February 27, 2004

Il Conformista (Poem for a Dog)

[Darren Wershler-Henry had the brilliant idea of writing s series of poems using only the words that his dog understands. I don't have a dog myself, but a friend of mine recently wrote to me about his mother's dog, who for some reason responds strongly to the phrase "il conformista," which is the name of the famous Bertolucci film (starring the wonderful Dominique Sanda). He also, unwittingly in his email, told me a few other words that the dog understands, and of course I couldn't help translating one of the Pisan Cantos into dog language. This is the first of what I imagine to be a growing anthology of poems based on the vocabulary of dogs... I'd love to read others.]

Dog Canto

        Outside... il conformista
                walk milkbone
                                        roll-over
                                        il conformista
        Sit! sit!
                il conformista
        Paw! paw!
                il conformista
                                roll-over il conformista...
        Good doggy.
        Good good doggy.
                                Fidelius.

Posted by Brian Stefans at 01:57 PM

February 25, 2004

Drunken Boat 6

[I know this might threaten my status as a card-carrying post-avant poet and drown me in the blithe currents of quietude, but I've got some poems and audio files in the new issue of the well-designed and edited webzine Drunken Boat. I missed the launch reading at Pete's Candy Store last week, still being at Brown, but I heard it was a hoot.]

drunkenboatlogo.gif

FEATURING
Norman Mailer
interviewed by Barry Leeds

POETRY
Andrea Baker   Brian Kim Stefans
Mark Bibbins   Lyn Lifshin
Kevin Cantwell   Aaron McCollough
Stephen Cushman   Jessy Randall
Benjamin Gantcher   David Starkey
Sarah Gridley   Lina ramona Vitkauskas

PROSE
David Barringer   Alyce Lomax
kari edwards   Marc Pietrzykowski
Thomas Fink   Felicia Sullivan

PHOTO
Nicholas Lawrus   Eddy Seesing
Hoag Holmgren   Daniel Simmons

VIDEO
David Ambrose   Lila Yomtoob
Nick Fox-Gieg   Mark O'Connell

SOUND
Jim Andrews   Geoffrey Datson
Latasha Natasha Diggs   Cary Peppermint

CYBERTEXT
Wolf Kahlen   Tony Rickaby
Robert Kendall   Lisa Bloomfield and Rod Val Moore
Dorothee Lang

WEB ART
Larry Carlson   Yucef Merhi
Alan Berliner   Philip Wood

Posted by Brian Stefans at 12:26 PM

February 24, 2004

Idiotic Pun

mad_cow.gif

Posted by Brian Stefans at 03:47 PM

February 16, 2004

John Cayley: Noisy Demons

[The poet / programmatoloist John Cayley recently reviewed my book for Mute Magazine, a journal devoted to "culture and politics after the net, published in the UK. There I am, nestled snug as a bug on page 143, second to last -- fame awaits! But sluriously folks, John's been an enthusiastic supporter of mine and I think he hits the mark quite well -- he's the serious theorist of the whole "digital poetry" world conspiracy -- if only getting at one part of the book. Run out and buy it! Or rather, run back in, after you've picked a few daisies and hugged some choice unfortunates, and order it!]

Brian Kim Stefans.
Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics.
Berkeley: Atelos, 2003.
(Paperback, ISBN 1-891190-14-8. Available from: SPD, www.spdbooks.org, US$ 12.95 plus delivery)

Fashionable Noise is published in Atelos, a series of specially commissioned projects ‘crossing traditional genre boundaries.’ The book contains six designated works and a couple of ‘appendices,’ all of which can be seen, in some sense, as process-generated, the co-work of Brian Kim Stefans and certain of his digital familiars - demons that drive both him and his media. Stefans mixes theory and poetry seamlessly and apparently effortlessly although, as he readily acknowledges, the burden of work is often shared with generative algorithms. Stefans is a New York-based poet who has engaged new media and its networks from the early days of its emergent hyperhistory. He runs arras.net and is well-known and highly regarded in the field of electronic writing particularly for ‘The Dreamlife of Letters’ (www.ubu.com/contemp/stefans/dream/), ‘a flash piece, organized by alphabetic principles, … credited with trying to exhaust all form of animated web poetry or the kinetics of movie titles.’ (His own apt characterization.)

In the midst of the book’s other pieces - a transcribed IRC dialogue, some ‘Reflections on Cyberpoetry’ that systematically recast T. S. Eliot’s reflections on vers libre, a ‘dos and donts’ of new media practice reworked from William Blake’s ‘Proverbs of Hell,’ more ‘notes on new poetrie,’ and ‘A Poem of Attitudes’ - the main portion of the book consists of ‘Stops and Rebels: a critique of hypertext.’ This chapter, for me, was the book’s demonic heart, one of the most considered and wide-ranging creative and critical treatments of writing in networked and programmable media that I have come across.

‘Demon,’ by the way, is Stefans’ name for operative code, those non-human agents, machine dwellers, who now take some share in cultural production. It is typical of Stefans and typical of serious poetic practice that such a term is slipped into the discourse without immediate explanation, demanding, as it were, both prior and emergent understanding in his readers: that ‘demon’ means ‘program,’ and the word demonstrates, at one and the same time, a geekier, hacker’s or UNIX-literate reader’s sense of the term while also allowing any discussion of the role of code to escape the nerdish gravity of technoscience in its evocation of shared folk-magic artistry. If I call my programs demons (and I plan to do so from now on), different groups of readers may begin to take note of how they behave, and this could be properly subversive, or differently subversive of the properly designated literary corpus - as demons devour and disgorge the illustrious cadavers of ‘genius,’ as demons do.

‘Stops and Rebels’ is constructed around a poem that has been algorithmically collaged from a number of source texts. The bulk of the writing, however, consists of footnotes on the poem, written as if by ‘an over-zealous student.’ Chiefly, the piece is clear discursive prose, but the structure makes it more useful for later reference since individual notes tend to organize around distinct topics: noise and interpretation, carnival and database aesthetics, Language poetry, artificial intelligence, ambient poetics, coding, etc. Labelled as articles, these notes might appear as fragments from a lost or future encyclopaedia of new media poetics. There are far too many such topics to seriously engage in a brief review, but fortunately the book’s title itself gives me one way into its overall concerns.

You know that you are reading a poet when a punning, multiply ambiguous title proves to signify far more than mediaspeak irony, reserve and denigration. ‘Fashionable noise’ seems at first to point to the transient, modish effects of a new ‘big noise’ on the fringes of poetic practice and literary art. These negative or rather challenging connotations would not, I suspect, be entirely disavowed by Stefans, but they are self-contextualized, embedded in a title phrase that bears more and other meanings, including much that is generative and engaged. The two words could, in fact, be set as a one line emblematic poem with the current subtitle promoted to its title. ‘Fashionable’ here is derived from the verb as well as from its frequently foppish noun. It means that the ‘noise’ of digital poetics is programmed, manipulated, ‘fashioned fit’ and shifted so as to work with and influence literary and social convention. ‘[The CP (computer-poem)] starts from noise and algorithm and moves towards convention.’ Noise in this context is far from being mere linguistic waste or excess. It is many things in Stefan’s text: the stuff and matter of language on the cusp of lexical or symbolic meaning, the non- or posthuman aspects of writing with new media, the algorithm itself, and its fragmentary, found, arbitrary, chance-selected sources. This is ‘noise’ as the representation of a downgraded but integral aspect of the entire gamut of linguistic phenomena. Noise gains entitlement in this context because the encompassing world of language is the poet and writer’s proper (if potential) palette - not those few notes plucked out of the soundscape by convention and tradition, but everything from letters to their dreamlife, from noise to silence. Because new media make poetic noise fashionable, it becomes impossible for writers and artists to ignore these admittedly fashionable ways of ‘making it new.’

As with the sense of its ‘demons,’ Fashionable Noise is all but uniquely responsive to both traditional and ‘bleeding edge’ language art practice. As a critique of hypertext begun in 1996, ‘Stops and Rebels’ was way ahead of its time, although it is hard to say what remains of its earlier states. Much of its close analysis of writing in programmable media is still poorly understood even in the most recent critical texts. Besides this, there are few writers like Stefans who are also able to program what they prescribe. This book will help to reconfigure the fashionable literary arcades.

Posted by Brian Stefans at 06:28 PM

February 12, 2004

Brown Literary Arts: E-Fest 2004

[Well, this isn't exactly a New York event but I don't have a category yet for out of town appearances. If you happen to be in Providence...]

---- TUESDAY, FEB. 17 ----

730PM
Where it All Began: Literary Hypermedia at Brown
location: McCormack Family Theater [70 Brown Street]
Introduction : Robert Coover
Reading by William Gillespie
Reading by Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Reading by Talan Memmott
Performance by Thalia Field and Jamie Jewett

OPENING RECEPTION


---- WEDNESDAY, FEB. 18 ----

1000AM-1130AM
Poetics Panel
location: ***
chair: Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Stephanie Strickland Returning Space and Time to Digital
Poetry
Talan Memmott Identity to Adentity: Network Phenomenology
and the Poetics of Being Online

100-230PM Positions and Provocations
location: ***
chair: Wendy Chun
Roberto Simanowski - Justifying the Spectacle
George Landow - Is Hypertext Fiction Possible?
Alan Sondheim - New Media Bytes the Dust
Noah Wardrip-Fruin - Hypertext - It's not what you link
Edrex Fontanilla - ***title coming

330-500PM
Theory/Practice Roundtable
location: ***
moderator: Talan Memmott
John Cayley, Aya Karpinska, George Landow, Roberto
Simanowski, Stephanie Strickland, Alan Sondheim, Noah
Wardrip-Fruin, Brian Kim Stefans

>>>>>DINNER for participants

730PM
Digital Poetry Spectacular
location: McCormack Family Theater [70 Brown Street]
Reading by Stephanie Strickland
Reading by John Cayley
Reading by Aya Karpinska
Reading by Brian Kim Stefans

RECEPTION


---- THURSDAY, FEB. 19 ----

100-230PM Artist Demos
location: Grad Ctr. Tower E - 123 [92 Thayer Street]
Alan Sondheim
Aya Karpinska
Brian Kim Stefans

330-500PM New Books on Digital Media
location: Grad Ctr. Tower E - STG [92 Thayer Street]
Noah Wardrip-Fruin/Pat Harrigan -- First Person
Nick Montfort -- Twisty Little Passages
Alex Galloway - Protocols

Posted by Brian Stefans at 02:30 PM

February 08, 2004

Bruce Andrews, Empire

[I've finally put up Bruce Andrews brief introduction to POLI SCI, his political writings. I'll put it here as well, since it's not quite properly hooked up to Arras yet.]

EMPIRE.

Excuse the deja vu.

About 30 years ago, at the start of a scholarly career in Political Science which these writings collect, I began a doctoral dissertation on U.S. imperialism. Specifically, on its most flamboyant contemporary spectacle: the U.S. war with Vietnam.

This is the war I went to graduate school in order to study — at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and (from ’71 to ’75) in the Ph.D. program at Harvard University.

The Nixon years, for the most part — against a backdrop of near-genocidal brutality abroad as well as turbulent dissent and soul-searching at home.

Why are we in Vietnam?

Why are we escalating or expanding the war?

Why do we refuse to withdraw?

Those were questions animating the moment.

By the early 1970s, anyone studying American foreign policy would be told: first, that the policies of the current administration would be shrouded in shadow and secrecy, open to polemic but not to scholarly grasp; and second, that from current accounts, U.S. war policy seemed ‘locked in’: still rutted in the premises that underlay the original large-scale escalations of the Johnson era, particularly those of 1964 and 1965. So, to understand the continuing imperial war, a student would need to make sense out of the earlier and massive unleashing of violence during the Johnson administration.

To figure a way out — or to imagine a possible future policy able to relinquish these imperial ambitions — involved a prescription. For policy change, if not for social change more broadly. And in the midst of protests about the present, this called for an explanation of the recent past. Not to retrace the steps that propelled the U.S. into Vietnam (a familiar preoccupation of journalists, as if chronology were explanatory), but to interpret its meaning, to grasp the point of the 1960s escalation.

To explain empire to get beyond empire. (Recent titles by my graduate supervisors were revealing: Robert W. Tucker’s Nation or Empire?, George Liska’s Imperial America, Stanley Hoffmann’s Gulliver’s Troubles, or the Setting of American Foreign Policy).

At the time (a period of raging polemic), so much of this was up for grabs:

1) Washington’s ‘official line’ (designed to justify the war) had virtually zero explanatory leverage for anyone but the true believers. [The debunking of official rhetoric had been a great triumph of the anti-war movement — with a timely assist from a new cohort of revisionist historians of American diplomacy, charting the continuities of the U.S. empire even further back than the misleading ‘origins of the Cold War’: this was an era when the ‘generation gap’ and the President’s ‘credibility gap’ with the general public were more than figures of nostalgia.];

2) scholars of international politics and foreign policy had developed a bewildering array of theories and conceptual models which had not been applied very often to current, controversial policies;

3) these disciplinary protocols in political science and IR (international relations) were embarrassingly narrow and blunted. Scholarly literatures in philosophy and social theory — able to provide a solid basis for explanation and interpretation — were still beyond the pale for the more complacently ‘policy-oriented’ afficianados of foreign affairs;

4) the vast heritage of critical theory was finally coming to light (and to translated availability) just in time to rev up the movements for social change and to make available entirely new modes of inquiry and interpretation.

Why did U.S. leaders refuse to budge?
What was the point of imperial aggression?
What was the broader foreign policy (and its plans for world order) designed to accomplish on the domestic social level?
What were the domestic sources and the domestic functions of empire?
How was I going to arrive at a place where I could say something about all of this?
Or: how to bite off more than I could chew?

To make sense out of Vietnam — and to keep faith with the dramatic (and across-the-board) radicalism and widespread push toward social change: these would be the self-serving replies to questions about what I was doing in graduate studies in political science. Asking questions and getting ready to ask questions (or, ‘getting ready to have been frightened’: to repeat a title of a poetic sequence from that time). It meant:

a) studying the ‘debate’ (between critics and apologists) over Vietnam and over U.S. hegemony and expansionism — to tease out the explanatory resonance of the arguments;

b) studying the conceptual work in I.R. and comparative foreign policy, to see how a set of competing, alternative explanations could be constructed out of it (from so-called Rational Actor models, investigations of ‘nondecision-making’, studies of bureaucratic politics or Presidential psychopathology, to the rule of public opinion and domestic pressure);

c) studying a terra incognita of work outside of political science to underprop the task of explanation (from the philosophy of science and history to Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophy and ethnomethodology, and even to the early rumblings of semiotics and structuralism shaking up the interpretive strategies in the arts and humanities);

d) finally, before this was incorporated into mainstream curricula (as it was in later decades, if only in the humanities), becoming an impassioned student (and book collector!) of critical theorizing (from Marxist political economy and Frankfurt School studies to the beginnings of post-structuralist analysis on the post-Leninist Left).

[These were, parenthetically, the years in which I became committed to a lifelong project of making radical or experimental art and to permanent residence within the (sometimes glamorized and more often demonized) intellectual Left. Looking back, without the inspiring backdrop of forceful opposition to American imperialism and the push, on the Left, of hope that a drastically different America could be imagined as well as struggled for, very little of my own effort would have turned out in the way it did. Blessing and curse: the legacy of the ‘long 1960s’, from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate.]

In 1975, I finished a doctoral dissertation on the interpretation of the U.S. escalation of the war at its most decisive period (1964 + 1965) — by laying out the conceptual building blocks of possible competing accounts of that war. Spookily, it was defended almost simultaneous with the last U.S. helicopters scrambling out of Saigon in the face of Vietnamese triumph: EMPIRE AND SOCIETY: Toward A Contextual Explanation of American Aims and Policy in Vietnam.

Posted by Brian Stefans at 05:18 PM

February 07, 2004

Experiments and Disorders reading

More Experiments and Disorders—again in convenient and bustling Times Square!

Brian Kim Stefans
+
Miranda Mellis
+
Kirsten Wilson

Wednesday, February 11

Dixon Place @ Chashama
111 West 42nd Street
(between 6th and 7th avenues)
7:30pm: $5

Kirsten Wilson is a performance artist, writer, and teacher. She was the founder and artistic director of the Santa Fe-based choreographed theater company, Friendly Fire. She has written numerous performance pieces, including There’s No Place Like Home, A Case Study, The Amazing Magician’s Beautiful Assistant Clara, and Odalisque. She taught monologue writing and performing classes at the College of Santa Fe, and Playback Theater through Bard College in New York; She currently teaches Letting the Body Speak: The Autobiographical Monologue Class, and Writing as a Spiritual Practice.

Miranda F. Mellis is a writer from San Francisco set to graduate in May with an M.F.A. from Brown University. She is in the Providence-based chamber-punk band Television Astronaut and has been published in BeeHive, Cabinet, h2so4, Fence, Nerve Lantern, Persephone, and a few anthologies. Formerly an aerialist in the tiny avant-garde circus, The Turnbuckles, she toured with Sister Spit in '98. She is a founding editor with Tisa Bryant and Kate Schatz of the forthcoming multifarious publication The Encyclopedia and is currently collaborating with Ali Liebgott on a graphic novellet called Goodnight Apocalypse.

Brian Kim Stefans is the author of three books of poetry, including Free Space Comix and Angry Penguins. His most recent book - comprising essays, poems and a dialogue - is called Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics. His Web site, devoted to new media poetry and poetics, is arras.net, at which his net art can also be found. He had a reading of his short play "Kinski in Kanada" on November 8 at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Posted by Brian Stefans at 12:25 PM

February 05, 2004

Keston Sutherland: Last Night in the Erasmus Room (on Andrea Brady)

[Keston asked me to post this to FSC, so that it could be "winkle-picked by readers unfamiliar with Andrea's work."]

Andrea Brady gave a reading of work from Vacation of a Lifetime and Cold Calling last night at Queens' College, Cambridge. There was a discussion afterward initiated by Ian Patterson that was one of the most engaging and luminous I've heard in such formal circumstances for a good while. I'll try here to sketch out some of the positions that were defined in dialogue, without attaching the hamper-lock of attributing them to the people who most identified with them or who offered them up for debate.

1. Andrea's work was described as having changed quite substantially between the later pieces in Vacation (such as 'Post Festen e', on which Robin Purves offered some thoughts at the poetry summit) and the new poems in Cold Calling. The difference is manifold. Most obviously, the earlier poems attempt a form of direct political criticism supported by research data and satirised reportage that the later poems do not attempt. Both sets of work were said to be contradictory in the schedules they set up for accommodating and impeding interpretion by turns; and this contradictoriness was said to be a defining feature of the work, leaving the reader sometimes "at home" in a locution and sometimes baffled in the attempt to get there. This point was not extended into a characterisation of the experience of poems as wholes, but was intended as a description of the channel-switching between locutions at the level of individual sentences or groups of sentences. That is, the argument did not propose a synthetic view of the poems as -finally- both inviting and refusing, but only indicated that such a pattern runs across the lines during the act of reading from one to the next; but the synthetic argument was perhaps implicit. This makes for a different experience in reading Vacation than it does in reading CC, since the footholds offered by data-selection and converted newsprint in Vacation become immediately the most obvious points of accommodation (provided we know SUVs are and what Dean and Deluca sells, etc.), whereas the points of accommodation in CC are more often intuitable rather than recognised.

2. Andrea herself suggested that CC is a book of "failures." She said that the poems are limited or even vitiated by their occasional character, which she takes to be essentially negative, in the sense that it amounts implicitly to the proscription of a more extended (possibly a more historical?) form of writing, a form less tied to and closed in by source-moments of private feeling. Against this it was objected that CC was in fact the more seriously political of the two books, for the reasons I'll try to lay out in (3). Andrea views the book as a kind of transition into a more sustained single project: her new and unfinished work of poetic retrieval and conversion of the Gilgamesh epic and other historical material into a long polemical piece addressing the recent wars in the Middle East. The negative term "occasional" seems to connote an absence of -research-; it was not discussed whether the latter is a necessary precondition for avoiding the former, but this seemed more or less implicit in Andrea's account of her own practice.

3. Vacation was criticised for being an ethnology of other people's behaviour from the perspective of a necessarily superior poetic critique. It was suggested that such an ethnology could at best only be of secondary political significance, and at worst amounted to a kind of celebration of inaction. The admission of complicity in that behaviour by the author throughout the book was not judged to be a way out of this problem or proof against the accusation of self-imputed superiority; rather it was suggested that the authorial voice was set up to be an example or paradigm of complicity in order preemptively to subvert the accusation itself. CC was said on the contrary to be a powerfully political text, partly because it avoids that circuit of the author who escapes complicity by virtue of electing to be its paradigm; but also because (and this was not made altogether clear) it approaches a kind of political critique without manifest political content, which was proposed as an ideal limit of what poetry can do when it tries to be polemical. Against this idea it was objected that "realism" in the sense specified by Lukacs would be abandoned entirely at that ideal limit. That is, the attempt to make an accurate and anticipatory picture of social contradictions might need to involve the kinds of data and even the kinds of ethnology said to exist in Vacation, no matter what the risks; and that a poetry from which all that had been expurgated in favour of implication of some kind would be an abdication as well as a refusal.

4. It was suggested that moments of particular criticism in Vacation, for example the polemic against the death penalty, tended to converge into a general critique only at the expense of seeming ironic; that is to say, the individual moments of criticism are not ironic but they take on an unintended irony as soon as their synthesis becomes apparent. This is the subordination of the particular to the general in a specific sense: through being incorporated into a more total polemic (against capitalism), individual moments of polemic (against events in capitalist society) are made to look like irony. This word "irony" was picked up and reused in various ways and in service of various points, without being specified. The original point was perhaps that irony conduces to make contradiction more palatable, by a kind of implicit insistence on the consensus that we all know how bad everything is and how little we can do about it. Irony in this sense is not radical but on the contrary conservative; it makes a show of destabilising language with the result that the most obdurate contradictions are kept out of it. This led to some discussion of more confrontational strategies in poetry that would deprive the reader of the satisfaction of an ironic consensus. The idea of such a strategy was questioned in turn from two perspectives, the historical and the moral. It was asked whether, after a century of art-confrontation, we could really expect any art to be confrontational in an unironic manner. It was also suggested that the ironic voice was more humble and attractive, and that it sought out a kind of amity with the reader that a more confrontational strategy could refuse only at the risk of seeming petulant or merely abrasive. This led to some talk about partial degradation of language (e.g. the satirical or withering detournement of journalese) versus its total degradation, or the attempt at least to produce the latter. It was suggested at this point that irony is in every case defensive of middle class attitudes and interests, and that totally degraded language could at least never be used to that end. What this total degaradation might look or sound like was not discussed, so that the antinomy remained strictly theoretical; but some real possibilities for future practice did seem to be at stake. Barry MacSweeney was mentioned as someone who tried to push his work toward total degradation. This raised the question, which was not uttered and certainly not answered, whether the kind of life necessary to produce totally degraded work might not itself need to be pretty degraded. That isn't an insult to Barry but a recognition of the real difficulties he suffered throughout his life. Which means also that "degradation" in this sense is not (of course) the failure to be pristine but the violent renunciation of the idea that anyone with half a brain and at least that much of a heart could ever even dream that they should be so.

Posted by Brian Stefans at 11:14 AM

February 04, 2004

Joebituary

[Not that Slate needs their articles reprinted on blogs, but I thought this was pretty funny, if a bit joeky.]

Joe Lieberman bows out.
By William Saletan, Slate

Say it ain't so, Joe.

Here's Joe Lieberman on TV, quitting the race.

I have such fond memories of Lieberman's campaign. Actually, it was never the Lieberman campaign. It was the Joe campaign. The Web site was www.joe2004.com. The campaign vehicle was the Joemobile. The blog was www.blogforjoe.com. Why the Joe theme? To identify with the average Joe, I suppose. And maybe because the folks at the Lieberman campaign thought the name Lieberman sounded, well, a bit too Joeish.

Joe was the heir apparent, Al Gore's right-hand man. A bit too right-hand, as it turned out. He started out the race with a presumptive seniority that might have been called, in the parlance of his campaign, PrimoJoeniture. But on the stump, voters found him Joematose. He had trouble rustling up Joenations. Antiwar Democrats in Iowa found his support of the Iraq war Joefensive. He went into a Joesdive. He was Joewhere.

In New Hampshire, however, he sensed a Joepening. All those McCain independents could vote in the state's Joepen primary. Joe set up house there and went to work. The crowds welcomed him with Joevations. He surged in the Joevernights. "Joementum!" crowed his campaign. He was Joevial.

Alas, Joeverconfidence felled him. He finished fifth in New Hampshire and was written off. He was Joast. Joadkill. D-Joe-A.

Yet he refused to bow out. The Joe must go on, he vowed. Critics said he was in Joenial, but he flew south, taking his Joe on the road. He faced down his lengthening odds with a certain Joe de vivre. Where would he break through? Joeklahoma? AriJoena? North DaJoeta? New MexiJoe? The Joe Me state?

Alas, he came up empty tonight. Joe-for-7. Joe-miliation.

Joe revoir, Joe. Joerivederci. Hasta Joe Vista. Somewhere conservative Democrats are laughing, and somewhere McCain independents shout. But there is no Joe in Mudville. Joe Lieberman has struck out.

Posted by Brian Stefans at 05:42 PM

February 02, 2004

FSC News

I had to take down my Denis Roche "Bootleg" for a few days because of a copyright infringement, but the publisher of Veronica Forrest-Thomson's Collected Poems, Anthony Barnett, has graciously permitted me to leave it up so long as I give proper acknowledgement in the file. There actually is a bibliography of source books on the last pages of the document, but no mention of permissions -- I'll fix that as soon as I get home today.

Ron Silliman has blogged my little chapbook, Jai-lai for Autocrats, published recently by Brenda Ijima's Yo-Yo Labs. He neglected to make the obvious pun, that FSC is, after all, the new FSG. Thanks Ron for the plug!

Lastly, I've been working on designs for the Segue Foundation site, just for practice really since I haven't been asked to do this and am not being paid. But heck, what they have now is such an eyesore, and I'm already doing the calendar for them! I've also recently designed a site for an employee peer of mine, Jane House.

Posted by Brian Stefans at 10:35 AM