On Kovitz's Style: Quotes and Anecdotes

Ultimately, my reading of Pig City Model Farm focused on the style of the book -- looking intently for elements of Kovitz's style that we could learn from and make use of as we begin our Prezi. 

Quotes 

One of the most striking features of the book is of course that it is made up of about 95% quoted material. For me, this was cause for frustration that lasted for about the first 25 pages. Most of us are use to reading for the author's position/stance, and, as Jake pointed out, Kovitz complicates that very notion of positionality. Thus, after getting over my frustration, what helped me "get into" the book was paying close attention to the sudden shifts in one discourse to another (ie, from quotes of farm-handbook discourse to stuff like Donald Barthelme). These shifts, as well as the juxtapositions between images and quotes, seem to be the location of Kovitz's work. When discussing "normal" books, we tend to point the presence of words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. as the location of the author's thought. Whereas, with Kovitz, we may do better to locate thinking in terms of absence -- to prioritize the white space as the mark of his most profound gestures, which is to establish (conductive) relations among disparate discourse. Like Kovitz, our consulting reports will perform a lot of quoting (whether it's verbal or visual), so I think we can learn from ambition (as I see it) to "write with the white space" -- to really stress the generative role of combination (collage/montage) in our composition. In the band presentation, I also plan to discuss a potential difference between Kovitz's book and our Prezi: Kovitz's quoting is primarily verbal and our quoting is likely to rely more on visuals. Through some examples, I'll try to show how we can try to make some of Kovitz's tactics work visually. 

Anecdotes 

Given the dominance of quotation, the anecdotes of Kovitz's summer work in the meat packing plant (spread over two different pages) really stuck out. Though the tone differs from Blanchot, these anecdotes reminded me a lot of Blanchot's inclusion of his primal scene in his book The Writing of the Disaster. In both books, the inclusion of the anecdote adds another layer of relationality, in Kovitz's case: the intersection of architecture and agriculture in Kovitz's early life which become two of the prime discourses in his book. Though I don't think we've put this on the list of instructions yet, the subtle inclusion of a brief anecdote (especially if written in the Hemingway/Chekhov style of Kovitz's, which seems to emphasize the object) in our Prezi may give our consultant's report an added dimension, as it does for Kovitz.