John Menick Blog

A new audio project: The Goldberg Variations Variations or Music for Insomniacs.

Listen to a sample: Aira (mp3, 6.5 MB).

When I started writing Hearsay, I decided I would use my own hearsay. Given the simultaneously personal and impersonal nature of the pseudo-knowledge, I realized that anyone could make his or her own version of what I was doing.  So here are some guidelines, which I hesitate to call “rules”:

1) Use only your own hearsay. No fair padding your list with your friends’ factoids.
2) It’s preferable that you don’t remember who told you the story.
3) If you do remember who told you, then it’s preferable that it was related to you verbally.
4) If you read the hearsay, the story should be secondhand (e.g. a quote in a paper).
5) Stories from experts or source publications are discouraged.
6) None of the hearsay should be personal.
7) Knowingly passing on disinformation is not allowed.

See the work for examples.

Some advice: don’t try writing all the pieces of hearsay at once. These things have to be collected over several weeks or months. Don’t commit to producing it in any kind of time frame. Hearsay has a speed of its own.

PS. Hearsay has also worked it’s way over to YouTube.

A new series of works: Mirage Terminal.

The following is an excerpt from an essay on a new project, Hearsay.

“Yes, they knew one another,” I said. It was throwaway information, one of those strange stories recalled in the space between two bits of talk.

“Samuel Beckett drove André the Giant to school when he, André, was a kid.”

I went on to tell my friend that Beckett lived part of the time in the same town as the pre-gigantic André. I didn’t remember the town’s name. I was never sure why Beckett drove him to school (bullies?) or what they talked about (wrestling?) or where the little André sat (shotgun?), but I was sure the two of them shared a ride to an educational institution at least once.

A few months passed. Then, one afternoon, we spoke on the phone again.

“Where did you hear that story about André the Giant and Sam Beckett?” He asked me.

“Um, I’m not sure. Why?”

“Because I’ve been telling people about it, and the other day someone didn’t believe it. To tell you the truth, neither do I.”

I paused a moment and tried to remember back to when I heard about it.

“I’m pretty sure it was the Samuel Beckett biography I read recently. Let me check.”

I put down the phone and found my copy of Damned to Fame, the gargantuan Beckett biography by James R. Knowlson I had read a few months earlier. I scanned the index looking for “André the Giant.” No listing. I looked under the wrestler’s real name, André Roussimoff. It should have been there, right between the entry for “Roussillon ” and “Routledge,” but it wasn’t.

I picked up the phone.

“I can’t find it,” I said. “I have no idea where I heard about it, but I could have sworn it was true. In fact, I still think it’s true.”

We finished our conversation. The next step, as it is for everyone with a computer, was Google. A search for “Andre the Giant Beckett” brought up Mr. Roussimoff’s Wikipedia entry. There, buried at the end of the thousand-plus-word entry, which devoted no fewer than six full paragraphs to André’s feud with Hulk Hogan, was the following:

Actor Cary Elwes explains in his video diary of The Princess Bride that Samuel Beckett was a neighbor of the Roussimoff family while living in France. The Nobel Laureate would sometimes drive André to school.

Perhaps it still reads this, or something similar to this. Or maybe someone changed the writer to André Malraux. I have no idea. All I know is that I was embarrassed.

I called back my friend.

“Listen, I’m not exactly sure where I read that story about – you know – but, um, everything points to Wikipedia.”

“You mean the Beckett entry?”

“Yeah, and, uh, the André the Giant entry,” which I hastened to add I had never read before in my life. I also had never read the Beckett entry, which mentioned the school factoid as well. Hearing the DVD commentary was also impossible. I hadn’t seen The Princess Bride since it came out in 1987.

We hung up. I looked online a little more trying to assuage my failing ego. More Web sites mentioned the same near-fact, but always credited the same Wikipedia entry I had never read in the first place.

Where did I learn this?

The André and Samuel factoid was unimportant. It’s barely a conversational amusement. But, for me, it brought up an entire category of knowledge containing things that are not impossible, but not quite known either. These are stories we actually believe, but cannot, and do not, bother to verify. It is a type of knowledge, perhaps a pseudo-knowledge, sitting somewhere between rumor, bias, research, erudition and fantasy.

The train keeps rolling with The Secret Life of Things in Berlin and Prague this coming month. The Berlin screening happens on July 2nd, 8:00 pm at a place called Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The video is also part of the International Triennale, Prague from June 3 to September 14, 2008.