|
Friday, January 30, 2004 ::
6:53 PM ::
closed cultural groups
"In the Icelandic skalds too much clarity is considered a technical fault. The Greeks also required the poet's word to be dark ... Modern schools of lyric ... with their restricted circle of readers ... are a closed cultural group of very ancient descent."
—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens
I'm teaching Intro to Lit for the first time this semester, which means that for pretty much the first time ever I'm attempting to teach poetry. It's an interesting experience. It feels a little bit like my job is to induct a few of these students (and it will be a select few) into that closed cultural circle Huizinga is describing...
College profs often say that you should never try to teach the writers you love the most, because invariably (the truism goes) your students will be bored or indifferent to these writers, and your heart will break. I'm starting to realize that as much as I love the John Ashbery poems in the anthology we're using, I cannot teach them: my appreciation for them is so fundamental that I do not know how to explain them adequately to anyone who is not my double.
That said, here's a nice introductory essay, in the form of a review of a John Ashbery audio-book.
Labels: poetry_commentary, teaching
url for this entry |
0 comments
Wednesday, January 28, 2004 ::
3:54 PM ::
social networking and its discontents III
Over at Black Belt Jones, Matt is attempting to use social networking technology to attain a specific goal: he wants to sit down and talk to Brian Eno within the next two months.
This experiment reminds me of the chapter in Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone where he critiques the Web because it primarily provides its users with information, and fails to fulfill desires for anything other than more information. For Bey, information is useful only inasmuch as it enables the fulfillment of real-world desires (especially forbidden / illegal ones), and he views most of the information available through the Web as irrelevant to attaining these desires. Dating sites like Nerve, or social networking sites like Friendster, which hadn't emerged at the time of Bey's writing, present themselves as tools for the fulfillment of specific real-world desires (friendship, sex, lunch with Brian Eno), and, as such, they seem to be offering the right carrot, but the real question is how effective they are at delivering on this promise. So I'll be intrigued to see whether Matt Jones gets his wish. Labels: internet, networks, rants
url for this entry |
0 comments
Tuesday, January 27, 2004 ::
2:39 PM ::
social networking and its discontents II
Darren B writes in to ask "What is it people expect of networking websites that isn't being delivered?"
Let's take an example of a real-world situation that I'd like to be able to use this sort of site for.
Let's say a friend invites me to a party at her place. I don't know many of her friends, but I know she has a Friendster profile, so I think "maybe if I browse her friends via Friendster I'll be able to see who might be coming to this party, so that I can find someone who might share my interests, someone who I might be interested in talking to." So I go check out her profile. There are 50 friends listed there (commonly more). I click on the first one, oops, that's someone from Maine. I click on the second one, that person's from Somerville, MA. I click on the third one, that's a fakester profile for "Beer." Suddenly clicking through the other 47 is seeming less appealing.
At this juncture there are three things I'd like to do that Friendster won't let me do:
1. Arrange the list. In this case I'd like to put the people who live closest to me at the top. Sorting it so that people who shared multiple connections to me might be interesting; I can also see wanting to sort the list by gender, or by who's single. But I can't do any of these things.
2. Search within the list. Within this group of people, who lives in Chicago? Who shares my interests? Who's single? Is there a way to find out without having to click 50 times?
3. Barring a way to arrange the list or perform a sub-search, I'd like to be able to at least quickly browse all the friends linked to my friend's page for some useful basic information. Which of them live in Chicago? A little blurb under the photo with just their location would at least enable me to know more-or-less at a glance which of these people I have a realistic opportunity to get to know. But all I can see are their names and, in some cases, their faces: information that holds no meaning given what I am trying to do.
I think Friendster has lost sight of the fact that the information that's most useful to us when looking for friends or people to date is local information. Friendster should be continually sifting by geographic proximity as well as degrees-of-separation proximity. Not "here's a random person in your network" but "here's someone in your network who lives next door."
Internet networking makes it easy to connect to people all over the globe, but unless I'm looking for correspondents, knowing that I'm two degrees of separation from someone who shares my interests but lives in Wyoming does me very little good. What I want Friendster to tell me is that I'm two degrees of separation from someone who shares my interests and lives two subway stops away. And the really frustrating thing is that Friendster has that information, but its interface isn't smart enough to let me ask for it.
To be continued (when Friendster repairs its broken search feature). Labels: internet, networks, rants
url for this entry |
0 comments
Monday, January 26, 2004 ::
7:02 PM ::
social networking and its discontents
I just joined Orkut, as I joined Tribe before that, and Friendster before that.
But I have to admit, I don't quite get the appeal of networking websites.
And it looks like Warren Ellis feels the same way: "[W]hat can you actually do aside from invite all your friends and piss about on a couple of small message boards? ... What happens after that? After you've gotten all your friends in—whom you send email to or IM regularly in any case, presumably. That's it. All done. Until, I guess, yet another social network system opens and you start all over again."
In fairness, I can see how they'd be interesting to study (see Danah Boyd's Apophenia, or, even more relevantly, the archives of her defunct Connected Selves blog). But, even with my interest in networking technology, my experience is similar to Ellis': I go to the sites, sign up, wander around for a bit browsing the profiles of strangers, and then wander away.
I might feel differently if I were actively looking to date someone new (I'm not) or if I were trying to do business networking (?).
Have any of you had rewarding experiences with these sites? E-mail me at jeremy [at] invisible-city.com.
Related: Village Voice article which draws rather lazy analogies between Mark Lombardi's drawings, Friendster, and a species of invasive blackberry (Rubus armeniacus). Labels: internet, networks, rants
url for this entry |
0 comments
Sunday, January 25, 2004 ::
10:17 PM ::
self-referentiality II
In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan wrote: "The first items in the press to which [people] turn are the ones about which they already know."
With that in mind, I turn your attention to Michael Rivero's thousand-word review of the weblog you are now reading.
url for this entry |
0 comments
Saturday, January 24, 2004 ::
12:49 PM ::
tucson poems / self-referentiality
The Tucson issue of poetry webmagazine Can We Have Our Ball Back.
Disclaimer: I know ten of the people in this issue, and at least one of them I dated. Put that in your social network analysis visualization schema and smoke it. Labels: internet, networks
url for this entry |
0 comments
Friday, January 23, 2004 ::
4:07 PM ::
infoporn
Friendship Choices Among Fourth Graders
An article documenting examples of pictorial images in social network analysis.
Related: Connecting the Dots, a use of social network analysis to identify terrorist networks (documented in the Business 2.0 article "Six Degrees of Mohamed Atta," now available to subscribers only.)
And no discussion of attempts to map "covert networks" is complete without mention of Mark Lombardi's hand-drawn documentations of capitalist power and influence. Iran-Contra makes the friendship choices among fourth graders seem like, well, child's play in comparison. Labels: internet, networks
url for this entry |
0 comments
Wednesday, January 21, 2004 ::
9:25 AM ::
five questions
I'm taking part in an interview game introduced to me by Angela. The rules:
1 - E-mail me, saying you want to be interviewed. (My e-mail address is jeremy [at] invisible-city.com.)
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal / blog with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.
So: what follows are Angela's questions for me and my answers.
1. How often do people you know (besides me) react to "seeing themselves" in Imaginary Year chapters?
Not as often as I steal from them. I'm a scavenger by nature, and the lives of the people who are close to me are a great source of raw material. Sometimes I just lift huge chunks of experience and put them in the work almost verbatim, but more commonly the act of reflection that's going on is more indirect. It's more like the lives of my friends represent to me a (enormously broad) pool of "believable" experience, and so when imagining the lives of my fictional characters, I know that if I draw elements from that pool the characters will seem more believable. I'm especially concerned with wanting my female characters to seem believable, because I don't have firsthand experience of what it's like to be a woman in this culture, and I don't want to "get it wrong." To a certain degree I can imagine what it's like, or infer it from how it feels to be a man (I don't think the two "subject positions" are completely alien to one another), but I also rely heavily on the experiences that women have told me about in conversations (or have written about in their novels, poems, blogs, LiveJournals, zines, etc.)
How do you respond to them?
I'm always pleased to hear that people are reading, so when someone remarks about seeing themselves in the work, I feel complimented. Usually what I most want to ask is whether they feel like I got the tenor of the experience right, whether I described it in a way that feels true to them.
2. If you had the power to change one person's mind about one important thing, who would you pick, and why?
I think it is unethical to (forcibly) change other people's minds. So I'd have to find an instance where I think the eventual benefits might be worth violating my own ethical stance. This probably means making George W. Bush a pacifist.
3. Would it be better to be a popular writer with lots of money but lukewarm critical response, or a writer who makes just enough to live on but is critically acclaimed? Why?
I have very little interest in being popular. I am clear-eyed enough to know that the topics I personally feel most interested in are relatively unpopular, and the works of art that most speak to me—the ones I would most like to emulate with my own work—are ones focused on unpopular themes, perhaps to the point of indulgence. Any work that fits this bill is unlikely to attain major mainstream success.
Critics, though, also tend to be people who are deeply interested in relatively unpopular topics, and, inasmuch as this is true, they tend to be people who are more like me than the average person. As a result the opinion of a small number of critics is more important to me than the opinion of a large number of anonymous people: it feels more like the judgment of people who I would consider to be my peers in a meaningful way.
As for the money question: there are so few fiction writers that even make enough to live on directly off of their writing that I treat the financial dimension of writing as entirely negligible.
4. I know you have said you're not interested in raising children. If you had a female friend who wanted you to father her child but take no further responsibility, how would you respond?
I don't feel very comfortable with this idea, for many reasons. The primary one is that I'd feel highly curious about how the child was "turning out," and I imagine that this would translate into a strong impulse to take more responsibility, probably in the form of meddling in some way—I think it's clear that all the ingredients necessary for some hideous boondoggle are present here. Even if I could resist the impulse to interfere, there is no guarantee that the child would not thrust some sort of responsibility upon me once he or she got old enough to do so. The only possible safeguard is to deceive the child in some sort of enormous way—which I think is powerfully unethical.
5. If you had an extra day a week, what would you spend it doing?
Probably the same things I'm doing now: reading books, hanging out with cute girls, and trying to make art. Labels: personal, writing
url for this entry |
0 comments
Tuesday, January 20, 2004 ::
3:26 PM ::
emergent politics
Napster Runs For President —a New York Times article about the way that the Dean campaign was aided by network technologies. Its optimistic tone seems abruptly dated after Iowa delivered its horrible hit to the Dean campaign, but an interesting read nonetheless.
Found through Metal Machine Music.
url for this entry |
0 comments
Thursday, January 15, 2004 ::
3:20 PM ::
[grid :: ritual] a prayer
[Today is the second experiment in "grid blogging" led by Ashley Benigno; this time on the theme of "ritual." Links to the various participating blogs can be found here.]
I don't pray regularly, but if I were to say a nightly prayer, it might look something like this passage from Samuel Delany's Dhalgren:
"I am limited, finite, and fixed. I am in terror of the infinity before me, having come through the one behind bringing no knowledge I can take on. I commend myself up to what is greater than I, and try to be good. That is wrestling with what I have been given. Do I rage at what I have not? (Is infinity some illusion generated by the way in which time is perceived?) I try to end this pride and rage and commend myself to what is there, instead of illusion. But the veil is the juncture of the perceived and perception. And what in life can rip that? Is the only prayer, then, to live steadily and dully, doing and doubting what the mind demands? I rage for reasons, cry for pity. Do with me what way you will."
url for this entry |
0 comments
Wednesday, January 14, 2004 ::
10:26 PM ::
hooray for people
Nick's taxonomy of Internet bookmarks. (This link will load it as a navigable sidebar, very cool.)
Angela's 100 favorite things list. Labels: lists
url for this entry |
0 comments
Tuesday, January 13, 2004 ::
5:03 PM ::
twisty little passages II
Early in Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages : An Approach to Interactive Fiction, Montfort makes a convincing case for using the term "interactive fiction" to describe the sort of electronic literature that he's writing about. I like the designator, partially because, as Montfort points out, it enjoys widespread usage, but also because it can be precisely located in a hierarchy of related descriptors. Specifically, it is a little bit more inclusive than the term "text adventure" (not all pieces of interactive fiction need to be "adventures") and a little bit less inclusive than my term command-line literature (not all pieces of command-line literature need to be "fictional").
(An aside: for those of you who aren't really sure what interactive fiction is, this page might give you a basic handle on the form.)
So. Within the first ten pages of Twisty Little Passages, Montfort remarks on the need for "a book-sized resource on interactive fiction's history and implications—one that considers how the form came into being and how it developed through the decades, with basic theoretical discussions of the nature of the form and at least an introductory critical discussion of important works," and it is apparent that the rest of the book intends to fill that need. To quibble with the book's subtitle, one could argue that the different strands in that list do not really constitute a single "approach," but rather several different approaches: there's really enough there to fill a couple of different books. By attempting to tackle each of them in a single concise volume, a certain scantiness ensues (I had no trouble completing the book in a day), but Montfort deserves credit for ambitiously staking out the territory: other scholars of electronic literature will undoubtedly see this book as a valuable starting point to branch off from.
The most successful chapters, to me, are the ones that consider "how the form came into being and how it developed through the decades." The history of Zork and Adventure's development is especially interesting reading, as is the overview of the contemporary IF scene, which has apparently thrived as a non-commercial subculture in the years following the decline of Infocom and other commercial IF publishers. Montfort's critical overview of the major IF works (of the both the commercial and post-commercial era) is pretty condensed—only the most important works get more than a page or two—but valuable nevertheless: I'm hard-pressed to say that I'd trade it for a deeper read into a smaller handful of works. That can come later.
The weaker chapters are the ones that attempt a theory of the form. The first chapter does some decent work establishing a useful terminology with which to discuss IF works: distinguishing between replies and reports, for instance, or distinguishing between which commands are digetic and which are extradigetic. This material, however, is dispensed with in under ten pages, and is forced to share space in this first chapter with the standard "what is interactive fiction?" boilerplate.
The second chapter, probably the book's weakest, unconvincingly attempts to situate the text adventure within the literary tradition of the riddle. Some of the parallels that Montfort attempts to draw have numerous exceptions: for instance, although it is true that riddles are "presented for solution," it is less true that all interactive fiction can (or should) be thought of as doing the same: for instance, notice that many of the IF works available through Adam Cadre's IF page are said to contain "almost no gamelike elements." ("If stuck, just keep exploring," Cadre writes of his latest work, and, in the release notes, he writes "even if you get to an ending, you may have only seen a small fraction of what's possible," neither of which seem like statements that usefully apply to any riddle I know of.)
I take less issue (at least initially) with Montfort's statement that interactive fiction creates a systematic world, but again, the parallel flags for me: is it accurate to say that a riddle also creates this sort of world? Perhaps technically, but the experience of solving a riddle feels to me substantially different from the far more immersive and ludic experience of exploring the world of a work of interactive fiction.
I think Montfort is more on the mark when he touches on the idea of IF as a "literary machine" or what Espen Aarseth would call "ergodic literature." The literary tradition there dates back at least as far as that of the riddle: the I Ching is commonly cited (including by Montfort) as a "literary machine" that dates back to antiquity.
Quibbles aside, I'd highly recommend this book to anyone studying electronic writing, and I even think that most of it is accessible enough to be of interest to people who remember the old Infocom games fondly and might have an interest in seeing what's new in the field. Labels: book_commentary, electronic_literature, interactive_fiction
url for this entry |
0 comments
Sunday, January 11, 2004 ::
9:13 PM ::
new music
Some new music reviews over there in the sidebar, plus a new mix CD available through the Raccoon Mix Exchange. This one is all drone works, from Japan, the US, and the UK.
url for this entry |
0 comments
Saturday, January 10, 2004 ::
2:43 PM ::
rules of play
One of the books I got for Christmas that I'm most excited about is Rules of Play : Game Design Fundamentals, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.
I think you can learn a lot about a book from its index, and this book is no exception:
Tetris
and cultural context, 86
endpoint, 259
experiential play, 86
formal rules, 86-87
information in, 210
metacommunication, 452
pleasure, 330, 341
protective frame, 95
rules, 143-144, 145-146
as simulation, 425
I read a huge chunk of the book almost as soon as I got it, but progress is currently on hold until I finish making my syllabi for the new semester. However, the blogosphere is already buzzing about the book, see this entry over at Confectious or, for a slightly more critical take, this entry at Antimodal. My own notes may appear in this space at some point but right now the priority is to do a write-up on Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages. Labels: book_commentary
url for this entry |
0 comments
Friday, January 09, 2004 ::
8:18 PM ::
taxonomies II
I am a lover not only of lists but taxonomies as well. So it's kind of a surprise (to me, anyway) that my "Favorites" list in Internet Explorer has always been a huge list of disorganized links. (This is, in part, explainable by the fact that most of the sites that genuinely qualify as my "favorites" are arranged here.)
But no matter. The point is that tonight, in a desperate attempt to avoid work that urgently needs to be done, I spent a few hours arranging all of the links in the Favorites list into a file hierarchy, which reads as follows:
Weblogs (contains only weblogs that I'm "trying out," those which haven't yet graduated to the sidebar or the portal; 26 sites)
Narrative and Narrative Technology (contains mostly sites that haven't yet been archived in this blog or in the old Narrative Technologies blog; 10 sites)
Sound (the only file which contains subfiles, which are: Review Sites (only those which haven't yet graduated to the portal) Sound Archives, Labels, and Miscellaneous Resources; 11 sites in all)
Poetry, Lit, Publishing (8 sites)
Interesting Projects (6 sites)
Blog This (5 sites, will eventually ideally be empty)
Magazine-esque (4 sites)
Tools and Toys (3 sites)
Politics, Paranoia (2 sites)
Images (2 sites)
Academia (2 sites)
Webculture (1 site)
Cooking (1 site)
Chicago-related (1 site)
Teachable (1 site)
404 (sites that weren't available tonight but which might just be temporarily down; 10 sites)
Most of these folders are pretty paltry, but now that the list is more navigable I'll perhaps find it more useful to add sites to it.
I'd love to know how other people have their favorites arranged. Send your taxonomies to Jeremy [at] invisible-city.com and let me know if I can archive them here in a future post.
url for this entry |
0 comments
::
1:19 PM ::
invisible networks
This sounds like it might be fun:
"Version>04 will occur April 16- May 1st, 2004. [During this time,] collectives and nomadic societies of artmakers, musicans, resisters, bikers, radical cheerleaders, activists, journalists, theorists, cultural workers, performance artists, urban shamans, political immigrants, programmers and mediamakers are invited to swarm Chicago in order to build, deconstruct, and make public the networks of contemporary social, political and cultural practices that are reweaving strategies for building another future.
"During Version>04 the public and private spaces will reveal the communications and strategies of disobedients, government agencies, psychogeographers, surveillance players, public interventionists, rogue agents, space hijackers, covert operators, digital detourners and urban planners. "
url for this entry |
0 comments
Thursday, January 08, 2004 ::
5:32 PM ::
a year in books II
Total number of books I read in 2003: 62 (full list)
Novels / novellas : 19
Collections of poetry: 15
Collections of short stories: 8
Books on science / technology (including narrative technologies) : 6
Books on religion : 3 (4 if you include Ecclesiastes)
Graphic novels / cartoon anthologies : 3
Books of literary or cultural criticism : 2
Authors I read in 2003 who have written at least one book I read prior to 2003: 15 (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lyn Hejinian, G. B. Trudeau, Neal Stephenson, Douglas Coupland, Rem Koolhaas, Bruce Sterling, J.G. Ballard, Don DeLillo, Margeurite Duras, William Gibson, Grant Morrison, Haruki Murakami, Lorrie Moore, Stephen Johnson)
Books I read in 2003 that I read at least once prior to 2003: 1 (Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash)
Even though I have the geek's deep love of list-making, I think the variety in this year's list of books makes it impossible to come up with a meaningful scheme of ranking them. That said, every single page of Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End, Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, and Barrett Watten's Plasma / Paralleles / "X" amazed me in some fashion or another. The enormous sheaf of Rem Koolhaas' Mutations contained about 100 pages that excited me more than almost anything else I read all year and wins bonus points for being the book that most pushed the boundaries of quote-unquote "the book." And, although they differ in almost every other meaningful way, Michael Warner's The Trouble With Normal and Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in The Bicameral Mind each argued an unpopular point of view with a spectacular audacity that made them equivalent pleasures.
Last note: counting up the number of books one reads in a year inevitably leads one to morbidly contemplate how many more one will probably read in his or her lifetime. (If I continue reading at this year's rate until I'm 75 years old I end up getting to read about 2,700 more.) Some, like Dan Hill, lament the inevitably dinky size of the calculated number, others, like Darren Bauler, wonder whether the number shouldn't be even smaller.
url for this entry |
0 comments
archive >>
|
