Grand Text Auto

Taper, an online literary magazine published twice yearly, is now in its 12th issue. An independent editorial collective (Kyle Booten, Angela Chang, Kavi Duvvoori, Leonardo Flores, Helen Shewolfe Tseng, and Andy Wallace, for this issue) makes all the decisions about selections, themes for forthcoming issues, and so on, and also handles all communication with authors. They do all the work! Editors are allowed to submit works, in which case they recuse themselves from the collective’s discussion. I’m proud to be publisher of this magazine — although it’s really the editorial collective that makes it happen.

February 14 is Valentine’s Day for many; this year, it’s also Ash Wednesday for Western Christians, both Orthodox and unorthodox. Universally, it is Harry Mathews’s birthday. Harry, who would have been 94 today, was an amazing experimental writer. He’s known to many as the first American to join the Oulipo.

Given the occasion, I thought I’d write a blog post, which I do very rarely these days, to discuss my poetics — or, because mine is a poetics of concision, my “poetix.” Using that word saves one byte. The term may also suggest an underground poetix, as with comix, and this is great.

At the recent ELO conference in Montréal Leonardo Flores introduced the concept of “3rd Generation” electronic literature. I was at another session during his influential talk, but I heard about the concept from him beforehand and have read about it on Twitter (a 3rd generation context, I believe) and Flores’s blog (more of a 2nd generation context, I believe). One of the aspects of this concept is that the third generation of e-lit writers makes use of existing platforms (Twitter APIs, for instance) rather than developing their own interfaces. Blogging is a bit different from hand-rolled HTML, but one administers one’s own blog.

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.”

I collaborate with Flourish Klink on two very specific Tumblr blogs, which are both open for submissons.

streetcrts.tumblr.com features photos of CRT televisions (or monitors) that have been placed on the street to allow others to take them away, or to allow them to be removed as trash.

xavierpauchard.tumblr.com chronicles, in photos, the legacy of industrial/furniture designer Xavier Pauchard, who, without formal training, designed steel furniture early in the 20th century that seems to be in about 1/5 of all New York restaurants, bars, and coffeehouses, and in many, many other places worldwide. Pauchard does not, as of this writing, even have an English-language Wikipedia entry.

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.

If the Internet did exist, we’d have to uninvent it: “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook.”

Those poor people in developing countries don’t know about the Internet, only Facebook.

Of course Babycastles, my main link to poetry & digital media in NYC, keeps a calendar of events only on Facebook, not on a plain Web page.

I’ve found it very difficult to find (open, public) poetry events in NYC because many are announced only on Facebook.

I’m at an LA poetry festival now. Didn’t know about my friends’ (public) offsite readings; they are Facebook-only.

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.

You don’t have permission to access /memslam/IN A GREEN, MOSSY TERRAIN,IN AN OVERPOPULATED AREA,BY THE SEA,BY AN ABANDONED LAKE,IN A DESERTED FACTORY,IN DENSE WOODS,IN JAPAN,AMONG SMALL HILLS,IN SOUTHERN FRANCE,AMONG HIGH MOUNTAINS,ON AN ISLAND,IN A COLD, WINDY CLIMATE,IN A PLACE WITH BOTH HEAVY RAIN AND BRIGHT SUN,IN A DESERTED AIRPORT,IN A HOT CLIMATE,INSIDE A MOUNTAIN,ON THE SEA,IN MICHIGAN,IN HEAVY JUNGLE UNDERGROWTH,IN AN OVERPOPULATED AREA,BY A RIVER,AMONG OTHER HOUSES,IN A DESERTED CHURCH,IN A METROPOLIS,UNDERWATER on this server.

Students published the first digital Des Imagistes in 2008, chose to self-host it without sending me a copy. It’s gone.

Wired: It’s up on the Internet Archive. Tired: Without scraping that I can’t get the CC BY-NC-SA site.

Beautiful class project. The preservation strategy was not so great. I should have required the files be sent to me, too. Live, learn.

If I used my Twitter account the way I’m supposed to, instead of as a conceptual writing project, I would have put that last post on Twitter.

If I had a Facebook account, it would be tagged as satire.

I can no longer keep myself from commenting on the Facebook “emotional manipulation” study. Alas. Here are several points.

• Do you want your money back?
• Don’t we only know about this study done on 689,003 people because it was written up and reported on in a prestigious journal?
• Could it be that other studies might have been done, or might be going on right now, or might happen in the future, and we might know nothing about them because their results will be kept as proprietary information?

I persist in my quest to develop extremely simple, easily modifiable programs that produce compelling textual output.

My latest project is Modern Perverbs. In a world where nothing is as it seems … two phrases … combine … to make a perverb. That’s about all there is to it. If phrase N is picked from the first list, some phrase that isn’t number N will be picked from the second, to ensure maximum perverbiality. The first phrase also carries the punctuation mark that will be used at the very end. This one is a good bit simpler than even my very simple “exploded sentence” project, Lede.

Check out “Wandering through Taroko Gorge,” a participatory, audio-enabled remix.

As James T. Burling stated on the “projects” page of MAD THEORY:

In this combination of presentation and poetry reading, I’ll present a remix of Nick Monfort’s javascript poetry generator, “Taroko Gorge.” My remix added a musical component using a computers oscilloscope function, and more importantly allows participant-observers to type in answers to prompts which are then added to the poem in real-time. The poem will be available throughout the day, gradually adding all inputs to its total sum. I’ll discuss the process of decoding html and javascript as a non-coder, describe some of my theories on participatory performance using computer interfaces, and raise questions about agency in performance and how a digital artifact can function as a poetic event.

Purple Blurb

MIT, room 14E-310

Monday 5/5, 5:30pm

Free and open to the public, no reservation required

Jill Walker Rettberg

“Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to Understand Ourselves”

This Monday (2014-05-05) the Purple Blurb series of Spring 2014 presentations will conclude with a talk by Jill Walker Rettberg on a pervasive but still not well-understood phenomenon, the types of digital writing, tracking, photography, and media production of other sorts that people do about themselves. Her examples will be drawn from her own work as well as from photobooths, older self-portraits, and entries from others’ diaries.

Purple Blurb

MIT, room 14E-310

Monday 5/5, 5:30pm

Free and open to the public, no reservation required

Jill Walker Rettberg

“Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to Understand Ourselves”

This Monday (2014-05-05) the Purple Blurb series of Spring 2014 presentations will conclude with a talk by Jill Walker Rettberg on a pervasive but still not well-understood phenomenon, the types of digital writing, tracking, photography, and media production of other sorts that people do about themselves. Her examples will be drawn from her own work as well as from photobooths, older self-portraits, and entries from others’ diaries.

Purple Blurb

MIT, room 14E-310

Monday 5/5, 5:30pm

Free and open to the public, no reservation required

Jill Walker Rettberg

“Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to Understand Ourselves”

This Monday (2014-05-05) the Purple Blurb series of Spring 2014 presentations will conclude with a talk by Jill Walker Rettberg on a pervasive but still not well-understood phenomenon, the types of digital writing, tracking, photography, and media production of other sorts that people do about themselves. Her examples will be drawn from her own work as well as from photobooths, older self-portraits, and entries from others’ diaries.

The AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) offers you eleven options on their Web form for indicating your gender. But these are listed in a drop-down box, so you can’t choose more than one.

To give a specific example, you can’t choose “male” and “cisgender.”

OPPRESSION!

There’s a remake (or maybe a reboot?) of superbad.com, the classic, off-kilter, uncanny art website that was employed back in 2008 in a Grand Text Auto April Fool’s joke.

It’s www.orworse.net.

I guess they made it worse by adding a “www.”

You may have noticed that “corpse” and “corporate” are lexically quite similar, and seem even more so when it comes to technology. Slate’s Google Graveyard lets visitors leave a virtual flower in memory of their favorite dead Google product. Seeking to be ever ready, they have dug a hole for Google Glass.

I like clicking through this: “Psychographics: Consumer Survey” by Dane Watkins. And I learned something about myself by doing so. I think. Yes.

“Description,” my 2014 New Year’s poem, was sent out as a text file at the end of 2013; it’s now online in a solvable and checkable form, in a new Web edition.

From p01 comes a 64 byte JavaScript program to produce a random-seeming maze, as long as the person at the computer is willing to wiggle the mouse a bit. It’s on pouet.net, with comments, too.

The new project European Poetry Forum by Zuzana Husarova Martin Solotruk is now online.

The project aims to connect a diverse group of poets with overlapping interests, as this statement about it explains. There are answers to queries from 38 poets up now.