brian, your discomfit is painful, but also for another reason: you are in denial of context, n'cest pas? First, your Dreamlife of Letters, which I've taken in and am digesting, is only made more urgent by the HP ad. The latter is junkeyefood and only made me want to view your work again to clean the eyepalate, which it does admirably. Context is everything... bpNichol said that, and that's why it saddens one to see you misread him so. You refer to a "bpNichol quote"--but brian, there is no such thing as a "bpNichol quote." Your quotation is totally out of context, since within its original poem, it is full of an irony you are missing. You might ask Darren Wershler-Henry to set you straight on this, since Darren knows the bp oeuvre well. (You'll recall that I refer to Darren's acute eye in the penultimate essay of "See What You Think"). In any case, how sad to see you refer to bp as a "forgotten modernist." Had he not died young, he'd be younger today than Ron Silliman and a billion others. Most importantly, your own work is deprived of deeper resonance when you stiff your sweetest admirer (and bp, in cloud-heaven I assure you, IS your true admirer. If you don't believe me, read The Martyrology again on the Coach House website and you'll see that he predicts and tenderly acknowledges you in advance.). Onward, I's wide open.

You're actually reading my quote out of context as well, which is of course pardonable because I didn't give it. This is actually a reply to something Darren wrote on the ubu list, so it's spottily written and not a complete statement.

I wasn't referring to bpNichol as a "forgotten modernist" -- I'm certainly well aware that Toronto hasn't forgotten bpNichol. In fact, I was just at the Coach House (on bpNichol Lane, as you know) three weeks ago and even gave the poem on the street a quick reread. I've often referred to the writings of the TRG as among the most useful and important works for young "cyber" poets to read these days.

I'm referring to other writers who seem to be resurrected for some other purpose that is often beyond me -- but even so, who am I to say who is a good poet or not, perhaps there is a sincere interest in poet X's work?

I just suspect some of the attention paid to certain "forgotten" figures has something to do with filling in a few holes in a Ph.D. and I fear this taking the part for the whole leaves us with neither a whole -- forgotten -- nor a very good part.

Certainly good poets like Tolson and Loy have benefitted by this very mechanism -- perhaps not yet enough -- and I'd love myself to discover a new poet from the period who we haven't yet read in full -- just not sure there's much more out there (but I'm a pessimist about a lot of things).

BTW, I don't refer to writers born after, say, Charles Olson as "modernist." I'm pretty conservative in meaning poets generally writing before the "Great War" and between the wars, but that's just me.

I even mention that "I am not even sure whether bpNichol is being neo-Romantic..." etc. -- i.e. I don't really know his context. Nichol can have a way of sounding a little like Steve McCaffery - using the semiotics language - but then twisting it in a way that is entirely idiosyncratic (and you're probably aware that there is, or was, something like a cult status around him). But Darren has used this quote, entirely isolated, a few times in the course of arguments and so I took him up on ths most recent moment.

Anyway, I'm glad beeps is smiling down on me since we share 4 letters in our nickname -- I am often referred to as beeks.

Good of you to help restore some context. Let's keep going and I think you'll see that there are two crucial issues that emerge. First, I'm glad you're reading TRG though puzzled at the comment, "Nichol can have a way of sounding a little like Steve McCaffery." One wonderful thing about TRG is that you can always tell bp from Steve--even though it sometimes doesn't matter. But often it does, crucially. The "cult" around bp in Canada is negligible, compared, say, to the cult around Ted Berrigan, which in the end ammounts to what? How and by whom the work is read--not flogged, to echo your alleged bp quote (which is actually from The Martyrology and re-echoes within the poem)--is what counts. And what counts today is that you and others who should be reading it OUTSIDE Canada, are not reading The Martyrology. I was not being clever about bp reading your work--not the "smiling down from heaven" cliche--but very specific. Look at Book 5, in which there are at least two sections which predict and comment upon your "Dreamlife of Letters." I'll look them up for you now: Chain 4 and Chains 10-11. But the other "Chains" provide further context and lead to my ultimate point: it's the TOTALITY of Nichol's vision & oeuvre that is barely yet comprehended. That it is still way out front is what I argue in "The Prophetic Poet of the Twentieth Century" within the book, "See What You Think." It's an argument about getting not simply off the page, as you reiterate, but behind it. It's precisely because you've bought the disguise of bp as a concrete or experimental poet that I want to push you a little further to consider the post-textuality of the selves-within-Self he projected. These are deathless i's--and the sweetness of "bpNichol Lane" is that it is only another disguise from which bp has moved on. The whole plan is there in The Martyrology.

Second, I enjoyed scanning the recent exchanges between you and Darren. Although Darren has a grasp of bp's totality, I think he forgets that most non-Canadian North Americans do not. My point here is that had you grasped it, you would not have expressed anxiety about the HP ad; rather, it would fortify you. Because bp still is teaching us that originality lies not in the novelty of form but in the novelty of the creator. And you, in the totality of your blogging & editing & lyrics (sic) & criticism & formal inventiveness--you may be a novelty yourself that bears watching, as bp watched hisself continually.

I wasn't anxious at all about the HP ad -- if anything, I took it as a sign that I had done something original -- or at least idiosyncratic --in the Dreamlife work.

Yes, but you're ignoring the point, which is that you did not do something "original--or at least idiosyncratic" in Dreamlife. What you did was re-open some paths, especially the one to Book of 5 of The Martyrology. Even Jeff Derksen, who you just reviewed so acutely, could probably tell you that. That makes you a translator. And the discourse about what that means might be more interesting than originality.

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Andrews is a time bomb even a silly man could not defuse.

Macromedia had intuited that a Flash enthusiast could be a contemporary ham operator though they are reliant on a DJ Shadow to both exhaust the technology while making of it an exemplary spectacle. To make the components accessible, they had employees create and maintain websites that displayed openly the source of their work and created forums to answer questions, thus bypassing technological support by telephony, while simulating an enthusiasm for the software. I referenced the aforementioned dj because he is now remixed on commercial labels.

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In his errors a man is true to type. Observe the errors and you will know the man.

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That 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.

But 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.

We 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.

This back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec

To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.