A History of The Jirí Chronicles
The Jirí Chronicles is a book without boundaries. Its aim is a multimedia invasion into the real world, where real people interact with a fictional character, Jirí Cêch, whether they know it or not. Each project within the Chronicles expands Jirí Cêch's nine-year infiltration and "bastardization" of aesthetic forms, creating narratives within narratives that overlap narratives, ad infinitum. To date, there are over 450 individual works of prose, poetry, video, audio, music, visual art, websites, and ironic consumer products.
Eventual "products" of the Chronicles married two literary explorations. The first began in the early 1990s with the question, "What if fiction wasn't limited to page and ink?" An unfinished novella, The Second Millennium War: What We Found At Birmenstau, was a first attempt to produce fictive elements that readers could interpret as "real." Two- and three-dimensional artifacts related to the plot were produced or attempted. Computer technology had not yet advanced to where writers could affordably manufacture believable artifacts on home computers and peripherals. Nor was the Internet or services like personal web site hosting available to economically challenged writers.
By 1998, however, personal technology had exploded, making a wide range of media feasible and the potential for real-world infiltration seemingly limitless. Likewise significant was the increasing shift in speed, consequent reduction of attention spans, and non sequitur thinking produced by the Internet. Reduced to bits and bytes, information grew increasingly fractured, virulent and difficult to separate into truth or fiction. The age of Information Excess had taken root. Thus began the second exploration: an experiment in randomness and meaning.
THE SHORT STORIES
The first short story, "Czechoslovakian Rhapsody Sung to the Accompaniment of Piano," attempted to prove that the mind can -- and does -- (re)form the daily deluge of unrelated information into a narrative with cultural and emotional significance. (Recent studies have indeed located the region of the brain responsible for creating narrative out of unrelated data.) The result was a mixed media fiction utilizing text and white space as visual elements, and incorporating illustrations, footnotes, and text appropriated from ad copy, news headlines, magazine articles and billboards, song lyrics, movie dialog, and genealogical, scientific and historical facts.
The story's unnamed narrator writes about "You," a Czech immigrant whose racism repulses her and good looks attract her, to the extent that she wants to have his baby -- though plot is hardly the point. Rather, it serves as an entertaining vehicle for process and product, modifications of what is traditionally defined as fiction writing.
In 2002, a conversation with The Iowa Review's editor, David Hamilton, led to the publication of "Czechoslovakian Rhapsody", and Jirí Cêch officially entered the real world. (The "You" of "Czechoslovakian Rhapsody" soon became Jirí Cêch, a name that translates to a fittingly generic "John Czech" with initials J.C., as in "Jesus Christ," a [very] subtle nod to the conclusion of J.D. Salinger's Franny & Zooey.)
To date, Jirí Cêch has appeared in seven mixed media fictions, two published in The Iowa Review, one in Drunken Boat, one in Notre Dame Review, one presented at Notre Dame's &NOW Festival of Writing as a Conceptual Art and, later, at a Riverfront Reading at The Writers Place in Kansas City, and at Lake Forest College, Illinois. Another was presented at T.M.I. (appropriately: “Too Much Information”) reading series in San Diego, California.
THE PRODUCTS
Jirí has recorded and produced five CDs of interviews, music and videos (two taught in a college lit course), now downloadable on 25-50 sites including iTunes, Rhapsody, Sony Music and MusicNet. Jirí's art metal band, Umlaut with 4 dots not 2 (formerly Ümlaut: ültimate über death metal) received their first royalties check in 2006.
In 2002, Jirí published a collection of poetry, Whither: Poems of Exile, for which he won the Mennstrauss Poetry Award. He most recently completed another collection, Comes Life: A Poetic Chronicle, that brutally documents events from September 11, 2001 to Bush's Iraq War, using appropriated text from the Old Testament, concerning topics from real newspaper articles, such as the high incident of soldiers committing suicide. A revision of the book includes real bullet holes created by various weapons; a limited edition includes a real spent bullet.
Jirí Cêch served as guest poetry editor of the Spring 2004 issue of The Melic Review, in which he earlier published poetry. Other poems have appeared in the online site, Poets Against the War, in Other Voices International Poetry Anthology, and in the notable literary journal, Pleiades, prefaced by a brief essay introducing Jirí, written by poet H.L. Hix. His poems, "I Am A Real Estate Developer," "I Am a Vampire" and "I Am an Opium Addict" -- all written in less than 10 minutes, will be included in an anthology of MySpace poetry, edited by Elinor Brown, United Kingdom (forthcoming 2008).
Jirí has been interviewed about his experimental poetry by the critic and fiction writer Steve Tomasula (excerpts downloadable on most music sites and available and on the CD Steve Asks Jirí: "Does Poetry Suck?"). His illustrated essay, “Bohemian Beasts and Their Buttery Buxom Brides” appears in the anthology, Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheimer (Fall 2007, Wayne State University Press). In December 2007 Jirí also was the subject of an interview by Dr. Kent Gustavson of Sound Authors (www.soundauthors.com).
Jirí Cêch's visual art has been exhibited in 2004 at Urban Culture Project's “Alias” exhibition for which he received positive reviews from Review arts magazine and The Kansas City Star. Other exhibitions include Beauty and the Beast art auction, and H&R Block ArtSpace exhibition, Making Meaning: The Artist Book. The majority of his hugely overpriced art therapy drawings appear in the book, When the Bluebird of Happiness Shits On Your Armpit. Two of these drawings (that respond to real rejections from real poetry editors at real literary journals) appear in Clackamas Review.
Also extant: Jirí's newsletter, 10-Minute-Muse blog, personal website, Umlaut website, MySpace page, Facebook page, and various online interviews, music selections and videos on sites ranging from USA Television Network to Notre Dame Review. His test pilot for Comedy Central and his homage to publisher Ralph Berry of Fiction Collective Two, can be viewed at youtube.com
His consumer products can be purchased at jadedibisproduction.com, and include tee shirts and undershirts, boxer shorts, ass patches, magnets, paper bags from which to drink Pilsner in public, autographed gravel from one of his suburban sprawl construction sites, and the newest addition: celebrity scents, Hung and pe, which premiered at the Associated Writing Program conference in April 2007.
Jirí frequently writes inflammatory letters to editors at various publications and receives less inflammatory letters back, junk mail and spam.
. The book, The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions, is now on the syllabus at a number of graduate writing programs, and is the subject of a PhD dissertation by Sheffield England linguist, Alison Gibbons. An article from her book on "multimodal fiction" will appear Summer 2007.
REALER THAN YOU
As Jirí Cêch's presence expands, so does his significance regarding contemporary culture and aesthetics. His website, it's a man's world, (the title of a poem by Jirí Cêch adapted to video and later featured on the website, Poets Against the War, suggests continuing problems regarding gender and power. The project itself chronicles the issues of our times and the democratization of a vast array of new technology, and how the two may be related. It questions the notion of boundaries -- whether geopolitical, socio-economic or aesthetic -- and the dangers of categorizing people and things according to our prejudicial standards.
On a more somber level, Jirí's ability to exist as "real" addresses the apparently burgeoning problem of The Lie in contemporary society, where politicians, media monsters, and corporate and religious leaders are able to spin webs of deceit by means of the very technology that allows Jirí Cêch to exist as "flesh-and-blood." It also surreptitiously explores the contemporary problem of sound bites & bytes, wherein the public's conclusions about people and concepts are reached without fully receiving and absorbing all information necessary to achieve an objective, rational viewpoint.
Finally, and crucially, The Jirí Chronicles attempts to explore and document Systems Theory* via interconnections between media and people, fact and fiction, and the resulting effects on our day-to-day lives.
*Systems Theory is the transdisciplinary study of the abstract organization of phenomena, independent of their substance, type, or spatial or temporal scale of existence. It investigates both the principles common to all complex entities, and the (usually mathematical) models that can be used to describe them.
RELATED WEBSITES:
http://home.earthlink.net/~jiricech/
http://home.earthlink.net/~umlaut/
http://home.earthlink.net/~ten-minute-muse/
http://jadedibisproductions.com
http://cdbaby.com/cd/umlaut
http://cdbaby.com/cd/jiricech1
http://cdbaby.com/cd/jiricech2
http://cdbaby.com/cd/jiristeve
http://www.melicreview.com/archive/iss23/GUESTPOETRYEDITORSINTRO.htm
http://shootingpoets.blogspot.com/2006/02/death-of-melic-review-final-issue.html
http://reallybadmovies.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_archive.html
http://www.soundauthors.com/debra-diblasi-jiri-the-media.htm
http://www.othervoicespoetry.org/vol17/cech/index.html
http://www.nd.edu/~ndr/backissu.html
http://www.nd.edu/~ndr/backissu.html
http://www.myspace.com/the_real_jiri_cech
http://www.facebook.com (search: Jirí Cech)
http://www.pitch.com/2005-07-21/calendar/everything-is-illuminated/full
http://fc2.org/diblasi/jirichronicles/reviews.htm
http://www.madhattersreview.com/issue6/interview_diblasi.shtml
"One certainty from [Jirí] Cêch's installation is that his work is conceptually engaging without being dry or didactic; it is hilarious and a welcome addition." — Oz McGuire, critic for Review, March 2004
