Bowling Alley Politics is the first longer writing of Travis Lee. Very early in his visual explorations he investigated language in realation to the
visual image. “It was a natural progression when I started writing,” he has said. Wrote during a troubled time in Travis Lee’s life, the book is mainly autobiographical, although he claims that it is also nonfiction. “Bowling Alley Politics was the first time I really started to find some kind of voice. I was having a terrible time in life, and most of it was because of my perspective. When I would write, this person would come out, he was such a bastard-asshole, and I hated him. But how ever much I hated him, he was still some part of me, a part held silent most of the time, but released when I would write.” Using many different kinds of forms, almost schizophrenically, Travis Lee writes about a wide vary of subjects during the four months it took him to write it.

The Human Brain and Superman
short story
written in 2002
13 pages
<click to read - full version!>

“A year after writing the Human Brain and Superman I realized that when I was writing it I was trying to find a character, a story, something. I didn’t notice that I was doing it at the time, but I realized now I was.” In Bowling Alley Politics Travis Lee had created a story with almost no visible action or any character development besides the main character. “You know, when I wrote Bowling Alley Politics it was a very troubled time for me, and I think when you first start working in a medium, you have to find yourself in it first before you can write about other characters.” In the Human Brain and Superman, the bareness of a beginning piece is the structure, laid bare out in front of us like the steel beams of a skyscraper. Travis Lee has always played with the idea of polishing up his work or leaving it how it came out of the horse’s mouth.

Travis Lee wrote this poem with the intention to be spoken outloud. Travis Lee has always explored the connections between the spoken and written word. Much of his writing is written like it is spoken. “I really hated when I read books and nobody stuttered. Everyone had this perfect speaking ability with a great vocabulary. And movies are the same way. It kind of demeaned life because I’ve never met anyone that can speak so eloquently as in a movie or book. I wanted my writing to be from life--how people really spoke. The way their words sounded when put together--the way they sounded when they didn’t. I wanted some passages to mean things and others to mean nothing--because that is how life is. A piece of wisdom there, something funny here, some- thing ridiculous next. Life is made of all these things, and I wasn’t going to separate the pieces because life was all of it--it is more real in religion or wisdom--it’s just as much in a pair of shoes as in a cross.”

This quote can be applied to much of Travis Lee’s work.

Sandy. the barfly. in Lucida Console 8 point type
2003
short nonfiction
3 pages

A bar.
Characters.
Action.

<click to read - full version!>

poem w/ scotch tape
2003
peom