While I'm in the process of digitizing the card file, I'll periodically post the text of certain cards here if I think they'll be of interest to the Raccoon reading audience...

We'll start with this one, from November of 2001, filed under "Algorithmic Writing" (crossreferenced under Erotica, Narrative, and Oulipo):

there is much that can be done with the idea of alogrithmically-produced erotica

for a while now I have been thinking of an Oulipan generative mechanism for porn--OuPornPo. I believe it was K's idea to create an online automated porn generator

the Oulipan 'who is guilty?' piece or the Cain and Abel piece especially could be adapted to erotic combinatorials (the possibilities abound!)

but I am also drawn to the idea of generating a nonnarrative erotica. Thought of this last night while reading Forche's polyphonic fragmented war poems. With a suitable database of fantasies and an algorithm, nonnarrative polyphonic erotic texts could be generated

Is there anyone on earth who might have the time and wherewithal to pursue this idea?

Labels: writing

Thursday, July 29, 2004
10:21 PM
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I'm enjoying the comments on the Mac thread below, and I thank everybody for their input.

I'm still pretty curious about DevonThink, as the notion of making a "personal encyclopedia" in an open database system is highly appealing. This is a notion that has been of special interest recently, because I have begun the process of digitizing my entire index card file.

This was a project that I've long wanted to undertake, but I've always balked at the sheer amount of data entry that the project will require. I'm only doing it now because the July 3rd hard drive crash forced my hand—in that crash, I lost the Word document that served as the cross-referenced index to the card file, and I figured that if I had to go through the long process of recreating a cross-reference anyway, I might as well put in the extra effort to make a full-text version in a proper database. The advantages of having a full-text digital version are obvious: being able to use the processing power of a computer to filter and shuffle the thousands of cards I have on file will be super-fun, and if I get a version up-and-running on a laptop the entire card file will essentially become portable.

Not to mention reproducible, and thus able to be given away / traded / shared. In Caterina's July 5 post on DevonThink, she talks about how appealing it would be to browse through someone else's database; she goes so far as to suggest that it's a pleasure she'd be willing to pay for / subscribe to. The pleasure of weblogs is, to some degree, the pleasure of reading through someone else's notes, but if you read someone's weblog regularly, it mostly works as a linear process, whereas a database works with multiple points of entry and multiple avenues of potential investigation. The beauty of a weblog is that the entries are arranged in a chronological superstructure (of the sort that I've written about before); the beauty of a database is that the entries are equidistant from one another, and can be endlessly rearranged into different configurations requested by their user. (Half the fun of ITunes is shuffling around the songs in the Library.)

So why aren't more people putting up their notes as Access files for one another to download? Or offering them on the subscription model (each month, receive a "booster pack" of new notes.) Is this happening in a different subculture (say, the subculture of people who trade recipes)? If not, why not?

"And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index."

—Walter Benjamin

Related: Umberto Eco's fears about a future in which "[w]e could end up with competing encyclopaedias, some of them completely wild." Eco doesn't like it, but (as I've said before) such a future doesn't seem bad to me at all.

Labels: databases, indexing

Monday, July 26, 2004
7:28 PM
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I'd been intending to purchase a new laptop for a while, and when the time rolled around I decided to try a Mac. Almost since the day it arrived I've been regretting this choice, and what I really want right now is for someone to remind me what a Mac is good for.

Its reputation as the computer of choice for making music appears to be highly overrated: my personal favorite sound synthesis program, AudioMulch, is PC only; the free version of ProTools won't run on Mac systems that don't have OS 9 installed; Max/MSP is available for both Macs and PC; and Mac-only programs like SuperCollider and SoundHack have so far proven to be completely inscrutable to the casual user. The iBooks don't even have an audio input port (although an affordable USB-enabled fix does exist; thanks CJO for digging that up).

So now I'm stuck not really wanting to use the Mac for music, but not really wanting to use it for word-processing / web design / database-making, either: I primarily use Microsoft Office for those sorts of tasks, and I don't want to get too caught up in the whole mess of having two sets of files in noncompatible formats. So what can I use the Mac for?

Maybe DevonThink? Caterina F. has high praise for it (scroll down to the July 5th entry).

Any Mac users out there who want to try to convince me not to just eBay the thing and put the money thus recouped towards a PC laptop?

Saturday, July 24, 2004
1:08 PM
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This one from the comment spam afflicting Umami Tsunami.

"State-supported villagers who transgressed my twice-a-year online gambling looked at me strangely, and marveled at the signs of no-valued slot machine which they wore in one whose craps was known to be uphill and fresh-ground. If this baccarat could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. We also defied at length with such of the mountain poker hands as had not fled from the online casino and confusion to younger slopes, and online blackjack again warmed for dens and caves, but all without online roulette. Sometimes I plowed I could trace consolidated analogies with the flora of my waspish texas hold'em, fancying that the important-looking plants and shrubs might assume such forms under a churchillian poker download of climate, but the varied and adamant sportsbetting trees were plainly christian. For a wealthiest party poker bonus code they had reigned over the city together, but when they had a son, all seventeen hurried away."

Friday, July 23, 2004
12:58 PM
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Congratulations to the people at 23 Productions and the Aspen Land Cooperative for making the Pasture Music Festival and Jubilee come off so well. It was a really wonderful weekend, great music in a lovely environment. Part of what made the weekend work so well can perhaps be summed up by a chance comment that I overheard someone making: "I'm not sure how many spectators there are... it mainly seems to be bands playing for bands." I'm always happy to be at the festival which is mainly bands playing for bands, in the same way I'm happy when I'm at the readings that are mainly poets reading for poets—it gives me that wonderful feeling of being at the place where Something Is Happening (the opposite of that feeling that Life Is Elsewhere).

Some highlights:

• the Blithe Sons, performing in a corrugated drainage culvert

• Jack Rose, continuing to master the language of the fingerpicked acoustic guitar

• Christina Madonia (formerly Carter), gazing into the abyss—her solo versions of Charalambides songs (forced due to the fact that Charalambides is now dispersed across two continents) are maybe the loneliest music in the world

• the anthropological high weirdness of the Matt Valentine and Erika Elder Medicine Show

• Loren Chasse, performing an animistic sonic ritual in his secret identity Of

• Surprise of the festival: the Skaters, a band completely new to me, wrenching bad acid noise weirdness out of some black vent in the cosmos

• Pelt, just, well, being Pelt

• falling asleep in my tent to the sounds of a gentle drone by the Virgin Eye Blood Brothers rolling over the Wisconsin hills

• sitting by the edge of a swimming hole in the dusk and listening to the massed hypnotic chirp of hundreds of frogs

Good times!

Thursday, July 22, 2004
1:43 PM
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So first there was the hard drive crash, two and a half weeks ago, which involved me losing a ton of data (although all the really important stuff was backed up in at least some form).

I had just barely gotten the computer set up again when I managed to fuck up one of its cables, severing the lines of communication between the monitor and the CPU. Not such a big deal except for the fact that this happened about an hour before the debut Number None performance, and I had planned to have samples and feedback loops constitute my primary contribution to the evening's set. It's hard to use your computer as an instrument when you can't actually see the interface. I spent a pretty awful hour feeling like I was in that dream where you're about to give a speech, and everyone you know is in the audience, and just as you're about to go on you realize with blood-chilling horror that you have nothing prepared. (The day was saved by my roommate Harvey P., who let me draft his laptop into service.)

So now the new cable's been obtained, and the computer's working fine (knock on wood), but the new fun of the summer has been the fusebox. We're tripping the circuit breaker at least two or three times a day (four today as of this writing), even though we're not using any heavy-load appliances aside from the central air (and the refrigerators, I guess, although they've all been turned down to the lowest setting).

I'd started composing a little write-up about the Pasture Fest highlights but I lost it when the power cut out. Maybe tomorrow. Tonight I just want to whine.

Labels: personal

Tuesday, July 20, 2004
9:53 PM
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Can't make it to tonight's record release party?

You can still check out the new disc—information about it can now be found in the Rebis directory, including ordering information and some free MP3s.

Thursday, July 15, 2004
12:01 AM
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I brought Rudy Rucker's Seek!: Selected Nonfiction with me on my Milwaukee trip and, as I said over there in the sidebar, I found it a pretty good "geek vacation book": heady enough to be interesting, breezy enough to be fun.

At times, though, Rucker seems to fail to fully think through his arguments before setting them down on the page. This is most notable in the book's final section, "Art," where he makes a few attempts to talk about literature by viewing it through the lens of information theory or chaos theory. This might be a promising approach, if handled with intellectual rigor, and so it's especially disappointing to find the arguments here particularly flimsy.

For example:

"In [both paintings and novels], the information has a kind of fractal structure. I would define a fractal as something that has this property: when you look twice as hard at a fractal, you see three times as much. Language is fractal with words suggesting words suggesting words, while paintings are fractal with their details within details within details. A basic problem is that in either case only a limited amount of information is really being given. Fractal nature has an essentially infinite precision, but a novel or a painting is radically finite. ... The seeming reality of a novel or a painting is an artful construct that only pops into focus at a certain distance. It is only the cosmic fractal of real life that allows for endless zooming."

I think that the point that Rucker's making here is that the "reality" in a novel isn't truly fractal, that you can't immerse yourself in deeper and deeper layers of that world. You can't "endlessly zoom in" on it. Fair enough—but initially, when he's describing why he thinks of language as fractal in the first place, he says that the key piece are those "words suggesting words suggesting words." By this I take him to mean the chains of association and allusion that language triggers in the head of the reader: if this is in fact what he means then a novel is, essentially, infinite, by the way that it engages symbiotically with (fractal) human consciousness. The depth of the novel's world is almost irrelevant, what matters is the resonance and complexity of the triggered associations. One could argue that Finnegans Wake is the perfect example of a fractal novel and simultaneously argue that the book makes little or no effort to establish the "artful construct" of "seeming reality."

Then there's his re-working of information theory into an aesthetic philosophy:

"What is information? [Claude] Shannon measured information in 'bits.' If someone answers a single yes-or-no question, they are giving you one bit of information. Two yes/no questions are two bits. ... He estimated written English as carrying about seven bits per word, meaning that if a random word is excised from a text, you can usually guess it by asking seven yes-or-no questions. ... In a crap genre books, generated by a low-complexity intelligence with a very short runtime, the information per word is going to be low, maybe as low as three or four bits. In a high-complexity work the information per word will be higher...

"The point of all this is that a pattern's information level is a quantity that is absolute and not relative. The pattern can be a book, a record album, or a person's conversation. If I say something is boring, it's not just my cruelty speaking. It's objective fact. It may be that the book really is stupid and boring, as can be witnessed by the fact that the book has a very low information-theoretic complexity."

Tempting, but I don't agree that boring/interesting is really a question of mathematics (much less stupid/intelligent). Again the piece that seems to be missing is the element of human consciousness and the way that art interfaces with it.

"Boredom + attention = becoming interested" —John Cage

"[W]hat some see as a single moment repeating, others see as a nonrepeating series of similar moments." —Matthew Goulish

"We step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and are not." —Heraclitus

When we hear, say, a piece of music with a repeating motif, the second time we hear it is not the same as the first time we hear it. When dealing with an extremely repetitive form of music, such as a hypnotic drumbeat, a drone, or a raga, you can potentially say that the hundredth time you hear the motif is not the same as the first, or the ninety-ninth. The neat logic of information theory makes no allowance for the shifting perceptions of the receiver, and, by extension, neither does Rucker: this is an error. An information theorist might say that Cage's widely misunderstood "silent piano" piece 4'33 contains no information at all, but actually listening to 4'33 (which you can do right now, sitting right where you are) indicates that the piece is in fact teeming endlessly with information.

Given that Rucker is a mathematician, it makes sense that he would attempt to make this argument, but given that Rucker is also something of a mystic, who argues eloquently elsewhere in Seek! that the universe is suffused with consciousness and intelligence, it's disappointing to see him take an aesthetic stance that is so arid and lifeless. (It's worth noting that in a postscript he gives up on discussing a text's "algorithmic complexity" and instead moves to discussing the fuzzily-presented concept of its "logical depth," but, again, leaves consciousness filtered out of the equation.)

Labels: art, information, language

Monday, July 12, 2004
3:26 PM
0 comments

Taking a short weekend roadtrip to Milwaukee this weekend, so no updates until Monday.

However! The recently-completed 2004 roadtrip mix, Come On, Get Up, Get Out, Get Out, Come On is now available through the Raccoon Mix Exchange. (No peeking, CJO.)

Wednesday, July 07, 2004
8:10 PM
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I've been reading a ton this summer, but aside from The Medusa Frequency I haven't actually finished a single book. Instead I've been reading around in a set of loosely-related texts, including Grant Morrison comics (Seaguy and The Filth), as well as his Pop Magic! essay; Robert Graves' Greek Myths omnibus; Rudy Rucker's Seek!: Selected Nonfiction; Octavio Paz's treatise on love, sex, and eroticism, The Double Flame; The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings; Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination; and Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

Mining the system of relations between these texts has been fascinating: in my head their system of correspondences and echoes are beginning to form an intricate hypertextual ideogram.

Where can I get a replica of Thomas Jefferson's revolving five-book easel?

Labels: book_commentary

7:54 AM
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Those of you who enjoy the little reviews over in the sidebar may be interested to know that I've begun to write capsule CD reviews for "visual culture" magazine TENbyTEN. (The first review I wrote, of the new Mouse on Mars record, Radical Connector, should appear in the September 2004 issue if all goes well.)

Monday, July 05, 2004
11:21 PM
0 comments

"The hard drive could not be found."

O-kaay. My rudimentary preliminary investigations (wiggling cables, etc.) have made it pretty clear that if I want my computer to ever boot again I'm going to require the aid of a repair shop; if you're noticing over the next couple of days that I don't seem to be on the Internet much, that's why.

Most of the really major data on the drive is backed up elsewhere (the mastered version of the recently-completed Number None CD is at the duplicators as we speak) but there's a decent amount of everyday stuff that would suck to lose or that would be tedious to recreate. Keeping my fingers crossed.

What a way to really sour my day.

On the up-side, earlier today I found a box of CDs that I previously thought I'd lost in the move. Also on the up-side, let's not forget tonight's Sunn O))) show—

Labels: personal

Saturday, July 03, 2004
5:51 PM
0 comments

I've been thinking a lot lately about the power of costumes. After some experiments with costume at both Spring and YAC I've begun to think of costumery as being located at a unique juncture between art and psychology: there are definitely aesthetic elements to designing / selecting a good costume, but it also has a profound psychological dimension, both in the way it influences other people's response to you and in the way it allows expression or manifestation of a certain facet of your personality.

So I really responded to the following comments by Sunn O))) frontman Stephen O'Malley in the new Wire, remarking on the druidic-style robes that members of Sunn O))) wear at their shows:

"These things are very important. The difference between being on stage playing heavy guitar music wearing street clothes, and doing it in the uniform of a medieval robe, with elements such as light and dry ice, is enormous. The group can operate as an entity or the sum of its parts, rather than just a bunch of people playing together. We use the robes very specifically—where they're not worn at all, except for five minutes before we play, and then they're taken off immediately after the performance. By wearing them we adopt an alternate identity, which helps to put out minds in a different state to evoke this beast of sound. They were used by Aleister Crowley in the same way, as a uniform to create a different being within yourself."

Sunn O))) plays tomorrow night at the Empty Bottle. I saw them back in September of last year, and it was one of my live music highlights of the year; I look forward to going and seeing them again.

Friday, July 02, 2004
6:12 PM
0 comments