Grand Text Auto

Sentences
By Charles O. Hartman and Hugh Kenner
Sun and Moon Press
New American Poetry Series: 18
1995
84 p.

Sentences begins.

money must
Sentences
Parsing
Sentences
Sentences
Sentences for love forsaken.

After a last-minute gift? I’m looking forward to receiving a copy of Ted Nelson’s brand-new book, Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the computer world got this way.

To my knowledge, this is the first new volume in years from the author of the original personal computer book (Computer Lib / Dream Machines) and developer of key concepts in digital media (most famously, hypertext), who remains one of the field’s consistently engaging thinkers.

Oddly enough, there’s Rara Racer. (Thanks, Jaroslav.)

An elusive 3.5″ diskette of William Gibson’s Agrippa has finally been located, and video of a 1992-era Mac computer running it under System 7 is now available (along with the bit-for-bit image of the disk itself) on The Agrippa Files. The site is part of Alan Liu’s Transcriptions Project at UCSB, with this emulation prepared by Matt Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside of Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities with help from several others, including Robert Maxwell at the University of Maryland’s Digital Forensics Lab. New bootleg video footage of the Agrippa launch event – an hour’s worth – is also now online. Many, many details of the process of recovering and presenting this important piece of imaginative, poetic software are available in the article “No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa.”

Blogging
By Jill Walker Rettberg
Digital Media and Society Series
Polity
2008
184 pp.

Blogging suits two sorts of readers perfectly: traditional writers (and instructors) looking to understanding more about writing in digital media, and the tech-savvy (including today’s students) seeking to reflect on blogging and understand the practice more deeply, as something that is potentially social, narrative, literary, and political. While elegantly written, the book delves into the history of hypertext, the nature of social networks, and oral and print cultures in addition to covering Web history through the 2.0 days, corporate blogging, hoaxes, and the relationship of blogging to journalism. For students who are to learn about writing and the Web through blogging, this book is a must. Accessible to undergraduates, it goes beyond how-tos and chronicling to inquire about where blogging has been, is now, and will go. Finally, there’s coverage of so many aspects of blogging that only an uber-blogger would know it all already. Even new media scholars and bloggers will benefit from Blogging.

The students in my Comparative Media Studies Workshop have just shared their Web edition of the first anthology of Imagist poetry, edited by Ezra Pound and published in 1914. Des Imagistes was not (as far as I could determine) previously available online, isn’t in print, and is not even very easily found in libraries. We don’t have a copy of it here at MIT, for instance.

Jason Nelson’s new game is called “i made this. you play this. we are enemies.”

The game deals with the difficult issue of his current residence in Australia. It is an investigation of the link, and of corporations and communities on the Web. There are video snippets with unusual stories or story-like discourses (about potatoes, a jar of hands, and so on) embedded within the game. There are screenshots and things to read – or not read, which might be more typical of the Web experience. Figure and ground are constantly at play, unless you are better than I am at discerning what parts of the image are background and what parts are the platforms and walls and such. And it looks pretty much like this: