Grand Text Auto

I hope you enjoy this one, and don’t dismiss it as lighght verse.

Gur anzr bs gur nhgube vf gur svefg gb tb
sbyybjrq borqvragyl ol gur gvgyr, gur cybg,
gur urnegoernxvat pbapyhfvba, gur ragver abiry
juvpu fhqqrayl orpbzrf bar lbh unir arire ernq,
arire rira urneq bs,

nf vs, bar ol bar, gur zrzbevrf lbh hfrq gb uneobe
qrpvqrq gb ergver gb gur fbhgurea urzvfcurer bs gur oenva,
gb n yvggyr svfuvat ivyyntr jurer gurer ner ab cubarf.

Ybat ntb lbh xvffrq gur anzrf bs gur avar Zhfrf tbbqolr
naq jngpurq gur dhnqengvp rdhngvba cnpx vgf ont,
naq rira abj nf lbh zrzbevmr gur beqre bs gur cynargf,

About 12 hours ago I was reading a text by Ulises Carrión, one that I’d read before but which I hadn’t fully considered and engaged with. As I thought about Carrión’s writing, I felt compelled to put together a short piece on the Web. That took the form of a Web page containing a rapidly-moving concrete poem. The work I devised is called “Una página de Babel.”

This month I published a zine in the form of a bookmark. It’s available by asking me for a copy, asking a contributor for a copy, or going to my local radical bookstore, Bluestockings, at 172 Allen Street, New York, NY. If you wish to find Remarker there you must, alas, look under the register among the freebies (and advertisements), not among the “grown up” zines. The upside is that Remarker is free.

My first PuzzleScript game is a concrete poem that, after a few levels, taunts you, the player, with a metapuzzle.

It’s “The Great Vowel Shift.”

I just put a new poetry generator up. This one was released in inchoate form at @party, the Boston area demoparty. I’ve finished it, now, writing an HTML page of 2kb that employs JavaScript to generate nonsense poems that I, at least, find rather amusing.

‘More Tongue’ is available in an expanded version (functioning the same but with uncompressed code and more meaningful variable and function names) which I suggest for just about everyone, since I encourage everyone to study and modify the code, for fun, for art, and so on. If you want to see the 2k version working, that’s there too.

I had five productions (one of them a collaboration) this time around at @Party, the Boston-area demoparty.

Browser demo: “More Tongue.” This was, well, not really a standard demo, even for a browser demo, that generates nonsense poems with compact code. Like everything at demoparties, it’s been released, but I’m going to work on a post-party version, so I’m leaving the party version out of this list.

Wild: “Shortcat.”

Shortcat is a very simple encoding scheme to make bytes (thus computer programs) into pleasing Unicode tweets, IMs, etc. #demoscene

Encoder: cat x.prg | perl -pe ‘binmode STDOUT,”:utf8″;tr/x00-xff/x{2500}-x{25ff}/;’ > x.txt #demoscene

Shebang Bash is a two-part event at Babycastles (137 West 14th Street, Floor 2, New York City) on Thursday, July 2.

It’ll be sort of like this reading in Saint Petersburg, but with projectors and a workshop beforehand.

The workshop (beginning at 6pm) provides an opportunity for anyone to begin developing computational poetry by modifying existing programs. Those without programming experience are particularly encouraged to attend. Workshop participants will develop, share, and discuss their work. Participants must register in advance and bring their own notebook computer running Linux, Mac OS, or Windows. (A tablet or phone will not suffice; computers are not available at the gallery.) Those who wish to can show and/or read from their work during the second part of Shebang Bash, although presenting during the reading isn’t a requirement.

[Some excerpts.]

… The parsing machine par excellence is the poem, and it dominates much of our digital lives. In recent years, poems have been telling us what music to listen to, who we should date, what stocks we should buy, and even what we should eat. It comes as no surprise, then, that it should also tell us what art we should view. But what happens when the art we are looking at becomes the poem itself?

… Are poems art? What happens to the intellectual property at the point of sale? What is actually acquired when one purchases a poem? Who would even buy a poem?

I’m glad to share the first Web edition of Des Imagistes, which is now back on the Web.

I assigned a class to collaborate on an editorial project back in 2008, one intended to provide practical experience with the Web and literary editing while also resulting in a useful contribution. I handed them a copy of the first US edition of Des Imagistes, the first Imagist anthology, edited by Ezra Pound and published in 1914.

My both systematic and breezy presentation at Interrupt 3, phrased in the form of an interruption, began with a consideration of electronic literature’s “ends” and digital poetry’s “feet.” During the beginning of my presentation I played “Hexes,” a digital poem I wrote a few minutes before the session began. I went on to read every permuation of the phrase “SERVICE MY INTERRUPT FUCKFLOWERS,” using a technique famously employed by Brion Gysin on a text that includes a memorable compound word by Caroline Bergvall. I continued to read some hypothetical captions from “Feminist Ryan Gosling” image macros about Donna Haraway. I then read from “Use of Dust,” a new work that is an erasure of Alison Knowles and Janes Tenney’s “A House of Dust.” I concluded with this text:

Although mostly our discussion is about computing and literature, and only a bit on commerce and the art thereof. Thanks to Andrew Lipstein for interviewing me:

Episode V: “Oh, I should definitely explain why I don’t care about this question.”

The proceedings of the June 12-14, 2012 Paris conference on the translation of electronic literature are now online. These include a paper by Natalia Fedorova and myself, “Carrying across Language and Code.” The conference took place at Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis and Université Paris Diderot, and encouraged me and collaborators to undertake the Renderings project, the first phase of which is now onlne.

To continue the trend of three-letter publications presenting reviews of #!, ebr (Electronic Book Review) has just published a review by John Cayley – an expert in electronic literature, an accomplished cybertext poet, a teacher of e-lit practices, and someone who has created digital work engaging with the writings of Samuel Beckett, among other things.

It would be difficult to ask for as thoughtful and detailed a review as Cayley provided. Nevertheless, now that ABR and ebr have offered reviews, I do hope that IBR, OBR, and UBR will follow suit.

Steven Wingate’s review of my book #! (pronouonced “Shebang,” Counterpath Press, 2014) appears in the current American Book Review and seems to be the first review in print.

I was very pleased to read it. Wingate discusses how the presentation of code provided a hook for understanding what programs do, much as bilingual editions allow a reader to learn more (at least a bit more) about a different language by skipping back and forth between recto and verso. An important goal of mine was to offer more access to computing and to show that code can be concise and open. I aimed to do this even as I wrore rather obscure and difficult programs, such as the ones in Perl, but certainly when writing Ruby and Python, the languages Wingate finds most pleasing.

Happy New Year! My New Year’s poem for 2015 is a one-line BASIC program for the Commodore 64: “The Era Canto.”

For the past six months I’ve been working with six collaborators,

• Patsy Baudoin
• Andrew Campana
• Qianxun (Sally) Chen
• Aleksanda Małecka
• Piotr Marecki
• Erik Stayton

To translate e-lit, and for the most part computational literature works such as poetry generators, into English from other languages.

After a great deal of work that extends from searching for other-langauge pieces, through technical and computing development that includes porting, and also extends into the more usual issues assocaited with literary translation, the first phase of the Renderings project (13 works translated from 6 languages) has just been published in Fordham University’s literary journal, Cura.

… from the Harvard Book Store.

And if it’s digital data you’re craving, it’s also available for free as a PDF and as an EPUB. And the code that generated these books is free software.

Two pieces on my book #! have just come out in Galatea Resurrects (A Poetry Engagement), number 23.

John Bloomberg-Rissman’s review.

Eileen Tabios’s engagement.

Robert Pinsky writes the first installment, noting the recent death of poet Mark Strand.

I didn’t ever properly meet Strand, but I know many of his poems well and I went to one his art openings and saw him there. His work is mostly surrealist and nostalgic, not my usual cup of joe – and yet I found much of it quite appealing and memorable.

Zach Whalen pointed out that it would probably be interesting to compare the reimplementations of A House of Dust that he did early this year and that I did more recently. Whalen’s work to reimplement historical systems is really excellent, by the way, and I in fact showed his animated GIF of “Kick that Habit Man” when I premiered Memory Slam, including a workalike of Gysin and Sommerville’s program and my version of the Knowles and Tenney poem, at NYU ITP’s Code Poetry Slam.

Arts at MIT has a nice new article about my book #!, one that is very aptly titled. It’s by Sharon Lacey. I read from the book at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT on October 22.

My next reading, on December 2, will be at Google in the Authors@Google series.

I recently released Memory Slam, a set of four reimplementation of classic text generators. I did them over in JavaScript and in Python in the hopes that people would easily be able to play around with them, modify them, and understand them better through this sort of use. I’ve seen a few cases in which this has been done already, but first off, please let me know if you’ve posted modified versions of these, as I would love to see more. The license terms do not oblige you to do so, of course, they are licensed as free software. I’m just asking.

I’m doing two Central Texas readings from my book of programs and poems #! this weekend:

San Antonio: The Twig Book Shop

Friday, Nov 21 at 5pm
The Twig Book Shop
in The Pearl (306 Pearl Parkway, Suite 106)

Austin: Monkeywrench Books

Saturday, Nov 22 at 4pm
Monkeywrench Books
(110 N Loop Blvd E)

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