Spiral Memoir

On an interview with Charlie Rose, Ian McEwan said he had always wanted to write a memoir, but he was bored with the idea of the usual linear recounting of life events; why would he want to read about someone’s father, grandfather, going to school? I thought of Flaubert’s Parrot,  Julian Barnes’s odd captivating biographical study in theme chapters. One chapter is a chronology of events in Flaubert’s life, but with unusual milestones chosen. McEwan said his own memoir, if he were ever to write it, would have to have a twist.  

My spiral memoir is twisted.

It is an altered book, a cut-up, a fold-in, a collage, a private reminiscence, a mixing of past and present, a collage . . .  and? 

Every year there is an Altered Book Exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato. One year I wandered through the fanciful exhibit and decided to make my own entry. 

Altered Books—an art form that takes a text and turns it into something else that uses the physical material without necessarily keeping the abstract referential nature of the text itself. Example: Bonnie Kuhr made a dragon that hung from the ceiling out of a novel called The Dragon. She used every scrap of the book to make her swooping Dragon.

The next year I made an entry of my own. Here's what I did:

1. Cut and pasted years of journal logs in my computer into one big file in no special order. Included thoughts, events, news, quotations, recipes, names of flowers. Eliminated all the spaces between sections and set all margins to zero. Reduced the type to 11 points. 

2. Dragged photographs from iPhoto into the text randomly. Scanned pictures from the box of family photo. 

3.  Printed the text a page at a time, organizing it so that the pictures lined up in a certain way, on high quality ivory bond paper. Cut off the remaining small margins on all four sides and piled the paper up.  

4. Wound each page at an angle around a metal Japanese skish kabob skewer. Made a pile of spiral pages with fragments of image and words.

5.  Experimented with various constructions:

6. and finally glued them together on a large piece of watercolor paper. 

The MOCA exhibit is a silent auction. My piece was awarded honorable mention. It got bids. In the end, I didn’t want my life hanging on the wall of some unknown guy in Florida, so I outbid him. Now it hangs on my wall.

Juxtaposed text: the cut-up technique--background for Spiral Memoir.

1.  Paterson, a booklength poem in five parts by William Carlos Williams, tells of the city in New Jersey, and a poet. Williams was an Imagist poet (as well as a country doctor). His method in Paterson was to juxtapose prose and poetry without obvious transition, including letters and news clippings. I wrote a poem taking off on Paterson, using justapositions, and published it in my college literary magazine. "Say it: no ideas but in things."

2. When I was in Paris staying at Shakespeare and Company, I picked up a copy of The Paris Review featuring an interview with William Burroughs where he talks about his cut-up technique. When I was back in the states, I wrote a long graduate school paper on Burroughs' method of combining words and images randomly using "all writers living an dead."

He describes his cut-up, or fold in, method:

"Pages of text are cut and rearranged to form new combinations of word and image-In writing my last two novels, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, I have used an extension of the cut up method I call "the fold in method"-A page of text-my own or some one else's-is folded down the middle and placed on another page- The composite text is then read across half one text and half the other-The fold in method extends to writing the flash back used in films, enabling the writer to move backwards and forwards on his time track-For example I take page one and fold it into page one hundred-I insert the resulting composite as page ten-When the reader reads page ten he is flashing forwards in time to page one hundred and back in time to page one-The deja vu phenomena can so be produced to order . . . "

"You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors."

3.  Burroughs was at Harvard when T.S. Eliot was teaching there although he did not take his seminar. Burroughs considers The Wasteland to be a precursor of the cut-up technique. 

While William Carlos Williams rejected the poetic idealistic philosophy of "The Wasteland" (his "long-time nemesis"), both he and Eliot used the method of juxtaposition in their long poems.

4.   Juxtaposition was used by the Surrealists -- “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" -- and the Dadaists, like Tristan Tzara who drew random phrases out of a paper bag to create a poem.

5.  Images and text were juxtaposed in collage (coined by Braque and Picasso, meaning to glue), and photomontage, cutting and rejoining photographs.