The famous Lord Sluk has written an interesting post on dream-journaling as a sort of negotiation process between the unconscious and the ego. This jibes with my own experience of dream-journaling, and also with my current project, where I've been writing poems in a semi-conscious state.

My response, in part, reads:

"In [my] semi-awake state I have a greater ability to allow unconscious material / intuitive connections into my mind. I have been looking at the process of writing these poems very much as a process of training—ideally I am trying to learn to trust the value of these sorts of intuitions and impulses... I'd like to be able to coax them out / access them more regularly during waking hours. As it is, they begin to emerge sometimes and then I (the ego) just immediately clamp(s) down on them.

Sometimes even in my semi-awake state the conscious mind barges in and begins to question the value of the unconscious material / juxtapositions, which tends to bring the entire process of the poem to a screeching halt.

In short, I'm trying to let my unconscious mind colonize my conscious mind, rather than vice versa. But perhaps Sluk's metaphor of the two establishing dialogue is the more generous metaphor here.

I promised that if I worked up the nerve I'd post some of the poems here, but probably a better place for them is my dormant LiveJournal, which had previously been my dream journal. Here's today's.

Labels: writing

Monday, March 29, 2004
2:10 PM
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I ended up skipping the two main things that I had planned to do during the AWP conference: namely, last night's Lorrie Moore reading and Friday night's Bridge / ACM party. Instead both nights, craving something more intimate, I went to AWP-related Discrete Series readings, at the Elastic Revolution space, which is right in my neighborhood.

These events were "headlined" by well-established poets (Maxine Chernoff, Cole Swensen, Pierre Jouris, and Paul Hoover) but I also enjoyed listening to the younger "opening acts," whose work I had not been familiar with previously.

Here are a few of them, and some samples of their work:

Chuck Stebelton (in Shampoo, in Diagram)

Kaia Sand (Five poems on the D.C. Poetry site)

Dan Machlin (Seven poems on the St. Mark's Poetry Project site)

Ray Bianchi (who runs a blog and The Chicago Postmodern Poetry Calendar)

Related: the two folks who run the Discrete Series, Kerri Sonnenberg and Jesse Seldess, each edit experimental journals: they are (repsectively) Conundrum and Antennae, which appears to have no web presence.

Tomorrow I get back to my real life, such as it is.

Labels: academia

Sunday, March 28, 2004
9:24 PM
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Went to a panel yesterday morning on the "DIY Web," which was basically a discussion on the way that poets are using blogs and listservs. I copied down a ton of links and even though I haven't really had time to sift (I've been running from event from event all week), but here are a few that immediately struck me as worth further investigation:

The online journal Unpleasant Event Schedule

Group poetry blog As/Is

Review site Bookslut

Experimental poetics site One Mississippi, particularly the paint chip poems.

More later—

Saturday, March 27, 2004
8:11 AM
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So far, the most intriguing things I've seen on the exhibition floor of the AWP Conference have been the tables of Verse Press and 3rd Bed. I'm strongly considering going on a buying spree tomorrow: I'm particularly drawn to Joshua Beckman's Your Time Has Come and Eric Baus' The To Sound (at the Verse table) and James Wagner's The False Sun Recordings (at the 3rd Bed table).

Labels: academia

Thursday, March 25, 2004
7:33 PM
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I'll be at the Associated Writing Programs Conference this week, so blog entries might be somewhat sparse (although I'll blog my conference notes if I take any that are interesting).

But first:

Many of you may have followed the story of the creation and supression of DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, which mixes together elements of Jay-Z's Black Album with the Beatles' "White Album." (See the Grey Tuesday site for more information about how people have publicized and disseminated the album.)

In the wake of the Grey Album came the wonderful Jay-Z Construction Set, "a toolkit with all of the necessary software and raw material to create a new remix of Jay-Z's Black Album. It includes nine different variations on the Black Album, over 1200 clip art images, and a couple hundred meg of classic samples and breaks." This strikes me as fabulous, for reasons well-enumerated in this article, which suggests that music companies could do worse than to follow the "videogame content creation model."

As one would expect, highly inventive re-mixes are beginning to pop up all over. The one I'm most partial to is Black on Black, which mixes Jay-Z's Black Album with Metallica's Black Album. You can probably track this down online through using a bit torrent utility, or I'd be happy to trade my copy of it for something, at least until I get the cease-and-desist from Metallica's attorneys.

Labels: music_commentary

Wednesday, March 24, 2004
12:09 PM
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There are lots of reasons why I sometimes wish that I still lived in Philadelphia; this passage in the new issue of The Wire is only the one that's most recently come to my attention:

"[T]he Fishtown area in the north-east of the city is rapidly becoming a lightning rod for some of the key players in the contemporary sub-underground, so much so that the Philadelphia Weekly recently ran a piece entitled 'The New Weird Neighbors' ... Kings of fuzz Bardo Pond have long made Fishtown their home but now Frankford Avenue boasts folk group Espers, sound artist Eric Carbonara, repatriated English folk spirit Sharron Kraus and Christina Carter of Scorces and Charalambides. Heather Leigh Murray, Carter's partner in Charalambides and a solo artist in her own right, now lives around the corner, as does Jack Rose of improvising ensemble Pelt, and Fursaxa's Tara Burke. Such a focused assembly of leftfield musicians has resulted in a creative rethink of performance options, with intimate shows at local houses and backyard performances supplanting club and bar gigs..."

A lot of the people on that list are among my favorite artists working at the moment.

Urban readers: anything exciting going on in your city right now? Musical or otherwise?

Sunday, March 21, 2004
12:04 PM
0 comments

It looks like comments are finally re-enabled for this blog, thanks to Haloscan.

Thanks also to C., who brought Haloscan to my attention.

Friday, March 19, 2004
4:38 PM
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Bear with me for a second here, but: should computers have genitals?

This is a question I've been asking myself since last week, when I went to go see Robot Stories, a collection of four robot-themed short films by Greg Pak that apparently won the Florida Film Festival's Special Jury Award for Emotional Truth. (!)

Three of the four films are science fiction, and while Pak seems to be a competent filmmaker, I can't say that I found his SF futures particularly well-conceived—his knack for the little details that make a future seem well-realized struck me as totally off.

In any case, one piece, "Machine Love," takes place in a future in which corporations utilize androids as sort of hyper-efficient temps. Two androids who work in adjacent buildings spot one another through the window, and, predictably (spoiler follows), fall in love, eventually meeting up and having a sort of "android sex," which involves them stroking one another's input ports, etc.

Emotional truth aside, this is a good example of the kind of fuzzy SF that operates in this film—to buy this vision, one needs to believe in a future where the android-manufacturers (modeled loosely after Apple in this film) don't forsee that two of their products might eventually work in close proximity to one another, and don't bother to take pains to, oh, I don't know, engineer this interaction to insure that it doesn't go so utterly haywire with so little provocation.

However, this complaint got me to thinking, what would happen if a forward-thinking designer designed the androids to fall in love and have "sex"? It's clearly supposed to be an anomaly in the film, but there could very well be a good reason to do enable them to do this. The androids in the film are adaptive—and while, in the film, they mostly "adapt" by picking up the lingo of their co-workers, one can imagine that a good android of this sort might also be able to learn various "expert strategies" used by skilled coworkers. Two adaptive androids, networked together, could potentially "breed" these strategies with one another, to yield a series of potentially new workplace strategies, some of which would be effective and could "survive," others which would not be effective and which would "die off," in the fashion of evolutionary algorithms.

This line of thought started me thinking "ok, well, what if, say, IPods could mate with one another?" One obvious application of networked IPods would be data transfer—two IPods could figure out which songs they shared in common, and download all the non-redundant songs from the other person's collection, akin to the way that Pokemon gamers can swap creatures through their networked GameBoys. But this isn't "reproductive" in the sense that I mean it: it turns the two entities involved into clones of one another rather than creating a unique new entity. Something more akin to what I have in mind could work at the level of the playlist: if each of us have a playlist called, say, "Roadtrip," we could network our IPods together and have them generate a series of recombinant playlists ("Roadtrip Jr."), each featuring a random selection of songs from each of our respective playlists. Sexy!

Or why not make hybrids at the level of the songs themselves? Once a song is converted to a digital format it becomes possible to perform mathematical operations on it; it should be possible to take any two songs and "breed" them—this is more or less what the eerily listenable Eigenradio is already doing. Most of what would result might be trash, but let enough people fool around with it and a fan culture would undoubtedly spring up, akin to mashup culture—people would want to showcase surprising / compelling / satisfying "offspring" that they'd created. And then there's the offspring of the offspring...

This could work with word-processing documents, too: check out The Dublin of Dr. Moreau (PDF), the offspring of James Joyce's Dubliners and H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr Moreau created (at least in part) by the textual analysis software Gnoetry (thanks to Grand Text Auto for introducing me to Gnoetry).

Thursday, March 18, 2004
9:45 PM
0 comments

A while ago, in one of my social software critiques, I wrote:

"What would actually be useful is to be able to rate my friends in terms of the intensity of the bond between us. There are eight people currently listed as my friends in Orkut. I am, indeed, fond of them all. But two of them I've never met. Two more I've only met on one occasion. One is a casual acquaintance who I haven't had contact with since he moved away from Chicago six months (or so) ago. Two are people who I enjoy some degree of intimacy with, people who I could call on the phone just to say "how are you?," people who I have had dinner with (once or twice) within the past year. And one is a guy who's been my friend for fifteen years. This information has obvious relevance to anyone who's trying to make a meaningful use of my network, but to Orkut (or Friendster or Tribe) all of the bonds are of equal intensity, creating a picture of me and my network of friends which is weirdly distorted to the point where it is practically a fiction."

What's needed in order to solve this problem is a workable taxonomy of types of relationships, and I had given some preliminary thought of some basic categories that such a taxonomy would contain. But now I've learned that Ian Davis and Eric Vitiello have cooked one up already: Relationship (which appears to have been designed as an attempt to formalize some sort of metadata protocol?).

Clay Shirky critiques Relationship (he actually describes it as "self-critiquing"), and he does so mainly by pointing out some of the predictable difficulties of establishing any sort of taxonomy (grey areas, etc.). Still: to my mind even the flawed Relationship taxonomy is better than the current model used by most social software, where all human bonds are equivalent.

Shirky's final point in rejecting the taxonomy is as follows: "the madness of the age is to assume that people can spell out, in explicit detail, the messiest aspects of their lives, and that they will eagerly do so, in order to provide better inputs to cool new software."

Thoughtful, but I think he might be wrong. I think the assumption that people would (if they could) is actually an increasingly safe assumption. The madness may be not the assumption that people will do it, but the fact that people will do it.

Labels: internet, networks, rants

Wednesday, March 17, 2004
11:12 AM
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From an endnote in Denise Levertov's Selected Poems:

"Imagination is what makes reality real to the mind (which is why it's so hard to imagine peace, for it has not been experienced in the reality of our life in history except as the absence of war). Yet not only peace but the disastrous realities of our time go unimagined, even when 'known about,' when 'psychic numbing' veils them; and this the energy to act constructively, which imaginative knowledge could generate, is repressed."

I feel a real kinship with Levertov's radical humanism; this book makes a nice companion piece to the Galeano I was reading earlier in the month. I'm also greatly interested in the spiritual poems that Levertov wrote later in life, after her conversion to Roman Catholicism. I don't consider myself a Catholic—I'd describe myself as a "militant agnostic"—but I'm drawn to the process of continual spiritual inquiry that governs Levertov's poems about faith.

Monday, March 15, 2004
9:44 PM
0 comments

Thinking about yesterday's discussion a bit more, I came up with a few other fictional examples of lethal / severely incapacitating memes:

• Monty Python's "Funniest Joke In The World"

• the film Infinite Jest [V], from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

• the coma-inducing bitmap from Snow Crash

• the "seven days later you die" videotape from The Ring / Ringu

To my mind, none of these are as effective as the Freddy Krueger meme seen in Freddy vs. Jason, because none of them (with the possible exception of the Ringu video) are truly viral: they don't use their hosts as a vehicle for making more copies of themselves. Mostly (again the Ringu video bucks the trend here) they incapacitate or kill their victims immediately, which functions as a sort of negative feedback mechanism and inhibits the spread of the meme.

The Ringu video is unique (spoilers follow) because of the clause whereby the tape becomes non-lethal if you expose someone else to it before your seven days are up. (This is true in the Japanese version of the film; I haven't seen the American version so I'm not certain if this detail survived translation.) This has the intriguing evolutionary advantage of compelling the "host" to continue spreading the virus (which we also see in They Came From Within) although the fact that the host is cured after infecting another individual operates as another negative feedback mechanism, ultimately preventing the meme from enjoying the exponential proliferation that the Freddy meme begins to attain.

Next up on the viral horror list will probably be Cabin Fever, which I missed in the theatres but which is now out on video. Cabin Fever isn't about memetic viruses, but we'll see if its biological version of virus horror stacks up well against Cronenberg's.

Friday, March 12, 2004
11:12 AM
0 comments

The other night, C. and I watched Freddy Vs. Jason. I'll say right up front that this movie is not a particularly good one, even when compared against earlier installments in either franchise.

But I've been flipping through my old copy of Metamagical Themas lately, and revisiting ideas about viral sentences and self-replicating structures, and so what struck me as interesting is the way that Freddy Krueger, in this film, functions as a viral meme, and a lethal one at that.

At film's opening, Freddy lacks the ability to kill or to enter people's dreams, because the residents of Springwood no longer fear him—they either are actively working to repress their memory of him (in the case of the adults), or they have never learned of him in the first place (in the case of the teenagers). The town of Springwood is essentially organized in a large-scale program of "informational hygiene" to keep the Freddy meme from re-infecting the town: the police don't mention his name, even among themselves; all references to previous murders are excised from the local library's archives; children who do dream are held in an institution, where they can be heavily medicated, and kept from circulating among the information system of the outside world. As long as this program can be maintained, the people are safe...

But, inevitably, someone escapes from the institution, and begins to spread rumors of Freddy's return, and the Freddy meme begins to replicate, in the self-amplifying manner of positive feedback: the more people speak of him the more afraid they get, and the more afraid they get the more they speak of him. (A second feedback mechanism also speeds this along: the more afraid they get the more he has the power to appear menacingly in their dreams, which of course causes them to become even more afraid, etc.)

Say what you will about the rest of the film, but this idea struck me as nicely elegant. (Another horror film that uses an elegant feedback mechanism is David Cronenberg's early They Came From Within, which features a venereal parasite with a unique evolutionary advantage: it represses higher brain function and acts as an aphrodisiac. Release it into a system (a high-security apartment building, in the film) and you can imagine how everything will spiral very quickly into chaos.)

I could probably write something about how you could also think of Freddy as a creature of living information, a sort of bastard cousin to the famous plasmate which slumbered in the buried library of codices at Chenoboskion until 1945 C.E., but, uh, I think I've been geeky enough for one day.

Thursday, March 11, 2004
10:31 AM
0 comments

I'm currently reading Eduardo Galeano's The Book of Embraces, a book recommended to me by James Luckett, of Consumptive. It's a collection of tales, meditations and autobiographical anecdotes about the big topics: love, death, human resilience, state violence. Many of them are perfect blog-entry length:

the culture of terror / 7

Blatant colonialism mutilates you without pretense: it forbids you to talk, it forbids you to act, it forbids you to exist. Invisible colonialism, however, convinces you that serfdom is your nature: it convinces you that it's not possible to speak, not possible to act, not possible to exist.

Monday, March 08, 2004
10:47 PM
0 comments

I haven't yet seen The Passion of the Christ, but I've been following the responses of others to the film with some interest.

I'll confess that I feel an early affinity with writers who have criticized the film—I get the feeling that Gibson has produced the film as a zealous dogmatist, and if I were attempting to describe my own spiritual side, "dogmatic" would be unlikely to be an adjective I'd choose.

So I was receptive when I read this bit from Body and Soul:

"I have a ... memory of boys who talked about the suffering of Jesus as if it were proof of manhood. The same boys who told stories about Indian tribes that tied boys to red anthills or hung them by their nipples to see if they could take it, if they were really men. The boys who thought kamikazes were the ultimate cool ... Putting all your attention on death inevitably leads to something cruel."

Or these bits from The New Yorker's review of the film:

"[Gibson] can rightly claim that there's a strain of morbidity running through Christian iconography—one thinks of the reliquaries in Roman churches and the bloody and ravaged Christ in Northern Renaissance and German art, culminating in such works as Matthias Grunewald's 1515 'Isenheim Altarpiece,' with its thorned Christ in full torment on the Cross. But the central tradition of Italian Renaissance painting left Christ relatively unscathed; the artists emphasized not the physical suffering of the man but the sacrificial nature of his death and the astonishing mystery of his transformation into godhood—the Resurrection and the triumph over carnality ... The despair of the movie is hard to shrug off, and Gibson's timing couldn't be more unfortunate: another dose of death-haunted religious fanaticism is the last thing we need."

Or even this bit from conservative critic Andrew Sullivan:

"In a word, it is pornography. By pornography, I mean the reduction of all human thought and feeling and personhood to mere flesh."

But, as I thought about blogging these reviews, something began to gnaw at me. I don't necessarily believe that filmic violence is a bad thing, and when I began to feel less comfortable with these critics when I realized that some of them seemed to be leaning towards a blanket "movies these days are too violent" argument.

Now, granted, there are a whole set of valid questions that open up here that go beyond just "is movie violence good or bad?":

Is this specific movie telling this specific story served by including so much violence?

What are the effects of filmic violence on the spiritual mind?

Is filmic violence an effective evangelical tool? Is it a "fair" tool to use?

What are the cultural ramifications of creating a film that uses violence to evangelize at this particular cultural moment?

Etc etc. In trying to puzzle through some of those questions, and in trying to figure out how the reviewers thought about those questions, I began to find that the emphasis in some of these reviews on "mere flesh" didn't sit well with me. The idea that the physical body and the material world are not holy, that they are things that need to be transcended, is an old idea in religious thinking, but religious thinking also contains a parallel strand, one that teaches that divinity is in all material things, including the body. Is the Jesus story really the story of "the triumph over carnality?" Or is it trying to tell us something more sophisticated: that the essence of God is equally at home in the carnal as it is in the ineffable? I don't actually think that this is the point that Gibson's film is trying to make, but I think critics of the film need to be careful not to fall into the normal trap that discounts the spirituality inherent in the physical.

I have a related problem with Czeslaw Milosz's A Book of Luminous Things, which I re-read this winter. This anthology contains many excellent poems that stress spiritual union with all things, but the book as a whole also reveals Milosz's marked anti-technological, anti-urban stance. If you share the mystical belief that everything is interconnected, you should be able to perceive God in an integrated circuit just as easily as as you can perceive him/her/it in a lotus blossom; you should be able to perceive the divine in the mercurial turbulence of the city as easily as you can perceive it in the permanence of the mountain.

Spotted at the bookstore: God as She Who Changes.

And, finally, The Passion of the Christ blooper reel.

Sunday, March 07, 2004
11:41 AM
0 comments

A few days ago, I wrote about how I enjoy reading poetry that, in some way or another, resists the impulse to directly communicate meaning.

Critics of this type of poetry will often be found voicing some variant of the familiar "anybody could do that" complaint. Just throw some random words together, how hard could it be?

Now, poetry of this sort isn't always as "random" or "meaningless" as it might first appear, but I'm going to set that aside for the moment and just point out that trying to create something that doesn't rely on familiar structures or meanings is actually more difficult than it might appear.

Homer: Jazz, pfft. They just make it up as they go along. I could do that: dee dee-dee dee dee dee dee, dee dee dee --
Marge: That's "Mary Had a Little Lamb".
Homer: OK, then, this: doo doo-doo doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo --
Marge: That's the same thing; you just replaced "dee"s with "doo"s.
Homer: D'oh!

Part of why I find poetry very difficult to write is that I'm primarily a narrative writer—that's great for fiction, but I'm not particularly interested in writing narrative poetry—if I want to write narrative, I'm going to write fiction, or maybe a prose poem. When I try to write something more lyrical or something experimental I have enormous difficulty resisting the tide pulling me back towards narrative, towards meaning.

My solution, recently, has been to take a tablet with me to bed, and to write out a quick draft of a poem as soon as I wake up in the morning, or when I wake up in the middle of the night. I've written maybe a dozen of these poems over the last two months, and while I'd stop short of saying that they're great poems, I do find that they show more strange (dreamlike) juxtapositions and unexpected associations than my normal writing, with an internal coherence that's quite loose, a refreshing change from the forwards-moving narrative logic that keeps the fiction integrated.

An interesting experiment, all in all. If I work up the nerve I'll post a few of the better ones here.

Labels: poetry_commentary, writing

Friday, March 05, 2004
11:21 AM
0 comments

They're throwing away the card catalogs at UIC today.

Now, I recognize that the card catalogs here have, for all practical purposes, been replaced by the computer system, and I've come to terms with that. This doesn't change the fact that, for me, a card catalog is a powerful symbol of knowledge, and so to see them lying helter-skelter in a dumpster feels symbolically wounding (symbolic wounding, by the way, is what I mean when I refer to something as soul-killing, as I have been wont to do lately).

OK, soul-killing aside, the real reason I'm upset about seeing the card catalogs get tossed is that I covet them for myself.

I can say that I would actually put them to good use. Those of you who know me know that I have been maintaining a rather elaborate card-index for the last five years or so... someone bought me a six-drawer card catalog from Ebay a few years ago and it has become one of my favorite possessions, maybe the one thing I would grab in case of fire. I can't help but look at those fifty-drawer monsters in the dumpster and think "one of those would be really handy."

Plus it'd look great in my apartment! They are, after all, beautiful objects.

But: even if I could manage to wrangle out of the dumpster, there's still no way to get it home, plus there's no room in the current apartment (and there's unlikely to be enough room in the next one).

The pain!

Labels: indexing

Tuesday, March 02, 2004
9:45 AM
0 comments