Author Notes: Eric Lloyd Blix

Jean Baudrillard is hyperreal, in case you were wondering.

Read Eric Lloyd Blix’s short story “Project Ω” in Issue XXI: Spring 2013 of The Puritan.

An Itemized list of Facts, Observations, and Impressions of the the Contemporary World vis a vis the Short Story, “Project Ω,” by its own Author, that, When Considered in Whole, could Possibly Say Something about Originality

    • I started “Project Ω” in December of 2011 after reading Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk about when We Talk about Anne Frank,” itself a hilarious send-up of the famous Raymond Carver story, and wished to rework a famous story, myself, in a similar fashion.
    • I arbitrarily picked Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” probably because it’s the most well crafted short story I've ever read, and also one of my favourites.
    • I wrote late at night, when my professional and social obligations were taken care of, and after a couple of months had a relatively polished draft on my hands.
    • This draft included a prim and kind of annoying grandmother character who, as the Jeffries family makes its way to the state fair, mistook a blank country road for one she and her husband had navigated early in their romance, resulting in an idyllic afternoon beside a farmer’s corn maze.
    • This of course led the Jeffries family down a false path: their mini-van broke down, leaving them stranded (slightly different from the way Bailey et. al careen off the road in O’Connor’s story).
    • The story ended with a section in which the Jeffries were picked up by a dubious Samaritan (my substitute for O’Connor’s Misfit), who brought them to his “homestead,” where they could be more comfortable while waiting for a tow truck.
    • This turned out to be some weird, poorly defined venture into realtime market research.
    • The gist was that, by duplicating the main action of O’Connor’s story and combining it with some fatalistic commentary on consumer capitalism, the characters would be quite literally trapped by the plot, or rather, by the artifice of the world around them.
    • This was supposed to induce despair in both character and reader.
    • I sent this version to a few journals—it was nearly published, though ultimately it wasn’t.
    • Over the several courses of revision that ensued I picked up and read Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation.
    • Baudrillard writes, “Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization.”
    • A quick summary: This is in the context of a people who consciously or unconsciously wish to restore some version of the past, and in doing so destroy its object.
    • The restored object conceals the destruction that bore it. Baudrillard cites mainly institutions and mediums that involve some type of collective behaviour: museums, jogging as recreation (as opposed to walking out of necessity), organic food (ancient Man munched on roots and whatever he could kill in nature), TV for its sedative abilities, film (he points specifically to Apocalypse Now, which is a continual re-fighting of the U.S. war in Vietnam), etc.
    • I wonder what Baudrillard would think of the internet or the upper east side trend of diaperless child rearing recently detailed in the NY Times, apparently an effort to recreate primitive methods of parenting, and also why he doesn't really take on any models of cultural colonization, as in, white kids who wear moccasins, headbands, and fringed-leather accessories, or the various white singers who made a living by appropriating and incorporating slave songs into the pop music vernacular? (Maybe he addresses this stuff in other writings?) These concerns are my own gripe and are probably beside the point.
    • One thing that people have, I think, commented on the most after reading the quote final draft (the version you yourself may have read) of “Project Ω” is the obvious ways I've been influenced by David Foster Wallace.
    • I suppose any comparisons between my own work and DFW’s are mostly made on judgements of style—syntactic eccentricities, specialized lexicon, narrative arrangement, etc.—though they're probably based quite a bit on subject matter, as well.
    • I like to write about the U.S. Midwest and working-to-middle-class white people (those commonly thought of as what I call Real Americans™) in ways that channel the absurd and the conspiratorial.
    • I generally take these comparisons as compliments.
    • I wish I could think of a better word than “comparison,” because I'm afraid that using it makes me seem like I have an overblown sense of the quality/importance of my own work, which insurmountably pales in the shadow of a writer like Wallace—I'm barely published.
    • This taps into my self-consciousness re: the subject of originality; I wish not to participate in the production of a hyperreal society’s toxic excrement.
    • Of course, I'm concerned about things beyond myself and my writing.
    • The larger question at hand is if anything in a hyperreal society can even be original? Duplication seems to be the norm. The Internet plays a crucial role, I think—it’s fully integrated in the consciousness of our time.
    • The internet provides seemingly limitless opportunities for newness, however, the inverse seems to be the most common result of its widespread use (Incidentally, I’ve been without Internet access in my apartment for the last two weeks, which has led simultaneously to heightened productivity and prolonged feelings of boredom and isolation—my girlfriend is out of town, as well: I am entirely alone).
    • Most people devote a lot more attention to the Internet than they do to fiction.
    • Social media is an integral development.
    • Integrate, v., is derived from the Latin integrare, meaning to make whole, while integration, n., comes from the French intégration, itself derived from the Latin integracio, which means renewal or restoration.
    • Business models, marketing strategies, product brands, political campaigns, news cycles, personal frames of reference, etc., are considered fully integrated if they include components of social media.
    • There’s this assumption, I think, of some type of wholeness and/or repair when social media is present. We’re more complete, more connected, more in tune than we were before it.
    • The salient function of social media is the rapid proliferation and reproduction of content and information.
    • The shape of the Tweet, for instance, is important: It’s a little white rectangle smaller than a man’s pinky finger. The text—sentences, fragments, hyperlinks—is contained in this small, virtual space.
    • Much like this list, Tweets are stacked in a cascade of thoughts and ephemera that can go almost infinitely (however unlocatable it is, probably unless you’re in the upper echelon of Twitter executives, there is indeed an original Tweet), depending on how far back you wish to load them.
    • The layout of Twitter’s homepage is conducive to scrolling, which on any mobile device is delightfully intuitive. It’s fun to scroll, especially to load fresh Tweets. You drag your thumb down the screen, and the existing tweets contract and shoot up as though loaded with a spring.
    • The constant addition of fresh tweets—fresh thoughts, fresh presentations of information, Tweeted and retweeted, messages duplicated sometimes thousands of times and broadcast among users, most of whom will never meet or, in many cases, even be in the same state—ossify immediately. They entomb the present in a digital box framed in plastic.
    • The idea of strangers Tweeting and seeing each other’s Tweets and sending the received Tweet along for yet more people to see resembles certain processes of the brain. A Twitter user can be thought of as a synapse, a physical part of a larger cognition.
    • A key desire among users, I think, is participating in this process. It’s part of a cultural yearning for integration.
    • The Tweet is definitely the toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization.
    • The yearning for integration, for wholeness, is more tender and can border on the sentimental, which makes it such a painful thing for people to feel (consciously or unconsciously), as it forces them to think about their own places in relation to other objects and subjectivities.
    • This yearning isn’t the toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization.
    • It’s the essential serum that strives to remove the hyper- prefix from contemporary experience. It’s our sustenance.
    • A common grievance with social media (especially when it’s made by older folks referring to the extensive use of such among people under 30) is that it indulges the vulgar narcissism endemic to a hyperreal civilization.
    • This is probably true in a lot of ways.
    • I’m skeptical that this supposedly unprecedented narcissism is limited to North Americans and white Europeans born after 1980.
    • The desire for wholeness and mutual connectedness is noble and, at least for me, brings to mind archaic stories of honor and unspoken agreements.
    • We wish to be connected to the things and people that came before us. This is what wholeness means. The renewal of a human past that we’re constantly killing and then recreating.
    • I’m like many other writers in that I wish to write a kind of literature I’ve never experienced before.
    • I wish to be both entrenched in and totally freed from any prior notion of what fiction is and what it can be.
    • I’m also like many other writers in that I wish to recreate my own experiences while reading the works that affected me most—my personal feelings of joy, anguish, delight, inspiration, and the rest—through my own writing, so that I might possibly feel these things again, or make another feel them as I did before, this was my goal with “Project Ω.”
    • Our world cannot possibly let us be connected to either the past or present in any meaningful way—we’re stuck in this predicament of simultaneous hyperconnection and absolute estrangement.
    • We are all of us alone.

Eric Lloyd Blix’s stories do or soon will appear in Necessary Fiction, Birkensnake, REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters, theNewerYork, and elsewhere. He studies in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato, where he also teaches writing. He is currently working on expanding “Project Ω” into a novel.

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