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[Here's my final contribution to the discussion that Darren and I have been having about Circulars -- it's the 12th paragraph I think. He's got the last word... if you want to read the other words, scroll down below, or find a link to the right for the entire thing. I'll repost it all when it's complete -- there may be revisions.]
Circulars was indeed intent, on the most abstract level, on “expanding an innovative poetic sensibility outward into policy and politics,” but not to argue for that sensibility. I agree that a liberated public domain is necessary to maintain the type of free-wheeling, free-borrowing public discourse necessary in a heteroglot “democracy” but, alas, the point of the site was to upset a government and exploit any means necessary in creating the sort of fervor one might associate with a “revolutionary” culture. Appropriation was one suprisingly popular means. Tom Raworth’s poem “Listen Up,” written in the voice of a bigoted warmonger in tight couplets and submitted as a joke to the “Poets For the War” website, was another (and stronger for being sui generis). I do think the torrent of “remixes” and detournements that ensued leading up to the war put centerstage a seething but as yet underground counterculture that shares many of your (and my) views on “property” – that could go somewhere. This is a generation of people who are on the other side of the paradigm shift regarding cultural property – that and other values could be the seed of a new, but as yet themeless, sensibility. My hope with Circulars was to illustrate the potential power of such sites in times of crisis as provocative, popular cultural tools, and to put our “avant-garde” poetics to the service of a specific cultural effort, not to refresh arguments for classic avant-garde gestures themselves. But, of course, intentions are neither here nor there.
Posted by Brian Stefans at July 7, 2003 05:44 PM | TrackBackWhen Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.
Posted by: Quivier at January 18, 2004 07:56 PMBut some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.
Posted by: Joyce at January 18, 2004 07:56 PMThis is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.
Posted by: Lancelot at January 18, 2004 07:57 PMA variable leads a simple life, full of activity but quite short (measured in nanoseconds, usually). It all begins when the program finds a variable declaration, and a variable is born into the world of the executing program. There are two possible places where the variable might live, but we will venture into that a little later.
Posted by: Elias at January 18, 2004 07:58 PMOur next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.
Posted by: Aaron at January 18, 2004 07:58 PM