Head to Head

          Behind the Scenes        Head to Head        Postmodern Riff         

The reality versus the appearance, isn’t the author always a mask? Is the choreographed disunity of multiple voices less of a mask than the unified voice of the single author construct? Certainly the choreographed multiplicity is the new kid in class. We really don’t have much of an idea of what she is capable of.       

While it may be harder to attribute the work of a movie to a single person, we do still somewhere want to do this – do we not? We want to call a Psycho a Hitchcock film, even though we see and can discuss the work of the actors, the decisions made by the person in charge of the music. We read the names of the workers behind the scenes at the end of the credits. We know Hitchcock did not do it all, and yet we want to attribute ownership of something even as complex as a film to a single author. Certain views of history and artistic creation are challenging this perspective, but have we really stepped outside of it? What would it take to do so? In The Beginning _________ Created The Heavens And The Earth.

There is a difference between discussing this stuff and doing it. When I sit around in my silk smoking jacket, pipe in hand, pontificating to students on the drollness of their single authored texts, its all in a day's work. As I work on this text though I'm constantly tugged this way and that between giving into the Emersonian Oversoul of Shovczon and clearly delineating "my" voice. In the beginning Shovlin created the Heaven and the Earth.

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