I feel like I am always catching up. The Yasusada affair is now way past infancy. The twenty letters to The Believer in Typo 3 explore the issues quite well. The issues of authorship cut deep, so maybe everything hasn't been said. So despite the possibility of repeating what others have said much better about Doubled Flowering, I have to write/think/ramble about it.
The issues of authorship are a constant subject in Yasusada's writings.
Yasusada's English assignment # 20 (his teacher is Mr. Rogers. A scottish guy who wears native garb in the classroom) is to write in the style of another. This is Yasusada's reply:
"You kindly asked us to write in the voice of another. I believe, very frankly, that all writing is quite already passed through the voices or styles of many others. This, I believe in my heart is the very marrow of writing"
So Yasusada points out writing is always already in the voices of many people. The real author does not exist if real is taken as a first cause. Writing voice(s) are overdetermined.
The quote from Tzvetan Todorov (as a footnote) also interests me. "[The symbol] achieves the fusion of contraries; it is and it signifies at the same time."
Is an author a symbol? An author is (object) and signifies (subject).
Yasusada likes Jack Spicer a lot. The last two lines from Yasusada's transformed Spicer poem # 6 keeps swirling in my mind:
"The space around it/ Where the shadow and the mouth are one?"
The speaking subject has a real mouth and a shadow mouth. The space around the writing is where the real and shadow mouth are one. So the real and shadow mouth disappear.
Yasusada is and is not Kent Johnson or Tosa Motokiyu.
Does it matter?
Well, in terms of the aesthetics of the text I would say no. The writings stand as great no matter who wrote them. But who wrote them has far reaching consequences for capitalist ownership.
Rent to Own has very high interest.