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[My latest column for the Poetry Project Newsletter... it was edited quite a bit for print, so this is the director's cut.]
Blogaholism continues to claim victims among the unwitting poetry community, with the roster – international, avant-garde, new formalist, new vineyardist, skanky, Spanish and English – ever growing for the fashionable poetaster’s blogroll. Keep one eye on your prose as you dawdle among: Chaxblog (Charles Alexander), For the Health of It (Tom Bell), Equanimity and Million Poems (Jordan Davis), Overlap (Drew Gardner), Ululate (Nada Gordon), HG Poetics (Henry Gould), Lester's Flogspot (Patrick Herron), Pantaloons (Jack Kimball), Ineluctable Maps (Anastasios Kozaitis), Jonathan Mayhew's Blog, Ich Bin Ein Iraqi (Camille Roy), Possum Pouch (Dale Smith), Mike Snider's Formal Blog, Elsewhere (Gary Sullivan), WinePoetics (Eileen Tabios), Laurable Dot Com, The Tijuana Bible of Poetics (Heriberto Yepez), SpokenWORD (Komninos Zervos).
A few of these predated Silliman’s Blog, one or two even Katherine “the blog queen” Parrish’s squish, but several are mere pups. I will spare you the URLs, but a clickable, up-to-date list can be found at Kasey’s limetree (limetree.blogspot.com). Soon, no poet will be able to read holding a piece of paper because of the stealthily deleterious effects of carpal tunnel syndrome, a brand of disease leading to crooked, John Merrick-esque postures that – like a model’s slumped shoulders in the more swish NYC bars or Orson Welles’ citizen’s paunch that seems to have taken hold of the UK’s sound poetry community – will be imitated by any sensible poseur desirous of seeming of the crowd that “took down Language writing” (Vendler).
Like shrooms after April’s swich licóur, metablogs – blogs that respond to the phenomenon of blogs like Spinal Tap to heavy metal – are beginning to sprout. Contact the folks at mainstreampoetry.blogspot.com to partake in the literary sensation that’s sweeping the world: Mainstream Poetry. (So that Fence thing was smoke and mirrors?) Be one of the grant-funded freshwater bass who write: “Once, on a gusty day, they fell in quatrains, / as unbelieveable as dandelion seed's cosmic pendulum.” On a different front is the mischievous (= Canadian) web program that’s taken on a life, and a bit of cultural capital, of its own, called the “Sillibot.” Using the Tjanting author’s daily posts as seeds, this artificial intelligence generates Flarfish text based on a markov chain algorithm (look it up) which it posts, with nonchalant hysteria, to its blog. Unfortunately, the Sillibot’s creator does not want to publicize the URL just yet as it’s still being tweaked – the paradigm shift awaits -- but in the meantime, you can mess yourself creating automatic sestinas, sonnets pantoums and canzones at Finnish Leevi Lehto’s de rigeur “Google Poem” (www.leevilehto.net/google/patterns.asp).
With some trepidation I hope to further the trend with the introduction of another multi-author blog Circulars (arras.net/circulars), which has a mandate to register in persuasive but concise prose the poetry community’s opposition to the US government’s war policy. As the propaganda states:
“CIRCULARS intends to focus some of the disparate energy by poets and literary critics to enunciate a response to U.S. foreign policy, most significantly the move to war with Iraq. CIRCULARS intends to critique and/or augment some conventional modes of expressing political views that are either entirely analytical, ironic or humanistic. These are all valuable approaches, of course, and not unwelcome on CIRCULARS, but our hope is to create a dynamic, persuasive idiom that can work in a public sphere, mingling elements of rhetoric and stylistics associated with the aforementioned modes -- analytical, ironic or humanistic. CIRCULARS is, in this sense, a workshop -- a place to explore strategies.”
By the time you read this, the war may be several weeks old, and my guess is that the site – the joint creation of several authors acting both as editors and writers – will reflect, for now and for the record, changes in the poetry community’s political priorities, sentiments and activities as they occur.
Beehive (beehive.temporalimage.com), edited by Talan Memmott, has just put up their fifth issue, featuring work by Bill Marsh, Juliet Ann Martin, Marianne Shaneen, Millie Niss, Alan Sondheim and others. Good to see names not previously associated with digipo in the mix – Marianne was lugging around a gaffer-taped Bolex on Roebling St. when last I saw her -- but I’m also pleased to see Juliet Ann-Martin, whose “oooxxxooo” (julietmartin.com) was revelatory for its time, grabbing some spotlight. The Iowa Review Web (www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/mainpages/tirwebhome.htm) also has a new issue, featuring a new piece by William Poundstone, “3 Proposals for Bottle Imps,” an interview with Motomichi Nakamura by Yang-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, and my interview with John Cayley, suggestively titled “From Byte to Inscription” (kind of a like a James Bond film, or maybe Justin Bond).
Free stuff? Well, you can try the new /ubu (“slash ubu,” found at ubu.com/ubu) series of e-books, featuring titles by Kevin Davies, Deanna Ferguson, Richard Foreman, Madeline Gins, Jessica Grim, Peter Manson, Michael Scharf, Ron Sillman, Juliana Spahr, Hannah Weiner, Mac Wellman, and Darren Wershler-Henry (sory, a touch of Lisztmania there…). Go to the recently revamped Duration Press (durationpress.com) for even more free e-books by the likes of Patrick Durgin, Rachel Levitsky, Brian Strang, Elizabeth Treadwell, Rick Snyder and Marcella Durand – really just the tip of the rapidly deepening iceberg (er…), countering the forces of ecological entropy that’s rendering even Antarctica’s historical Borchgrevink's hut a pile of stinking guano. Kudos to Jerrold Shiroma for putting together such an amazing site.
For those who don’t go much for reading, there are the digital anti-war bumper stickers at Masturbate for Peace (masturbateforpeace.com), with minimalist offerings such as “Touch Your Sack, Not Iraq,” and “My Bush Doesn’t Declare War!” And if that’s too much for your impoverished lexicalismus, then it doesn’t get much lighter than this page of Japanese Emoticons (club.pep.ne.jp/~hiroette/en/facemarks/index.html), including such classics of the industry as:
“Here you are, the tea.”
and
“He sends you a kiss with a sound effect.”
Ok, it’s not the Cantos, or even Eistenstein’s Film Sense, but it’s an easy in for those of you who are responding to Eliot Weinberger’s call (arras.net/circulars/archives/000130.html) to learn the names of more Asian poets – I think this one’s called Hiroette.
physics
Posted by: a at January 14, 2004 11:28 AMThis variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
Posted by: Hector at January 18, 2004 10:10 PMLet's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.
Posted by: Margery at January 18, 2004 10:11 PMEarlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.
Posted by: Drugo at January 18, 2004 10:11 PMThat gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.
Posted by: Rook at January 18, 2004 10:11 PMWe can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Posted by: Faith at January 18, 2004 10:11 PM