“The 100s” captures all the writing that involves constraints and rules, named after the most common system I’ve adopted, where each paragraph contains 100 words, a process which began properly with a text commissioned for Einar Hansen’s The Fog Will Clear, The Snow Will Melt and which reached a culmination of sorts with the publication by JOAN of A Dog At the Edge of Things (2023) which gathers 21 years of 100 word field notes of mine.
Constraints other than the 100 word rule have included an OULIPO-lite toolkit of syllable counting, using punctuation as morse code, textual encryption, appropriation without citation, word and letter erasure and automatic translation (“Unnatural Selection,” published in theme park magazine in 2001 used Babelfish translation engine to alter a passage of Charles Darwin’s text).
Two great cover blurbs for “A Dog …”:
‘Sounds haunt these texts, erupting suddenly, evoking memories, or wild to themselves.The precarity of the audio-artist’s process is generously exposed in these records of attempts to capture the vibrant elemental world he immerses himself in. Always conscious that he is not some detached observer, he very much desires to be part of the whole, even if he is sometimes at the mercy of unpredictable weather and landscapes.
The writing captures moments others might not give time to, background details are anything but; an epic contained in a wave moving pebbles, or smoke curling through a street lamp’s glare. The writer is sharp-eared and eyed like the often mentioned birds that appear amongst these pages, offering up a fox’s scream, a chalk-gleam, the swerve of a jet, the language itself circling and enfolding the sounds and sights.
Field recording and writing are depicted as a kind of hunting, animal-like, but with delicate equipment, human vulnerability, and compassion. The moods and activities of light and weather are given as much agency as any human, and seem immense and mysterious in their passing. Mundane detail is always on equal footing with the sublime in these writings, or maybe it was always sublime all along.’
– Suzanne Walsh
‘The index precedes encounter. Code and classification hum in anticipation. This prophetic includes what was never published, and what was rejected (inevitably – Cassandra knew this, keenly). Carlyle is no less enthusiastic. Previously he has run his way towards record and the provisions of meaning. Here he gathers the moments in shards of richly sonic upload. Place / s is / are the ground of the work, various and hybrid. Text, talk, essay, blog, submission, report, diary, chapter, sleevenote: the form proposes an outcome this suggestively elusive anthology resists. The dog might be at the edge but place yourself central: read its constellation. Stories don’t need plots, but they require attention. This is a listening device, a collection of fugitive pieces for uncertain times, one to carry with you.’
– Gareth Evans, Adjunct Moving Image Curator, Whitechapel Gallery, London
And a wonderful review by David Berridge at the Glasgow Review of Books on August 27, 2023.
The ‘field note’ concludes when its gathering exists as atmosphere, epistemological project, authorial statement and loss, all certain and changeable as air, body, sea, car, and microphone.
After reading Carlyle’s book I looked in Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary for a quote where Barthes writes (as I remember it) that the written diary is useful only as a mnemonic for the vastness of what is unwritten. Was that relevant here? I must have felt something was. But the quote must be somewhere else, if it exists. I find instead another of Barthes’ memos made in grief: ‘In taking these notes, I’m trusting myself to the banality that is in me.’
Which is a word to describe the openness it takes to write these field notes: of position, activity, practice, body, to realise, record, keep, process, now, not now, until, as, when, and, if.