Grand Text Auto

David Foster Wallace killed himself on Sept. 12th, 2008. I wrote a couple of short texts in response to his death — he was my teacher when I was a master’s student at Illinois State University, and he will always be an important figure in the landscape of my life. I’ll post both texts here, in reverse order. I wrote the first piece here a couple of weeks back for his memorial service at ISU, which occurred yesterday. It is included in a collection of remembrances that was bound and given to his parents. The second piece I wrote the night after I heard about his death. It is a bit rawer, darker, and perhaps in some ways angrier than than the one I wrote for his memorial. I posted that piece on Grand Text Auto, and a redacted version was also posted on the McSweeney’s website. It has been a strange process watching the world react to his death (in some ways getting to know him better through the fragments of his life shared by others, in other ways just shocked at the way his postmortem memory has taken on a kind of rock-star hagiography). I have thought about him, his life, his writing, and his end very often since.

The deadline for submissions for the Digital Humanities 2009 conference at the University of Maryland this June (22-25) has been extended to November 14th. The joint international conference is the oldest established meeting of scholars working at the intersection of advanced information technologies and the humanities, annually attracting a distinguished international community at the forefront of their fields. Submissions are invited on all topics concerning digital humanities, e.g.

Many GTA readers had a chance to view the video of Robert Coover’s excellent keynote talk from the Electronic Literature in Europe Conference, “A History of the Future of Narrative.” It is an important talk of interest both to specialists in electronic literature and to a general audience of readers interested in how contemporary technology is affecting contemporary literature. Unfortunately we have had to pull the plug, at least for the time being. The publishers of the volume “The Cambridge University Press History of the American Novel,” in which the essay will be published, have elected to deny the author permissions to allow any portion of his essay to be openly distributed, even in video form. I offered to include information about the book and the Press on the page where the video is hosted, and to provide the Press with a copy of the video for their own promotional use free of charge, but it seems that Cambridge University Press is resistant to the idea of readers being exposed to this chapter of the volume in any forum or format other than their own. The irony, of course, is that many readers might have been inclined, after watching the video, to buy the book once it is published, while those who care about the free and open exchange of academic discourse will now be more likely to avoid Cambridge University Press altogether than to support it by buying their books. One hopes that they will come to some resolution that will allow the author to read his own work outside the pages of their book and to enable the talk to be publicly distributed in new media formats, but Coover’s might simply be a voice silenced by the curmudgeonly and proprietary practices of an academic press more accustomed to the ways of the 19th Century than those of the 21st.

“A History of the Future of Narrative”: Robert’s Coover’s closing keynote address delivered on September 13, 2008 at the Electronic Literature in Europe seminar at the University of Bergen. Video produced by Martin Arvebro.

A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

David Foster Wallace was a great teacher, in his own particular way, and he was a gifted writer who maybe got a little hung up on things, on interiority, on the prison of his own consciousness. He could write the shit out of you. He feared and was fascinated by the twisted. He knew grammar and could speak it very well. He knew theory and didn’t want you to try and teach it to him. He was so fucking postmodern that he grew sick of contemplating his own existence. He was not moderate. He wrote long and loved footnotes but hated the fact that he felt compelled to use them. He loathed that he loathed. He told tasteless jokes about death. He managed to write a monument and then he never could quite escape its shadow. He was a genius. He used smilely faces for grades. He was greasy. He would sweat. You would smell him in the room. He was conscious of his own body odor. He would scratch at the side of his face absent-mindedly but not absent of mind, if that makes sense. He would ask you if things made sense in a way that was both sincere and dismissive. The questions primarily rhetorical. He had a great desire to be a good human being. He had acne and feared it. He was athletic. He would see you and wonder if you had once played tennis with him. He had a very intense stare, you could say piercing but that wouldn’t be quite right, it didn’t pierce, it did something else. It worked in conflict with his body language. He loved writing and was humiliated by it. He was sympathetic to any creature in pain and sympathetic to anyone who caused pain. You need to wonder if he might have been better off if he had stayed on drugs. He was large and filled a room with language. He was complex and verbose and often right. He made errors. His eyes were evasive but he would work his way to telling you what mattered. He feared middle age and deterioration. He was a man of his time and he limited it. He feared the image. He loved the idea of celebrity in reclusion. Pynchon, DeLillo, Dostoevsky. He drank those carb milkshakes that bodybuilders drink. He read self help books in order to both help himself and to see how contrived and pathetic and self-indulgent the American mind had become. He confronted each of his addictions, one at a time. He never really learned how to dress himself properly. He sometimes wished he had become a philosopher instead. He studied sentences. He edited mercilessly, but found the text grew longer with each incision, fresh trees sprouting from every wound. He hated fluorescent light, and the buzz of technology. He loved his dog. He was a precocious child, and lonely. Humanity is a difficult subject, a dying life form. He told a string of jokes about the Branch Davidians. He wanted to make you laugh and cry at the same time. He thought that was the problem, that we could no longer get past our by-now-ingrained habits of looking at our own situations from a raptor’s-eye-view of irony, of postdeconstructive psychoanalytic abstraction, from a post which would make everything cool to the touch, that it had become impossible to feel. The need to be cool. The need to be cool consuming and leading to the failure of the heart. The heart has become impossible. The need to disconnect the brain from the heart. The dread. The sound of the tapping keys, the leaky faucet tapping, the reader, the viewer. The fear of the red pen. The jailer. The purpose of the novel to disturb and entertain. The impossibility of the subject. He wished he had chosen to become a mathematician, a physicist. He was devoted to the word and lived within the claustrophobic walls of its temple. He tried to deconstruct manhood. He was trying to explain something in way that even you could understand it. He could not explain. You could not understand. This incredible awkwardness. He feared himself, reclining by a pool, dripping with sweat, completely satisfied and empty. The reductive cockroach, the expansionist lobster. The most complicated problem you could throw at him. Eating a corn dog at the state fair. Interviewing porn stars with an awkward erection. Destroying the television because you are addicted to it. Never really leaving home. He wanted to save something. He thought that life was too short, or ought to be. The desire to find a humorous way to get to something real. The desire to extend. The understanding of the psyche of the man facing the firing squad, the desire to dwell on it. The impossibility of the word love. The impossibility of ending. The metaphor of getting into the ring to fight. The desire to remove oneself from the arena. The trouble with closure. Finding a voice. Finding a note. The decision of whether or not to leave. Recognizing that voice is a sentimentality. The sense of failure. Finally just tired. Leaving a tragedy. Did he think to erase his hard drive? Probably not, you poor bastard. Given the possibility of forensics. Burning the manuscript. Throwing the pages into the fire. The eventual film. The desert. The spider, the variety of it. Diseases that eat the flesh. This move across the dark room, this groping with alien fingers. What one does after being bitten by a brown recluse. Walking in the desert. Remembering the clouds. A ligature. Suspension. Constriction. The most common method after firearms. Read the footnotes. Have you read it, and yet you still don’t get it? The very long joke. The partial weight of the body. The sense of an ending. The conditions related to the event. The argument at hand. The desire to leave a little mess for pain but not so much as to trouble your love. Your sense of love. The awareness that your body will likely shit itself. The contemplation of that shit as you tender the cord. The awareness that you are loved and yet not able to de-abstract it. The occasion an excuse. But deep. You loathe the very idea of the sublime and you want to express it. The rise and the leap. You cannot ultimately communicate. See the notes. Finding the other and still knot. You hear yourself gag and you smell everything as your nostrils flare. Time is relentless and it will not slow for you now. Agency was had. A certain type of determination. A private novel on a machine of one’s own. No intentional fallacy. Flee from me. Reaching for the cord. To pull it away. To scratch at it. The survival instinct. Merciless. Cruel. Inevitable. Brave. Cowardly. Wanting. Full stop.

50 scholars, writers, and artists from Austria, Croatia, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, the United Kingdom, France, Poland, Slovakia, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, and the United States will be in Bergen from September 11-13th for the Electronic Literature in Europe Seminar: two days of presentations and discussions of academic research in electronic literature, two nights of readings and presentations of works, and one day of planning a European research network for electronic literature. This seminar is organized and sponsored by the University of Bergen Faculty of Humanities Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies’ Program in Digital Culture and cosponsored by Landmark Café, Permanenten, and HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area). In addition to the presentation of papers, highlights will include two nights of readings at Permanenten (Thursday) and Landmark Café (Friday), and a closing keynote address by American novelist, electronic literature pioneer, and Brown University Professor Robert Coover.

I include the program below, and will post an update later this week. Noah is in town for the event and to show work at tonight’s reading. Although I know that most of you who are reading this can’t be here, most of the participants have posted their full papers online.

Quick link — the pioneering electronic literature author Deena Larsen has been putting together a site for high school and introductory college teachers of electronic literature as a creative writing or rhetoric course called Fundamentals: Rhetorical Devices for Electronic Literature that does a great job of describing some of the basics of how the electronic media can change the way that literary artists communicate with their audiences. Nice tool for writing teachers of all stripes.

I’m sitting in a cafe in Vancouver, Washington, trying to cut down my presentation for the ELO conference to a manageable size. Since I’ll only present about half the paper at the conference, I thought I would post the paper here for people who are interested in reading it. My paper is not about any particular work of e-lit an attempt to take a kind of “long view” of the field of electronic literature as it currently stands, about nine years after we started the ELO. Forgive the lack of formatting. I’ll also post a pdf version on my website later this week.

Communitizing Electronic Literature

I have been involved in what you might loosely call “the field” of electronic literature for ten years, as a writer of digital fiction and poetry, as a community organizer through my work with the Electronic Literature Organization , and as a scholar and teacher. In 1998, after writing the collaborative hypertext novel The Unknown with my collaborators Dirk Stratton and William Gillespie, I fell down a rabbit hole from which I have yet to emerge. After The Unknown won the trAce/AltX prize for hyperfiction , I found myself immersed in the fascinating world of computer literature. At a conference in 1999 hosted by Robert Coover at Brown University titled “Technology Platforms for Twenty-First Century Literature,” I encountered a small but robust community of authors who had chosen the computer as a platform for their literary endeavors, a motley and innovative crew of literary experimentalists who were energized by the potentialities of the networked computer as a medium: by the new ease with which multimedia elements could be integrated into literary texts, by the programmable nature of digital literary artifacts, by the distributive capabilities of the emerging global network, by the new registers of semantic representation opening up to authors who made this network their home.

You’ve played the game, now read the book. This month Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: a World of Warcraft Reader was published by the MIT Press and is now available for purchase on Amazon. My colleagues at the University of Bergen, Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, edited this volume, which is the first book-length anthology to carefully read the culture of the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online game. The anthology is the product of a unique collaboration. The volume’s contributors all played the game together for a year in a guild of academics known as “The Truants” before writing their chapters, each of which examines the game from a different theoretical/analytical bent. There are thirteen chapters in the book. The chapter I wrote, “Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft,” examines both the economic model of MMOGS and the economies within the game, with the thesis that the reason why so many players are willing to spend so much of their lives playing the game is that the game is in fact a form of play that itself is enough a form of work to appeal to the protestant work ethic which has plagued America since its foundations. In her chapter “Never Such Innocence Again,” Esther MacCallum-Stewart examines the tropes of war and histories in the game.

Call for Papers and Works: Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe

September 11-13th, 2008 at the University of Bergen in Bergen, Norway.

The Fall 2008 Bergen Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe will build upon the work of the e-poetry seminar held in Paris in February 2008 at the University Paris 8, the 2007 e-poetry conference in Paris, the 2007 Remediating Literature Conference in Utrecht, and other recent activity in the field of electronic literature in Europe. The goals of this gathering are:

1) To provide an opportunity for European researchers to share and discuss their current research on electronic literature, e-poetry, and digital narrative forms.

Call for Papers and Works: Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe

September 11-13th, 2008 at the University of Bergen in Bergen, Norway.

The Fall 2008 Bergen Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe will build upon the work of the e-poetry seminar held in Paris in February 2008 at the University Paris 8, the 2007 e-poetry conference in Paris, the 2007 Remediating Literature Conference in Utrecht, and other recent activity in the field of electronic literature in Europe. The goals of this gathering are:

1) To provide an opportunity for European researchers to share and discuss their current research on electronic literature, e-poetry, and digital narrative forms.

2) To provide a forum for European authors of electronic literature to share, demonstrate, read, or perform their work.

3) To discuss and explore the foundation of a European research network focused on electronic literature, funding opportunities for such a network, and network activities.

The seminar will last three days and will include about 20-30 participants. The day-long meetings during the first two days will consist of short presentations of papers in panel format. Additionally, there will be performances, readings, and demonstrations of electronic literature in the evenings. The third day of the conference will be dedicated to proposing and discussing the formal establishment of a research network on electronic literature in Europe. Paper presentations should be in English. Presentation and performances of works can be made in English or in the native language of the presenter.

Jessica’s first new media artwork, originally uploaded by srett.

Shortly after he received the birth announcement, my friend the digital poet Jason Nelson made Jessica’s first new media artwork. Even better, when I showed it to her she stopped crying.

Closeup of Jessica, originally uploaded by srett.

Saturday April 19th at 11:40AM in Bergen, Norway, Jill gave birth to Jessica Ann Rettberg. Our daughter weighed 8 pounds, was 50 centimeters long, and is 100% healthy and beautiful.

Lørdag 19.april kl11:40 fikk Jill og jeg en datter: Jessica Ann Rettberg. Hun veide 3655g, var 50 centimeter lang, og det står bra til med mor og barn.

Today I upgraded to WordPress 2.5, which has a much nicer backend interface and some smart improvements (though I can’t seem to get the media uploader to work). In the process I also found out my previous theme had somehow been spam-hacked, which explains the new look-in-progress. But the major technological upgrade of the day was my subscription to MLB.TV. We have a DV cable to put the stream through to the TV. At anything over 400K, the image stream is too jerky on my connection, but at 400K, it is a lot like like watching baseball used to be when I was a kid and broadcast television involved rabbit ear manipulation. Still, you can’t beat being able to watch the Cubs live from Norway. Great game, the Cubs beat the Phillies 6-5 in the 10th inning. Well worth $20 a month.

A new book by N. Katherine Hayles: Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary was released today from the University of Notre Dame Press. The publication of the book is a major event for the field of electronic literature. In addition to the printed book, each copy comes with a CD-ROM of The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1. In addition, there is a great website accompanying the book at newhorizons.eliterature.org that includes syllabi for electronic literature courses, a blog/forum, and an additional online anthology of essays by students and scholars of e-lit.

Issue 11 of the online journal Fibreculture is now out. The journal features a collection of essays from the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture conference, including my essay “Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature“, as well as eleven other notable essays from the conference. Among the highlights: Axel Bruns on Produsage, Jim Bizzocchi on African Diasporic Orature and Computational Narrative in the GRIOT System, Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce on the Gendered Poetics of Space in computer games, Jaako Suominen on Retrogaming and more.

Issue 11 of the online journal Fibreculture is now out. The journal features a collection of essays from the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture conference, including my essay “Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature“, as well as eleven other notable essays from the conference. Among the highlights: Axel Bruns on Produsage, Jim Bizzocchi on ambient video, Fox Harrel on African Diasporic Orature and Computational Narrative in the GRIOT System, Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce on the Gendered Poetics of Space in computer games, Jaako Suominen on Retrogaming and more.

I’ve been asked to serve as an adviser for the 2008 Ars Electronica Competition (the group that gives out the Golden Nicas) for the Digital Communities category, and to suggest some sites that might be worthy of the prestigous honor before the end of this month. I’ve got a couple of ideas, but I thought I’d ask the GTxA community for some suggestions. Please suggest sites in the comments, along with a couple of lines about why you think the digital community is important. Don’t be shy about suggesting a site you are involved in developing.

This Thursday and Friday, I’ll be attending a seminar, “Questions autor des poésies numériques” at the Laboratoire Paragaphe at Université Paris 8. The seminar will include talks by European, American, and Brazilian digital poets and electronic literature scholars, and the seminar is also intended to launch the development of a European research network on digital poetry. I will take notes and send in a report this weekend.

SAID (tasteful)

said no way

Maggie discussed her plans for a green burial with her father. This might have been a bad idea. He insisted that she would outlive him, to begin with, that this was just a passing thing and that she would outlive it, first thing. And second, he didn’t think this thing sounded tasteful at all. Her mother’s funeral had been done the normal American way, and that was how it should have been, wasn’t it? Then he was crying. Her sister was the executor, so it didn’t really matter. She just wanted to prepare him.

ELO Meetup at the MLA

As we have for the past several years, we are planning an informal meet-up for people affiliated with or interested in the Electronic Literature Organization at this year’s MLA conference. This year, we are planning on meeting at the “Big Bar” at the conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency, after the “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, Navigating” panel, from 5-6 PM on Friday, December 28th. We plan to converge on the bar and have a drink or two. Afterwards, for those who would like to continue the conversation and take advantage of the world’s best deep-dish pizza, we’re reserving some tables at a nearby restaurant. If you’re only planning on joining us for a drink, just show up at the Big Bar at 5PM. If you want in on the pizza, please send an email to Stefanie Boese (sboese2 at uic dot edu), indicating how many people plan to attend and your preference for sausage, spinach, or mixed vegetarian pizza. We’ll put the order in ahead, so we won’t have to wait long in the restaurant to eat. We will “go dutch,” splitting the bill evenly and paying in cash.

Electronic Literature & Related Panels at the MLA 2007

This year’s convention features several panels (“New Reading Interfaces,” “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, and Navigating,” and “Electronic Literature: After Afternoon”) that are explicitly focused on electronic literature, and several that are more tangentially related to the subject. Below is a mini conference guide focused on e-lit.

The United States Library of Congress is archiving 300 electronic literature web sites in collaboration with the ELO (Electronic Literature Organization) and archive-it.org. To suggest sites to be included in this project, please see

http://eliterature.org/wiki and note there is a FAQ linked on that page, http://eliterature.org/wiki/index.php/FAQ.
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Categories:
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Electronic Literature: Collections of Works: Sites that aggregate works of electronic literature by multiple authors, such as online journals and anthologies.

Electronic Literature: Individual Works: Individual works of electronic literature and collections of works by a single author, as opposed to collections of works by multiple authors.

Electronic Literature: Context: Sites related to the critical, theoretical, and institutional contexts of electronic literature.

There’s a great short documentary at Ubuweb, Sucking on Words, by Simon Morris, about the conceptual, “uncreative” writing practice of Kenneth Goldsmith.

John Zuern offers a detailed and insightful review of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 in ebr. Among other aspects of the Collection the review addresses is whether or not the difference between print and electronic literature is anything other than trivial?

The Paris-based International Poetry Bienniale has announced a media poetry competition to be judged by luminaries in digital poetics. The prize is an expense-paid trip to the Poetry Biennale in Paris.

From Jean-Pierre Balpe
Director
BIPVAL (Biennale Internationale des Poètes en Val-de-Marne)

For its tenth edition (May 2009), the International Poetry Biennial is
pleased to announce an International Media Poetry Contest.

Works considered “media poetry” are those that place contemporary
technologies at the service of poetry, be it within the framework of a
performance or in that of a recorded and projectable work. Among the many
forms accepted are included videopoetry, digital poetry, multimedia poetry,
sound poetry, interactive poetry, and poetic installations in physical space
or on the Internet. Works that illustrate a poem will not be considered
(these are works that use sound or images to represent or complement a poem,
for example). There are no restrictions regarding the form or content of the
media poems submitted.