Ahmed's Thoughts on the Value of Scaricity (Repost)

Poster Draft 2

Seattle People, it's not too late to sign up for an adventure of self-discovery into your writer's voice. There is no prerequisite for Verbal Expression Lab; writers of all levels are encouraged to apply. As an illustration, in our first facilitation of the Verbal Expression Lab, we had three students. Two of whom were rank beginners and where English was their second language. Both didn't think they could write creatively, but you know what using techniques and exercises Ahmed and I use in Verbal Expression Lab, they both produced creative writing. The third student was a life-skills teacher who was suffering with writers block on a project he was working on. He found the application of scarcity helpful in opening doors into a world he didn't know exited in him

The course is offered at Seattle Central Community College and first class meets July 7th, 7pm, for 70 dollars. That's a whole lot of seven's. You gotta sign up for it.'Cause you know its going to be a special experience.

A few months ago, Ahmed (who is my partner in this endeavor) wrote a short blurb on scarcity, which is the thesis of Verbal Expression Lab:


"Eliminating the illusion of free choice to give real choice is scarcity. Without constraint, free will becomes its own worst enemy. Imagine the horror of immortal beings who have been around forever and will be here forever more: Everything has become banal to them. Choice lies in its own limits--like life gains meaning through its own finiteness, every part of which must be finite and therefore precious.

Another aspect of scarcity makes it an ideal tool for writing exercises: scarcity is too scarce for perfectionism. Under scarcity, there can be no room for revision, second guessing, searching for the "mot juste" rather than "juste un mot". Under time constraints, we produce just what we can before the clock runs out. Under word constraints, we use just the words we have to work with and can't wonder the option of the perfect word. Under style constraint, we fit what we have to say into the form dictated, rather than search for the perfect form to fit our content.

Scarcity is not just a writing tool. Scarcity is the source of the everyday improvisations we all perform to get from A to B, and stay within C. Scarcity is living life to the fullest with intelligence--doing the best with what you have. Scarcity makes art possible: finding infinite meanings in finite materials. Scarcity makes musics possible: finding endless variation of the small number of notes on a scale. Scarcity makes love possible: otherwise, we would always find another fetish in the newest object. Scarcity drives commerce and economics, and governs our day-to-day working world. Scarcity is this class: meeting only four times but attempting to impact your writing forever--or just the rest of your finite lives."

---by Ahmed Teleb

Poster Draft 1

You can do this too; Fill out the Six Word form

 
On 6/27/11 at 13:18:17, Alexis from Seattle filled out the six word form and these six words were beamed into my google docs account: (1) Paradox, (2) Liberation, (3) Sparkle, (4) Quandary, (5) Fruitful, and (6) Chaos.

When you go to the "six words" page you will see just how simple it is to put words in the boxes. And the little people from inside hollow earth sing Abracadabra and walla, words begging to be written into a story will show up in a google docs account Then at a later date I will post said story just like the one you are about to read now.


Paradoxically, the liberation of sparkles
from the dark matter soup was the crux of Hope's quandary.
Chaotic, but unlikely an easy solution would be fruitful.
 
Chaos implied that quandary theory would liberate
the cosmic string Hope singled out called a Sparkle.
The fruit of the thesis was embedded in the paradox.

It was fruitful to track sparkles as they ebbed into paradox.
When dark strings zip around the collider they liberate
quandary separating them into vectors of chaos.

Quandary in a plasma treed into a chaotic mass of fruit
which became the three principle components of paradox.
Sparkles were discovered to unravel into liberation.

Sparkles also disrupted paradox giving birth to new chaos.
This unexpected solution Hope found clever and fruitful.
Liberation theory was born and an end came to quandary.

Liberation was fruitful in that it exposed the quandary
which was a hidden constant Hope frond in chaos.
Paradoxically, strings unravel when contacted by sparkles.



Go to six words and give me six words by keying six words into boxes on the page called six words.

 
 

Also check out my new wordpress website. It's a literary journal called Randomly Accessed Poetics! Submissions are open. I will be publishing literary works, explicit language pieces, and eventually a journal a relative wrote in the late 1800's detailing their journey to Oregon on the Oregon Trail. And when I gather enough submitted works from other people, I will be cobbling together an e-anthology called Randomly Accessed Poetics.

William James' Six Word Poetic Form

 
The other day I added a new static page/tab called "6 Words." If you go to it now you will see that it is a form with little boxes that you, the reader, can place information into.

Six words is a poetic form that I derived from the sestina. The Sestina, if you do not know, is a thirty nine line poem that repeats (six) end words in a specific pattern. And if you've followed my page you will note that I have a post (or two) about sestinas. 

On March 2, I wrote a post on the first generation of this form. Click here to see the first generation of this form if you are interested. As you can see (if you clicked on either of the two hyperlinks above) that six words is twenty one lines shorter than a sestina.

Stanza 1	Word Placement in the sentence
Line 1)	1	2	3
Line 2)			4
Line 3)	6		5
	Word Placement in the sentence
Stanza 2	beg	mid	end
Line 4)	6	4	2
Line 5)			3
Line 6)	5		1
	Word Placement in the sentence
Stanza 3	beg	mid	end
Line 7)	5	3	1
Line 8)			2
Line 9)	4		6
	Word Placement in the sentence
Stanza 4	beg	mid	end
Line 10)	4	6	5
Line 11)			1
Line 12)	3		2
	Word Placement in the sentence
Stanza 5	beg	mid	end
Line 13)	3	1	6
Line 14)			5
Line 15)	2		4
	Word Placement in the sentence
Stanza 6	beg	mid	end
Line 16)	2	5	4
Line 17)			6
Line 18)	1		3

If you'd like to give the form a try study the patterns in the table above. If you have any questions shoot me an email and I'll do my best to clarify your inquiry. And if you email me your poem, I'll post it for the world to read :)

Now, go up to the "6 Word" tab / static page and challenge me with six words.

Response to the Enkidu Experience

 

My name is Adam or Eve or Steve or
Cain or Rehab, Ahab, Jezebel
Jimmy, Johnny, Billy-Sue, whatever.
Does it matter, my name?

What does matter is this:
I am a victim!
A victim,
Do you hear?

This may sound silly, but,
I have discovered
that there exists
processes’, realities’, gnosis’

contained in my biology
I cannot control,
I cannot change.
I am powerless,

betrayed,
victimized,
by this body
I wear as clothes!

---June 28, 2005
    This poem was composed with a girl I offended in mind.

 
 
 
 
 

A Twisted Answering Machine Message

 
Do you remember the answering machine in those dark days before voice mail and the proliferation of cell phones? Back in the days of darkness when I lived in the quaint little city of McMinnville in house I rented on Baker Street (which also happened to have the same designation as Sherlock Holmes' apartment). People used to call my number just to hear what cleverness I recorded onto the answering machine.

In the late 1990's the following is one of the more darker stories I told:

This is Jimmy Jones and I am

speaking for Dick and Anita Jackaway

who are indisposed right now.

You see they traversed down

to the Jonestown Soda Shoppe for

my famous cup of Jo.

Where the Kool Aid is always

served chilled and always served

in little Dixicups