Writer

Biography and Origins

While there exists no doubt that Arthur S. Halsey, Jr. (ASHjr) is a current, and secretive, writer, there are distinct questions concerning his identity, most notably a general confusion as to his absolute time spectrum. Reports have indicated that ASHjr “attended schooling” in the 1980s and is a member of Generation X, having been born in the early 1970s. This would put him in his late 30s (summer 2010), and the general consensus is that ASHjr is a current author, writing contemporary to now. (In fact, much of his material is concerned with the interaction of the 21st century networked world with that of the recent past, especially various pinpoint moments of the 20th century.)

However, there are other contradictions in the historic account. Arthur S. Halsey was known for developing a “bomb rack and control” in 1933, and his appearances had been briefly documented in both Great Britain and New England at various points in the early 20th century. It has been proposed on at least a few occasions that the real ASHjr, a visionary, had written his entire oeuvre in the past and the work is only surfacing now due to delayed agency release. This proposition does not seem likely. Other speculations indicate that some of these references are actually to ASHjr’s father, or to other persons of no apparent relation. Whatever the case, the secrecy and confusion has only elevated Halsey to cult status as a writer.

Online “disappearances”

Inexplicably, there were occasions when it appeared that Halsey had all but disappeared from the Internet. This phenomenon has not been explained and cannot be caused by brief network outages as the actual references in the links appear to have been cut, but appear later in a future time. The “disappearance” has an uncanny connection to actual situations and themes in his work, as will be shown.

Writing style and work

ASHjr is primarily known for a new fiction style described by readers and critics at times as “extraordinarily fun,” “cinematically vivid,” “extremely strange and frightening” and “thrilling.” This style appears concerned with exploring lost and contemporary ideas of history, the paranormal and the unknown in a literal “fabulist” manner, heavily atmospheric in an often noir mode, and his material (often literary in style while blatantly commercial in character and design) is sometimes described as paranoir, a genre that seems exclusive to him. A characteristic ASHjr piece involves “timebending” and “time splicing” (varous events occuring at two separate moments in time and connected, or two distinct scenes at different times occurring at the same location, or a linear scene whose principles or narrators are operating in regular time but are cutting through time and space at a different speed, or multiple isolated moments — distant in time and space — that are conjoined in the narrative to reveal plot motion and meaning); elevation or reduction to different mental states involving experimental psychology, psychotropic pharmacology and NLP; the use of stylistic and atmospheric elements from vintage commercial genres (film noir, espionage, true crime, western and classical mystery); “lost” legends, secret histories and paranormal tropes; a thematic obsession with the loss or breaking-away from reason; popular scientific models and cultural artifacts as they exist not at the narrative present but from some different time (1910s Egyptology accounts, implications of 1930s cosmic ray theory, long descriptions of rare 1967 acid rock vinyl, unsigned memoirs of 1990 Manchester “acid house” scene, Sony Discman hacks, Palm Pilots, Ray-O-Vac 9v battery flashlights as a handheld “electric torch”) juxtaposed in or on top of other eras; breakdowns of character, “character molding,” and alternate or subconscious views of the same person; “constant themes of disappearance, obscurity, resurgence and bilocation” (Hapsburg 2008); cut-up dialogue or description; philosophical puzzles or logical paradoxes that are what he calls his characters’ “barriers to entry.”

The Agency

Little has been revealed about the “agency” that ASHjr has been associated with; it is unclear if this agency is a writing group, a sponsor or benefactor, or some other type of organization who are working to develop the ideas presented in his fiction. It is known that the agency operates online and consists of a great many writers, possibly in the upper hundreds. It has been speculated that the agency exists or was formed as a counter to the prevailing postmodernism. But the precise origin and even name of the agency is not known; ASHjr fans have at times referred to it as “The Agency.”

Published fiction and excerpts

Information on published material by ASHjr has been difficult to obtain, as apparently much of his early work had been published on small press broadsides and distributed via local channels and have yet to be properly catalogued or collected. However, as of this writing (Aug 2010) there appears to be a new resurgence of his work.

“The Dreamreapers,” a new story, has been collected in The Lifted Brow no. 7 (Aug 2010); it chronicles the work of agent Arthur Munfrey and has been noted as part of a larger “story-cycle”; the unnamed “agency” that Munfrey is or has been employed by is thought to be a fictitious parallel of the secret agency that Halsey works for.

Various quotations have been attributed to ASHjr, most notably the early phrase “Become who you hate,” but the original context of this quotation is not known.

Other quotation-graffitis that are known as ASHisms:

• TAKE OFF THE LOGIC CHAIN

• MOVE BEYOND REASON

For futher reference

In development.

The cut-up (or “cutup”) is a method of juxtaposition where a work (usually text) is cut into pieces and the pieces rearranged in a random order, similar to the montage or collage technique in painting. The traditional cut-ups of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs were done manually with scissors, razor blades, axes and other cutting devices. (Netmonkey.com has published an excellent summary of the theory behind the cut-up method, and another good one is in Brion Gysin’s own words.)

Scissors are no longer necessary for making cut-ups; they can be performed more efficiently using a digital computer. The following is a list of open source tools for cutting up etexts and other data using open-source software. The best of these tools improve on the process, generating Markov chains from text input and who knows what else.

Note that the cut-up does not free the artist from the duty of expression; cut-ups serve as a compositional aid and are not a substitute for the act of composition itself.

• Florian Cramer’s “Permutations” contains what he calls “the only technically ‘proper’ CGI-Adaption of Gysin’s/Burroughs’ cutup method.” (All of the site’s Perl source code is GPLed.)
• Lee Worden offers a similar cutup CGI which uses a different algorithm than Florian’s, but is also easy to use.
• cutup, part of the tinyutils package (deprecated), is a small shell script for cutting up an input text file into four sections and then reassembling the slices diagonally. (a Perl rewrite should feature the ability to choose the number of x- and y- slices on the text.)
• Luke Kelley’s Cut-Up Machine is a Web cgi that lets you insert up to 100 elements from Naked Lunch into the output text.
• English as She is Spoken is Jonathan Feinberg’s Python script which takes text and runs it through AltaVista’s Translations service, and then runs the output through again, multiple times until no further “linguistic mutations” occur.
• An earlier Translations tool is the Transmogrifier; this tool powers a multi-lingual chat room (within 10 years you will probably be able to select a default language in your net interface and see the entire Internet translated in such fashion.)
• chef is a lex scanner for outputting its input text in the dialogue of a Swedish chef; the Debian filters package contains a bunch of these little text dialogue filters.
• The Shannonizer takes text or URL input and outputs a translation by a number of famous writers, including Hunter S. Thompson and Lewis Carroll.
• BABLE is a Perl script that generates Markov chains. It works best on large texts.
• Dissociated Press is an Emacs function for “dissociating” the current buffer, combining words and characters to form newords and charcatures; in Emacs, type:
  

  M-x dissociated-press <RET>

• Jamie Zawinski’s dadadodo generates Markov chains of word frequencies. One of its best features is the ability to scan a given text and write a compiled object file which you can then use later to generate output based on the original text.
• JWZ’s latest is webcollage, which builds a collage of random images from the Web on the root window of your X session.

  Ideas for improvements/expansions to webcollage:

  • ability to specify a single host or localhost directory tree when searching for images;
  • ability to specify the number of random images to output (coupled with the above gives a random-image cgi that could be useful for Web sites).
  • ability to save the image from the root window to a file (with as many of the original file properties saved as possible)
  • ability to limit images from a site or sites (say, display random images from eBay auctions)
  • integrated with the window manager so that a double-click with the left mouse button (say) opens a default web browser window with the URL of the originating image; a triple-click (say) pastes the URL to the X selection.
  • option for outputting to an .html file, either with x number of <img src> lines or with an image map
  • including a text option so that random pages/paragraphs/sentences/words/chars of text can be added to the output

This last one leads to an idea for an avant-garde web-art project: you write a program that obtains random text from the Web and then outputs that text in HTML, with random links interspersed through the text (the link heuristics are configured by a filter file whose entries contain two lines: the pattern to match in the input text and the link to use in the output, either a specific URL or a text value, in which case it uses a random URL containing that text); the resultant page is then a hypertext cut-up. Will sites allow you to link to them in such a context? Will linking out of context be outlawed? Or will popular browsers eventually contain cut-up-mode toggles, enabling a network of enthusiasts to trade and morph their filters, even holding filter-contests for the most unique views of/traversals through the Web?

Free software cutup tools are described in The Linux Cookbook, 2nd edition.

Related to this subject is a page on computer-generated writing.

As is Fuse by Scott Draves. The algorithm is inspired by dissociated-press but works on images, not text.

Another related subject is generative art — art where devices such as computers are used to generate source material (which, as with cut-ups, may then be reinterpreted, modified and otherwise used by the artist). Like cut-ups, it poses interesting philosophical issues of authorship and the creation or invention process. The definitive site for generative art research and free software tools is www.generative.net.

Food-science expert and nutritionist, “First lady of nutrition” (1904-1974)

Daisie Adelle Davis, American health and nutrition expert, dietician, progenitor of the health conscious (“health food nut”) movement, advocate of unprocessed additive-free foods and high-protein breakfasts [wiki]

AD Today: the Adelle Davis Foundation, active online discussion group

B-vitamin shopping list

Pepup

Invented the pepup cocktail for vigor and energy: whipped milk and egg yolks

Original recipe

Corbis photo of Adelle Davis drinking milk, circa 1970

The pepup is discussed, along with new modern variations & improvements on it, in English writer Michael Allen’s book, The Truth About Writing: An Essential Handbook for Novelists, Playwrights and Screenwriters (Kingsfield 2003). Allen recommends the pepup as a daytime energy drink for writers. [PDF]

Mentioned briefly in short online essay “What’s a Mother to Do?” by Ardith W. Walker

Books

Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit

Let’s Get Well

You Can Get Well

Let’s Have Healthy Children (“America’s most famous food expert gives the vital nutritional do’s and don’ts for expectant mothers, babies, and growing children.”)

Let’s Cook It Right

Exploring Inner Space: Personal Experiences Under LSD-25 (as Jane Dunlap) (Mystical experiences mentioned in The Secret Chief Revealed by Myron J. Stolaroff.)

Quotations

“As I see it, every day you do one of two things: build health or produce disease in yourself.”

“Thousands upon thousands of persons have studied disease. Almost no one has studied health.”

Articles and info

“Adelle Davis Revisited” is a site containing information on modern supplements, vitamins and routines related to Adelle Davis’ ideas.

“The Legacy of Adelle Davis,” a critical look by Stephen Barrett

Adelle’s Granola

• 5c old-fashioned oatmeal
• 1c cut almonds
• 1c unrefined sesame seeds
• 1c sunflower seeds
• 1c shredded coconut
• 1c soy flour
• 1c powdered milk
• 1c wheat germ
• 1c honey
• 1c vegetable oil

1. combine all dry ingredients

2. combine honey and vegetable oil in separate dish

3. combine all ingredients, spread on two cookie sheets

4. bake at 300 degrees for 1 hour or until slightly brown

(From Life magazine, Oct 1971)

For further reading

]]> http://thedossiers.net/adelle-davis/feed/ 0 http://thedossiers.net/dream-writing/ http://thedossiers.net/dream-writing/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:51:38 +0000 admin http://thedossiers.net/?p=818 Dream journals and direct transcriptions of the dream world.

Catalog of notable dream writers


People who kept famous, large, or lengthy dream journals.

1. “George Weldon” (pseud.) cataloged 2,400 dreams from 1981 to 1986. [case study]

2. Barb Sanders recorded 3,116 dreams over 20+ years. [case study]

3. Jack Kerouac, Book of Dreams (this new edition contains the whole manuscript, including 200 dreams omitted from the original edition from 1961).

More…

For further reference

Research library: Useful Articles on Dreams

]]> http://thedossiers.net/dream-writing/feed/ 0 http://thedossiers.net/automatism-in-art/ http://thedossiers.net/automatism-in-art/#comments Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:01:42 +0000 admin http://thedossiers.net/?p=783 Automatism is a form of “instant art” — the destination, the final product, the aim of the work is completely and purposefully unknown at the time of commencement. It’s exactly like automatic writing, but a picture, not words: instant illustration. Automatic drawing and automatic painting.

Used by surrealists (surrealist automatism) [wiki] it’s a technique applied equally to drawing and painting. [wiki]

The topic is discussed in the book Poets on Painters, a collection of essays on art.

A good introduction to the technique and its history is found in this article from Answers.com, which lists out some of the early pioneers and more famous examples of artists applying techniques of automatism in their work. In 1933, Time magazine ran an article on automatic painting, profiling the artist Marion Bush. In more recent times it’s been called “yoga for artists” and a way to “channel” altered states of consciousness.

Automatic-art techniques

It’s simple. You just draw (or paint), going with an empty mind — you don’t think at what you’re trying to arrive at or what it is you are trying to illustrate. It’s all on process. The idea is to just start drawing, or painting, taking the instrument in hand and going — not thinking, not planning, but allowing for only the motion and the flow. It probably helps if you have the basics of painting already down, so a book like Instant Oil Painting is helpful at first just to learn basic craft.

Automatism as applied to art therapy and meditation

Techniques of automatic drawing are used for art therapy purposes because of their meditative qualities. Called “meditative drawing.”

In the literature, this appears in discussion at around the time of the surrealist painters. It’s the topic of a book by Milton H. Erickson, Use of Automatic Drawing in the Interpretation and Relief of a State of Acure Obsessional Depression, which was published in 1938!

The trademarked Zentangle technique is marketed as a form of relaxation, art therapy and meditation. [benefits] [theory] [galleries]

For further reference

]]> http://thedossiers.net/automatism-in-art/feed/ 0 http://thedossiers.net/ganzfeld-effect/ http://thedossiers.net/ganzfeld-effect/#comments Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:23:44 +0000 admin http://thedossiers.net/?p=741 The Ganzfeld (from the German, meaning “full field”) effect describes the state of sensory deprivation achieved by flooding one of the senses with a constant uniform signal. Once the constant signal floods the particular sense, the brain stops registering the differentiation and the result is an absolute deprivation of that particular sense. Used for meditation, parapsychology. [google]

Short blog article and Ganzfeld goggle HOWTO. Another, similar guide for a visual Ganzfeld device.

]]> http://thedossiers.net/ganzfeld-effect/feed/ 0