Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

Page 8 of 68

Words as Cogs and Machines

Happenings-with-tiresI’m going to take these a few essays at a time now from the New Media Reader.

The first is yet another essay about the affordances of computers and yet more predictions for a utopian age of computers and then we finally get into more obvious literary concerns with two essays from 1961 that begin to show how computer theory and avant-garde literary theory merge.

In the introduction to “Man-Computer Symbiosis” by J. C. R. Licklider (1960) Norbert Wiener (I love the name Norbert) and Katharine Hayles raise issues for humanists around ideas about true subjectivity, paying most attention to the fuzzy border where humans end and machines begin (never more relevant than today with our smartphone addictions). Wiener also shows where New Media projects began, right around World War II with the development of anti-aircraft guns. Computer science then began to study how did humans and machines fit together in cutting-edge weaponry systems and war games.

These technological advances, Wiener says, also intersected with new thinking about the self as an illusion which dovetailed nicely with increasingly-popular Zen Buddhist ideas of the self.

And here is the pivot where the humanist and the engineer come into conflict.

The engineer, not typically steeped in history or  liberal arts, rarely pauses to consider the human consequences beyond the building of a new gadget or tool. Humans do respond as if they in fact have a real self. And this always guarantees my favorite scary boogeyman: unintended consequences.

IMG_20220331_091640_01

The article alludes to this itself with a reference to “The Monkey Paw" story about magic wishes and unforeseen consequences. Wiener sees a parallel with  computer engineering: handy solutions may bring bigger problems.

This article predates the beginnings of the Internet (APRANET) in October of 1969, but Linklider predicted “men will communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face.” He even predicted cyber-romance. But like other predictors of this era, he completely failed to predict the downsides: cyberstalking, cyber-bullies, conspiracy theory proliferation.

He talks about the “inflexible dependence on predetermined programs” and who in a modern office environment doesn’t twitch at that little string of words?

In the article Licklider dreams of a computer/man symbiosis similar to the insect/tree symbiosis. He sees computers performing both the most repetitive, clerical operations of the human mind and solving more difficult problems with more efficiency and speed than a human brain can manage.

He says the question is not what is the answer. The question is what is the question. I don't know for sure, but I think I've heard my father say that a few times. We’re still struggling with this little bit of wisdom anyway. We spend too much time asking the wrong things and studying the wrong data.

Most interestingly, Licklider does a survey of his own thought process and maintains that 85% of his thinking time is spent “getting into a position to think or decide,” the bulk of his time learning, gathering and researching versus a small amount of time spent actually digesting information and calculating. He says it takes him “seconds to determine.”

He admits, “books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered, components in existence, and they will continue to be functionally important within the context of man-computer symbiosis.”

The next essay is “’Happenings’ in the New York Scene” by Allan Kaprow (1961). The introduction addresses how audience participation and  interactivity attempted to break down the barriers between creators and their audiences and how this influenced media artworks and menu-driven media seeking non-hierarchical relationships. The introduction also notes an article by Söke Dinkla, “From participation to Interaction,”  where she notes that these kinds of participation happenings often occur along a fragile border and that their efforts were never entirely free of authorial manipulation. I think this is relevant to current, similar multi-media experiments.

Kaprow defines for us what happenings were in the realms of theater, writing, music and painting and he traces the history from of interactive performance from circuses, carnivals, traveling saltimbanques and medieval plays.

Drawing connections to modern media pieces, Kaprow notes that happenings often had no literary point; they might not “go anywhere” or have any beginning, middle or end. Audiences co-mingled with creators who aimed for un-artiness, a more natural habitat and results had a rough, studio-like feel. Pieces were not written but generated in action. Words were materials, structures based on chance techniques.

Kaprow admits that most of the attempts at un-self-consciousness failed and these events felt ironically planned and academic. And all too often, the results were boring.

But admittedly happenings have had a profound influence on new media pieces, like all kinds of chance artworks and writings. But there’s no reason that chance characteristics and interactivity must necessarily define media pieces.

The last essay is “The Cut-Up Method” by William Burroughs (1961) introduced by Brion Gysin. Like happenings, surreal and beat experiments also influenced not only new media projects but computer game theory. Gysin reminds us that initial poetry generators were meant to be an intermediate step for generating a rough draft of content, and that even Burroughs admitted to performing a human edit as he worked toward a final draft. (My boss at ICANN just reminded me this week what an oxymoron the term 'final draft' is and it reminds us how truly final anything really is).

The benefit of such a method for Burroughs was the happy accidents that resulted and Burroughs insisted, “all writing is, in fact, cut ups.” Mentally speaking, this is very true.

Read more about this kind of creative assemblage: "Cut Up: The Creative Technique Used by Burroughs, Dylan, Bowie and Cobain"

The Essay Project: Crafting Good Titles

WinckelThe next essay in the stash is “Staking the Claim of the Title” by Nance Van Winckel. I see this essay appeared in AWP’s March/April Writer’s Chronicle magazine at some point. We might have received our typed-but-unpublished draft in Tom Lux’s Sarah Lawrence craft class since the essay is full of love for Tom Lux and his quote that became the essay's title.

At first I thought this was a horrible title for the essay about titles but then changed my mind when I heard the quote in context.

Titles are crucial, of course, the essay claims. Titles “give a literary work a frame or a spark. They can infuse a piece with power and authority, or with mystery and allure. Bad titles can be lead weights; clever ones can kill or poison.”

Which is all to say the title sets the tone, which is no small thing when  a title contains the first words a reader will encounter. You can work against a title’s tone (Wallace Stevens is a good example) or clue the reader as to what might follow. Will the piece be absurd, smart-ass, comedic, dramatic, whatever.

Winckel claims a title often will work subconsciously and that a reader absorbs more than we may even know, that this happens because a reader has no context yet for the information in a title. So a title will often “hover in the mental periphery” as we read through a piece. Winckel uses Thomas Hardy’s novel “Jude the Obscure” as an example of a title that doesn’t even click in until three-quarters of the way through, “the title’s been looming, accumulating the force it will eventually deliver.”

So a title is more, she says, than merely a label, which early “working” draft titles often are. She tracks title changes in Sylvia Plath poems and explicates how James Wright’s tongue-in-cheek titles work (“As I Step Over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I think of an Ancient Chinese Governor” and “A Message Hidden in an Empty Wine Bottle That I Threw into a Gully of Maple Trees One Night at an Indecent Hour”), Brenda Hillman’s titles (“Never Mindshaft”), Barry Hannah’s titles (“Midnight and I’m Not Famous Yet,” and “You Can’t Any Poorer Than Dead”), Gen X titles like Dave Eggers’ use of irony in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Winckel calls Tom Lux a “contemporary title maestro” and quotes him in saying our job is “to write poems that are hard not to read.” Titles, Lux says, stake a claim as they grab the reader’s attention. Winckel says “then it’s up to the poem….to maintain its spell.” A title “must be both a surprise and an inevitability.”

The title is like a circus ringleader (I wrote this in the margins at the time).

Winckel then quotes Stephen Dobyns, “a poem has an emotion, idea, physical setting, language, image, rhythm and tension…one must be made important as soon as possible, either in the title or in the first line or two.”

Winckel traces title-history through English novels (typically names of protagonists) to titles about the poet’s state of mind (Coleridge’s “Fears in Solitude”) to metaphysical titles (like T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Hart Crane’s “The Bridge”) to titles that allude to other titles (The Sound and the Fury and Of Mice and Men). She admits postmodernist titles are less about guiding the reader and explores “the uncontested titular master” Wallace Stevens. She tries to explain iconic critic Helen Vendler’s explanation of Stevens’ titles, something about first, second and third order experiences. I have no idea what this means but it has something to do with the tenor and the vehicle of a metaphor

Winckel admits that Stevens’ titles are often only “tangentially associated” with their poems.

All I know is that Wallace Stevens’ titles were often colloquial and the poems themselves very intellectualized, leaving the reader to try to grasp the connection between the two. Winckel’s example works well to explain this, “No Possum, No Sop, No Taters.”  She tells us Stevens had a list of over 300 titles unconnected to any poems and she lists about 11 of them, of which these were my favorites: “The Halo That Would Not Light” and “The Last Private Opinion.”

I wish that last poem did in fact exist. We need that poem right about now.

The title to avoid, Winckel says, is the summary. She says “there’s no surer way to sap a good poem’s energy than to laden it with a phrase that ‘sums it all up.’”

Better to dig into the subconscious, she says, and work through “layers of meaning” and “interconnections…ramifications…[more of a] sideways glance than a summation.”

Titles can “be interesting just at the level of language itself….provide information the piece needs early….lift to the surface some important feature that might be missed…establish tension…develop expectation.” She explains how paintings do this when their titles are unexpected. Her example is Susan Bennerstrom’s painting of a cleared table entitled “Waiter.”

Winckel says, “the richness of the world looms in what isn’t here, in what’s waiting to be set before us.”

Poems About Movies

Reel-verseRecently I received two books of poetry about movies. The first was a gift called Reel Verse, Poems About Movies, an anthology by Everyman's Library. There are so many good poems in this one and I found quite a few online.

Some of my favorites were poems about racism and segregation in movie theaters: Ellen Byrant Voight's "At the Movie House: Virginia, 1956," a similar poem by Elizabeth Alexander called "Early Cinema," and a very chilling poem about the movie Birth of a Nation called "Meanwhile" by Martha Collins where she traces the damage this infamous 1915 movie did to real people, including an increase in lynchings, torture and the rebirth of the KKK.

Denise Duhamel's great poem "An Unmarried Woman" about the movie of the name and how it's seen viewed through the lens of two young girls: "This was just marriage, we guessed, sipping our frappes."

Amy Gerstler has a great poem called "The Bride Goes Wild" about love and sex that is basically just movie titles strung together. Ron Koertge's "Aubade" is about Bette Davis movies. "Janet Leigh is Afraid of Jazz" is a great Noir poem by Marsha De La O. 

Sonia Greenfield does a funny role-reversal in the poem "Celebrity Stalking" where Meryl Streep and George Clooney are stalking the poet for poetry. And Gregory Djanikian's got an empowering poem called "Movie Extras"  and Vijay Seshardri's "Script Meeting" was a tour de force about special effects. Paul Muldoon has poem about young boys accidentally watching a romantic film called "The Weepies" and Carol Muske-Dukes talks about watching her actor-husband get murdered repeatedly in her poem "Unsent Letter #4." 

Patricia Spears Jones has some good lines in a poem about the movie Hud (which I haven't even seen):

"Where else can a man be a jerk
and still make a woman's heart ache?

We want more.
More of his cool, patrician inspection
of the very core of our lusting selves.

Oh for a day to be Patricia Neal
warming up her whiskey voice
just so she can tell Paul Newman
where to go and how fast to get there.

For now, the jerk stands bare chested
literate, tasty."

There's a whole chapter on auteurs. Highlights are:

I took the term "field of music" for my NaPoWriMo 2022 project from Elena Karina Byrne's "Easy Rider."

Other good ones were David Wojahn's "Buddy Holly Watching Rebel Without a Cause," "At the Film Society" by Stephen Dunn and one of my favorites, "Voice Over" by Geoffrey O'Brien about a tough, fall guy getting his revenge.

When-pilotless-plane-arrives-cefolaThe second book was the new chapbook from Ann Cefola called When the Pilotless Plane Arrives available on Trainwreck Press.

This is an amazing little set of ars poetica poems culled from the material of old movies, like Bette Davis' Now Voyager or the somewhat newer Close Encounters of the Third Kind plus Universal's suite of horror movies. Some of your favorite b-movies might be here: This Island Earth, Dr. Cyclops, The Monster and the Girl aka D.O.A., King Kong Escapes, The Mole People, The Bride of Frankenstein, House of Horrors, The Leech Woman, The Mummy's Hand, Dead Man's Eyes, Calling Dr. Death, House of Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Invisible Man.

Each poem extrapolates a delightful and non-obvious lesson about writing from the serepentine plots of these movies. And that lesson might be four lines or four words. 

A longer example from "First Draft in a Drawer" (after Now Voyager, 1942):

….proving an initial
draft needs care, questions asked by a skilled
professional, exposure to revered poets,
the wide Atlantic, salt air, and above all,
proscribed love, to risk its truest self.

Or this more brief lesson from "You're Getting Sleepy, Sleepy…" (after Calling Dr. Death, 1943):

"cross out articles, finish off adjectives with a pillow"

In some poems, Cefola addresses the poet directly: "You too, poet" or "poet, you maybe be irritable as that scientist." In the last poem she brings it all together, the connecting fiber between the poet and the scientist gone mad,  in the poem "Propulsion" (after Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977):

It's always been this way. A tuning fork for the world. I just.
Want to know. You enter the sparkling city and—know.
You had already been taken long ago.

Mid-Century Predictions and the Love Letter Generator

Mark1Hearts and Machines

To return back to digital art essays from the New Media Reader, I'll be talking about two predictive pieces next: Vannevar Bush's essay "As We May Think" from 1945 and "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" by Alan Turing from 1950. 

Bush's piece is a list of predictions, both hits and misses, but some impressive hits like ideas around wearable informational devices, wireless data connections, machine voice interactions, information storage working like brain cells and e-books. Forefront in his mind was the predicted coming information explosion. His ideas inspired the invention of the computer mouse, the word processer and hypertext.

Bush

He wanted to solve the time-consuming lookup problem and make man's "record of ideas" highly searchable. As he said, significant attainments have been lost in a mass of inconsequential, the glut of publications being crippling to researchers. But he probably didn't foresee the glut being so big and growing exponentially bigger as storage systems themselves grew, not only with information but misinformation.

Technologists predictably never predict meanness.

Although Bush didn't predict digital storage systems; he instead imagined storage on film. He also couldn't see beyond a room full of girls keyboard-punching data onto cards. But, most specifically for our purposes, he did predict possibilities for machines beyond numerical calculations. He saw machines manipulating language. And he envisioned an efficient text search much like the Internet parses IP addresses, although he envisioned a clunky "memex" machine instead of the Internet itself. He also dreamed of machines that would work beyond logical files and paths but would operate as the mind operates, by an almost random association via a web of trails (which is pretty much the Internet). 

At

In "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Alan Turing explains the imitation game (and if you've seen the movie of the same name, you're familiar with Turing's tragic story) and his hopes to test computers with the imitation game in order to answer the question can machines think,  which would become known as The Turing Test. He rephrased the question to can computers fool us into thinking they can think, or can they think at a rudimentary level?

Like Bush, Turing also saw language possibilities. His work also led to early programming languages like FORTRAN and COBAL, email, word processing, voice recognition, chat bots and that OK button you've spent half your life clicking.

The article follows a very rational path, explaining the imitation game and why it would be good to find out the capabilities of the machine as a way to ask, "what are the physical and intellectual capabilities of man?" He then systematically goes through all the objections, from contemplations of the soul and God, superiority complexes, mathematical limitations, human frailty, infinity and even ESP. In an early question of identity, Turing even wonders if the human mind is like an onion, full of layers but ultimately no core there.

Stachey

Turing created a random-number generator on the Mark I machine and, in the summer of 1952, Christopher Strachey used that to write the love-letter-generator program in what is now considered the first piece of digital art.

From https://dukeupress.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/4701/:

“One of Alan Turing’s final projects was a computer-based, automated love-letter generator, which some have identified as the first known work of new media art. It was programmed by Christopher Strachey in 1952 for the Manchester Mark I computer. Turing maintained this machine, which was fondly known as M.U.C, as a professor at the University of Manchester, and the love letter generator was but one among its many applications. It operated with a template similar to the game of Mad Libs, into which the computer would insert nouns and adjectives of endearment randomly selected from its database."

DEAREST JEWEL,

MY RAPTURE ADORES YOUR FERVOUR. YOU ARE MY PRECIOUS BURNING. MY COVETOUS EAGERNESS TENDERLY LIKES YOUR EAGER SYMPATHY. MY LOVESICK FONDNESS WOOS YOUR SYMPATHY. MY FONDNESS PINES FOR YOUR FELLOW FEELING.

YOURS PASSIONATELY, M.U.C.

Darling Sweetheart

You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking.

Yours beautifully

M.U.C.

M.U.C. stands for Manchester University Computer. What a sweet talker, that machine!

"As Noah Wardrip-Fruin has suggested, it is interesting that Turing and Strachey were both gay men, and that their first literary collaboration for the computer imagined it as the author of a one-sided epistolary romance. The tangled mash-up of sentimentality bespeaks a twinge of longing beyond the one that already accompanies the genre: one can almost sense M.U.C.’s thirst, as if the computer were struggling to speak from the heart but discovered that its vocabulary had been arbitrarily limited to the language of clichés. Like the wooden puppet in search of the Blue Fairy, the computer longs to be human; like Snow White fleeing into the forest, it longs to be admitted into the company of those who are capable of care and affection.”

According to Stobhan Roberts in The New Yorker, basically 70 base words here could create three hundred billion different letters.

"In choosing to write a program that expressed adoration rather than humor or literary talent, Strachey was perhaps playing the cynic, exposing the mechanical nature of romance. The German artist and theorist David Link, in his book Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts, observes …'ultimately the software is based on a reductionist position vis-à-vis love and its expression,” Link writes. “Love is regarded as a recombinatory procedure with recurring elements.'”

And I need to stop at this point and say Alan Turing has been an important inspiration to me since I first encountered this co-created random love letter generator in the Electronic Literature MOOC from Davidson College. It's not insignificant to me that these two men were closeted gay men (although not in a relationship) and that one of Turing's final projects was contributing to something we can call digital love art. So basically emotion, drama, concealment, longing was baked into the very first digital art. And the idea that machines can aid humans in unpredictable ways.

The algorithm broken down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strachey_love_letter_algorithm

Take a spin on a recreated generator: https://www.gingerbeardman.com/loveletter/

Christopher Strachey had a literary pedigree: https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/apr/9/queer-history-computing-part-three/ 

The Essay Project: Dylan Thomas Talks Inspiration and Craft

DtThe next piece in the essay class was "Notes on the Art of Poetry" by Dylan Thomas, which confusingly is also a poem. The essay is most likely from the book Modern Poetics: Essays on Poetry edited by James Scully (1965). 

Although the essay in the version from the book is not available online, quotes from the essay are found here and there: https://quotesondesign.com/dylan-thomas/ and this version is not the same as my version, but it's close.

The subtitle says the essay was “written in the summer of 1951, at Laugharne, in reply to questions posed by a student” – a fact that seemed somewhat indulgent at first; but I think this a very understandable impulse, the desire to elaborate on something you previously only considered while thinking on your feet.

Anyway, Thomas starts by saying how poetry first came to him with sound and nursery rhymes (which I can relate to as the first two books my parents gave me were my father's copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses and Hallmark's A Child's Rhymes which was illustrated). Dylan says, “let me say that the things that first made me love language and want to work in it and for it were nursery rhymes and folk talks, the Scottish Ballads, a few lines of hymns…”

He maintains “I am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly…they were, seemingly lifeless, made only of black and white, but out of them, out of their own being, came love and terror and pity and pain and wonder and all the other vague abstractions that make our ephemeral lives dangerous, great, and bearable. Out of them came the gusts and grunts and hiccups and heehaws of the common fun of the earth”

“What I do like to do is to treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mould, coil, polish and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, figures of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly-realised truth I might try to reach and realise."

“My first, and greatest, liberty was that of being able to read everything and anything I cared to. I read indiscriminately, and with my eyes hanging out.”

He goes on to define the charge that he has been influenced by James Joyce; he also talks about “the great rhythms” of the Bible and Sigmund Freud.

Then he moves over into talking about craft:

"I may apply my technical paraphernalia. I use everything and anything to make my poems work and move in the direction I want them to: old tricks, new tricks, puns, portmanteau-words, paradox, allusion, paronomasia, paragram, catachresis, slang, assonantal rhymes, vowel rhymes, sprung rhythm. Every device there is in language is there to be used if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twisting and convolutions of words, and inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.”

He also lists as influences the Surrealists (and the subconscious mind…without the aid of logic of reason…illogically and unreasonably in paint and words”)  but he breaks with them in insisting that afterwards composition “must go through all the rational processes of the intellect. The Surrealists, on the other hand, put their words down together on paper exactly as they emerge from chaos; they do not shape these words or put them in order; to them chaos is the shape and order. This seems to me to be exceedingly presumptuous; the Surrealists imagine that whatever the dredge from their subconscious selves and put down in paint and words must, essentially, be of some interest or value. I deny this. One of the arts of the poet is to make comprehensible and articulate what might emerge from the subconscious sources; one of the great main uses of the intellect is to select, from the amorphous mass of subconscious images, those that will best further his imaginative purpose, which is to write the best poem he can.”

I agree with this. Neglecting to edit through selection, deletion, reconfiguring has always seemes presumptuous and lazy to me. Five little more minutes could turn something mediocre or solipsistic into something amazing and meaningful to someone besides yourself.

Thomas finishes attempting to avoid defining poetry.

“What does it matter what poetry is, after all….All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it, however tragic it may be. All that matters is the eternal movement behind it, the vast undercurrent of human grief, folly, pretension, exaltation, or ignorance, however unlofty the intention of the poem.”

“You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick…But you’re back again where you began. You’re back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder in.”

And that's pretty much all you have to say about that.

NaPoWriMo 2022 Demographics

Records

Updated (March 16, 2022):

Ok so the mix of songs has, for the most part, been nailed down. Some happy things; some unhappy things. I think a good balance. Despite the completely nailed-down title ("A Field of Music: 30 Love Songs Incorrectly Explained"), not all of the songs are popular, nor will they necessarily be incorrectly explained (although tangents might ensue). Oh and there's a three-song interlude plus one poem with two songs so there are actually 33 of them. So there's that. 

I ran some demographics on my choices just to see how I did. I completely disregarded genre because I didn't care about that nebulousness. But here is some other information:

  • Songs by men: 20
  • Songs by women: 12
  • Songs by white people: 27
  • Songs by people of color: 5 (that's not so great)
  • Songs from the 1950s: 2
  • Songs from the 1960s: 6
  • Songs from the 1970s: 6
  • Songs from the 1980s: 10
  • Songs from decades after the 1980s: 9
    (because everything after I graduated high school is contemporary to me).

 

NaPoWriMo 2022 is Coming

BoomboxIt's almost time for NaPoWriMo again. I have two more years to finish before I hit my goal of 300 NaPoWriMo poems to assemble into a book. 

So…I couldn't figure out what to do this year and had decided maybe I would just follow the official NaPoWriMo prompts; but then it occurred to me I had already planned to follow the NaPoWriMo prompts in the final year (which would be next year) in a set of interactive poems I'm already working on a list for.

I've been enjoying writing from pop-songs recently, so I decided to do a set called Field of Music: 30 Popular Love Songs Incorrectly Explained. Look for that starting April 1.

If you're interested in joining this year's challenge, find more information here: https://www.napowrimo.net/.

New Media: The Story That Started Forking Path Stories

BorgesNext in our journey through the New Media Reader textbook is a short story by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges who wrote a very influential short piece of fiction called "The Garden of Forking Paths" (1941).

Here's the translation from my book, also the original translation by Donald A. Yates.

Here's another translation I found online that isn't as good by Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd.

The difference can be seen clearly in the final words between:

  • "infinite penitence and sickness of the heart" (Temple/Todd)

    and

    – "innumerable contrition and weariness" (Yates). 

Maybe I'm just partial to the words I read first. But the language in the first story was evocative enough that not only did I read the story twice, but created a cut-out poem from it.

Anyway, the heart of the story is a conversation about narrative direction (or directions) and possible alternate, simultaneous narratives, like Quantum Mechanics talks about.

The story is about an Asian soldier in the British Army during World War I. He is a spy for the Germans and is about to be discovered and arrested before he can send his final message. 

He picks a very random but secret message delivery method and then goes about trying to make it happen. He encounters a random person who just so happens to have the key to a long-held family mystery of his and in the process of their conversation the man explains to him the idea of narrative forking.

The story itself soon becomes as an illustration of narrative alternatives and "innumerable outcomes."

Often referenced as ground zero for narrative forking, this story spawned the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books and similar digital variations. 

It's worth checking out.

More information about the story.

The Essay Project: Postmodernism and Childhood Inspirations

HoldenThis week we're tackling two essays. The first one is another essay by Jonathan Holden (two in a row!), "Postmodern Poetic Form: A Theory" available on JSTOR. 

This is a very interesting essay where Holden takes issue with the admittedly vague definitions out there for what postmodernism is, particularly because all the postmodern poets don't seem to fit into definitions suggested by many literary critics.

For example, for Jerome Mazzaro who says, "…modernism seeks to restore the original state often by proposing silence or the destruction of language; postmodernism accepts the divising and uses language and self-definition…as the basis of identity." Modernism is more mystical, he says, "whereas postmodernism, for all its seeming mysticism, is irrevocably wordly and social." T.S. Eliot, he notes, insisted modernism "'is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality,' postmodernists propose the opposite."

Holden says this leaves out a lot of romantic, psychological-pastoral poets like Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, James Wright and Gary Snyder.

Holden translates Harold-Bloom-speak as another example:

"postmodern poetry shuns confessional, strives toward organic form, and is therefore transcendental, part of a tradition that goes back to Emerson."

Holden says this leaves out the postmodern confessionalists like Carolyn Forché, Louis Glück and "radically misunderstands stands the creative process."

Radically. Well now.

Holden defines postmodernism this way:

"…poets have increasingly turned to non-literary analogues such as conversation, confession, dream and other kinds of discourse as substitutes for the ousted 'fixed forms,' substitutes which in many cases carry with them assumptions about rhetoric which are distinctly anti-modernist…poets are attempting to recover some of the favorable conditions for poetry…before the triumph of modernism."    

Holden quotes Robert Hillyer in defining what postmodernists might find lacking about modernism:

 This general rejection of humanity, this stripping away of a mystery and aspiration is the result of a materialistic, mechanistic point of view so closely allied to the self-destructive elements of the age."

Hillyer, among many, many other things, also misses the music of meter when he says "we are metrical creatures in a metrical universe."

And Holden sympathizes with Hillyer when he says,

"While the great modernist experiments see themselves as specialists, and it is no accident that the metaphor at the heart of Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' is drawn from chemistry: it required  'scientists' to synthesize the new compounds, the new 'art-emotions' that would replace the old. But the resulting losses were immense and have not yet been fully tallied. Just as Hillyer complained, the revolution has left the poet in America a bureaucratic specialist isolated in a university as in a laboratory, conducting endless experiments with poetic form, and in an adversary relation to the general culture."

Amen to all that; but this is not supposed to be an essay on modernism, but postmodernism. Four pages later, we get back to that.

Holden says our poems fit formal "analogue" categories. One of Allen Ginsberg's long poems is a sutra; many of Richard Hugo's poems are forms of letters; William Stafford's uses a "mimeses of conversation." Louise Glück and Carolyn Forché use rhetoric which resembles religious or secular confession. Galway Kinnell's poems are like "primitive song." 

Postmodern forms often use non-literary forms. 

He quotes a conversation poem by Gary Gildner, "First Practice" and says "the conversational analogue…is the most difficult one, because it places extreme demands on the speaker to be casually brilliant."

Holden says "without the notion of an analogue…it is nearly impossible to describe [the] poem's form at all, let alone account for it. Is it a lyric…is it narrative…" etc. "The more we list characteristics, the more we implicitly regard this poem's 'form'….and are drawn toward an organic conception of the poem's form. Our analogical account of its form, however, is more accurate."

He's referring to Denise Levertov and Harold Bloom's idea that all poems are organically formed as they are written. Levertov says, "form is never more than a revelation of content."

Holden says for "organicists" form "acquires such a range of reference that it becomes meaningless." Holden says it also "requires inordinate faith."

We then look at the poem "Losing Track" by Denise Levertov, a poem formed with a kind of ocean wave structure.

His conclusion about the poem:

"We also see that this 'content' would be just as recognizable if the lineation of the verses were different, if the text were written in prose, if the stanza breaks were eliminated, if the order of the sentences were different, or even if some of the diction were changed. In other words, the poem's content is largely (though, not entirely) independent of its form."

We then look at Ted Kooser's poem "A Summer Night" and Holden discusses conversation poems and says Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" is a conversation "form," Ezra Pound's "Cantos" is a fugue or an ideogram form, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is a collage and his "The Four Quartets" is based on a musical analogy.

He says postmodernists were/are dissatisfied with "the impersonality of modernism" and so they favor "communal analogues such as confession and conversation over such impersonal alalogues such as the fugue, the ideogram and the vortex."

Confession, Holden says, can take a ritual, religious aspect or a secular, psychoanalytic, testimonial aspect, "particularizing the agenda of the inner life."

"Whereas the authority of the lyric voice finds its source in tradition, the authority of the confessional voice finds its source in the authenticity of the speaker's testimony–a testimony which must, however, transcend the narrowly personal; to some extent, the persona's story must acquire, like a saint's life, a mystical significance. The persona must become a ritual scapegoat."

He then looks at an excerpt from Carolyn Forché's long poem "Return" a confessional poem about El Salvador:

Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you

tell me, are tied to something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed & grace
where you have this sense of yourself
as apart from others. It is not your right
to feel powerless. You have not returned
to your country. but to a life you never left.

 

Cynthia OzickOur next essay is from the book Fame & Folly by Cynthia Ozick, the tiny, tiny little essay called "Existing Things" which was so good (and short) I'm going to have to quote most of it.

She talks about how it was the glinting mica in the pavement that attuned her to seeing things artfully:

"If you're five years old, loitering in a syrup of sunheat, gazing at the silver-white mica-eyes in the pavement, you will at once be besieged by a strangeness: the strangeness of understanding for the very first time, that you are really alive, and that the world is really true; and the strangeness will divide into a river of wonderings.

Here is what I wondered then, among the mica-eyes:

I wondered what it would be like to know all the languages in the world.

I wondered what it would be like to be that baby under the white netting.

I wondered why, when I looked straight into the sun, I saw pure circle.

I wondered why my shadow had a shape that was not me, but nothing else; why my shadow, which was almost like a mirror, was not a mirror.

I wondered why I was thinking these things; I wondered what wondering was, and why it was spooky, and also secretly sweet—and amazingly interesting. Wondering felt akin to love—an  uncanny sort of love, not like loving your mother or father or grandmother, but something curiously and thrillingly other. Something that shone up out of mica-eyes.

Decades later, I discovered in Wordsworth's Prelude what it was:

 …those hallowed and pure motions of the sense
Which seem, in their simplicity, to own
An intellectual charm;
…those first-born affinities that fit
Our new existence to existing things.

And those existing things are all things, everything that mammal senses know, everything the human mind constructs (temples or equations), the unheard poetry….the great thirsts everywhere….First inkling, bridging our new existence to existing things."

New Media Reader: The New Stereo vs Neil Young

KeyboardTime to continue on our journey with the New Media Reader. The next essay in the book is "New Media: from Borges to HTM" by the textbook's editor, Lev Manovich.

Our editor describes new media as any computer-based artistic activities. However, that definition expands to interactive exhibits in museums and new tools of commerce, computer games, Artificial Intelligence (AI), networks, multi-media, 3D modeling (and now 3D printing), CD Roms (has-beens), DVDs (practically has-beens), animation rendering tools…

Pieces are presented and aided by computer software, algorithms, different media and semiotic logics, text parsing, image manipulations.

He says digital medias challenge our “romantic ideas of authorship" (because of the interactivity, the collectives, the on-the-fly publications).

He says digital media pieces challenge our ideas of the one-of-a-kind object (because of the infinite copies and infinite states).

He also says they challenge our ideas of a centralized distribution of control (for example, the Internet network that has bypassed the art industrial/commercial system).

Digital media challenges our deeply held conceptual, ideological and aesthetic beliefs.

Cyberculture even possibly challenges our ideas about our own human identity and culture.

The keywords are modularity, variability and automation.

On the downside, some people have developed a literal fetish for the latest technologies.

Manovich says new media is always an incorporation of the old, morphs with the old, guided conceptually by old media (just the names of tools alone: page, frame, desktop, icons, maps, zoom, pan). 

At one time proponents believed new media would build a better democracy because there would be less centralization of propaganda and that more intimacy between people online would "eliminate distance.” Disinformation and propaganda have since exploded but from de-centralized spaces (so they were half-right). 

There were worries (as there is with every single communications innovation, including the printing press and motion pictures) that new media would cause the erosion of moral values and would destroy the relationship between humans and world (which is not looking like such a crazy idea now). 

The real breakthroughs have come with "faster execution of sequences of steps, sorting, counting, compositing, changes in quantity and quality (he singles out new recent forms, like the music video and photomontage between 1985-1995). 

He then tracks a very interesting historical mesh of a timeline:

The Modernism era ends, Post-Modernism begins, new visual/special communication techniques are used to challenge societies attitudes, constructivist design, typography, cinemograph editing, montage, mainstream computers cut-and-paste, memes, windows, tables, filtering reality in new ways, collage, media assets, film, audio, raw data processed and mined, manipulating databases, search engines, simulations.

In the 1960s we saw interactive happenings, performances, installations, processes, open systems, (we didn’t always need computers for this, by the way), the principles of modern GUI were articulated, networks created and imagined…

…finally realized in the 1970s with the Internet, UNIX, object-oriented programming, better networking, workstations, real-time control, the graphical interface (Macintosh 1984), draw and paint programs, creativity tools, the first inexpensive computer, Atari with sound, video games, movies, Photoshop, (a key application of post-modernism, he says), big business goes online, government goes online, higher education goes online.

In the 1990s we have real-time networks and an exploding Internet, “a radically horizontal, non-hierarchical model of human existence in which no idea, no ideology, no value system can dominate." Fast forward to QANON and the Russians exploiting social media algorithms in 2018 and dominating the fringe of each political party, fully controlling one.

Manovich calls the Internet a “perfect metaphor for new post-Cold-War sensibility.”

It's good to remind us right now this textbook is old

The challenge to the "romantic idea of authorship" never did prove its point fully. Most humans still seek a somewhat direct communication between other humans. Engineers have been the only ones to declare this point won; we’re not even close to a consensus of artists, writers or art critics.

The same goes with the challenge to the one-of-a-kind object. Original art, the handmade culture of etsy.com all still thrive. Museums still have more stuff than they can display in a hundred years.

But the point about distribution, this is what I feel is still relevant and revolutionary. It's a double-edged sword, though. Sure, you can easily disseminate your own work now but so can everyone else. And some messages are full of much more propaganda and mind-manipulation than others.

All cultural gifts are problematic. Take Manovich’s explanation of the web browser itself as a cinema screen (I know Millennials who don't own TVs anymore), a music player (ditto: no stereos or portable devices), a museum, a library, a game console.

Just try to share with a Millennial or Gen Z person any kind of pop culture artifacts. They're a generation of people disabused of the idea that pop culture must be owned and living inside their habitats. This means sharing a mix-tape with a Millennial or Gen Z aficionado is very challenging as music (for example) has become oddly re-centralized. The Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan controversy of the day shows just how precarious that centralized stereo system can be.

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