Illot-Mollo

Our vocab word of the week in practice, that somehow became a brief musing on penmanship and personality.

Illot-Mollo

Or, Penmanship and Personality

I would like to open this piece by saying, unequivocally, that this week’s vocab word does NOT refer to the song by Moby. no indeed—illot-mollo is a writing exercise used specifically for generative purposes for stream-of-thought works or prose poetry, originated by those wacky guys in the Dada movement. I came to this exercise through the late great Jack Collom, who loved to do it in each class he taught… actually he did this everywhere, not just in class—you’d be minding your own business at Dot’s Diner or Penny Lane and he, smiling, would bring his coffee over to join you and lo and behold: at least one acrostic and one illot-mollo would ensue.* And then when he’d run into you next, he’d gleefully hand you a typed copy of your shared work. I worked at the copy shop downtown during this time and therefore I made and received these copies first hand, all the time. I wish I had more of them, though I’m glad for the ones I have.

Suffice to say that illot-mollo was a frequent activity in grad school, and it’s so fun, I can totally see why we did it so much. Just the other day when I was recording the latest episode of The Outrider podcast (have you heard it? Here.), I mentioned that I had put my own grad students through a bout of illot-mollo in our Zoom class meeting, and my co-host, a friend of mine from grad school in fact, exclaimed in delight, “Oh I love illot-mollo! I miss it!” My students loved it, too; as difficult as it was for some to grasp it, two others told me they wanted to do it every class session from now on. Hey, maybe we will…

Oh yeah, I guess I should explain what illot-mollo is, huh. 

Illot-Mollo

So what happens is this:

You start out doing a constantly flowing freewrite: advanced writers can sometimes just go with no rules other than to keep moving forward and no going back to edit. I like to use the I Remember prompt, to keep from getting stymied and to keep the flow going. So that freewrite goes on for a couple minutes, and THEN comes the fun part, the part that makes it illot-mollo:

Somebody (usually the instructor, if there is one, begins) calls out loud the last word they just wrote. Everyone then has to incorporate that word into their own writing. A little while later, someone else will shout out the word that just came out of their pen, and so on through the whole writing session, words popcorning out till the conclusion. 

What this does is it makes you keep writing, but! the popcorn-words interrupt that flow, and having to incorporate wild words that you may never have thought of yourself, freshens your work and keeps things lively.

*the Penny Lane piece you see here in this post of mine was two exercises at once: not only an acrostic but an exquisite corpse. I don’t think I have any illot-mollos of ours left from that time, but I’m sure someone from Naropa U. still must.

It had been so long since I’d done this generative exercise when I put my students through it recently, and I found that what I ended up writing was something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while. So. why not use it as a seed for a Musing? See if you can hear which bits are the illot-mollo. I could tell you which words were the called-out ones from class but that would give it away. Go ahead and guess in the comments, and maybe I’ll throw em in there later. Anyway, Here’s some thoughts about penmanship I had, that came out during this recent illot-mollo, with expansions and extra mullings and Musings woven into the raw original. 

Look at how fucked up that Q is. Let alone the Zs. I see they’ve updated them in a more recent cursive guide, so they now look more like the actual letter, but part of me misses these unhinged curlicues. 

Topic at hand: Penmanship

Remember cursive? In my school days, we learned cursive handwriting in 3rd grade, and continued it in 4th. Then after that we were allowed to use whatever type of handwriting we wanted, but in those two years it was all cursive. I was a straight-A student pretty consistently, but I got one B+ in handwriting in 3rd grade—my only non-A that year, and my only one to date, till high school (darn you, Geometry). I think even in 4th, I remained a straight-A student but for Penmanship, which remained at a B+. Ironic, because I was an artsy kid, too, and loved to practice calligraphy. But my cursive was sub-par, I guess. 

In 5th grade, I sat down and I designed and then practiced a custom handwriting, that was all my own. It was print, not cursive, but it had graceful long curves and loops that made it look kind of like Elvish (from Lord of the Rings) and kind of like a simplified calligraphy. None of this was a coincidence, of course, as my LOTR obsession began in 4th grade. I wrote in that custom personal handwriting from then on, from junior high schoolwork to high school yearbook inscriptions to lecture notes in college, taken with multicolored thin Crayola markers. Washable. You know the ones.

This is the only sample of that old handwriting I could easily find to show you today: notes from a movement class in college. It’s a hasty workmanlike version of this handwriting of mine: the long loops are shortened and it was obviously written quickly from in-class instructions, but you get the basic idea.

But then, in that job I mentioned above at the copy shop, where all orders and invoices were taken down by hand, I received complaints. My coworkers could not, could not read my beautiful handwriting when it was hurried and flustered. It got in the way of the work flow. And so. I eradicated my graceful curves and began writing all my work stuff in block capitals. This solved my work problem. But it caused another. 

I could no longer write in my old handmade handwriting after that. I could only, from then on, write in all-caps. I guess handwriting is like language: if you don’t use it, you lose it. To this day, I’ve tried to write in that old personal penmanship and I just can’t. Besides, it slows me down no end. But then again, I rarely hand-write anymore anyway: pretty much everything is typed into a device these days, even rough drafts. Even generative exercises. Though I did use a pen and paper for this recent illot-mollo. Which is interesting…

I’ve been using this new pen that’s both old fashioned and brand-new—having received it for one of my 50th birthday presents. Who knew a fountain pen could be so smooth? So a smooth flow for a smooth flowing exercise is perfect, right? But. Hoo boy—it’s funny how even with an evenly flowing instrument, how bad my handwriting has gotten. It used to be okay, if a bit eccentric, but at least it was something resembling a pleasantly curly handwriting. And later at the copy shop, of course, I just changed it into all-caps to make it easier for everyone. But now in this digital age of typing, typing everywhere? Even my block letters are a huge mess.

It’s funny, too, how straight handwritten words make us exhibit different aspects of our selves that maybe we wouldn’t necessarily try on our own, like wearing lipstick on a Tuesday. But I do feel like a part of my personality has gone missing with my lost handwriting, as though it was… washed away by rain? Painted over like a cockroach by a lazy landlord? Pulling the wool not over my eyes but over my self, or even my ability to poeticize—I mean, how can I describe a tree using only capital letters? Can I evoke a tree using only straight words that lack a curly spine? 

Sometimes I get thirsty for that part of me that wrote in curves in my college notebooks using fine Crayola markers. Sometimes not. But I can’t write that way anymore (I’ve tried), and, so it seems, I can’t really write very well in my neat capitals anymore either. At least not with this pen, or at least not very fast. I wonder what that means.