Becoming that overshadows being means dynamism that overshadows stagnation means melting that overshadows solidifying means Bergsonian time overshadowing the Gregorian calendar means the personal overshadowing the conventional.

Or, to put it otherly: movement. Tangent. Moment. Engagement. Disallowing the filter, perhaps? Disallowing the oppression of rules and value criteria and instead letting one’s fingers poke the keyboard as quickly as the letters can get from the thought room to the finger hallways, the finger machines. Stein did it while studying with James. Breton did it and professed it. Kerouac did it and Capote exclaimed “That’s not writing, that’s typing!”

Practice-based criticism is typing, is the scrimmage overshadowing the competition, the fuck-up and learn overshadowing the deadline penalty and consequences, the freewheeling carefree laidback serious but loose endeavor that can’t be taught by virtue of being unknown until known, undocumented until documented, untried until tried.

Practice-based criticism is always different given circumstances, given feelings, given blood-sugar levels, music, days gone without sex or drugs, given cravings and perversions and fetishes and given the relative distance between the writer and thinker and lover and failures and the red wheelbarrow full of sorrow and guilt and embarrassment and all the little apparitions of faces.

For example, reading Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J, Henry Waugh, Prop. (Plume, 1968), thinking about fictitious creatures creating other fictitious creatures, thinking of Borges, of the matryoshka doll, the mirror turned on the mirror, that scene in Chris Nolan’s film Inception where the character Cobb is introducing the character Ariadne to the landscape of dream walking for the first time and she pulls the giant mirror to face the other giant mirror and we see infinitely repeated versions of them both echoing down the long hallway of simulacra, thinking of myself as a bundle of versions rather than a singular entity: the me my students know, the me my parents know, the me my wife knows, the me my friends know, the me on the internet, the me at the comic book shop, I am constantly hyperbolic, constantly trying so hard to be other than myself, to be greater than myself, to impress the imaginary version of other people who I encounter in flesh or in virtual space, thinking about the character Coover has created, Henry, the man who lives alone, who eats pastrami and drinks beer every night for dinner, the fact that I eat the same lunch everyday: a ham sandwich on multigrain bread with mustard, tomato, banana peppers, and lettuce, some kind of chip (salt and vinegar or salt and pepper) and a fruit of some kind lately it’s been kiwi fruit, and to drink usually sweet tea or soda pop, thinking I am Henry at the same time I am supposed to be me and besides there is no such thing as Henry, he is a fictitious creature, is there such thing as me (?), thinking about the scene where Henry goes to the flower shop to buy a flower for the funeral of the baseball player who died, who was beaned by the pitcher, whose head was bashed in, and how Henry gets upset because the flower shop is full of plastic flowers instead of real flowers, how what is real is not really real and what is not real is sometimes more important.