Reply to comment

So I just finished Gish Jen's collection of essays, Tiger Writing (which I'd celebrated below); now I do not think we should assign it as text/model for our students’ short autobiographic explorations, but there are a couple of ideas in there that we might use for short writing prompts (and I note them here, as prompts to our own thinking/design of the “grid”):

* Jen describes the Western emphasis on individualism, the isolated, the particular, and the extraordinary, as contributing to a conception of art as proceeding from within--in contrast to the emphasis in Eastern art on moral utility and mastery, on artistry as tied to study and practice (p. 76)--> so, in our terms: art as play, vs. art as the grid?

* “In contemporary individualistic America…even famously activist writers…have maintained that ‘the writer is nothing but a questioner’…encouraging…all-absorbing play and ‘purposeless purpose’…A piece of art…may be designed…But in the dominant Western view, it is studiously non-instrumental….Works of art are…like people, autotelic…Like their makers…they are ends in their very own selves” (95-96)--> in our terms, play for its own sake, not altering the grid w/in which it is performed?

Over the course of her lectures (as in her novels), Jen works towards a balance of the independent Western and interdependent Eastern views. She describes, for instance, a 2006 documentary, 

in which Ou Ning gives easily-operated cameras to citizens who were evicted from their homes, which were being demolished for the Beijing Olympics. The footage they shot was “a balance between the individual and the collective….a participatory project: a documentary in which the distinction between those in front of and behind the camera has been blurred, the subject of the film actually becoming involved in its production” (117)--> in our terms, grid and the play it enables, play and the grid it constructs, becoming indistinguishable?

Jen also cites a song by Fleet Foxes called “Helplessness Blues,” in which the self, once conceived as “naturally” unique, celebrates being a contributing part of an industrial system:
“I was raised up believing I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes
Unique in each way you can see
And now after some thinking I’d say rather be
A functioning cog in some great machinery
Serving something beyond me.”

Similarly, she describes installation of The Forty Part Motet—40 speakers around a room, each projecting an individual voice, with words clearly distinguishable if you stood close to it, while, from the middle of the room, you can’t make these out-- only the motet, heard as a whole (156-157)--> in our terms, play as making the grid “work”…?