A few years ago, as I was on a Blue Line train on my way to the loop in Chicago, I was reading Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (Apex, 2016) and listening to Hole’s Celebrity Skin (DGC, 1998). At the exact moment that I read the phrase “all dressed in white” on page 57 of Rosewater, Courtney Love sang the same phrase in my ears on the song “Use Once & Destroy.” 

A few months later, I was clearing some records off my iPod to add a few new things, including the newly released Jay-Z record, 4:44 (Roc Nation, 2017). When I finally stopped deleting files and checked the available space, it was 444 MB. Just minutes later, while reading the latest Thrasher Magazine (July 2017), I happened to notice the issue number: 444.

Yesterday, I was browsing the clearance racks at Hot Topic (closely guarded fashion secret) as “MakeDamnSure” by Taking Back Sunday was playing. Just as Adam Lazzara sang “You are… you are so cool,” I slid a True Romance shirt into view that read “You are so cool” on the front.

I watched Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile (1988) the other night. I found this movie in quite a roundabout way. A few years ago, William Gibson posted a picture of the Cliff’s Notes for Gravity’s Rainbow with the caption “The Key.” This sent me on a search. I dug in thrift stores, looked in bookstores, asked proprietors. No one seemed to know whether these particular Notes existed.

A couple of years later, I found out that the Cliff’s Notes to Pynchon’s most famous and confounding work were a prop for De Jarnatt’s 1988 apocalyptic love story, Miracle Mile (Gibson also mentions it in his 1993 novel Virtual Light, which I recently reread). The movie is wild, overdone in some ways and underdone in others. It reminded me of two of my other all-time favorites, Alex Cox’s Repo Man (1984) and Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006), though it’s not as intentionally campy as the former and perhaps not as fully realized as the latter.

Sometimes things just sync up with no meaning outside of themselves. Sometimes there’s no alignment evident whatsoever, like how I came to Miracle Mile. Other times the path is important.

Sometimes I get a book in the mail or from the library, and I can’t remember how I found it. In late 2000, during an especially impoverished period of my adult life, I was going to the Seattle Public Library almost every day. I was reading bits and pieces of so many books. I remember digging deeper into the work of Marshall McLuhan and Walter Benjamin, finding more Rebecca Solnit and Guy Debord, discovering Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard. I remember the row of volumes I had lined up against the wall in an almost completely unfurnished apartment, their spines and call numbers pointed at the ceiling. Due dates, new discoveries, and new arrivals kept the books rotating, and at some point, I started having a difficult time keeping up with where I’d read what. So, I started keeping a research journal.

While those journals — I’ve been keeping them ever since — help me remember things I’ve read, they’re less helpful in tracing my path to the things I read. 

I do sometimes try to keep up with the paths with flowcharts like the one above. It’s not a new idea. Early versions include Paul Otlet’s 1934 Traité de Documentation and Vannevar Bush’s memex from the 1940s. The memex — a portmanteau of memory and expansion — was a dream machine for navigating and researching with the vast stores of information of the time using cameras, microfilm, and print — an analog hypertext system. In his 1945 article “As We May Think,” Bush wrote, “Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.”[1] The problem with the way that Bush proposes such “associative trails” is that they are of little use to anyone aside from the researcher who’s trod them. I mean, do you find the above flowchart useful without some narrative context? As Donald Norman puts it:

Following the trails of other researchers sounds like a wonderful idea, but I am not convinced it has much value. Would it truly simplify our work, or would all the false trails and restarts simply complicate our lives? How would we know which paths would be valuable for our purposes? […] If you, the reader, were to follow these trails, you might not be enlightened.[2]

Maybe the mystery is better. I have so many precious books and movies and ideas that lack provenance or lineage. Does it matter? A meandering or aligned path doesn’t change the end result. 

You can plan not synchronicity nor serendipity, but magic happens every day. 

---

[This piece was originally published on Lit Reactor.]

[1] Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, 176 (1): 101–108.

[2] Donald A. Norman, Living with Complexity, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011, 134-135.

Quoting and paraphrasing are common in writing disciplines such as journalism and academia, but plagiarism is anathema, punishable by excommunication. While endemic to the creative practices of hip-hop, the practice of interpolation is also hotly debated. The orthodox rule there was no biting, but if you can take what someone else wrote and make it better, that’s worthy of respect. “I can take a phrase that’s rarely heard,” Rakim once rapped, “Flip it, now it’s a daily word.” Because of the perils of plagiarism, in writing practice, riffing on the work of another is not widely accepted, but it can be quite fruitful.

While some still consider the interpolation of rap lyrics an act of biting, others see such a move as metaphorical and central to the art form and indeed historical African oral traditions. In the use of allusive appropriation in hip-hop, a practitioner must make something new while still adhering to the traditions of hip-hop. In this way, lyrical allusions can be viewed a lot like the musical samples over which they’re spoken. The tension between biting and innovating has been around since the beginning of recorded rap. The lyrics to the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 hit, “Rapper’s Delight,” were lifted straight from the streets. The fact that those verses belonged originally to Grandmaster Caz and the Cold Crush Brothers is the oldest bit of rap lore. One person’s clever quip is another’s cliché. Novelty is as cognitive as it is cultural.

My most used example of this practice comes from Eminem. In his 2000 song “The Way I Am,” he says:

I am whatever you say I am
If I wasn’t, then why would I say I am?

His words have their direct meaning in response to his treatment in the news media at the time, but they also allude to the 1987 rap song, “As the Rhyme Goes On,” by Eric B. & Rakim. In the earlier song, Rakim raps:

I’m the R to the A to the K-I-M
If I wasn’t, then why would I say I am?

The line has also been flipped by Nas (on both “Got Ur Self a…” and “You’re Da Man”), Jay-Z (on “Supa Ugly”), and Curly Castro (on ShrapKnel’s “Lazy Dog”). Allusions as such pose a communicative problem in that they employ and require shared knowledge. At least a passing familiarity with the Eric B. & Rakim song interpolated by Eminem heightens its meaning, gives it another layer of significance and signification.

They’re also a great way to learn and improve your craft. Ursula Le Guin once said that while musicians practice by playing another’s music, we expect writers to just bust out with their own work from the start. Kathy Acker used to rewrite great novels as a writing practice, some of which ended up in her published books. You can write and rewrite whatever you want in your practice.

You can use allusions and interpolations yourself as a writing exercise. Take your favorite bar from a rap song or a line from a poem or a book, find the central idea, and flip it. For example, on Public Enemy’s “Welcome to the Terrordome,” Chuck D raps:

When I get mad,
Put it down on a pad,
Give you something that you never had

I rewrote that like this:

I lace the white page
When I write with rage

It might not be quite as forceful or have as much impact as Chuck’s version, but it’s mine. 

Another way to approach this is by recontextualizing a lyric. You can use a bar as a jumping off point or you can introduce a bar with your own, giving the latter new meaning. This is common in hip-hop and a common exercise in improvisations of all sorts.

On the song, “Get Off My Dick and Tell Yo’ Bitch to Come Here,” a less family-friendly Ice Cube raps:

All I got is hard dick and bubblegum
Just ran out, my last stick, is where I’m comin’ from

Several other rappers have interpolated this line: Blueface on “Disrespectful,” Fabolous on “Bubble Gum,” Big L on “7-Minute Freestyle,” Jay-Z on “Show You How,” Bun B “Pourin’ Up,” and Gucci Mane on “Killin’ It,” among others.

In a recent exercise, I re-introduced the second line with this one:

All this dynamite is getting quite cumbersome
Just ran out, my last stick, is where I’m comin’ from

Changing the first line gives the second line a whole new context and meaning by changing what the word “stick” is referring to.

This is a good writing exercise for loosening up, for expanding your practice, or just for getting better at paraphrasing. It can also be applied as an advanced technique for hiding messages or references in your work. As in the Eminem example above, if you don’t know the Rakim lyric, you’re not in on the reference. You get left out. An allusion like this is a great place to nod to your network and to hide information from your enemies. Try it!

If you happen to try the exercise above, feel free to share. I’d love to see what you come up with.

[This exercise originally appeared on Lit Reactor.]

The process of writing is one of those things that eludes even those of us who do it every day. Sometimes sentences just pour out of you. Sometimes you go weeks with nothing. When I’m in the flow of the sentences, I’m always trying to figure out how to make them the best I can. When I’m in the nothing of the nothingness, I’m always trying to figure out ways to recalibrate my approach. Maybe if I do that part first instead… Maybe if I sneak up on it this way… Maybe if I have a snack…

Eating and writing sometimes feel inextricably linked. They are both done sitting at a table after all. There are also so many things done in the service of eating that aren’t eating and in the service of writing that aren’t writing. I’m thinking of recipes and cooking done before eating and the cleaning up done after; the planning and research done before writing and the editing done after. 

I’m writing about writing here of course, but these ideas are applicable to other creative pursuits as well. So, with lunchtime in mind, here are three food-based tips for research and editing.

Making Waffles Out of Spaghetti

After the success of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (HarperCollins, 1992), the self-help relationship subgenre shelf saw many more man-woman binary metaphors. In one such book, Men Are Like Waffles, Women are Like Spaghetti (Harvest House, 2001), Bill and Pam Farrel argue that men compartmentalize all the things in their lives like the griddled grid-shaped breakfast food, that they think in boxes. And women think of everything as intertwined like so many wet noodles. It’s a ridiculous analogy, but one that I thought about for years.

One day in the library on campus, while tracking down yet another citation for whatever paper I was working on, it hit me: Writing is Like Waffles, Research is Like Spaghetti. When we’re putting together the theses, arguments, paragraphs, and sections of an article, a chapter or a book, we’re compartmentalizing the information into an easily digestible, grid-like structure. The research we do in the service of those waffles is like pulling apart noodles. It’s like we’re making waffles out of spaghetti!

It’s only an analogy, but one that has helped me make sense of some of the research process.

No Brown M&Ms

Arena-rock pioneers Van Halen infamously insisted on M&Ms with the brown ones picked out, as shown below on page 40 of their tour contract. Everyone I heard tell the story accused them of being diva rock stars because everyone knows the M&M colors all taste the same.

In his 1997 memoir, Crazy from the Heat (Hyperion), erstwhile frontman David Lee Roth explains the candy-coated demand:

Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.

It was a colossal production, any mistake pregnant with the potential of not only crippling the show but also destruction of property or injury to person. “So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he continues, “well, line-check the entire production… They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.” It was a test. A brown M&M was an indication that everything might not be up to the requirements of the contract.

If you see a small spelling, grammatical, or factual error in a piece of writing, it makes you wonder if the piece has been edited, copyedited, or even looked over one more time before it reached you. That’s a brown M&M. It casts doubt over the whole thing. As a writer, you want to make sure you remove all of those.

Table Etiquette

Okay, I couldn’t come up with a third food-based piece of advice, but this one is close: Do a table read. One of the most satisfying things about writing scripts is hearing them read aloud by a cast. There’s also nothing more helpful in finding out what’s not working on the page. Awkward dialog, weird phrasings, and unnatural rhythms will all be evident in a table read.

For example, if you write “fill wind” when you mean to write “will find,” you might not see it on the page, and your spell-checker won’t catch it. If you read it out loud, you have a much better chance of catching brown M&Ms like that. You can do this with any kind of writing. Just read it out loud. All kinds of things you won’t catch editing on the screen or page will pop out when read aloud. I can’t recommend this enough.

And remember…

[This piece originally appeared on LitReactor. With thanks to Joshua Chaplinsky. Header image made with Put Words Between Buns by Ian Bogost. Drawings by Roy Christopher.]