User:Aitantv/Goldsmith, K (2011) Uncreative Writing

Goldsmith, K (2011) Uncreative Writing. Columbia University Press, New York.

"An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dessemintation"(Goldsmith p1 2011)
"Mimesis and replication doesn't eradicate authorship, rather they simply place new demands on authors who must take these new conditions into account as part and parcel of the landscape when conceiving of a work of art: if you don't want it copied don't put it online."(Goldsmith p10 2011)
"While traditional notions of writing are primarily focused on "originality" and "creativity," the digital environment fosters new skillsets that include "manipulation" and "management" of the heaps of already existent and ever-increasing language."(Goldsmith p15 2011)
"If my identity is really up for grabs and changeable by the minute - as I believe it is - it's important that my writing reflect this state of eve-shifting identity and subjectivity. That can mean adopting voices that aren't "mine," subjectivities that aren't "mine," words that aren't "mine" because, in the end, I don't think that I can possibly define what's mine and what isn't."(Goldsmith p84 2011)

+ although this last point sounds techno liberating I'm not sure if I fully agree. There are some things which belong to some and not others. There are cultural boundaries (fortunately) that we collectively won't overstep. There are ethical limitations on freedom of expression.

"Sorting and filtering - moving information - has become a site of cultural capital. Filtering is taste. And good taste rules the day: Warhol's exquisite sensibility, combined with his finely tuned tatse, challenged that locus of artisitic production from creator to mediator.1"(Goldsmith p139 2011)
On George Perec's food inventory - "Perec's inventory is a massive indulgence in the pleasure principle, creating a portrait based on the cliche you are what you eat. Or perhaps not. Taken as autobiography, if food and drink can be signifiers of class and economic status, then we can glean a lot from this list about the author. But the problem is that , even though the work recounts what Perece himself ate, we have no verficiation of it....Yet I'm more intrigued by the idea that someone would try to quantify everything they ate for a year and present it as a nearly fourteen-hundred-word list of food as a work of literature, rich with sociological, gastronomoical, and economic implications."(Goldsmith p200 2011)
"Globalization and digitization turns all language into provisional language. The ubiquity of English: now that we all speak it, nobody remembers its use. The collective bastardization of English is our most impressive achievement; we have broken its back with ignorance, accent, slang, jargon, tourism, and multitasking. We can make it say anything we want, like a speech dummy."(Goldsmith p221 2011)