraza (which is an old Scrytch reference). Later this became some CGI/database stuff which mangled emails, so that I could add to it from public terminals while I was computerless. Now it’s xml/xslt stuff that I still haven’t finished. A number of people are actually developing interesting online narrative structures which actually work, so lately I’ve been taking notes and mostly just been collecting all the material, which is taking a suprisingly long time. The structure basically forms a scaffolding for nested narratives, it is what John Barth would call the Arabesque. It has a particularly strong tie with Raymond Roussel’s work Locus Solus, both in structure and subject, and if I do it right, it will feel endless withouth actually being endless.
(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else/processengine] #

Paul Ford interview
[I wrote this for a site called Process Engine, which has been down for a while and I haven’t really been in touch with Deb lately so I don’t know what’s going on with her at all. Paul writes Ftrain, among other things. This interview came out of discussion about narrative technologies, and possibly starting some sort of focused web resource on that topic, but like everything else I basically flaked on that. I think this was early-mid 2003, but that might not be right.]

Bhlyr: are pieces generated with the character-as-narrator in mind, or are the pieces later fitted to whoever would be most appropriate? which is to say, do you know who’s speaking when you’re writing?

PF: I definitely WANT to know who’s who; those pieces where the authorial voice is uncertain are problematic, and need fixed and edited. In general, Scott is much more direct; Paul will gaze at his navel endlessly. Scott is actually quite violent - emotionally, morally, physically, and is constantly trying to goad Paul into action. At least that’s how it works in my head. It hasn’t always played out that way in the prose.

But I’m working on that. The next phase of the site is definitely going to be character-centric, and the lines will be more clear. I’m going to step out as much as my fragile ego will allow and let the characters interact. Sort of like when your parents leave for the weekend and leave you in charge for the first time.

Bhlyr: did the narrators begin as characters in other stories?

PF: I’ve had the idea of faking characters-as-writers since I first learned about the Web. And I did a few Web hoaxes in 1994 or so. It seemed to be one of the most promising things about the medium. It generates anger and confusions sometimes.

As for where Scott began, honestly, I don’t know. The boundary between work, life, text, play, and Web site is pretty thin for me. I think Scott Rahin (Ray-hin, not rah-heen) began as a kind of joke, or a parody of one of my friends. I don’t know if I ever put up the first pieces that included him. He just popped up some day when I needed him and hasn’t gone away since. I have his back story pretty well in place, and if I ever was to get off my ass and write a novel it would probably be about him.

I am always surprised how many people believe he’s real; as I forward with the work and audience continues to grow I’ll have to find other ways to let people in on it, but I also like the ambiguity at the beginning of the reader’s experience; it raises some interesting questions as they try to draw their own lines between the author and the characters/writers.

Bhlyr: is there any basis for the narrator-characters in actual people, or perhaps aspects of different people? are they physically defined, in that you could see them in your mind’s eye, or are they strictly textual?

PF: I’ve attached a picture of Rebecca Dravos which I drew a bit ago. I still don’t know exactly what Scott looks like, which makes me crazy; I’d like to know. He’s fairly strong and not bad-looking, but I think he runs to the stocky, and has a slight limp. I can do his voice - it’s nasal and slightly higher than mine, and his tone is very arch.

Rebecca Dravos

Overall the characters are collaged from my social environs: Scott is made of bits of about 5 of my male friends, and of course more of myself. Rebecca, who will hopefully have much more to say soon, is sort of a female foil to Scott, very disappointed, smarter, quieter and more focused. The other characters are in development. I’m still learning, as a writer, how all that works. Hopefully I’ll be a little farther along in a few years.

Bhlyr: do you see pieces written by “paul ford” to fit a style distinct from, say, pieces written by “scott rahin”? could anyone, thus, write as “paul ford”? or is it not that distinct?

PF: No, I think we all have distinct styles. MY style changes but it’s essentially a fingerprint; I tried to submit an anonymous parody to another Web site which was asking to be parodied, and it was immediately identified as my work, even though I clearly marked myself as a “concerned reader from Chicago.” Entering that contest was a moment of terrible late-night weakness, but I guess it proves that the “Paul Ford” stamp is fairly indelible in its way.

So to write as Scott I sort of have to become Scott, and of course it’s still me. Scott is a little more willing to take risks and he speaks from a less repressed place than Paul.

See how “Paul Ford” is also a character in this? I mean, I sort of cast myself as a bit of a neurotic-but-brilliant, kindly, lonely, mopey, literary-minded fellow. It’s a fun persona to explore, but it doesn’t acknowledge what a shithead I can be often enough.

And you COULD say that’s me if you met me, but I don’t think that’s who my friends know. Mostly people see me as someone who works fairly hard, likes to read, and is fairly profane. The Web site is part of my life, that persona is part of me, but it’s a surprisingly minor part if I’m out on the town. One more thing…I’ve received a number of emails from people writing to Scott, asking him to write more and to get me away from the monitor - agreeing with his critical assessment of myself. Those are the best emails.
(12:16.05.19.2005) [/else/processengine] #