Creative Writing In Higher Education + Sceptical Interruptions

September 08, 2022 in Article, Feature

Walker Zupp

Creative Writing In Higher Education

The words “Creative Writing in Higher Education” fill me with dread (angst, disquietude). For the past 7 years, to varying degrees, I have studied creative writing at university level. If there was any consistent philosophy that held together the various modules I studied, it was evidently wasted on me: from the standpoint of a student there was no coherent vision for any of these modules. I have listened to creative students bemoan the courses which they cannot get their heads around and worry about whether they’re doing what they’re meant to be doing. But perhaps that is the point, the significance, the substance of these creative writing modules: that they have no “point”, as such, but instead play roulette with undiscovered talents and ignore them when they make significant headway. And there is a part of me that thinks this whole process insidious and evil: a damning summation of everything wrong with the teaching of creative writing in higher education. But, as Lars Svendsen points out in A Philosophy of Evil, the problem with many theories of evil is that they have a tendency to assume that evil wants to commit harm. (Cf. Natural evil.) And the one-sided nature of this tendency “leads us to lose sight of ourselves” which in itself can be described as evil (Svendsen 87). The whole losing-sight-of-ourselves could be prescribed to the evils committed under both Hitler and the Nazis as well as Stalin and the Communists. Thankfully, the teaching of creative writing in higher education is nothing so serious. And in many ways that is a part of the problem: it is not taken seriously enough.

It’s also a mistake to try and make people take things seriously. What often happens when this is attempted is the people for whom the lesson is being taught start cracking up; because the fact of the matter is that anyone who says they ought to be taken seriously ought not to be taken seriously at all. (E.g. Hitler and Stalin.)

Town Meeting: Big Ol' Road

April 17, 2022 in Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature, Podcast

Mutable Sound of the Month

The new single out this month from Town Meeting starts big. The vocals are large, looming, and upbeat, and it goes from there. But what starts out almost church-y quickly turns weird and then heavy, with down home chops reminiscent of musical legends as Canned Heat. This is a song that begins brightly and then dives into its winding interior, psychedelic, punchy, instant classic material. It presents a cheery face but this is a face that hides secrets and marinates in gems. Enjoy!

Mutable Sound is pleased to present a unique musical experience every month or so by ourselves or someone we’ve been introduced to. These are from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world. If you have a track you would like us to hear, please feel free to send it on to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

Video: The Backrooms

March 30, 2022 in Article, Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

A bunch of teenagers are making a horror film when their videographer stumbles and finds himself in an abstract space. He wanders, Blair-Witch-style, breathing heavily and muttering incomprehensibly when he stumbles upon some terrified scribblings upon one wall.

The Backrooms began as a photograph on 4chan and evolved into a Reddit thread. (r/CreepyPasta.) It inspired fan fiction, followed by a backlash (r/TrueBackrooms) and then… Earlier this year…

A collection of shorts about the Backrooms, produced and directed by 16-year-old Kane Pixels, can be found on Youtube. The Backrooms is a k-hole of found footage from different people who have found themselves in “the Backrooms”, whether it’s the teen videographer or scouting parties from some underground government agency. The vintage video look combined with the generic, anonymous, and occasionally and increasingly surreal space is addictive. Start below and then continue to explore. The Backrooms is a paranormal mystery and horror film presented in bits and pieces that you can explore and peruse to manufacture your own story about what is “the Backrooms”.

Enjoy!

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

Re-Thinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto

February 24, 2022 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Manifesto of the Month

“The end is near. Or has it come and gone before?”
– An ancestor

Why can we imagine the ending of the world, yet not the ending of colonialism?

We live the future of a past that is not our own.

It is a history of utopian fantasies and apocalyptic idealization.

It is a pathogenic global social order of imagined futures, built upon genocide, enslavement, ecocide, and total ruination.

What conclusions are to be realized in a world constructed of bones and empty metaphors? A world of fetishized endings calculated amidst the collective fiction of virulent specters. From religious tomes to fictionalized scientific entertainment, each imagined timeline constructed so predictably; beginning, middle, and ultimately, The End.

Sallo: Otoño

December 23, 2021 in Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature, Podcast

Mutable Sound of the Month

Stumbled upon this album from Shelly Strunk and instantly fell in love. It has been compared to Satie and Tchaikovsky with a touch of Wendy Carlos, but what a clear voice is heard in all of this—-that transcends influence. When this music works, it works like magic. Shelly Strunk, the voice behind Sallo, deserves to be noticed. Enjoy!

Mutable Sound is pleased to present a unique musical experience every month or so by ourselves or someone we’ve been introduced to. These are from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world. If you have a track you would like us to hear, please feel free to send it on to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

On Criticism

December 07, 2021 in Article, Feature

Walker Zupp & Olga Belsky

It’s impossible to talk about criticism without talking about interpretation. Before I do that, however, I would like to talk about logical inference. This is, quite simply, the drawing of a conclusion; the engine for truth. There are several theories of truth. The most relevant one here is the correspondence theory. The correspondence theory of truth posits that a proposition is true when it corresponds to a fact. And what is a novel, if not a series of propositions? You can’t deny that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s descriptions of cars, for example, correspond to automobiles in the real world; and the fact that automobiles exist. If we bear in mind, Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance, moreover, it doesn’t matter if one car is red and another car is blue; or if one car is a Ford and the other is a Chevrolet. Fitzgerald’s descriptions (i.e., propositions) of automobiles correspond to those in the real world, for those are the facts which we call automobiles, or cars.

How can I say that logical inference breaks down on a literary level? Am I asking the impossible? I have demonstrated, via the correspondence theory of truth, that the things propositions describe correspond to those things which are described; they exist in the real world and can be committed, via writing, to print.

What does the word ‘fiction’ correspond to? If the logic of correspondence is anything to go by, it must correspond to something. If this were a perfect world, I would say that ‘fiction’ corresponded to anything that was not non-fiction; even if non-fiction, in light of the correspondence theory, becomes redundant, like snow which is non-snow, and water which is non-water. We can quickly see a problem bubbling to the surface here; it’s obscuring our goggles and making us nervous.

Video: Deeply Artificial Trees

November 20, 2021 in Article, Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

Everyone loves Bob Ross, but AI-filtered Bob Ross becomes like a mystical message full of the swirls of animals, eyes, and bits of insect, challenging how we think of the intersection between perception and reality. In parts hilarious, absurd, and downright disgusting, this dream journal of mad anthromorphisms and salacious animal graftings can be viewed again and again and new layers revealed, new possibilities discovered.

The below video was originally shown in 2017 at “Basilisk”, Nicodim Gallery, in Los Angeles, California, USA, and is by Alexander Reben.

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

Darius Jones: Figure No. 2

November 08, 2021 in Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature, Podcast

Mutable Sound of the Month

For this month, we have chosen the first track off Raw Demoon Alchemy by Darius Jones. Something like a Coltrane minimalism, this song features a single melodic phrase repeated by a single saxophonist for the full close to ten minutes of listening time, but each time, with a different nuance of intonation and expression. It is a track with a raw primacy, like a Raga endlessly introducing itself or if the blues-born traditions of America approached the mystical purity of certain types of Persian classical music. The repeating phrase can vary ever so slightly from one telling to the next. An altogether enchanting experience. Give it a listen below!

Mutable Sound is pleased to present a unique musical experience every month or so by ourselves or someone we’ve been introduced to. These are from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world. If you have a track you would like us to hear, please feel free to send it on to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

This is Not a Review: of Wally Shawn

October 15, 2021 in Article, This is not a Review, Feature

Gabriel Boyer

It was something like the summer of 1998, and I was living in a warehouse by the Brooklyn Bridge—living illegally in a warehouse that filled with raw sewage one night—where the landlord cut the sewage access and electricity every so often—and the dry wall we’d put up didn’t reach to the ceiling eighteen feet above—and I never had electricity in my room. When I think of that summer, I always remember the time my roommate claimed that a stream of flame sporadically shot out of his upper arm while working construction earlier that day, and the time I met Wally Shawn while working at the Film Forum.

He’d come in to complain about the line. I remember how I chuckled and shrugged at his incorrigibly irritated self like a person presented with some rom com darling come to life. I couldn’t take him seriously because of the fact of him being him and all that goes along with that, but Wally Shawn should be taken seriously.

He is not just the Sicilian in the Princess Bride. He is not just Woody Allen’s foible in Annie Hall. My Dinner with Andre only scratches the surface of what he is capable of. Uncle Vanya does not do the many talents of Wally Shawn justice, brilliant piece of theater though it may be. These are valid and interesting faces of Mr. Shawn, but the point is that he has more than even these myriad faces, and the more you look for them, the deeper they go.

On Porn

October 01, 2021 in Article, Feature

Walker Zupp

[Disclaimer: As much as I detest genre, this is a piece of creative non-fiction, where the names are not real, but the entities are. Most of them.]

My first exposure to porn was aged 15. I viewed the exploits of a rubber-donged superman called OG Mudbone whose witticisms were matched only by the 14-inch prosthetic he adorned for each naked and mostly hilarious adventure. Soon after, I discovered genuinely large penises and genuinely large breasts.

I have always disliked watching porn where there is no laughter. Given that the majority of porn has little to no laughter, this poses something of a problem, and directs me to several regulars. Jack Napier—out of work since a near-fatal motorbike crash—is always laughing. His affability is infectious, and he comes across as highly professional. Another admirable regular is Gianna Michaels: a Hooter’s waitress-turned-porn-star, whose brassy giggle I find more alluring than her sizeable cleavage and prodigious sex drive. These people are the exceptions.

Slow Media Manifesto

September 21, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Zachary Katz

The pitch of life has reached such a frenzy that it seems impossible to react with anything more than astonishment.

Whereas once thoughts were formed over a lifetime in contact with family, friends, community, and the earth, now thoughts form, disseminate, multiply, and vanish with the speed of attention.

Ignorance is cured through experience, isolation through empathy, the sense of being lost through connection.

The slow media movement is an attempt to create connection through human presence, by the creation of objects by hand, and by the dissemination of objects by hand.

Physical space is limited, finite, arduous, and lasting. Objects in our space connect us to the persons who made them, and the places they were made. Connect us to each other and to ourselves.

Each object formed by human hands is intrinsically unique and serves as a vector for story, as a means of maintaining human presence across time and space.

We urge you to create unique objects of lasting permanence, to distribute unique objects of lasting permanence, and to share unique objects of lasting permanence.

This is the slow media manifesto.

Read. Comment. React.

The manifesto as a literary art form is often forgotten, but we here at Mutable have had the audacious notion of collecting these remarkable objects for our Manifesto of the Month series.

This month’s manifesto was expressly written for Mutable. More is to come. We are just beginning to explore the possibilities and potentialities presented by Mr. Z Katz

Interview with Joshua Hiram Banks

August 16, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

[This week we thought we’d share an interview with Hanoi DIY producer and punk aficionado, Josh Banks.]

Mutable: Could you give us some background on your time in SE Asia? Where have you lived? What are some events you’ve been involved in?

JB: I’ve lived all over South East Asia since moving here from China in 2009. Most of my time was spent in Thailand, but I have had the chance to travel and live in several different countries. I’ve spent a lot of time in Bangkok but also lived in the Deep South of Thailand, Vientiane, Laos and also Yangon, Myanmar.

Basically I’ve been involved in teaching English to make a living and got involved with different groups over time to write, promote and also later started to put together my own shows here in Hanoi. My main hobby became traveling for gigs around South East Asia in around 2015. I’d spent a lot of time in Bangkok. While living in Vientiane Laos I would head over to Thailand and fly down to Bangkok for shows. Later, I ended moving to Bangkok and getting more involved in the scene. Even after moving to Vietnam, I still spent a lot of time heading over to Bangkok to check out the shows happening, yet Vietnam, especially Hanoi, had more opportunities for me to put on my own shows. Here I was able to use my connections and past knowledge to put on gigs. My last show was the most successful, at a small underground venue called the Hidden Club which was a hot spot for the scene. The name of the event was “Return of Hanoi Punk Rock.” The headlining band was “Cut Lon”, a thrash metal group whose members all wear Pikachu outfits. They have gained quite a following in the underground music scene here in SEA.

The Stuckist Manifesto

July 26, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Billy Childish & Charles Thomson

[Billy Childish epitomizes an ideal of ours over at Mutable, multi-faceted, multi-talented, the forever amateur who refuses to cave to the trends of the day, an anachronism that is also somehow the future. Apparently, the Stuckist movement evolved from an incident between Childish and his ex Tracey Emin (who made her name by installing her bed in the Tate, which went on to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize in ‘99) apparently shouted at Childish that his art was, “Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!”]

Stuckism is the quest for authenticity. By removing the mask of cleverness and admitting where we are, the Stuckist allows him/herself uncensored expression.
Painting is the medium of self-discovery. It engages the person fully with a process of action, emotion, thought and vision, revealing all of these with intimate and unforgiving breadth and detail.

Hesheraunt: Palm Sunday

July 13, 2021 in Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature, Podcast

Mutable Sound of the Month

This month, we have chosen an album that evolved from the minds of E-Kronk and Sifu Tweety, an album that is somewhere between a kind of minimalist techno and the meanderings of Bitches Brew. The tracks are long and unfocused, but with moments of sonic brilliance that can captivate the listener. It is an album that evolved from the aesthetics of the hacker houses of the 90’s and the idealistic early days of Burning Man. This is an album I like to play while I work, not because it helps me concentrate, but because it can on occasion arrest my attention. Give it a listen below!

Mutable Sound is pleased to present a unique musical experience every month or so by ourselves or someone we’ve been introduced to. These are from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world. If you have a track you would like us to hear, please feel free to send it on to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

Darkleaf & Hymnal's Performative Philosophy

June 24, 2021 in Article, Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

Many, many years ago, I heard a song that would haunt me, a rap song that seemed unlike anything I had ever come across before. For the next twenty years, that song would occasionally burble up like a puzzle. The mystery of Darkleaf would nag at me every so often. Who were they? The pieces never seemed to quite fit.

The song, a single called Caution, featured Mumbles, Acey Alone’s famed producer, and Cut Chemist, the notorious DJ behind Jurassic 5. The lyrics had a kind of mystical exactitude that I had never come across before.

A few years later, I discovered a “debut album”, F… the People, but it seemed off somehow. And it would take another decade before I discovered that this supposed debut album came out a full fourteen years from when the group was originally formed in ‘88, that much of the material had been reworked from a couple mixtapes that were coveted for their “abstract rhymes over primal beatscapes, infused with references and allusions to the occult and black mysticism” [The Untold Story of Terry “Hymnal” Robinson, by Nate LeBlanc]. The group had originally focused around the trio of Hymnal, Jahli, and Longevity, and were part of the notorious hip hop scene at The Good Life Cafe in LA.

The Identicals Have Been Criming Again

June 19, 2021 in Story, Feature

Ben Segal

[Below are three shorter fictions, by Ben Segal. Enjoy!]

Robert Helps a Synagogue

There were eight of us and I was speaking. We were circled on chairs with metal frames and beige injection-molded plastic. Mid-week the run-down Beth El basement hosted a rotating string of such circles, each freshly and uniquely depressing. AA and NA and Grieving and us.

I was saying something I meant about my mother. David's eyes had strayed and fixed on a loose patch of wallpaper. Elaine ground her tea-tree stick to splinters. I kept talking, tried not to be irritated. This was hard enough for all of us. Murray, meanwhile, had worked his hand into the denseness of Jessica's hair and slowly pulled a fistful to his mouth. I caught on when I saw the sweep of black from his fat lips to the back of her head. I watched the silent movement of his jaw and wondered when Jessica would notice.

On David Foster Wallace

June 06, 2021 in Article, Feature

Walker Zupp

I am here.

A hyper-intelligent adolescent whose scientific understanding of the world is betrayed by his lack of life experience. Undercurrents appear overhead, love is something only movies talk about, and whatever things the universe can’t articulate itself our hero can’t even begin to imagine.

I’ve not dedicated much time to David Foster Wallace: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, The Pale King and The Broom of the System are the biggies I’ve read.

There’s Infinite Jest, but I got about halfway through and wanted to read some other books. I’ve also listened to him reading his porn essay, Big Red Son, and his commencement speech, This is Water. But I’ve not read the other Lobster essays; nor have I examined Oblivion or The Girl with the Curious Hair.

I like his work broadly speaking, but I think the emotional detail is lacking. I think it prevented him from producing works like Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and pretty much every book Norman Mailer wrote. So Wallace had neither emotional nudity or a kind of progressive misogynism.

*The cognitive system according to the German scholar Johan Lindner of Mönchenburg. Illustration to a manuscript copy of Aristotle’s De Anima (1472-1474), courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.*

Mundus Imaginalis

May 25, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Henry Corbin

[The below essay was originally brought to our attention sometime in early 2009, and would be part of a pivotal reshuffling of thought here at Mutable. It is presented in its full glory. The “imaginal” is not “imaginary”!]

In offering the two Latin words mundus imaginalis as the title of this discussion, I intend to treat a precise order of reality corresponding to a precise mode of perception, because Latin terminology gives the advantage of providing us with a technical and fixed point of reference, to which we can compare the various more-or-less irresolute equivalents that our modern Western languages suggest to us.

I will make an immediate admission. The choice of these two words was imposed upon me some time ago, because it was impossible for me, in what I had to translate or say, to be satisfied with the word imaginary. This is by no means a criticism addressed to those of us for whom the use of the language constrains recourse to this word, since we are trying together to reevaluate it in a positive sense. Regardless of our efforts, though, we cannot prevent the term imaginary, in current usage that is not deliberate, from being equivalent to signifying unreal, something that is and remains outside of being and existence-in brief, something utopian. I was absolutely obliged to find another term because, for many years, I have been by vocation and profession an interpreter of Arabic and Persian texts, the purposes of which I would certainly have betrayed if I had been entirely and simply content-even with every possible precaution-with the term imaginary. I was absolutely obliged to find another term if I did not want to mislead the Western reader that it is a matter of uprooting long-established habits of thought, in order to awaken him to an order of things, the sense of which it is the mission of our colloquia at the "Society of Symbolism" to rouse.

In other words, if we usually speak of the imaginary as the unreal, the utopian, this must contain the symptom of something. In contrast to this something, we may examine briefly together the order of reality that I designate as mundus imaginalis, and what our theosophers in Islam designate as the "eighth climate"; we will then examine the organ that perceives this reality, namely, the imaginative consciousness, the cognitive Imagination; and finally, we will present several examples, among many others, of course, that suggest to us the topography of these interworlds, as they have been seen by those who actually have been there.

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Video: Alexander Ross

May 12, 2021 in Article, Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

We here at Mutable just discovered Alexander Ross, and he has immediately become one of our new favorite humans. At first, we merely enjoyed him for the fact that his art is just the sort of abstract realism that we love to love. (See above.) Which for some reason reminds me of Kelly Reaves’ work.

But then, we discovered the album of his below, put out by our friends Audio Dregs, and featuring art that is more Jim Woodring than Salvador Dali. Then we listened to his music. Then we asked ourselves how it was possible we had never listened to his music before.

Of course, we had to immediately contact Eric Mast over at Audio Dregs to discover more about this mystery, and he was happy to explain how he had first discovered Fantastic Palace's music on a CD comp in ’92 called Chinny Chin Chin (See Eye) and played it on his college radio show at the time a bunch, listening to it for some 20 years, only to then discover it was his friend, Mike McGonnigal, who had originally released it, and the two got in touch with Fantastic Palace (Alexander Ross) to re-issue it on vinyl, a release that has just recently officially sold out.

As for the video below, it was not taken by Mast, but it certainly rounds out the mystery of who Alex Ross is and what he believes in.

Through the course of it, Ross discusses all aspects of his style, influences, and current experiments. The first painting they talk about is very different stylistically from the drawing above, and at first glance it seems almost cheesy, but when you get in close, you see the wonderful vibrancy of the piece. We have a special fondness for works that begin with clay sculptures and go from there, not to mention works that transform as you approach (think Chuck Close), and of course it’s also so illuminating hearing Ross talk about the “photorealism” of the paint versus the more abstract pencilwork in that first painting the video focuses on.

Over the course of the studio visit, Ross also talks about his distinct interests and many inspirations, from psychedelics, to silly putty, to mites, describing his drawings as a kind of monstrous R. Crumb scientific drawings. My favorite parts are always when Ross lets loose about how his ideas have evolved and are continuing to evolve.

Be sure to stick around to the end to get some nice peaks of some delightful experiments. “The most intelligent technology is nature.” Indeed.

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

Neptune: Cave Drawings

May 07, 2021 in Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature, Podcast

Mutable Sound of the Month

This month, we have chosen the re-issued LP, Cave Drawings, from Neptune. The best thing that ever happened to art rock, Neptune featured guitars and other instruments constructed by Jason Sanford, and was a staple of the Boston scene throughout the 90’s and 00’s. This album, originally released in 2013, is just now being re-released through WWAB. Give it a listen and consider purchasing it for Bandcamp Friday, during which time all proceeds go to the artist. And while you’re at it, pick up one of the many fine Mutable products available as well!

Mutable Sound is pleased to present a unique musical experience every month or so by ourselves or someone we’ve been introduced to. These are from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world. If you have a track you would like us to hear, please feel free to send it on to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

Walker Zupp & Olga Belsky

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

Zachary Katz

The manifesto as a literary art form is often forgotten, but we here at Mutable have had the audacious notion of collecting these remarkable objects for our Manifesto of the Month series.

This month’s manifesto was expressly written for Mutable. More is to come. We are just beginning to explore the possibilities and potentialities presented by Mr. Z Katz

Billy Childish & Charles Thomson

Ben Segal

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

Product