February 25, 2009

            Well, you have to start somewhere so I’ll start with Neil Young and his plan to publish an archive of songs, lyrics, photographs, articles, and reviews. I’ll start with “Action/Abstraction: Pollock, deKooning, and American Art, 1940-1976” at the Jewish Museum in 2008, the exhibit that included letters, journals, magazines, photos. I’ll start with your garden-variety movie on a DVD, the kind that always comes with out-takes, trailers, scenes cut out of the movie, and actors and directors telling you what in the hell they were trying to do.

            Think of it as raw sludge: the raw stuff from whence art or a reasonable facsimile thereof is produced. Think of it as the stuff of dreams or just stuff—the garbage you throw out after a meal. This source material is the sine qua non of any story or history, the exhibits the historian (or forensic CSI criminologist) must sift through to select only those things that bring a story to life.

            The Supernovel, in contrast, puts every bit of the sewage back on the table for further scrutiny, sometimes with no obvious semblance to the original meal. A review, an article, an introduction, a letter, an email, a postcard, a fragment—as photograph or YouTube video or a pencil drawing  by a child—the sources of the source material are open-ended and endless and the process of selection shifts to the reader. The balance of power is no longer held by the creator alone. That’s a whopper right there, a show-stopper, and something worth thinking about though not too much just yet.

            As a writer-producer, this represents a new world, brave or not, because the basic artistic process shifts from selection to inclusion, from punctilious paring to the sloppy equivalent of the fat once cut off meat. The source material becomes a tool kit whereby the writer opens up the story to new lines of inquiry probably unforeseen, and voices too small or niggling to mean much in a smallish book.

            I’m reminded of one other thing. Somewhere in a galaxy far, far away—deep within the innards of Skywalker Ranch in northern California—I’ve read that George Lucas keeps a master copy of the complete storylines for all of his “Star Wars” permutations. The source of the material is ultimately Lucas’s brain, but there’s really no reason the story ever has to end, Sludge has a shelf life of forever.