WHAT I'M READING::::P A R T O N E ::::
9/19/02

1) Peter Ganick, podiums: autobiographical cafe fictions:
Not, as the title suggests, a book of short stories about
dissident Berlin coffeehouses, this title from the esteemed Potes
& Poets press is a luxurious walk through Ganick's mastery of
syntax. I've long admired Peter's work; it fulfills much of what
I've always felt was possible with language art, but have far too
often been afraid to try (addicted as I am to a lyricism
sometimes impossible to shake off). Ganick does pepper these
numbered prose poems with autobiographical detail; I'd like to
see that "henna salsewoman" who creeps in as agent in some of the
pieces. But Ganick's autobiography is a true one; confessional in
the sense that it remains true to the flux and chaos of
perception, which includes the surface properties of language
itself. I highly reccomend this one to anyone who hasn't read
Peter's work yet; it's an adroit introduction. And to those lucky
enough to have lived with Peter;s work before, it's pure delight,
as always.

2.) Poetry, September 2002:
You know, every time I pick up this pretigious barometer of
the mainstream poetry zeitgeist, I'm annoyed. Not only is it
chock full of the same people issue after issue (there are always
new voices in its pages, but I could use less Yusef Komunyakaa),
but too often this "mainstream" stuff is just plain bad. This
issue in particular, which focuses on the September 11 tragedy
(each poem saying everything predictable that would have been
said had the tragedy happened in the nineteenth century, in much
the same style), had me reaching for my collection of LOST AND
FOUND TIMES to cleanse myself. Anyone who can use the hoary
phrase "cold comfort" in a poem without it's use being tongue-in-
cheek is probably an English professor somewhere, watching his or
her students' eyes glaze over at every mention of Adrienne Rich.
Avoid this stuff at all costs, if you're interested in anything
contemporary; one would do better to read graffiti tags on
passing trains. There's more real poetry there anyway.

3.) Stephen Pinker, The Language Instinct:
Just started this one, and it's very hard to put down.
Pinker takes the Chomsky approach, proposing that language is an
organ in a way, that we're (as Eryk Salvaggio once succinctly put
it) "hard-wired for language." A few months ago, I created a
Flash work that generated new words at random, and released the
source code to a few list-servs; one colleague wrote back, saying
I should read Pinker. So I am....
By the way: there's a brilliant debunking of the Whorf
hypothesis early on in this book that has me convinced. And I'm a
poet!

Some collaborative poems currently being passed around several lists:
all of these are in progress

The trAce collaboration:


As per your explicit instructions, I
coated every orifice with rhetoric.
And then slept for an hour. Just the one.
I was finding it hard to breathe,
snatching at words, dreaming of membranes.
Was it my answering machine that activated?
Your voice melding with empty moans as you
ask why the office is not yet painted?
stumble motion forward head down
feeling as i was rising from the dead
was it really worth staying on till
last call? music now dies from my memory
a thin steam of mesmerism blends
with the unopened paint cans
bundled in the bathroom. Who
knows what color I'm thinking in,
right now, other than you?

Ordinarily, I would not dip my finger
in the light socket. However, today, with






The Wryting/Spidertangle poem:




A lot of us were scarred when Tammy walked
into the soda-shoppe. No-one had seen or
painted their senses before
So the marines, disguised as Capt. Adjective,
were visibly invisible just behind the glass
/* [D]n.tr&ced: succes
but that was Dustin the Just,
pervasive as three spritzed little auras
w h o s e ver
sows a gip's ear will not make milk pure
C
All we can do is keep on a keepin' on
R
B
O
NATION al
MAGMA TURRET

A lot of us were cleared when Jimmy walked
into the head-shoppe. No-one had seen or
painted with senses before or even hereinafter
So the Aquamarines, disguised as adjectives,
were invisible from every but the naked why
There was a feeling of less and less air in the
stall but we aimed for suffocation.
Suddenly, the whole building farted
tumbled, crumble, shake, rattle and role-play.
No-one warned us that the corporate lawyers who
had
been
insufficiently consulted charging only five-thirds
the
usual overstated
fee - they were way too busy to worry about a
piffling little detail
having come across it time and time again:
plagiarizing sources and
calling it sufficiency described as a text of
dentrioriginality & pursuing
the wronged parties, themselves, to even dare to
care if you know
what I mean
to say is:
things are exactly what they appear to be--
the niteclubb is a nightclubb--
furnished with mud-truffles, and the children
who wake them mud-eyed, as reputed, were engaged
to be welded to the body of christ, which
as you all know, is all blue. So much is so that
as it happens, when she sprays the beautiful shellac
on her gorgeous hair, and i began to paint my odor
the color of Aquamarines (it's not the nauti-camouflage
you would expect, it is a mint green),

NOTES ON WORK IN PROGRESS: ANNINGAN

This one started like all the others do: with the basic idea of
making an interactive poetic environment. In this case, the
original vision was to create a sonnet via user interaction: one
would be presented with three game interfaces (a fill-in-the-
blank interaction, a drag-and-drop matching interaction, and a
fake chat interaction). Every user response, particularly those
captured during the chat, would be fed into an array; I would
then take slices from each array member to construct the sonnet,
which I would have printed from an invisible frame in the
document...

As time went on, though, I became more interested in the
chat interaction. What if I made the piece like a fake chatroom,
wherein the work "spoke" to the user, and the user's responses to
this determined what the piece said back to the user? So I
deleted all of the work I'd done on the previous interfaces and
began in earnest to concentrate on the chat portion of the piece.

And then the ghost of ye olde hypertext chimed in: "Hey,
dillweed, what if this were a hypertext fictive poetic piece?
Say, one in which the user's responses determined the flow of the
work, as opposed to using ye olde hypertext reference link?"

Thus the piece was born. Or the idea, the skeleton, was
scaffolded over the previous version.

Not too long ago, my beautiful girlfriend took a proficiency
test online. Part of this test was essay-based...and then the
application graded her essay RIGHT THERE ONLINE! This puzzled me,
as my understanding of computers and language was that the
machine couldn't REALLY read user-input text; it couldn't, for
example, understand a sentence you typed into a form; it could
only store that sentence in a variable for future use. So, when
she told me that this had happened, I started digging for methods
that would simulate reading. Ultimately, what the essay-grader
did was search for keywords in certain places in the document.
Once I figured out how to do this in actionscript, I knew that it
was possible to truly simulate interaction with the user. The
user's responses would be scanned for certain keywords; the
piece's output would vary depending on the presence or absence of
these keywords...

In this way, it became possible to write a hypertext that
didn't depend on links. Instead, the user invested actual
responses into the piece; this (in theory, at least) would deepen
the user's commitment in the work, and truly tailor the work
around the user's activity. In traditional hypertext, the user
only invests a mouse click; other than that, she remains outside
the work; none of her activity is truly crucial to the work's
manifestation. With the methods used in Anningan, she becomes
immersed in the world of the piece.

So I started this blog thing so I and anyone who cares to may ramble on and on about net art, poetry and other little ditties.
This is just introductory text. Don't get excited.