Traffic

Kenny Goldsmith is a master at taking something that I will call every day, some might classify it as the mundane, and taking it to the extreme and making it comical. He accomplishes this in his piece “Traffic.”  Goldsmith takes a simple interview with the notoriously reclusive Andy Warhol and repurposes into a minute by minute exaggeration. These pieces that he does, always border on the line between offensive and funny without ever really crossing the line to offensive, but always having his toe on the line. Doing this not easy, because it is incredibly difficult to not really care if you offend a small portion of the public, while still be mindful of the majority of your audience.

Soliloquy

“Soliloquy”, has a very frenetic feel to it as you drag your mouse across the screen and receive numerous responses to the same question at the top of the pages, until you move down the page in the same direction, than it becomes an instant message or text conversation between people. This was a disorientating experience for myself. However, having met and seen Goldsmith perform his work, this feels more authentic to my experience on both of these occasions I had the pleasure of sitting in the audience.

The confusion and disorientation I felt reading “Soliloquy” was something I had expected and was more than a little surprised when reading “Traffic.” This is not to say that I didn’t feel disoriented while reading “Traffic,” it was just a different feel. In “Traffic” it was more of a barrage of text in a minute by minute transcript. While in “Soliloquy” it is a what will happen if I do this feel. Both these methods are challenging.

Uncreative Writing

Goldsmith does a great job in this essay of explaining his work and the reasons for this trajectory. I had never heard of Marjory Perloff before this, or her idea about the extinction of the romanticized idea of the isolated genius who emerges from isolation to present a masterpiece of literature or original thought. Unfortunately, the proceeding generations as a whole will never experience such an idea. It is most definitely time that we embrace this and find a way to use this hyper connective of the digital age to benefit humanity. In the process if writers can make an honest living doing this, than we should, keeping in mind that what we put out there is important and will affect people in some way.