Medium Specificity

Artist Statement

I talked to my mom on the phone briefly before I dove into this assignment, and told her goodbye by saying "Well, I'm off to write an excruciatingly boring story!" to which she responded with this quote by John Cage: 

"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all."

For the project, my chosen medium was fiction prose, and my chosen elements were story-structure and repetition. I came to the decision to use that medium and those elements after I was initially inspired by the film Purple Rose of Cairo. In the film a romanticized movie character, Tom Baxter, walks down out from the movie screen to have some adventures with habitual moviegoer Cecilia. These adventures reveal some very hilarious things about movies by showing Tom getting into hilarious situations. For example, Tom and Cecilia have to make a run from a restaurant and so they jump into a nearby car. Once in the car, however, Tom expects it to go without having to even put the key in, push the gas pedal, or turn the ignition. He explains that in the movies he never had to bother with those little micro-processes. Later that night, he and Cecilia kiss. However, before they get very far into it, he stops, wondering where the fade-out is—because there is always a fade-out in the movies before the kissing gets too passionate. These scenes were major inspirations to me as I thought about what micro-processes and private parts of life fiction prose ignores. While daily micro-processes may somehow fit into a typical 3-act plot structure, and repetition (which is technically a good element of writing) is something we constantly interact with in our routines, our daily interaction with story and repetition is uninteresting and obscenely mundane.

And it is exactly those uninteresting and mundane parts of life that prose glosses over. Whenever a person writes a piece of fiction, they are constantly prompted to “cut out the unnecessary” and to “not begin too early.” And while this may be a good practice for fiction, it certainly pinpoints one of the major shortcomings of fiction & prose: it can in no way portray real life in an interesting way.

After thinking about this, I highlighted both repetition and mundane story structure within my “story.” Story-structure I hit more head on, by telling a story very unnecessary to tell and by having the climax be something completely inconsequential (a girl turning off her alarm). Repetition, however, was more tricky as I took an abstract approach. Here I took inspiration from the reading “Show and Tell” as well as the Chuck Jones cartoon we viewed in class. In both of these examples, the audience was very aware of the artist and their control over the creation. Just like the animator announces their presence by animating a pencil, I tried to reveal my existence as a creator through my use of repetition—over-using particular phrases, such as “The phone alarm went off at 6 o’clock AM.”

Now, back to the quote I started with. While I initially started out intending to make a critique on the superficiality of written fiction, I discovered something better than that: by presenting the mundane and the boring in this very medium, it ended up making it far more interesting than normal life could every be. I discovered that by writing about an alarm going off, I went through a full thirty-two minutes of boring and found that it was not boring at all.

6 O'Clock AM

At 6 o’clock AM the alarm went off. It was on a phone—not an iPhone, but just one of those old phones that looks like a smoothed brick. The sound was a really bad mixture of elevator jazz, birds tweeting, and dogs barking, and when combined with the over-enthusiastic vibrate it sounded more like a newscast featuring bad camcorder footage of an earthquake taken at a zoo. The ring was called “On the right side of the bed.”

The phone alarm went of at 6 o’clock AM and the phone was on the side-table that someone had put together from Ikea. Except when that someone made it, they put the bottom board on top so while the rest of the side-table was stained that nice Ikea black-brown, the top was white and bare. On the surface were a few rings left from cups of water and hot cocoa. There was a good amount of dust too, mixed with bobby pins, a yellow sticky note with dust and a hair caught in the sticky part that had “Finish History Reading” written on it, a broken rubber band, a strangely bent paperclip, a piece of chewed gum wrapped up in paper, a used toothpick, a fortune cookie fortune saying “You will soon meet a person of influence,” and a stack of books in the following order: the Gideon Bible with a Days Inn stamp on the inside cover, a battered copy of Beezus and Ramona, Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point with a big yellow USED sticker on it, a book called The History of Newspapers with three of the big yellow USED stickers on it, and finally a paperback Harry Potter an the Prisoner of Azkaban except the front cover had torn off and so it just showed the title page with the picture of  Sirius Black hiding in his hair at one of the barred windows of Azkaban.

When the phone alarm went off at 6 o’clock AM playing “On the right side of the bed” with a terrifying vibrate the phone buzzed its way into one of the bobby pins which touched another bobby pin which touched another bobby pin which touched another bobby pin which touched the yellow sticky note that had dust and a hair caught in the sticky part that had “Finish History Reading” written on it, and the sticky note fell to the floor.

The phone that had an alarm that went off at 6 o’clock AM by vibrating and playing the ringtone “On the right side of the bed” had scratches all around the input for the charger which Sherlock from the new BBC Sherlock series would have claimed were from plugging it in at night when the owner of the phone was drunk. Except Sherlock would have been wrong in this case, because the owner of the phone was only sometimes drunk and most of the scratches were just from carelessness and impatience because the phone was just a gray brick-like “dumb-phone” that had come free with the phone plan. The phone had scratches all around the input for the charger, a tiny crack in the corner of the screen from dropping it on the kitchen counter, dust in all of the crevices, makeup residue on the screen, and if the phone had been slid open the keyboard was missing most of the letter labels on the keys because they had been used far too much.

When the alarm went off at 6 o’clock am playing “On the right side of the bed” and vibrating loudly, it woke up Emily was in the bed next to the side table that the phone was resting on. The bed was a box spring bed and was propped up on cinderblocks that had been splashed with white paint, and on top of the bedframe was the mattress that had a nasty 80s-esque floral pattern on it in outdated pastels which a blue and white pinstripe sheet was mostly covering except for a corner where it had been pulled up and was revealing the ugly mattress and a good part of the mattress pad as well. Emily, who was wearing flannel pajama pants with a blue and green plaid on them kind of like the plaid of the Henderson clan from Scotland,  was sleeping on top of that ugly paste floral mattress and was covered in a plain blue comforter that had all of the stuffing bunched in the corners. She was sleeping on her belly with her arms and legs spread out and her foot hanging off the bed and she was drooling a little bit onto the pillow.

The alarm went off at 6 o’clock and Emily reacted by digging her face into her blue pillow and wildly trying to reach the phone, but her coordination wasn’t very good so early in the morning so at first she only managed to knock off Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban from the pile of books, but she finally reached the phone and grabbed it, looking up just long enough to see the touch screen of the phone (which was smudged with make-up) and slowly slide the button to “dismiss” despite the very insensitive touch screen, after which she dropped the phone back on the badly made Ikea side table which rattled the bobby pins. Then she closed her eyes and dropped her head back onto the pillow, and promptly fell asleep.

At 6 o’clock AM the alarm went off vibrating and playing “On the right side of the bed. It was on a phone—not an iPhone, but just one of those old phones that looks like a smoothed brick. It vibrated so much that it pushed many bobby pins that pushed a yellow sticky note off a badly made Ikea table that had dust, bobby pins, a broken rubber band, a strangely bent paperclip, a piece of chewed gum wrapped up in paper, a used toothpick, a fortune cookie fortune saying “You will soon meet a person of influence,” and a stack of books including a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that had no cover and so showed that picture of Sirius Black where he stands in the light of a barred window of Azkaban with his shaggy hair falling all over his face. Emily, who was asleep on the bed next to the badly made Ikea table and who was wearing blue and green plaid pajama pants like the Henderson clan of Scotland, heard the alarm that went off at 6 o’clock AM and turned it off after trying to do so with her eyes closed, and then dropped the phone back onto the table. Then she fell back asleep.