Library of Babel

Oh, Canada

2009-03-17T16:01:00.000-07:00

It will be the first of almost a dozen reported speaking engagements Mr. Bush will hold this year. Activists in Calgary won't let it be easy.

Footwear has been collected and a cannon has been constructed to toss shoes at an effigy of the much-maligned leader in homage to the Iraqi reporter who chucked his loafers at Mr. Bush last December and was sentenced last week to three years in prison.

Windows Error Code of the Day

2009-03-16T17:03:00.000-07:00

ERROR_TRUSTED_RELATIONSHIP_FAILURE

It was almost a shame to read the definition: "The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed." Perhaps "workstation" and "primary domain" are metaphors?

Because Nothing Else Matters

2009-03-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

Apocalyptica

Bif Naked

And the original...

Proposition 8 in Redmond

2008-11-16T11:05:00.000-08:00

Californians Against Hate has a dishonor roll of people and organizations who gave more than $5,000 to support Proposition 8 and end gay marriage in California. There are the usual suspects—Concerned Women of America, Focus on the Family, and so on. But one surprised me.

The only donor from Washington state is Mike Murray of Redmond, a former software executive, who gave $100,000. To read about some of Murray's retirement work and his Crystal Springs Foundation, you'd be hard pressed to guess he would finance hate.

UPDATE: A little more digging provides some data, here.

Wave

2008-10-12T10:23:00.000-07:00

There are a half-dozen books of which I own two copies—one to loan and one as insurance. Donna Stonecipher's The Reservoir is one of those books. I got the loaner copy back Tuesday night and was flipping through it this morning. Most of the pieces are extended prose poems where the paragraph stands in for the stanza. Here's the first stanza/paragraph of "Wave":

Seaside, the sun proves that I am hollow. Down by the water the sandcastle is a small irritant in the wave's mouth. My white shirt flutters above me, blinding with sunlight; a white butterfly navigates the tufts. It is for reaffirmation of certain knowledge that a pilgrim seeks out an uncertain landscape. Why, tonight, did the sunset tell me something I already know, when there is so much unseen goldenrod yet to clasp?

The Writer's Craft

2008-10-01T00:14:00.000-07:00

What follows is the presentation I gave at the Its About Reading Series on 14 August.

NO THINGS BUT IN WORDS: CHANCE, PROCEDURE, AND CONSTRAINT

George Perec wrote a novel without using the letter "e". Ronald Johnson wrote a poem by crossing out words and letters from Milton's Paradise Lost. Raymond Queneau wrote his Exercises in Style by telling the exact same story—about seeing a man wearing a hat on the bus—100 times, each time using a different style from opera to that of the business memo. Christian Bök wrote a poem each section of which uses only one vowel. Jackson Mac Low wrote his Virginia Woolf Poems by painstakingly selecting words from Woolf's novels by an almost mathematical procedure. Doug Nufer wrote a poem based on Eliot's The Wasteland by reversing the order of the poem's lines and reversing each line. I wrote a piece that substituted words beginning with the same first letters as the words in the opening verses of Genesis.

Why would someone choose to write this way? If writing is supposed to be about something, what is this kind of writing about? You can't entirely rule out perversity. Perec—the fellow who wrote the e-less novel—worked as a scientific librarian and sometimes was asked to re-type his memos when his superiors failed to appreciate seeing the memos written in the shapes of triangles or hexagons. There is an answer beyond perversity, though. For me, there are two parts to the answer, one philosophical and political, the other psychological and personal.

The philosophical and political part has to do with what may be called the materiality of language. When we think about words, we often think of them as tools we use to get to something else, something else in the world—say truth, or experience. You may regard these tools as partially broken and makeshift, or finely-honed instruments of precision and meaning, depending on your particular view of the world. I don't want to dismiss this view of words. I make a good living with language in that mode by writing documentation. And if that documentation isn't precise and meaningful, my company's customers give me an earful. But thinking about language in this way is to see it outside and, perhaps, opposed to the world.

Language, however, is part of the world, part of our human world. A promise or a wedding vow has no objective existence in what we sometimes call the world. Promises and wedding vows are, however, real things in our human world. And they are real things in that part of our world formed by language. So, for me, at least, language and the world aren't opposed because the world is the human world in which I live. And, in that sense language is material. It exists in the human world because promises and wedding vows exist for me as much as the keyboard on which I type or the bowl that holds my morning cereal.

There is another sense, or really an extension of this sense, in which language is material. I can best illustrate this with the first few stanzas of a poem, "Zen Acorn" by Harryette Mullen from her book Sleeping with the Dictionary.

Zen Acorn

a frozen
indian acorn

a frozen
indiana corn

afro zen
indian acorn

afro zen
indiana corn

Each stanza in this poem is a re-arrangement of the letters in that first stanza. In this poem, Mullen isn't trying to get to something outside the poem. Instead, the letters of the words become objects—objects of language—and the poem moves forward by finding increasingly extreme ways of moving these letters around to create new things, new words from old. This poem isn't about the world in the same sense, say, as Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. But it is still about our world because it takes place within our human world of language. And it uses the material nature of language—the pieces like letters—that make the things of language. If we think about it a little, we'll notice that even Wordsworth's poem is partly about language, too, because of its crafted alliteration, consonance, rhyme, and rhythms. These things exist within and because of language.

So, one answer to the questions about those writers I mentioned at the beginning is that they write the way that they do in order to explore the materiality of language by finding bits of language to re-arrange into new things, new work, new novels, new poems.

The personal and psychological reasons for writing in this mode are personal ones. They are reasons that, because of my narcissism I think are true for others, but you'll need to decide that. When I started writing seriously—by this I mean writing poetry—I took the hoary maxim of "write what you know" to heart and wrote first-person, semi-autobiographical pieces. I tried writing from experience. I found it frustrating. I found it frustrating because I'd been there when those things happened. There wasn't the sort of surprise I wanted out of the process of writing. Billy Collins, in "The Secret Game of Poetry," describes what he likes a poem to do. For Collins, a poem that works is like hitchhiking, getting a ride, and being dropped in the middle of someplace you don't know. I liked that comparison and wanted that sense from the process of writing.

Mary Karr was also very popular at the time and it seemed, in some ways, that if you hadn't had an experience of substance abuse, well, you hadn't had writerly experiences. I wrote a piece in which I turned my quiet, straight-laced real mother into an alcoholic. The piece was awful. And so was the feeling of writing it.

Because this is a narrative, I'll skip the byways I took—which included East European surrealism, Louise Glück's essay "Against Sincerity," Rae Armantrout's work, Lyn Hejinian's My Life and her essays, and the revelation of Mac Low's writing—and get to the epiphany. Like all modern epiphanies, it happened in an unlikely place—a Barnes & Noble bookstore in a mall. In that bookstore I found a book I'd never seen before and that I have never seen since in that store. The book was The Oulipo Compendium edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie.

The Oulipo are a group of writers who came together in the 60's in France in reaction to surrealism. One surrealist practice was automatic writing, an attempt to remove the normal, waking barriers and let the unconscious come forth. For the Oulipo, the surrealist process of automatic writing wasn't and couldn't really be as free as claimed because it was subject to unchosen and often unconscious forms. Better, the Oulipo argued, to choose a form consciously and write within it. And they set about—and continue to this day—developing new forms and new ways of writing.

Part of the The Oulipo Compendium is summaries of the Oulipo's major essays and publications, most of which haven't been translated. Most significant for me, however, is that The Oulipo Compendium is also a giant toolbox. It contains descriptions of the hundred or so different forms the Oulipo have created. The most well-known of these forms is N+7. In N+7 you take a piece of writing and a dictionary and substitute every noun in the writing with the seventh noun in the dictionary following the original noun.

For me, this way of writing has been a godsend. Rather than ransacking my life for something interesting, I can choose a form and start writing. Those forms often lead my writing to places I never would have gotten to otherwise. I have the pleasure of surprise in my writing in a way that the first-person lyric rarely provides me.

Using a procedure—say, collecting definitions and proverbs around a particular word then dropping the selected word and writing something using the words that are left—also helps me win one of the struggles I have with myself. When I'm using a form or procedure, I'm not trying to write Poetry with a capital "p". I'm just playing. Trying to solve a puzzle. Moving things around and seeing what happens. With no goal, the process opens up and I can just write and let the result take care of itself.

I also think that these forms have, in an indirect way, a political function. Forms are a way of approaching something. The more forms we have, the more ways we have of approaching things. And the more ways we have of approaching things, the less likely we are to become fundamentalist in our thinking. In a sort of existential irony, using forms or constraints produces greater freedom—freedom of thought, freedom of writing, and freedom to create.

The next to last thing I'd like to say is that it would be a mistake to think that using a procedure, form, or constraint produces impersonal writing. Whatever the form or procedure, when we use it we are exercising a choice. N+7, for example, may seem mechanical. But its results are rarely so because it is the writer who chooses the starting point—the original piece of writing and the dictionary to use. And no matter what or how we write, our obsessions and deeper concerns will come out. I had a direct experience with this in reading a review of my book of Oulipian-inspired pieces.

I'd like to end by quoting from an essay, "Not-Knowing," by Donald Barthelme. Barthelme writes:

[N]ot-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.

For me writing with a constraint—using only words without "e" or using only the vowel "a" or forming a new paragraph by crossing out letters and words from a badly written bestseller—becomes a way of keeping this not-knowing open, a way that keeps more directions available for longer than would otherwise be possible. It keeps the process—and me—open and, therefore, alive.

John McCain's Leadership

2008-09-25T09:41:00.000-07:00

I urge all of you to follow John McCain's example: call your office and tell them you can't come in until the financial crisis is over.

Fear or Hope: Two Speeches, 9/23/2008

2008-09-24T02:21:00.000-07:00

Tag clouds generated with TagCrowd.

First, the speech Sarah Palin had planned to give on 23 September:

created at TagCrowd.com

Barack Obama's speech on the same day:

created at TagCrowd.com

Palin is peddling apocalypse. Obama is talking about plans and hope. The pictures are clear to me.

It's About Choice

2008-09-21T12:04:00.000-07:00

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...

— David Foster Wallace

The Graphs of Life

2008-09-20T10:53:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I need to put the book on data mining aside, but this appeals to me today.

George Saunders on Sarah Palin

2008-09-18T00:08:00.001-07:00

Saunders, the author of Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, has a joyfully satirical piece on Palin in the 22 September New Yorker. And it's on line.

John McCain: The Early Years

2008-08-29T12:39:00.000-07:00

"Johnny where's your book report? It's three days late."

"But Mrs. Barnacle, I'm going to be a POW."

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

2008-07-08T00:04:00.000-07:00

I'd managed to miss this until yesterday—part of Graham Chapman's funeral, ending with a chorus of "Always Look on the Bright Side" from Life of Brian.

I'm Just Asking...

2008-07-06T17:46:00.000-07:00

Does the recorded books version of the Bible belong in the "Audio Nonfiction" section? That's where the local Barnes & Noble shelves it.

Memorial Day

2008-05-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

Yet Another Reason for Encryption

2008-04-22T17:30:00.000-07:00

Wired's Threat Level reports on a ruling that border agents don't need a warrant to rummage through any of your digital devices—cameras, cellphones, laptops, etc.

Might be time to visit PGP.

The Perfectionist's Diary

2008-04-11T18:52:00.001-07:00

What would it mean if I failed a blood test?

A Good Valentine's Day

2008-02-17T17:37:00.000-08:00

Leaving your lover's house the morning of the fifteenth.

Voice in the Wilderness

2008-01-06T12:38:00.001-08:00

George McGovern says what should be obvious by now.

Contemporary Music

2007-12-28T00:05:00.001-08:00

Stumbled across a new Web site when looking for information about Elliott Carter's solo guitar piece, "Changes": Art of the States which, whatever else it may be, is an online anthology of 20th and 21st century American music.

Favorites so far include "Becoming Becoming" by Linda Dusman, "In the Name of the Holocaust" by John Cage, and, of course, "Changes".

It's an amazing site. How they got permissions for all of these things, I have no idea. We're not talking about excerpts—you hear the whole composition.

Library of Congress

2007-12-24T12:16:00.001-08:00

The Edge of the American West has an interesting short history of the Library of Congress.

One Number Says It All: 600

2007-12-14T12:11:00.000-08:00

That's the percentage increase since Bush took office in what the government spends on paper shredding. Summary, and details and more details.

We're All Looking for Kindness

2007-12-08T10:41:00.000-08:00

Then there's the email forwarded by the dating service so filled with longing and despair that you know something is broken inside her, that it's nothing you can fix, that it's so broken it would be dangerous to reply.

Love and Anger

2007-12-08T01:59:00.001-08:00

A Kate Bush video I'd not seen before, from The Sensual World (1989) — the first of her albums I bought. It introduced me to the pleasure of discovering her earlier work and the pain of waiting four years for The Red Shoes (1993). Which was nothing like waiting the twelve years for Aerial (2005).

Non-Reading Group

2007-12-08T01:24:00.000-08:00

Three of us from my old writing group meet (usually for drinks) as a non-reading group. We've been assiduously not reading Don Quixote for the last two years.

One of our number has branched out and joined a Reading Non-Group. Everyone is reading War and Peace, but they will never meet to discuss it.

What are you not reading or not meeting about?

Sometimes You're Special...

2007-12-06T13:29:00.000-08:00

...and sometimes you're not.

The on-line dating service I've subscribed to has a quick "hey, I noticed you" feature. I got one today where the criterion for who she wanted to meet was a man between 3' and 8' in height. Period.

At 6' I just barely made the cut....

Umm, Maybe I Should Rephrase That...

2007-12-04T10:39:00.000-08:00

It occurred to me—a split-second before I pressed ENTER—that maybe I didn't want to use "aleatoric" and "Oulipian" in my personal profile on a nationwide dating service.

Sweet jeebus, I'm bad at this stuff.

Firefly Wisdom Monday

2007-12-03T03:02:00.000-08:00

MAL You are very much lacking in imagination.
ZOË I imagine that's so, sir.

— Out of Gas

The Mercy of the Fallen

2007-12-01T19:04:00.000-08:00

This is my mood tonight. What's yours?

There's the wind and the rain
And the mercy of the fallen
Who say they have no claim to know what's right.
There's the weak and the strong
And the beds that have no answer
And that's where I may rest my head tonight.

Ask Willa!

2007-11-25T16:21:00.000-08:00

The chipper white Aryans (be a feerd of furiners!) at Family Security Matters have an anonymous CIA operative who will answer your questions—and help fan the flames of paranoia that keeps the Dems cowed and Bush on top.

Here's what I decided to Ask Willa:

Is it possible for Islamic Fascists to wreak havoc by planting explosives in produce?

Given how widespread potatoes are in this country, it seems to me that vegetable bombs pose a significant threat.

Join the fun!

Them Heavy People

2007-11-19T11:40:00.000-08:00

Because it's just that kind of day.

Firefly Wisdom Monday

2007-11-19T02:17:00.000-08:00

ZOË     Captain will come up with a plan.
KAYLEE     That's good. Right?
ZOË     Possibly you're not recalling some of his previous plans.

—Safe

How to Make a Buffoon

2007-11-19T02:05:00.000-08:00

Inflate bag with gas, let bag leak slowly in front of a microphone.

The homophobic Rev. Ken Hutcherson showed up at the Microsoft company meeting to threaten the corporation if they continued to support gay rights. Box Turtle Bulletin has the video and details.

When it was later pointed out to Hutcherson that 97% of the shareholders supported Microsoft's policies, Hutcherson made noises about getting different shareholders, i.e. taking over the company. As Box Turtle points out, at $34 a share, Microsoft has a market capitalization of around $318 billion dollars.

If anyone was shaking in their boots, it was from laughter.

It's All Explication de Texte

2007-11-16T01:33:00.000-08:00

Isn't this piece from today's Writer's Almanac

Beside the Point

The sky has never won a prize.
The clouds have no careers.
The rainbow doesn't say my work,
thank goodness.

The rock in the creek's not so productive.
The mud on the bank's not too pragmatic.
There's nothing useful in the noise
the wind makes in the leaves.

Buck up now, my fellow superfluity,
and let's both be of that worthless ilk,
self-indulgent as shooting stars,
self-absorbed as sunsets.

Who cares if we're inconsequential?
At least we can revel, two good-for-nothings,
in our irrelevance; at least come and make
no difference with me.
—Stephen Cushman

really just a gloss on this Dickinson poem:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one's name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Maybe I have an associative disorder that resolves everything to Dickinson. Well, there are worse universes to be trapped in.

"This Is What a Police State Looks Like"

2007-11-15T00:41:00.000-08:00

...or at least being on the road to one. From a notice posted on Seattle Indymedia:

At 3 PM, on Friday, November 2nd, the landlord of the building which houses the Pitch Pipe Infoshop received a call from a Tacoma PD lieutenant. He told her that the Infoshop and the Anarchist Bookfair which it is holding this Saturday and Sunday is a homeland security threat and will be monitored by police for the entire weekend. The landlord then approached residents of the building and threatened eviction. As of now, no one is threatened with a sudden eviction.

God forbid someone reads a book. More about the Pitch Pipe Infoshop Collective.

It's impossible to know if this is Federal pressure or just local cops being thuggish and stupid. I'd bet on the latter, but these days it's not paranoid to consider the former.

Meanwhile, there's some Althusser, Marcuse, and early Marx in my basement that might find its way south to that lending library.

Resistance Is Futile

2007-11-14T10:36:00.000-08:00

Or, as Žižek would have it, "Resistance Is Surrender." The argument is, in part, that most forms of resistance to global capitalism are determined (and thus compromised) by that very global capitalism. Most—but not all.

Not necessarily Žižek at his best but Žižek at his always interesting. And if you're wondering who the heck is Žižek, Routledge has a splendid introduction to his work and thought.

Commuting Tip of the Week

2007-11-13T00:57:00.001-08:00

Don't listen to the Twin Peaks soundtrack on a windy day that makes the traffic lights swing ominously against a gun-metal sky. Just don't.

This has been a Library of Babel Public Service Announcement.

Firefly Wisdom Monday

2007-11-12T01:12:00.000-08:00

MAL     If anyone gets nosy, just, you know... shoot 'em.
ZOË     Shoot 'em?
MAL     Politely.

—Serenity

LAPD's Maps

2007-11-09T11:18:00.000-08:00

The LAPD is mapping Muslim areas of the city to find areas that might produce/encourage terrorists.

And they wonder why folks think they're racist.

Given that the majority of terrorist acts in the U.S. are committed by right-wing Christians (Tim McVey, clinic bombers, etc.), perhaps they'd be more effective mapping Evangelicals?

Firefly Wisdom Monday

2007-11-05T01:50:00.000-08:00

MAL My work's illegal, but at least it's honest.

—Shindig

"She's dead. Wrapped in plastic."

2007-11-04T13:54:00.000-08:00

And with Pete Martell's phone call to Sheriff Harry S. Truman, I knew I was back in the overwrought and weird world of Twin Peaks.

The new, complete release came out last week and last night I sat down and watched the pilot. I wouldn't call it fun, exactly, but it was hard not to put the next disk in.

The Carriage, or the Limo and M&Ms

2007-10-30T16:06:00.000-07:00

Compare Susan Deborah King's poem (from Writer's Alamanac):

As Death Approaches

I can't believe I'm laughing!
I'd have sworn I'd be
shaking or sniveling.
And I sure didn't expect
a limousine.
I've never been in a limousine.
No biggy.
I've had better than fame.
Who needs the pressure?
As for fortune, I'm filthy.
That's why I'm laughing.
I've had so much love:
the giving, the getting.
It's shameful.
It's embarrassing.
And it's too late.
No one can take it away!
And I've had the pain
to help me appreciate it.
Thank God for the pain!
Easy for me to say
now that I'm going!
But no, seriously,
the kicks in the teeth,
the gut, the rugs
pulled out, slammed doors,
setbacks, snubs.
Without them, I'd
never have recognized
Love, bedraggled,
plain eyes shining,
happy to see me.
Do I want more?
Of course I want more!
I always want more
of everything: money, hugs,
lovemaking, art, butter,
woods, flowers, the sea,
M&Ms, chips, tops, bottoms,
trips — I did give up drinking —
time, sure, and yes,
I'd like to see
my grandchildren,
if there are any.
I'd like to see my books
but more has never
been good for me anyway.
Enough — that's what I've
always needed to learn,
and is there a better way?
So this laughter
I had to work up to
through so many tears,
it just keeps coming
like a fountain, a spray.
Let it light on you
refreshment, benediction,
as I'm driven away.

With this:

Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality.

We slowly drove—He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility—

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess—in the Ring—
We passed the fields of Gazing Grain—
We passed the Setting Sun—

Or rather—He passed Us—
The Dews drew quivering and chill—
For only Gossamer, my Gown—
My Tippet—only Tulle—

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground—
The Roof was scarcely visible—
The Cornice—in the Ground—

Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity—

King's use of the limo and death as journey makes the comparison inevitable. I just don't see the point of the slang and flabbiness of King's poem coming, as it does, down line of the Dickinson.

Oh Yeah, That Gore

2007-10-28T12:17:00.000-07:00

I pulled my copy of Michael Nicolella's Shard out of the shipping box and there, on the front lower right, was a black-and-white "Parental Advisory" sticker. My first thought was, "Well, thank God, who knows what would happen if the youth of the country listened to too much atonal music."

Nicolella's album title comes from the recording of Elliott Carter's Shard, a particularly dissonant and difficult 20th-century guitar piece, and the reason I'd bought the album.

But alas, the sticker was not, as I had hoped, for Shard (nothing would spur interest in atonalism as quickly as banning it). No, it was for the next track on the disc, an electro-acoustic work for electric guitar and tape called Grab It. The tape contains highly processed fragments of interviews with prisoners. And they're not happy campers. It is, however, a very interesting work as the guitar mirrors, almost exactly, the pitch and intonation of the speech fragments going on around it.

And so, because the track includes the word "motherfucker" (one word or two? I never know), an album of difficult, engaging, and serious 20th and 21st century music gets a parental advisory label.

Lest we forget, in the haze of nostalgia brought on by the Nobel prize, it was Al Gore's wife Tipper who first called for censorship of music and, when that failed, browbeat the industry into the labeling we have today. We should also remember that Al backed his spouse 100%.

Whatever its virtues in other contexts, on the front of an album of dissonant contemporary music, the label is utterly and simply stupid. I look forward to the day when we have a country of adults.

Uh Oh.

2007-10-26T11:38:00.000-07:00

Since the divorce I've been sleeping smack in the middle of a queen-sized bed. This, of course, leaves room for books to either side of the pillows.

This morning I woke up looking at a volume of Kafka's short stories on top of a book on dating and relationships.

I don't know what this means, but I doubt that it's a Good Thing.

Stay Out of New York State This Weekend

2007-10-25T14:10:00.001-07:00

...unless you'd like a face full of buckshot. Dick Cheney will be hunting this weekend in Poughkeepsie.

Firefly Wisdom Monday

2007-10-23T01:18:00.000-07:00

JAYNE   You want I should shoot 'em now, Marco?
MARCO   Wait until they tell us where they put the stuff.
JAYNE   That's a good idea. A good idea. Tell us where the stuff's at so I can shoot ya.
MAL   Point of interest? Offering to shoot us, don't work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.

—Out of Gas

GodblogCon

2007-09-18T00:27:00.000-07:00

The banshee religious right and those too rude to keep their religion to themselves are having a blogging conference: GodBlogCon.

I was concerned until I read the following entry in the schedule:

Writing Well in the New Media
Writing technique and style changes depending on the medium. Like writing a thought piece for a journal is unlike writing a thought piece for a newspaper, so also is writing a blog post different in style and technique as well as the expectation of the readers reading the piece. La Shawn will teach you some of the secrets to developing a clean, crisp, compelling writing technique for blogging.

What an inadvertently masterful bit of self-deconstructing and self-destructing prose. If that's how they're going to write well, secular society and the blogosphere are safe (for a while).

Surge-a-Palooza!

2007-09-11T11:05:00.000-07:00

From the good folks at MoveOn.org.

Firefly Wisdom Monday

2007-09-10T19:50:00.000-07:00

BOOK If you take sexual advantage of her, you're going to burn in a very special level of hell. A level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.

—Our Mrs. Reynolds

Secret Music Lessons

2007-08-28T13:38:00.000-07:00

I've started working on the fourth of Brouwer's Estudios Sencillos (Simple Studies). We spent a good ten minutes at my lesson working out one measure of it, measure 8. In 8 there's a three-note melody in the bass line punctuated by three two-note chords. Hitting the middle chord requires a partial barre on strings three and four.

If you're playing slowly, there's enough time to jump the fingers from one position to the next. However, if you try this at tempo, you're screwed. To play at tempo, you have to use the time during the melody notes to pre-position the fingers to play the chords.

Working that out and practicing it felt like I was being let in on a secret about the music itself. I understood something a casual listener would never know—he or she will just hear the music, as it's supposed to be.

All of which reminded me of the pleasures of using constraints to get started writing. The constraint will shape the piece, and in some cases make it possible, but the reader may never know it's there. But I'll know, and I'll know a secret.

Geek Chic

2007-08-23T01:53:00.000-07:00

Pictures of science-related tattoos gathered by Carl Zimmer of The Loom.

The one I don't get is the Scheme code tattoo for the Fibonacci series. It really should use memoization rather than being directly recursive....

Understanding Humor

2007-08-21T14:01:00.000-07:00

A recurring theme in Star Trek: The Next Generation (for example, The Outrageous Okona) was Data's attempt to understand humor. A story in The New Scientist reports on two University of Cincinnati researchers who have written a program that understands a particular kind of joke.

The kind of joke the program recognizes relies on a pun:

Property broker: "I tell you this new house has no flaws at all."
Buyer: "Then what do you walk on?"

Here's how the article describes the program:

To teach the program to spot jokes, the researchers first gave it a database of words, extracted from a children's dictionary to keep things simple, and then supplied examples of how words can be related to one another in different ways to create different meanings. When presented with a new passage, the program uses that knowledge to work out how those new words relate to each other and what they likely mean. When it finds a word that doesn't seem to fit with its surroundings, it searches a digital pronunciation guide for similar-sounding words. If any of those words fits in better with the rest of the sentence, it flags the passage as a joke. The result is a bot that "gets" jokes that turn on a simple pun.

Also interesting is the sort of joke the program does not understand:

Patient: "Doctor, doctor, I swallowed a bone."
Doctor: "Are you choking?"
Patient: "No, I really did!"

Here, the program fails because the word "choking" occurs in a context (medical) in which it fits. As the researchers remark in the UC news release, the hardest part of the program is representing the knowledge of the world required to recognize an anomalous word.

And this highlights something Simon DeDeo said offhandedly in "Towards an Anarchist Poetics" in Absent: "Every attempt to produce authentic text with a computer equipped only with a dictionary and syntax rules has failed." This is true. It is also silly—no one and nothing can produce "authentic text" with only a dictionary and syntax rules. Writing of any sort involves many rules, conventions, and cultural knowledge far beyond vocabulary and syntax. Finding ways to represent that knowledge and put it to use is the hardest part of programming some sort of writing machine. (See Haiku, Dog Grammar, and Computer-Generated Text I & II for a long aside.)

[The researchers' presentation is not available online. A story in The Telegraph provides different details. You can find references to other, earlier articles on Julia Taylor's web page and on the page for the UC Applied AI lab. Taylor's page includes a PDF of her Master's thesis which contains a summary of earlier humor-recognizing programs and an extensive taxonomy of jokes based on puns.]

Firefly Wisdom Monday

2007-08-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

Zoë Scared her away again, did you?
Simon This may come as a shock, but I'm actually not very good at talking to girls.
Zoë Why, is there someone you are good at talking to?
—The Message

WTF?

2007-08-19T23:29:00.000-07:00

It's lazy blogging to just embed YouTube videos, but....

I was doing a search for something else and came across references to a Bollywood flick, Keemat. Apparently the following scene is (in)famous. Even minimal continuity is thrown aside for the music and dancing and, just when you think it can't get any weirder, the guys lose their trunks and dance in skirts made of leaves.

Enjoy. Or something. I still can't get my head around it.

Uncle Sam Blues

2007-08-17T01:10:00.000-07:00

Because you can never have too much Jefferson Airplane.

Looks like it's footage from Woodstock.

And here's an amazing clip that I think is better, though you probably need to be a fan of Slick's vocals.

Henri Alleg, La Question

2007-08-14T10:45:00.000-07:00

About a year ago, I bought and watched Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. The booklet in the set included a bibliography that mentioned a small book by Henri Alleg, La Question.

Alleg is a French citizen who supported Algerian independence through the newspaper he published in Algiers. In 1957 he was arrested. La Question is his first-person account of his capture and torture. The book was banned in France for years, though it circulated and was a major contributor to the French finally pulling out of Algeria.

Last week I read it in the Bison Press translation, The Question. Unlike the current French edition, the translation includes Sartre's 1958 Preface and a very recent "Afterword" by Alleg. The parallels to Iraq and Abu Ghraib are striking. It is not pleasant reading (and much is lost in translation), but it feels like essential reading.

The "Afterword" highlights something I didn't know. When the French paratroopers who ran the secret prisons and torture chambers left Algeria they went to South and Central America where they trained troops and death squads. And they came to the United States where they helped train U.S. forces as part of the war in Vietnam.

There is, then, a direct line between the "paras" in Algeria and the torturers of Abu Ghraib and other secret prisons. A direct, bloody, disgraceful, evil line.

Theodore Roethke

2007-08-13T12:49:00.000-07:00

What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?
—Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire, 206

This weekend I went to see First Class, David Wagoner's play about Theodore Roethke. Although several folks had recommended it highly, I was reluctant thinking it might be pure hagiography, given Roethke's continuing influence around here. (There were still stories about him circulating when I started graduate work at UW.)

The play is really quite wonderful, showing, so far as I know, all sides of Roethke, the brilliant teacher as well as the drunken asshole at the faculty party. It also captures perfectly that weird combination of challenge and encouragement that constitutes the writing workshop.

If you're in Seattle and you haven't seen it, do go. The play closes on August 26th.

Duchamp

2007-08-08T11:11:00.001-07:00

If you're a regular reader of Boing Boing, you already know about this. If not, well, here's a nice interactive introduction to Duchamp's work and life. Requires Flash.

What Are You, 12? Special Poetics Edition

2007-08-06T22:32:00.000-07:00

Updated below, 8/8/07.

Kent Johnson's staging of his self-dramatization in response to yet another mess of which he is the origin: Johnson effectively spammed Lime Tree's comments, reverted to "please explain to me what I've done wrong," next trotted out his old stand-by "I was entering into the spirit of things," and then goes into full-throated cries of censorship, this last the final step every time he pulls this bullshit.

Kent justifying his sociopathology as theory at Blazevox, an otherwise interesting online journal and publisher. Example entry at Lime Tree here.

Watch the pivot point in the article when it goes from innocence and shock, and broadens into accusations of "censorship" against the "avant-garde." This is his shtick. This is why he was booted from the POETICS-L list multiple times.

Sometimes a cigar is a cigar and an asshole is an asshole, not a theorist.

UPDATE: From the That Certainly Went Well File—I wrote the above rant on the blog because it seemed a way to safely vent and not contribute to the brouhaha that usually surrounds these things. Only a few friends read the blog.

Checking this morning, I've had more traffic in the last twelve hours than I usually have on a really good week. Looks like the URL made it into some email folks are circulating as well as into the Flarf private list on Google. So much for low-key venting.

Tips on name changing and relocation appreciated.

UPDATE II (7/8/07, 3:03PM): More of Johnson's perfervid self-staging captured in the Google cache.

UPDATE III (8/8/07, 6:53PM): John Latta's silly comparison of the blog dust-up to Stalin (Kent Johnson's comments vs. 20 million dead—gosh, John, thank God we have you to be our moral compass). You'll have to scroll to find them. And some of his comments from Lime Tree, courtesy of Google cache, whose deletion he (foolishly) protests.

I was thinking about this, and the various posts on POETICS-L surrounding it, while listening to the two-part NPR report on life in the FEMA trailer parks in Mississippi. Now there's something that might, perhaps, be worth talking about as genocide.

Something real. Something genuinely evil.

Firefly Wisdom Monday

2007-08-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

MAL He's not the first psycho to hire us, nor the last. You think that's a commentary on us?

—The Train Job

Wisdom of the Body

2007-08-05T13:44:00.000-07:00

Like Peter, I'm not a fan of the Blue Angels. It's not just the noise, though I live in one of the nieghborhoods they fly over low and fast after a North/South run on the lake. No.

I have never served in the military (Nixon ended the draft just before my lottery), and I have never been in combat. So Vietnam was largely TV news stories, photos in Life, the knot in my stomach as draft registration approached, and the stories I've heard from vets that told me it was worse than I imagined.

But every time I hear the Blue Angels, I'm taken back to that one, single, iconic picture of the war: the naked Vietnamese girl running screaming down the road where, in the distance, smoke and flames show over the jungle.

Before the Blue Angels switched to the F/A-18 Hornets, they flew A-4 Skyhawks, the work horse of the Vietnam era. As the Wikipedia article notes of the aircraft's use in Vietnam, "Skyhawks carried out some of the first air strikes by the US during the conflict and a Marine Skyhawk is believed to have dropped the last US bombs on the country."

The Navy adopted the Hornet for the Blue Angels in 1986. And while they're shiny and blue in the August sunshine, here's what those sleek machines usually carry (hardpoints are the external mounting points for weaponry and fuel):

Guns: 1x 20 mm M61 Vulcan internal gatling gun with 578 rounds

Hardpoints: 9: 2 wingtip, 4 underwing, and 3 fuselage, carrying up to 13,700 lb (6,215 kg) of missiles, rockets, bombs, fuel tanks, and pods

Missiles:

Air-to-air: AIM-9 Sidewinder, AIM-132 ASRAAM, AIM-120 AMRAAM, AIM-7 Sparrow, IRIS-T

Air-to-ground: AGM-45 Shrike, AGM-65 Maverick, AGM-88 HARM, SLAM-ER, JSOW, Taurus missile

Anti-ship: AGM-84 Harpoon

Bombs: CBU-87 cluster, CBU-89 gator mine, CBU-97 CEM, Paveway, JDAM, Mk 80 series, nuclear bombs, Mk 20 Rockeye II cluster, mines

Yes. Cluster bombs, mines, and even nuclear warheads. Over six tons. It's no accident—there's a reason every cell in your body tells you to throw yourself at the dirt when these things fly over. Sometimes the body is very wise.

What Are You, 12?

2007-07-31T16:30:00.000-07:00

From the We Are Governed by Children File—Tom Tancredo thinks we should threaten to blow up Islamic holy sites to deter an attack.

Meanwhile in other pre-adolescent fits, Pamela of Atlas Shrugs posts the following picture (and many more) of herself flipping off Cindy Sheehan.

Idiots.

Archive Fever

2007-07-31T15:41:00.000-07:00

Article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the strange battle over the disposition of Jacques Derrida's papers which ends with UC Irvine suing his widow and sons.

Very odd.

Firefly Wisdom Monday

2007-07-30T11:16:00.000-07:00

INARA It sounds like something this crew can handle. I can't guarantee they'll handle it particularly well, but —
NANDI If they got guns, and brains at all —
INARA They've got guns.

Heart of Gold

Batshit Crazy II

2007-07-18T14:41:00.000-07:00

Ms. Oetting has been busy again, this time with a post titled "Rape of the Truth." Yes, my irony meter slammed into the stop peg, too.

Less racism this time out, but the same proportions of venom, contempt, and ignorance. I left a comment, again. I suppose it comes across as condescending, but, damn it, if you're going to make philosophical arguments, you probably should know something about philosophy:

Tracy, there is no usage of "empiricism" in English that corresponds to what you’ve said:
However, our progressive counterparts, for the most part, believe that reality is entirely subjective, with all of reality being inside the brain of the perceiving subject with nothing independent of it. This philosophy is also known as Empiricism.
This is solipsism and is regarded as the antithesis of empiricism.

Adler’s book was written in 50s and has thus missed much of significance in the development of philosophical thinking over the last half century. Adler also indulged his prejudices quite freely and his book should not be mistaken for a systematic (let alone consistent) approach to philosophy.

I haven’t read Sire, but IVP is generally not a reliable publisher when it comes to philosophy.

If you really want to understand philosophy, I strongly recommend Metaphysics: An Introduction by Michael Loux or Metaphysics by Peter Van Inwagen. Inwagen is a Christian so that you may be more comfortable with him. Loux is a bit more rigorous. Neither of these are easy reading. However, given the complexity and significance of the issues, they deserve serious attention. You might also find Robert Audi's Epistemology: An Introduction of interest.

The correspondence theory of truth that you talk about is quite problematic in many ways. The American philosopher Hilary Putnam examines this in great (some might say excruciating) detail. Putnam is not what you would call postmodernist. His essay "Language and Meaning" in his collected papers would be the best place to begin thinking through the issues. Any of his books touch on this at some point.

All of this presupposes, of course, that you’re actively interested in thinking through the issues rather than throwing things together into a club with which to beat up people whose politics you dislike.

Today I'm a Luddite

2007-07-18T13:14:00.000-07:00

I've been working in computing and technology for close to thirty years. I'm still amazed by how fucked up systems can be.

Today I went to the supplier's Web site to re-order checks. Two levels down, I get to the form. I enter the order id number from the supplier's re-order form. Error. I try the option of entering the check information. Error. I dial the 800 number for the supplier which I can only get by going back to the top of the website and causing an order id error. After four levels of numeric menus (including entering all of the information I had entered on the forms), I talked to a person who tells me that my bank no longer uses the supplier's services. I have to call my bank.

I call the 800 number for my bank. The person there transfers me to the branch. Except she doesn't—I wind up listening to a "disconnected number" tape. I call the 800 number for my bank again. This new person seems confused about why I'd tried to call the branch and, instead, gives me an 800 number for the new check supplier.

I dial the number for the new supplier. However, the 800 number is for their corporate headquarters. I have to listen to the message twice to get the right 800 number. I dial the new 800 number.

I enter the routing number, my account number, select a couple options and then wind up being transferred to a representative who requests all of that information again. He asks me several more questions, puts me on hold, and then asks me if my bank had a routing number change. I tell him no because I'd done a wire transfer on Monday using it. He puts me on hold again. Finally, he comes back and says that there's something wrong with their database and the routing number won't work. He tells me to call my branch.

I call the 800 number for my bank and ask to be transferred to the branch. This time it goes through. The guy takes my check order and explains that when they switched suppliers account information was moved over to the new check supplier only for folks who had ordered checks within the last year. I hadn't. I'd been digitally disappeared.

The next systems analyst or bit of silicon that crosses my path today had better watch out.

Today in Weather

2007-07-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

It's raining.

It's weather I understand, all soft sounds and greys without the sharp shadows that look like they cut up the world.

Really Batshit Crazy

2007-07-17T11:32:00.000-07:00

I post something like the article below and about 12 hours later I wonder if it says more about me (and not in a good way) than about the object of criticism. Perhaps I should follow the Radish King's procedure of silently deleting posts.

Instead, this time around, I Googled the author's name, "Tracy Oetting." Quite the wingnut Republican, as it turns out.

The most telling item is her first-person account of how she and her husband set aside their plans for the day so that they could harass a couple anti-war protesters. All recounted with a truly childish glee.

I don't feel guilty anymore.

Batshit Crazy

2007-07-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

There's quite a swamp of racism on the web, especially toward Muslims. Effin' Unsound pointed me to this little pestilential patch. I left an extended comment:

I do not think "the unhinged side" means what you think it means.

WRT the quote from the Qur'an, one has to wonder about the translation because the beginning commands "slay them" while it is clear in the remainder of this, and subsequent verses, that whoever the idolaters are (again, I do not think this means what you think it means) they’re still very much alive.

It should hardly be necessary to say this, but there are parallel passages in the Old Testament. You may have noticed those are not operative in 20th century Christianity (or Judaism), except, of course, for the looney-tunes branches. The same is true of Islam. Contemporary Islam, like contemporary Christianity, has found ways of reading the scripture in tolerant, humane ways. The Tim McVeighs and the David Koreshs are exceptions, just as Osama bin Laden is an exception in Islam.

Repeating yourself more loudly and at greater length does not change the simple, transparent, pellucid fact that you are indulging in ignorant, paranoid racism.

If you deny humanity to entire races/religions, what realistic expectation should you have of not being the subject of ad hominem (note the spelling) attacks?

Zero. That’s what.

Edit your comments. Pull the door closed and live in your room of mirrored fear. Do not, however, expect any of the rest of us to applaud.

UPDATE: Special Bonus Firefly Wisdom Monday quote:

MAL Nothing worse than a monster who thinks he's right with God.

Firefly Wisdom Monday

2007-07-16T12:12:00.001-07:00

MAL You know, it ain't altogether wise, sneaking up on a man when he's handling a weapon.
INARA I'm sure I've heard that said. But perhaps the dining area isn't the place for this sort of thing?
MAL What do you mean? Only place with a table big enough.
INARA Of course. In that case... (rearranges guns) Every well-bred petty crook knows — the small concealable weapons always go to the far left of the place setting.

from Heart of Gold

The Right Books

2007-07-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

Whenever I'm taking a trip, I always feel unsettled until I figure out which books I'm taking with me.

Clean clothes, shaving kit, towels, and all the rest seem to take care of themselves—as long as I have the right books.

This is clearly a symptom of something.

Haiku, Dog Grammar, and Computer-Generated Text, Part II

2007-07-12T14:36:00.000-07:00

To continue from Part I ....

To review, in formal language theory, a language is defined by a set of terminal symbols, a set of non-terminal symbols, a symbol marked as the starting symbol, and a set of rules using the symbols that describe how to replace or rewrite a symbol in terms of other symbols.

To see if a sentence (in the formalism, it need only be a string of symbols) is part of the language, we see if it's possible to apply the rules in such a way as to derive the sentence (string) from the start symbol. If there is, the sentence (string) is in the language. Otherwise, not. This process is parsing.

This kind of grammar, however, can be used to generate sentences as well. And, in the previous post, I hinted that if we were clever in the construction of the rules, we might actually get interesting sentences.

And so, here is a first run at a grammar for haiku (note that we're ignoring syllable count, and bunch of other things here):


Haiku -> Season-Reference Haiku-Body 
         | Haiku-Body Season-Reference

Season-Reference -> Season-Word | Season-Word Noun 

Season-Word -> winter | spring | autumn | summer 

Haiku-Body -> ExtendedImage | Image Image 

ExtendedImage -> Image Preposition Determiner Noun

Image -> Determiner Adjective Noun | Adjective Noun 
         | Noun

Determiner -> a | the | this | that

Preposition -> about | as | by | down | for | in 
               | into | of | on | to

Conjunction -> and

Verb -> ate | cut | digs | goes | has | have | keep 
        | melt | opens | see

Adjective -> bare | black | crane_s | dried | first 
             | interesting | misty | my | settled 
             | silent | snowy | tonight_s | weathered 
             | white | wind-pierced

Noun -> body | bones | branch | chestnut | chewing 
        | crow | day | end | evening | eye | frost 
        | fuji | hand | hibiscus | horse | i 
        | law | legs | mind | moon | moonflower 
        | moonlight | morning | myself | net | no_one 
        | outhouse | rain | road | roadside | salmon 
        | seeing | torchlight | tree | way | worm

The first rule says that a Haiku consists of a Season-Reference followed by a Haiku-Body, or (that's the vertical bar) a Haiku consists of a Haiku-Body followed by a Season-Reference. In turn, a Season-Reference consists of a Season-Word, or (the vertical bar again) a Season-Reference is a Season-Word followed by a Noun.

Now, we can use this grammar and Norvig's Lisp code to see if we generate something a little more interesting than random sentences. I translated Norvig's Common Lisp code into a dialect of Lisp called Scheme. And, to make it easier for the program to use the grammar, I also translated it into what are called S-expressions which are kind of the native form for expressions in dialects of Lisp. You can take a look at the code and the translated grammar. (If you want to explore Scheme, probably the best thing to start with is DrScheme, a free interactive Scheme environment. The tutorials are top-notch.)

Running the generator program, which consists of typing (generate 'Haiku) at the prompt, we'll get a succession of strings. Adding some line breaks, some of them are more interesting:

this silent morning
snowy branch
spring bones

summer torchlight
cranes
moonlight on the eye

autumn
no-one
chestnut by that outhouse

spring
a misty moon
a misty roadside

than others:

winter worm
this tonight's horse
on that evening

spring
the my law
weathered salmon

One obvious thing to do, given this last, would be to handle the possessive pronouns separately from the adjectives. But first, let's talk about text grammars—that's the road we're headed down with this.

In 1928, Vladimir Propp wrote what would become known, in translation, as Morphology of the Folktale. Propp's book wasn't translated until the 1950s and it didn't make it into English until 1968. Propp's book laid out a grammar for the Russian folktale, a text grammar. The grammar included possible actions, character types, events, and rules for combining them into stories. When Propp's work reached the U.S., it set off a search for other possible text grammars as part of the shift toward structuralism in literary studies.

It also held out the possibility of running the grammar backwards and generating folktales—and it didn't work worth a darn. Part of the problem is the way that the elements of a grammar are relatively independent of each other. There's no method, in our current formulation, to indicate, say, the selection of a plural adjective so that we'll later select a plural noun. Or, that the Prince is already married when he encounters a maiden a second time. We could make more refined categories, but this is usually handled by adding attributes to elements in the grammar creating what is, not surprisingly, an attributed grammar. This wasn't, however, the first thing tried.

Enter GPS, the General Problem Solver. The program, despite the hyped expectations set by its developers, wasn't really a generalized problem solver. Instead it was the first of what are known as planning programs. Norvig talks quite a bit about GPS and provides code for a scaled-down version of it. GPS is designed to take a start state and find a series of actions that produce a goal state. Actions have three parts: the preconditions that make the action possible, the action itself, and the conditions that result from the action. The program begins with the start state and searches for a series of actions that produce the goal state. Planning algorithms like GPS are in wide use creating schedules and in structuring processes. They're also of great interest in robotics.

In 1976, James Meehan wrote Tale-Spin, a program that applied (and elaborated) the GPS algorithm to writing stories. The program took a story start, a goal, and specifications about characters and objects and the actions they could perform. It then found a series of actions that would produce the goal. These actions formed the narrative spine which was then fleshed out into a story by another part of the program that produced descriptions of the actions and world states. Tale-Spin solved the problems of text grammars by separating the generation of the narrative from the generation of the language giving the narrative.

This was in keeping with much that was going on in literary studies at the time surrounding narratology—the study of narrative structure and how a sequence of chronological events are re-mapped into a story (among other things).

And there I'll stop, for now.

Religious Bigots

2007-07-12T13:39:00.001-07:00

...disrupt this morning's Senate invocation given by a Hindu chaplain. CNN has the video (seems only to work in IE).

Meanwhile, another wannabe Christian terrorist harasses and threatens biologists at the University of Colorado.

UPDATE: The assholes yelling in the Senate were members of "Operation Save America," apparently named with no sense of irony. TPM has details.

A Map

2007-07-10T12:36:00.000-07:00

My book is now available through Amazon. Also newly available is Rebecca Loudon's Radish King which it would be extremely foolish not to purchase and read. Really. Your imagination will shrivel without it.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson

2007-07-09T12:59:00.001-07:00

... wrote today's poem at No Tell Motel. (Permalink to the poem.)

I'm very pleased that Floating Bridge Press published some of his earlier work in Pontoon when he was in the area.

Language Kills

2007-07-08T17:58:00.000-07:00

Important piece by the New York Times Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, about the Administration's latest linguistic con to justify more death and destruction in Iraq.

HOW2

2007-07-08T13:34:00.000-07:00

The summer issue of HOW2 is up, with work by Hejinian & Scalapino, Osman, Schultz, and a special section on women's experimental writing. Cooler than cool as always.

Christian Bök Interview

2007-07-08T02:39:00.000-07:00

Postmodern Culture has just published an interview with the Canadian poet Christian Bök. An excerpt:

Stephen Voyce: When did you first begin to write poetry? How would you describe those initial efforts at writing verse?

Christian Bök: I began writing poetry in my late adolescence, producing work inspired mostly by the likes of Michael Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen, and Gwendolyn MacEwan. I published some of this juvenilia, but I became convinced late in my undergraduate career that, if I continued writing emotive, lyrical anecdotes, then I was unlikely to make any important, epistemic contributions to the history of poetry. I decided to become more experimental in my practice only after I encountered the work of Steve McCaffery during my graduate studies. I was surprised to discover that, despite my literary training, none of my professors had ever deigned to expose me to the "secret history" of the avant-garde (what with its wonderful zoo of conceptual novelties and linguistic anomalies). I realized then that, by trying to write emotional anecdotes, I was striving to become the kind of poet that I "should be" rather than the kind of poet that I "could be." I decided then that I would dedicate my complete, literary practice to nothing but a whole array of formalistic innovations.

SV: This assumption about what a poem "should be"—can you elaborate on this statement? Why has the emotive lyric become almost synonymous with poetry as such?

CB: Unlike other artists in other domains where avant-garde practice is normative, poets have little incentive to range very distantly outside the catechism of their own training—and because they know very little of epistemological noteworthiness (since they do not often specialize in other more challenging disciplines beyond the field of the humanities), they tend to write about what they do know: themselves, their own subjectivity. The idea that a writer might conduct an analytical experiment with literature in order to make unprecedented discoveries about the nature of language itself seems largely foreign to most poets.

SV: That said, has the concept of formal innovation changed since high modernism?

CB: Postmodern life has utterly recoded the avant-garde demand for radical newness. Innovation in art no longer differs from the kind of manufactured obsolescence that has come to justify advertisements for "improved" products; nevertheless, we have to find a new way to contribute by generating a "surprise" (a term that almost conforms to the cybernetic definition of "information"). The future of poetry may no longer reside in the standard lyricism of emotional anecdotes, but in other exploratory procedures, some of which may seem entirely unpoetic, because they work, not by expressing subjective thoughts, but by exploiting unthinking machines, by colonizing unfamiliar lexicons, or by simulating unliterary art forms.

Links to more about Bök and Eunoia in this older post. Text-only back issues of PMC are available. McCaffery's major essays are collected in North of Intention.

Bob Hicok Interview

2007-07-06T15:50:00.000-07:00

Over at Poetry Daily.

A couple excerpts:

...There is not a correct kind of poem to write, or an incorrect kind. I want access to the whole spectrum. If I piss on the surreal, I won't let myself head in that direction. If I insist that the lyric is dead, that door closes. Being open to all kinds of poems allows for a fuller range of expression and helps the poet write out of different kinds of moods and sensibilities.

...I almost never have a goal in mind for a poem, so poems failing to do what I want them to do aren't usually a problem. It's a large part of the joy of writing for me, to arrive where I didn't know I was going. Writers talk about this quite often. I think it's why many of us don't want to talk in detail about what we're writing. I tend to run with the first line or image that arrives with force.

Cranky Old Bastard

2007-07-06T13:37:00.000-07:00

I thought about deleting the post below. It's one of those things that makes me wonder if I'm turning into the crazy old guy who sits on his porch, waiting for the kids to walk on his lawn so that he can yell at them.

Maybe so. Heaven knows we all have our blind spots about ourselves. Just ask my ex. Or my siblings.

However (the introductory word of self-justification—you knew it was coming, didn't you?), there really has been a conversation about poetry going on for 2500+ years. To extend the metaphor, it would be extraordinarily crass to rush into a room where people are talking, shout something, and then run back out. And it'd fail to respect the topic or the conversation. That's how the thing on Helium struck me yesterday. Some of the folks in the conversation were actually quite proud of their anti-intellectualism.

Why in the world would you devote yourself to an art and yet, proudly and loudly, proclaim your ignorance of the best that has been thought and said about that art? Why? It makes no sense—and it shows a hidden but pernicious contempt for the art itself.

I'm not arguing that everyone who picks up a pen or a keyboard has to be a literary theorist. But in this day and age, there's more than enough introductory material out there that there's really no excuse. And there are poets out there who write thoughtfully and well and add to the conversation. Folks like Mathews, Hejinian, and Ashbery.

If you're going to write, you have to read. And if you're going to reflect on what and why you're writing, then you should know part of that conversation, too.

Now, get the hell off my lawn.

Aaarrgghhh.

2007-07-05T17:14:00.000-07:00

Given two and a half millenia of serious, systematic thought about poetry, do dumbass, pre-theoretical, pre-thoughtful questions like this make you feel outraged or just very, very tired?

Discuss.

Scholarly Books Online

2007-07-05T13:27:00.001-07:00

Ohio State University Press is making the full texts of some of their books available online—for free. You'll need Adobe Reader, but it's free, too.

I'm tempted by Alexander's book on Arnold and Ruskin, and the essays on Joyce....

A thank you to The Long Eighteenth for the link.

Surrealism Lives

2007-07-04T21:26:00.000-07:00

At Starfish Poetry. A thank you to dumbfoundry.

Rejoyce

2007-07-04T13:01:00.000-07:00

In college I was in the Honors Program. That meant that all of my required classes were replaced with honors classes where the size was limited to 25 students. It also meant putting up with a lot of elitist bullshit from the director of the program who would have benefited greatly from the surgical removal of a large stick.

More significantly, for me at least, it meant that there was always summer reading. The first two years, I chose pre-prepared lists that introduced me to Kazantzakis and to more Waugh than I knew existed. The third year, I decided I was going to read Joyce.

I went to John Ehrstine, the English faculty member who'd been supervising my summer reading. Ehrstine was an old-style humanist. When I'd go in to talk to him, he'd always ask me what I was reading. And, inevitably, he'd ask me "But what are you reading for your imagination?" Frye's The Educated Imagination was gospel for him. We agreed that I'd read Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses.

It was a good summer of reading. I can still remember lying on the lawn after work, Ulysses open in front of me, Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses and a copy of The Odyssey ready-to-hand. All I really remember about the summer is reading Joyce, especially the delight of such sentences as "Please ptake some ptarmigan."

I'm on my 100-day break from contracting at Microsoft. And my imagination is feeling shriveled, exhausted. So, I've decided to see if I can find some of the delight and pleasure of that summer so many decades past by re-reading Joyce. Might be time to read Frye, again, too.

So far I've read the first three stories in Dubliners. I'm amazed by their naturalistic realism which is still instinct with meaning. In "The Encounter," you can actually draw the route the boys take on a map of Dublin. But, at the same time, the man they encounter in the field, who brings them confused and perhaps unwelcome news from the world of adulthood, has the green eyes of Odysseus. "Araby" has the same naturalism and yet includes hints of the Grail myths. I've been reading mostly genre fiction for the last eight months and had forgotten how much depth could be under the surface of a narrative.

I'm enjoying the reading. And maybe this time I'll get to Finnegan's Wake.

Science Quiz

2007-06-27T04:04:00.000-07:00

Noticed the quiz at Peter's blog. I scored 96%—missed the mammalian respiration question.

Help Georgie

2007-06-18T19:16:00.000-07:00

Help little W test his anti-missile system here. It seems to work better than the real one.

How to Live. What to Do.

2007-06-13T10:28:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite (though perhaps not the best) Wallace Stevens poems. Right up there with Anecdote of the Jar.

How to Live. What to Do.

Last evening the moon rose above this rock
Impure upon a world unpurged.
The man and his companion stopped
To rest before the heroic height.

Coldly the wind fell upon them
In many majesties of sound:
They that had left the flame-freaked sun
To seek a sun of fuller fire.

Instead there was this tufted rock
Massively rising high and bare
Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown
Like giant arms among the clouds.

There was neither voice nor crested image,
No chorister, nor priest. There was
Only the great height of the rock
And the two of them standing still to rest.

There was the cold wind and the sound
It made, away from the muck of the land
That they had left, heroic sound
Joyous and jubilant and sure.

Could be Zen, a joke, a wonderful Zen joke, or something else altogether. Text borrowed from Emperor of Ice-Cream Cakes.

EU Report on U.S. Secret Prisons

2007-06-10T19:59:00.000-07:00

...is available here [PDF, requires Acrobat] in all its awful details.

It's past time to impeach that sawed-off shit from Texas and send him to the Hague for war crimes.

By the way, good old home-grown Boeing appears in footnote 157.

The Contingency of Realism

2007-05-22T03:18:00.000-07:00

The current Paris Review has an interview with Harry Mathews, the only American member of the Oulipo. The website has an excerpt, but I'd urge you to get hold of a copy and read the whole interview.

I think what Mathews says in the interview gets at the whole stasis that constitutes the current practice of mainstream poetry—the notion that the poem is somehow (and must always be) about something other than itself. A few excerpts:

MATHEWS (Talking about 14th century ars nova music): The music is often lyrical—what I meant by nondramatic is that the formal structures used weren't created to produce a specific effect on the listener. Like stanza forms, they were tools used by the composers to construct their music, and this in fact is what poets have always done, until free verse came along. What is interesting about a complicated stanza form? It has no inherent dramatic or emotional value. Its main use is to construct the poem.

...

MATHEWS: I don't say there is no sense or no meaning. There is, but it's not one that exists outside of the work. Robert Louis Stevenson—and he's not exactly considered a modernist writer— once wrote: "The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must consist of leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is both designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work." For me, that's it.

...

MATHEWS: Something I've said again and again, which I try to make sure is evident in all my books, is that the experience of reading is the experience of reading. In America there's a tradition that says that what literature should do is give you the real thing. But for me, the only real thing is the writing.

To me this gets at what Stein and other folks were up to, and what I've tried to explain to my puzzled fellow workshoppers as the materiality of the word, the word (and writing) as always and primarily a thing in itself, and with "realism" and "expression" as secondary, contingent, and entirely optional effects of the construction.

UPDATE: The interview fails to mention it, but Mathews's volume of collected essays, The Case of the Persevering Maltese, is available.

A big "Thank you!" to Tatyana Mishel for pointing me to the Mathews interview.

Je suis jalouse.

2007-05-21T02:39:00.000-07:00

Interesting (to me) French music video.

Emily Loizeau - Je Suis Jalouse
Uploaded by bridlefilms

The album is available only in Canada and through iTunes. Both Babelfish and Google do an absolutely horrible job translating the lyrics.

Monday Wisdom

2007-05-13T23:22:00.000-07:00

Just in time for start of the work week, Atrios reminds us of this essential piece of daily wisdom:

Put down the duckie!

Photographing while Brown

2007-04-28T11:33:00.000-07:00

Australia's "heightened security" and racial caricatures.

And a Baghdad blogger and her family have found life unsupportable and are leaving the country.

Earth Intruders

2007-04-22T01:58:00.000-07:00

The video for the song from Volta, out May 8. More Björk news here.

Haiku, Dog Grammar, and Computer-Generated Text, Part I Redux

2007-04-11T02:23:00.000-07:00

I'm reposting this entry from a year ago, with the intention of writing part II later this week.

A few years ago, I read Charles O. Hartman's The Virtual Muse. The last experiment the book describes is an attempt to get the computer to write English sentences. Hartman develops a grammar, adds some additional rules to it, hooks the whole thing up to a massive vocabulary, and lets it run. The results are underwhelming.

When I read about it, I knew at least one area in which he'd been in error. Artificial intelligence programs are most successful when you restrict the domain in which they work. Hartman's experiment had been too ambitious. I thought about trying something different, more restricted, but the whole idea languished. Until I came across Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming. In the introduction, Norvig shows a very small Common Lisp program that generates random text from a grammar. That gave me the idea of trying to come up with a grammar for some restricted piece of writing and seeing whether anything interesting would come of it. Haiku seemed like an interesting thing to try.

Before we go farther, let's talk for a minute about what a grammar looks like in this case. In formal language theory, a language is defined by a set terminal symbols, a set of non-terminal symbols, a symbol marked as the starting symbol, and a set of rules using the symbols. The symbols aren't particularly interesting in and of themselves. So, let's look at the rules in a very restricted language. We'll call it the Dog Language:

S -> NP VP
NP -> DET N
DET -> a | the
N -> dog
VP -> VERB
VERB -> ran | walked

The arrow means "can be replaced by" and the vertical bar means "or." The symbols in uppercase are non-terminals, things that get replaced. The lowercase symbols are the terminal symbols—they don't get replaced by anything. Now, this grammar represents a very small language—a total of four English sentences:

A dog ran.
A dog walked.
The dog ran.
The dog walked.

Let's take the last sentence and see how we might go through the grammar to get to it. S is the start symbol, and it has only one rule describing what it can be replaced by.

S -> NP VP
S -> DET N VP (replace NP w/ DET N)
S -> the N VP (replace DET w/ the — we can use "a" or "the")
S -> the dog VP (replace N w/ dog)
S -> the dog VERB (replace VP w/ VERB)
S -> the dog walked (replace VERB w/ walked)

The process of seeing if a sentence can be derived by following the rules of the grammar is called parsing. So, we just "parsed" the sentence "The dog walked" by showing that you can follow the rules in the grammar and arrive at the sentence. The sentence belongs to our Dog Language.

Parsing is interesting and useful. It's done with translating computer programs into binary instructions. It's even done in some natural language interfaces. But we can also use a grammar like this to generate random text. We can begin with the start symbol and apply the rules until we have nothing but terminal symbols. When there's more than one choice, we can randomly select one of the alternatives. And depending on how clever our grammar and our vocabulary (the set of non-terminals) are, they could even be interesting sentences.

End of Part I.

Crap Lives Forever

2007-04-11T02:00:00.000-07:00

Prior to his death, Hart had built up a significant computer archive of drawings for B.C., and family members have been assisting with drawing the strips for several years. It is expected that new B.C. strips will continue to be produced for the foreseeable future.
Wikipedia Article on B.C. cartoonist Johnny Hart who died on 7 April.

See the Seattle PI article about Hart's infamous and anti-semitic Easter strip (and the strip's final panels) here.

Hippitus, Hoppitus, Deus.....

2007-04-06T00:56:00.000-07:00

South Park lampoons Bill Donohue, the Church, Peeps, The Davinci Code, Hair Club for Men, and the pagan remnants in Easter, all in under half an hour. See key clips here.

UPDATE (7/4): Someone has created a Wikipedia entry unpacking the cultural references in the program.

Poetics Alert

2007-03-27T04:30:00.000-07:00

Fer crissake, get your grandmother out of that damn poem. No one enjoys seeing her like that, and she's none too happy about it either.

This has been a BABEL Poetics Alert.

Maybe Eclectic

2007-03-24T12:38:00.000-07:00

...means you just can't make up your mind?

Ethics & the Social Emotions

2007-03-23T01:13:00.000-07:00

A new study demonstrates that the area of the brain governing social emotions is a critical component of ethical decisions.

"Social emotions were really the scaffolding for what we came to construct as ethics," Damasio says. How those social emotions are taken into account in the process of decision-making seems to be very biological. "When things get complicated, we engage an emotional system—it's not reason alone."

Library of Babel

Oh, Canada

Windows Error Code of the Day

Because Nothing Else Matters

Proposition 8 in Redmond

Wave

The Writer's Craft

John McCain's Leadership

Fear or Hope: Two Speeches, 9/23/2008

It's About Choice

The Graphs of Life

George Saunders on Sarah Palin

John McCain: The Early Years

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

I'm Just Asking...

Memorial Day

Yet Another Reason for Encryption

The Perfectionist's Diary

Tag Cloud

A Good Valentine's Day

Voice in the Wilderness

Contemporary Music

Library of Congress

One Number Says It All: 600

We're All Looking for Kindness

Love and Anger

Non-Reading Group

Sometimes You're Special...

Umm, Maybe I Should Rephrase That...

Firefly Wisdom Monday

The Mercy of the Fallen

Ask Willa!

Them Heavy People

Firefly Wisdom Monday

How to Make a Buffoon

It's All Explication de Texte

"This Is What a Police State Looks Like"

Resistance Is Futile

Commuting Tip of the Week

Firefly Wisdom Monday

LAPD's Maps

Firefly Wisdom Monday

"She's dead. Wrapped in plastic."

The Carriage, or the Limo and M&Ms

Oh Yeah, That Gore

Uh Oh.

Stay Out of New York State This Weekend

Firefly Wisdom Monday

GodblogCon

Surge-a-Palooza!

Firefly Wisdom Monday

Secret Music Lessons

Geek Chic

Understanding Humor

Firefly Wisdom Monday

WTF?

Uncle Sam Blues

Henri Alleg, La Question

Theodore Roethke

Duchamp

What Are You, 12? Special Poetics Edition

Firefly Wisdom Monday

Wisdom of the Body

What Are You, 12?

Archive Fever

Firefly Wisdom Monday

Batshit Crazy II

Today I'm a Luddite

Today in Weather

Really Batshit Crazy

Batshit Crazy

Firefly Wisdom Monday

The Right Books

Haiku, Dog Grammar, and Computer-Generated Text, Part II

Religious Bigots

A Map

Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Language Kills

HOW2

Christian Bök Interview