September 03, 2003

Coda: The Nineties Tried Your Game, There's Nothing In It

This .pdf was commissioned for the next issue of The Iowa Review Web, who also interviewed me and will run a review of Fashionable Noise, which will go live in September I think.

Here's a brief description of what it is that I sent to TIR:

The final 12-poem sequence of "Pasha Noise: life and contacts," a long poem which was partly inspired by Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: life and contacts," the poet's satirical "farewell to London," published in 1920.

My "Nineties" is that of the "new economy," my London is New York City (particularly Williamsburg), my Lionel Johnson is Alan Davies, and my haircuts not the pre-Raphaelite locks of a Dante Gabriel Rosetti or Algernon Swinburne but the practical buzz-cut of, oh, Miles Champion? John Cayley? Darren Wershler-Henry?

The earlier part of the poem, written prior to 9/11, deals with more narrative elements, and introduces characters such as Pasha Noise, Tepid Ezine and HVA (Her Videoness Avatar). This latter section was written after those events and thus occasionally evinces a more nostalgic tone.

Coda: The Nineties Tried Your Game, There's Nothing In It

Posted by Brian Stefans at September 3, 2003 11:07 AM | TrackBack
Comments

Let'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: Helen at January 18, 2004 10:49 PM

Each Stack Frame represents a function. The bottom frame is always the main function, and the frames above it are the other functions that main calls. At any given time, the stack can show you the path your code has taken to get to where it is. The top frame represents the function the code is currently executing, and the frame below it is the function that called the current function, and the frame below that represents the function that called the function that called the current function, and so on all the way down to main, which is the starting point of any C program.

Posted by: Roger at January 18, 2004 10:50 PM

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.

Posted by: Isabella at January 18, 2004 10:50 PM

These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.

Posted by: Cecily at January 18, 2004 10:51 PM

Earlier 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: Tristram at January 18, 2004 10:51 PM