The Craft of Creative Writing: Wk5
Wk5 Assignment: Ambulatory Poetics
This week, we listened to Mark Fisher and Justin Barton’s On Vanishing Land. I would describe the audio experience as an ambient haunted house — so overwhelming that I tuned out most of the performance. But, I prefer my classmates’ interpretation of the piece. For example, Gaby shared that she felt “like I was listening to a historical documentary . . . Like documentaries have a lot of layers of mixed footage, imaginative components, etc.,” and Nina typed what may be the most eloquent zoom chat message I think I’ve ever read: "thinking about On Vanishing Land as music → there's a lot of dissonance, which may be accounting for the feeling of the music and the words not marrying - its crunchy and doesn't always go together, but I think maybe that's what they meant to do sometimes!”
If you choose to listen to On Vanishing Land, I encourage you to keep in mind the insight my classmates have offered.
In regards to the writing for this week’s assignment, we were tasked with articulating our own walking/writing practice. Embracing the spirit of dérive — by taking a less goal/object oriented approach to wandering and observation — I went roller skating. Due to inclement weather, my roller skating was limited to my apartment building’s parking garage. My version of an ambulatory writing practice resulted in my first attempt at a roller skating apocalypses story. This story is not done yet, but I definitely plan on finishing it in the near future.
Try listening to this linked skating ASMR in another window, as you read.
P4
To avoid the traffic of the heavily utilized P1-P3 parking levels, the building’s small community of roller skaters and bladers went to P4 to do their skating. Since it takes so long to get down to P4, and since there is ample parking on P1-P3, no one makes the trip.
Being so far underground, P4 can feel like a post-apocalyptic relic of some long lost people.
So it was almost fitting when the community of skaters who lived in the apartments above the parking garage in question were enjoying their weekly meet-up on P4 when the world ended.
* * *
After some time, the people on P4 ventured up to P1, and then out of the building and onto the road. What they encountered outside was concerning, — gruesome remnants of the apocalypses they’d all narrowly escaped — so they returned to P4.
It appeared that P4 would be their new home.
No one liked thinking too critically about their circumstances, — speculating about their fate was a form of torture — so they listened to their wheels on the concrete of the parking garage. The rougher the concrete, the louder their wheels.
Their feet went numb, and they focused on that.
