Joe Hale
2012
"A
few years ago I was lecturing to a class at Princeton. After the
class, a small group of students came up to me to tell me about a
workshop that they were taking with one of the most well-known
fiction writers in America. They were complaining about her lack of
pedagogical imagination, assigning them the types of creative writing
exercises that they had been doing since junior high school. For
example, she had them pick their favorite writer and come in next
week with an “original” work in the style of that author. I asked
one of the students which author they chose. She answered Simon
Morris. She then added that the assignment felt meaningless to her
because the night before she tried to “get into Morris’ head”
and scribbled a piece in “his style” to fulfil the assignment. It
occurred to me that for this student to actually write in the style
of Morris, she would have been better off taking a road trip across
the country in a 2002 Renault Clio Sport with her psychoanalyst,
eating books by the fistful, simultaneously laughing and crying while
hurling all 222,704 words of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams
out the window, speeding 90 miles per hour down a deserted Dorset
country lane. And even then, it would’ve been a completely
different experience, not to mention a very different piece of
writing than Morris’.
"Instead,
my mind drifted to those aspiring painters who fill up the
Metropolitan Museum of Art every day, spending hours learning by
copying the Old Masters. If it’s good enough for them, why isn’t
it good enough for us? I would think that should this student have
retyped a chunk - or if she was ambitious, the entirety - of Getting
Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head wouldn’t she have really
understood Morris’ style in a profound way that was bound to stick
with her? I think she really would have learned something had she
retyped Morris. But no. She had to bring in an “original” piece
of writing."
--Kenneth Goldsmith
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