I've been trying to decide how to classify this Storyland website, and I've decided that it falls neatly at the intersection of two different categories of electronic literature.

It is part computer-generated narrative, of the sort assembled by programs like James Meehan's Tale-Spin. But its frivolousness aligns it with sites like They Have Blogs!, or the Random Bar Joke Generator. I think of these sorts of sites language toys: they're entertaining enough, but they don't, to my mind, produce anything that takes on the status of literature. (The possible exception being the sites that are dedicated to the William Burroughs' cut-up technique, a technique which arguably possesses both a cultural critique and an occult potency.)

Forerunners of computer-generated narrative: Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale, Georges Polti's The 36 Dramatic Situations, S. Klein's plot generating software (1973).

Forerunners of language toys: Mad Libs, random number generators, Raymond Queneau's 100,000,000,000,000 Sonnets, Tristan Tzara's Dada cut-ups, surrealist games.

Labels: electronic_literature

Monday, May 20, 2002
11:11 PM
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Well, now that I have your attention...

No, seriously. Many Imaginary Year entries over the past two years have dealt with sex, and today's deals explicitly with the inability of language to adequately describe the experience of sex.

The last several entries have been leading up to this one, and over the past few weeks I've been thinking about how I wanted to handle it. At the same time, I've been engaged in this business of pulling the old fiction out of the files and revising it. All of this has reminded me of a dormant project, a book that I've wanted to write for some time now, a book of short stories which all deal with human sexual behavior.

We human beings think about sex an awful lot—at least I do—and yet there still seems to be a surprising shortage of good sexually-explicit literature. I'm not talking about erotica and porn here—those two genres certainly have substantial cottage industries. But the goal of stories within those genres is to titillate the reader—to get them off, in short—and I'm more interested in a literature that attempts to represent sexuality in a way that's honest, to communicate the ways human beings actually explore sexuality, experiment with it, mess around with it, play with it; a literature that is interested in sexual failures as well as sexual accomplishments, that examines the ways people integrate sexuality into their everyday lives. I have trouble thinking of many authors who have pursued this theme extensively—the only examples that leap to mind are Henry Miller and Philip Roth (both of whom are problematic, at best). Also Anais Nin (also problematic, but in a different way), and perhaps Jeanette Winterson?

If you have a favorite author, novel, or story, who deals with this kind of material, feel free to let me know via the comments link (or e-mail, if you're shy).

Anyway, I've been working on this book on and off for a few years now. I've written two stories for it, and about half of a third, and I have notes for a few more. The fact that the project continues to nag away at my mind must be a sign that there is some promise there.

The book's working title is How We Come.

There are all sorts of difficulties involved with representing sexuality in fiction, but I'll go into those more in a later entry.

Labels: language, sexuality, writing

1:04 PM
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Copies of my freshly-revised story "Clip Art" are now in stamped envelopes, ready to go out to potential publishers. Wish it luck as I kick it out of the nest.

Oh, right, need link: Submit!

Labels: personal, projects

Friday, May 17, 2002
1:54 PM
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The person or persons behind the strange Process Engine interview Paul Ford, of FTrain.com, on the subject of fictional web narrators.

Related: who is Ana Skyfish?

Labels: information

Wednesday, May 15, 2002
5:25 PM
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Regular readers of this weblog know that I'm interested in rule-generated music, and in the process of making any kind of art. These two ideas dovetail in the Oblique Strategies, a deck of creative suggestions designed by musician Brian Eno and painter Peter Schmidt.

I've used the Oblique Strategies with some regularity for a long time now, and I recommend them to everyone. But when I used them in my recording sessions with Chris, I found myself occasionally craving a set more tailored to the specific possibilities of group improvisation.

So a few weeks ago I made up a deck of 56 cards derived directly from my own musical process. I call these strategies the Possible Moves, and they can be found here.

If there's any interest, I'll put these up as a series of PDFs so that people can print them out and make their own decks.

Labels: creative_process, instructions

Saturday, May 11, 2002
11:20 AM
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I'm currently in the midst of a "grab the summer by its horns" kind of week.

I turned in grades on Monday, and ever since then I have been sifting through odd heaps of accumulated stuff and sorting files, in an attempt to get my living space (and my headspace) organized.

This is a precursor to my summertime work, which (this summer) will mainly consist of revising and sending out fiction for publication. I've got lots of stored-up material that just needs to be submitted in a dedicated and consistent fashion.

Today I began major revisions on an old short story of mine, "Clip Art," which I plan to have out in the mail shortly.

But just in case you were wondering, yes, I'm still here, and, yes, I plan to keep updating this weblog regularly throughout the summer (not counting a short hiatus that will be coming up at the end of May).

Labels: meta, personal

Thursday, May 09, 2002
3:20 PM
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From the liner notes to Karlheinz Stockhausen's Hymnen (a recording that I can't find available anywhere):

"Hide what you compose in what you hear.
Cover what you hear.
Place something next to what you hear.
Place something far away from what you hear.
Support what you hear.
Continue for a long time an event you hear.
Transform an event until it becomes unrecognizable.
Transform an event that you hear into the one you composed last.
Compose what you expect to come next.
Compose often, but also listen for long periods to what is already composed, without composing.
Mix all these instructions.
Increasingly accelerate the current of your intuition."

Labels: creative_process, instructions

Sunday, May 05, 2002
4:57 PM
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I went to see Anti-Pop Consortium last night.

(For those of you who don't know, Anti-Pop Consortium is a hip-hop / electronic improv band from New York, featuring veterans of both the Nuyorican Cafe poetry scene and Survival Research Labs. Their latest record, Arrythmyia, is out on WARP Records, "pioneers of weird electronic dance music.")

It was an amazing set. Philip Sherburne sums up the "live experience" quite well in last week's Needle Drops.

The only thing I'd want to add is a mention that Anti-Pop Consortium are now doing what all the best electronic musicians have done: they are imagining new ways that humans and technology can co-exist, not only peacefully, but fruitfully.

(Projected on the video screen behind their set were images of breakdancers, Marvel Comics characters, anime robot-girls, and wireframe animations of rotating skeletons and slithering machines. The same terrain seen from different viewpoints?)

Labels: music_commentary, technology

Saturday, May 04, 2002
12:00 PM
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An Umberto Eco article on the role of intellectuals in the information age.

I admire Eco a great deal, and some of his work has been deeply influential in the way I think about the world. But I found this article to be oddly disappointing, revealing a distinct lack of understanding about the way that information technologies such as the Web function in practice.

"With the Web, everyone is in the situation of having to filter information that is so vast, and so unsustainable, that if it isn't filtered it cannot be absorbed. It is filtered unsystematically, so what is the primary metaphysical risk of this business? That we'll end up with a civilization in which every person has his own system of filters, in other words where every person creates his own encyclopaedia. Now a society with five billion concurrent encyclopaedias is a society in which there is no more communication. ... We could end up with competing encyclopaedias, some of them completely wild."

A few points:

1) Evoking "five hundred billion encyclopedias" strikes me as a reductio ad absurdum argument, but I'll let that slide.

2) I'm not convinced that a world with some "wild" encyclopedias would be all that bad. Are the encyclopedias we have now truly so utterly free of ideological bias that they need no competition to keep them honest? For instance, a positive example of a "competing" text might be Exhibit A.

3) Most importantly, Eco's notion that working on your own particular set of filters precludes communication with others strikes me as ridiculous, and it completely overlooks the collaborative nature of the Web, which is exactly what has kept me working on the Web so consistently for these past four years. Collaboration, context and cross-reference are fundamental to the Web; they are literally built into the Web by virtue of hyperlink technology. Everyone who I've ever known to work on any kind of Web filter does so because they want to find other similar-minded people to communicate with: often these sorts of Web collaborations work spectacularly.

Someone actually uses the Web, and who thus seems closer to "getting" what it's all about is David Weinberger, of JOHO. From this recent entry in the JOHO weblog:

On the Web we join with others who share our passions, but we do so in our own unique voices. Sameness and difference, the ultimate contradiction. If the Web lets us resolve such a basic duality — which means embracing both sides fully and simultaneously — no wonder it matters so damn much.

Now, let me pull back from the dread disease: Ontological Overstatement. It's not as if we've never overcome this contradiction before. In fact, we resolve the duality every time we have a conversation with someone in the real world. The importance of the Web, in this regard, is that as a medium (because of its hyperlinked architecture) it enables the resolution of this duality on a scale we've never seen before.

That seems a lot more true to me than Eco's recationary apocalypticism.

Labels: information, internet

Friday, May 03, 2002
2:39 PM
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Thinking about diaries reminds me of Laurie Langbauer's interesting book Novels of Everyday Life: The Series in English Fiction, 1850-1930. In that book, she looks at the way serial novels focus on "the everyday," and she discusses the political and cultural ramifications of such a focus.

While diaries (and the related diary-based forms I discussed on Monday) are not novels, they could certainly be thought of similarly: as a serial literature of everyday life.

Langbauer:

"What distinguishes [a term like the everyday and a form like the series] from other terms and forms ... is that they foreground repetition and ongoingness. They prompt me to insist on process."

The notion of process is an important one to me. I''ve begun to grow less and less interested in artworks (writings, paintings, songs) that present themselves as a completed, standalone work, and more and more interested in artworks that document the way a mind holds a nagging idea up to the light every which way, works and reworks particular sets of material, pursues themes, makes mistakes, tries strategies, abandons some, salvages others.

Georges Perec:

"Exclusively preoccupied with its great capitals (Work, Style, Inspiration, World-Vision, Fundamental Options, Genius, Creation, etc.), literary history seems deliberately to ignore writing as practice, as work, as play."

As Chris and I were putting together the Number None CD, we considered the model put forth by albums like The Faust Tapes or the Tower Recordings' Folkscene, albums which are less about presenting a particular set of "finished" songs and which are more about compiling a pile of promising odds and ends, weird experiments that blur into one another, unfinished bits and pieces, a portrait of the studio-in-process. (We eventually decided to err on the side of the more traditional album, but the model here still holds potential, and may be something that we explore more in the future.)

(Idea: the "process" album as a kind of companion-piece to the "official" album. I can say with great certainty that I'd love to hear a disc of, say, whatever was left on the cutting-room floor after the recording of Vision Creation New Sun, or abandoned experiments from the Beck/Dust Brothers Odelay sessions, and I can't be alone in that.)

Josef links to the Praystation CD-ROM, which contains 397 folders which hold all the data that Praystation mastermind Joshua Davis collected over the course of a year: "All original source files, art files, text files, accidents, epiphanies, etc." This SaskiWoxi album, also linked to from Josef, seems to be set up similarly.

These ideas seem hot with promise.

Labels: creative_process, writing

Thursday, May 02, 2002
12:37 PM
0 comments