Kill Tony Trehy

There was a moment when I was pulling together the Language Moment structure when I knew that all the major organisational issues had been resolved. At that instant, even though I was very tired, I also knew that this would mean that by the time the event actually happened (if it did) I would have to have moved beyond it to stop myself being bored. I was reminded of Geof Huth’s proposal for my ‘death’ back in June during the Text Festival Thinking Environment workshop. We were considering the question: “What are the assumptions + obstacles that prevent the extension + intensification of the connective + transformative model which the Text Festival represents?” In one of the circuits through the participants, Ron Silliman suggested that the solution would be ‘to clone Tony Trehy’. Geof Huth picks up the story on his blog at the time (http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2009/05/it-was-metaphor.html ) “By the time the conversation wended its way around our circle to me—I was two people away from Ron, so it didn’t take long—I said something like, “I apologize, Tony, for what I’m about to say. But what we need to do is kill Tony. Whenever you think you’re doing something right, you need to do something different. Otherwise, you’ll keep doing the same thing but think you’re moving forward. The good thing, though, is that Tony knows how to kill himself. Over the past two days, in conversations with me, he’s shown how he is trying to find new ways to do things, to become something else than Tony Trehy.” It has been fun teasing Geof about the death threat, I think he apologised again in Finland. As I recover from the intense draining effort of getting the Language Moment ready, Tony Trehy had already been killed before it was submitted and now to finding the new things. The ambitious conception of the last six weeks or so has opened up global possibilities with new collaborators whom I look forward to creating new thinking with, but I look forward most to my own new thinking.

This week Sue and I are in Nice.