Convolute L: Elle

Could not help but notice the similarities between these two covers of Elle, one featuring Britney Spears and one featuring Lady GaGa. The two are certainly similar in the sense that they both flaunt platinum blond hair and credit Madonna as a musical influence.

Convolute K: Kim Kardashian Cites God

The Jenner-Kardashian brood is currently the subject of a book being shopped in the publishing world. The most notable quotable of 2011? Kim Kardashian found God on Twitter, but she's not the first celebrity to do so, nor is she the first to challenge the public's perception about her through this social network.

Earlier in 2011, the INF Daily posted pictures from Megan Fox's Twitter account. The starlet used her account to upload photos in response to her rumored use of Botox. Check it out here. Celebrities can use new media to manage their own PR campaigns.

Convolute J: Jacque's Justice (Most Creative Error Messages of 2011)

What could be worse than being foiled by your favorite media outlet? Possibly being directed to an uncreative redirect page. Best "Whoops" designs of 2011 after the break.

#1: The Bleary, Twitter Curmudgeon Chiller Template

This designer for Twitter makes apt use of the ambiguity surrounding the word "chill." Is "chill as in halt" chill or dark? Do you identify with rabid ice cream cones? #immelting

#2: The Mac OS X Disses Spotify (It's-Just-Like-Real-Life Fun Factor of 1.25/5.00 Stars)

Safari, however, manages to convey the hauteur of a Mac down to its 404s.

#2.5: Derrida Deconstruction of the Blog Post

In an unrelated note, there is no better marker of absurdist anger than Angry French Philosopher Jacques Derrida ranting about Angry Philosophical Misinterpretations. Even deconstruction, a system of philosophical communication, gets a bad rap. Much like the Twitter and Mac error messages, he deconstructs deconstruction itself. As a method of literary inquiry, it's like Derrida is sending his own error message out to the public while he frames infinitely more abstract arguments.

#3: Google Bot is Awry

Makes sense that the physical realm of the computer, another system of high-level communication, has developed its own language for errors. As in the case of the Google bot below, which showcases a bot that's broken into pieces. I encountered the bot when trying to scrobble some old photographs on the New Friends blog here, another blog that seems atemporal with its rendition of antiquated photographs and modern text. But, here, you cannot help but laugh at the image of a perplexed robot as a 404 error.

You won't get information superhighway road rage with these error messages, unless that is, SOPA restricts one's ability to navigate the Internet.

Convolute I: International Artists

These dyads are like an artist's means of showcasing their work to an international audience. Here, the Google+ profile showcases the work with five major pieces and a larger, encompassing profile picture. For artists, this design enhances the clarify of their image. The work is then accessible to an international stage of art.

Convolute H (Runner Up): High-Waisted Jeans

Z. Cavaricci pants bring to mind the popular look of the early '90s. These have come back in style and are the runner-up in relation to "Holograms."

Convolute H: Holographic Jesus Postcards

Stills from Coquette (1929)

The Red - Negative Film

Convolute G: /g/

The notorious board 4chan has gathered a following since its 2003 start-up in the bedroom of then 15 year-old Christopher Poole. Poole started 4chan as a spinoff to a Japanese message board, the Futaba Channel, that was called 2chan for short. However, in February 2009, Poole announced that he was 20K in debt and turned to advertising on the site. His true identity beyond his avatar was hidden until it surfaced on July 9th, 2008 in The Wall Street Journal. By 2010, he had gone on to raise $625,000 to create another site, Canv.as.

Of the most popular boards on 4chan?

/g/, the technology forum.

Convolute F: Future of History

This video was sampled from a recorded discussion that occurred at the University of Michigan in regards to the future of history. The lecture begins at 01:09 and continues with an introduction of the speakers. The terminology "operative criticism" is coined in this discussion. It attempts to draw connections between the past and the present.

Recently, Kwame Kilpatrick spoke at Eastern Michigan. In the present, as of the present printed edition that occurred in their school newspaper on December 1st, 2011, Kwame addressed the role of his past actions in relation to his current affairs. The article is filled with the responses of individuals who are commenting on Kwame's portrayal in the media. There was one protesting person who stood outside the event with a sign that said, "Actions speak louder than words." He was brought to speak at the auditorium by a student organization. In the editor's article about Kwame, she quoted him as saying that Kilpatrick... "is currently facing several federal charges" and he "didn't come to EMU looking for anyone's forgiveness or approval."

Regardless of Kwame's personal responsibility in the political events of the past, he is stressing a platform based on the current. He said, '''You never black enough for black folks.... You never white enough for white folks." It seems that Kwame's constant concern is identity politics. His future concern is the impending litigation, as of the beginning of December.

Convolute E: Education

Remember the video with the confusing accents and the lady getting kicked off the train who kept insisting that she was well-education? This video was uploaded to YouTube. This video was recently redone in graphic art and can be found at the subscriber's site here.

Not filmed by me, nor drawn by me, and I am unsure of the rationale behind the film. The instance is strange, regardless it has generated a meme culture. This person is belligerent but in the middle negotiating a conflict. This is a recognizable trope.

As we can see in the film, the individual is clearly further incensed when they are merely referred to customer service. That is, until the individual here starts imagining the future conversation with customer service. It is almost as though this person's conversation continues the train of thought while they are mediated out of the train itself.

The second strange thing about the film is we hear the predominance of education being asserted in the film. Being said individual is educated, they attempt to negotiate their position as a member of the educated class. The Conductor, however, is preoccupied with avoiding the conflict, disengaging from the instance, and referring to the dissatisfied consumer to the appropriate department. If this is how we negotiate the conflict of spaces, then the two individuals in the film state their conflict only in terms of their disengagement from each other.

Oddly enough, the entire instance is filmed. Perhaps, the person filming the video is cognizant of a conflict, but the video reveals the day-to-day conflicts we have in transit.

Brandon Harris Triptych

Convolute D: 3-D Imaging

The prominence of 3-D graphic design in the healthcare industry intrigued me in this quest for a working definition of modernity. The types of 3-D imagery are stereoscopic imaging (through stereo photography), virtual reality (through computers), or holography (through lasers). Basically, the goal of 3-D is to enhance imagery with the illusion of depth. The documents are then displayed either through 3-D viewers, anaglyph pictures (these require the sexy specs), or screening through digital stereo production.

Back in August of 2011, Clay Dillow blogged on POPSCI that "two MIT researchers... cracked some fundamental problems with high resolution 3-D imaging using a novel gelatinous interface and computer-vision algorithms that, in tandem, can easily and portably provide imaging resolutions that were previously only possible with large... expensive laboratory gear." As a result of this discovery, Dillow's article predicted that the "resulting high-quality, 3-D models can be manipulated on a computer screen to a variety of ends ranging from quality control to criminal forensics to dermatology."

2011 also saw the release of The Immortals, a mythological, big-budget film that director Tarsem Singh used as a platform for adapting 3-D technology to classic, Grecian story lines. Singh's work in The Immortals builds on the same larger-than-life sets. His skill in The Fall, similarly, was of crafting the story-within-a-story. Singh flirted with the idea that not only is, obviously, the plot derivative, but the ability of one to harness technology is only as adaptive as the film itself.

• Singh, along with other 3-D progenitors like James Cameron, have a certain skill in adapting new technology to recast what is commonly perceived as historicity.
• Historicity, as a philosophical unit, delves into the relation between teleology, temporality, and historiography.
• 3-D is the medium that depicts the historiography of modernity.

Private loans are not eligible for federal forgiveness programs, but that conflict is not as well-publicized. The prevailing sentiment is that the corporation has the legal means to charge you whatever they want whenever they want. The government has a laissez-faire response to their regulation.

Convolute C: Chaudhury

Krishnendu Chaudhury spoke recently on behalf of Google at the University of Michigan. Chaudhury outlined affiliations with the University of Michigan in the Google Books project and when questions arose about the general fate of newspapers, he surprised the audience. An individual remarked that this town, meaning Ann Arbor, used to have a newspaper. Perhaps, the comment was made nonchalantly, but it still raises the question of the past transformation of media dissemination. Not-so-suprisingly, the media cohorts present at the industry who were once equipped for that platform of representation had potentially lingering resentment in how the issue was treated. They suggested that Google return to the public library to continue with archival scanning.

As reported by Search Engine Land in May 2011, the decision of the organization to stop scanning the archival material was interpreted as a neutral instance. Google returned the material to the original partner, Boston Phoenix, including copies of the scans. The evolution of Search Engine Land, incidentally, reflects a turn in media that suggests it is embracing the transition albeit warily. Like no other news organization, however, Google has grappled with interesting challenges. Google has circulation wars, users can experience Google bombing, and all of this Internet socialization exists in a covert lens. Occasionally, it is tempting to imagine that Google was founded as an organization that sought to dapple in Institutional Critique.

Institutional Critique, or the field of visual art that arose in the '80s, suggested that you could view a monolithic organization within a new context in order to demystify the the entity. Andrea Fraser was one performance artist who generated considerable interest. She created the film, "Museum Highlights," that pantomimed the relationship between the museum and the spectator. The film, despite the controversy, ended up becoming an important dialog in art history. Art history is filled with such instances of individuals helping to create the idea that an institution contains an image, which can be modified with time and innovation.

An institution has a narrative and, as with the protests in the Occupy Movements across the country, the creation of the social networking cite Diaspora, and the ability of us to engage remotely, its important that in our excitement to broach new horizons, we don't destroy the existing bridges of communication. The individuals in my class on conceptualism, for instance, suggested that conceptual art can be annoying. For the twelve or twenty or so individuals taking notes, there are connections between print media and modernity. There is writing that embraces non-negotiable spaces, such as transcript, Sprawl, Dies, The Inkblot Records, and other literary works.

Recommended reading aside, the talk with Google was fascinating. Chaudhury detailed that Google is capable of tracking the archives in vertical graphs. The way he described vertical graphs is similar to the aspects of literature discussed in the post-structural movement. Language acquired horizontal and vertical planes of interpretation. For instance, metaphors in a text could be unlocked and applied to planes of interpretation. If this comparison sounds mathematical, it is inherently so.

For what Chaudhury noted was the way that the data being scanned is like snapshots of large volumes of information. The language becomes contained data. The data is interpreted in a graph and viewed by technicians who catalog the material. They can see gaps, for instance, in the years being scanned.

On a metaphorical and literal level, what does it mean if our intake of history is delimited to that available within this one process of interpretation? In this one snapshot of history, do we compute that something is missing? How different, truly, is this from understanding whether 3 gigs of information represent the public as aptly as the press? How different is this from the arguments that characterized the Industrial Revolution? What rights or concerns does the digital humanities have for projects of this nature? How does the public feel about crawling?

I would like to hear some stories about Google. Please leave in the comments section. Spambots, trickery, and artisanship encouraged but subject to critique.

Convolute B: Babinski Reflex

We're waiting for Halloween and I have a composition notebook. The design is speckled and the font is wide. The cars filter past the stadium on the game day.

Convolute A (Apple Store)

The mall is the modern arcade. It teems with the modern archetypical figures of the window-shopper, the family, the teenager, etc. The brightest store in the mall is the Apple store. Outside the Apple store is a line of people waiting for the new iPhone. The release is hyped. They're next to a small vendor selling iPhone cases.

I, meanwhile, had a question. I had to inquire about the queue, but that was for the newly released product. I asked the last person in line about this subject. They directed me inside the store where I asked an associate (who was looking at his iPhone) how to order a new charger for a MacBook Air. He looked up from his phone and gave me advice that I already knew or could have looked up online. But, before one questions the value of these living conduits of information, one should take note that I would, sometimes, much rather take advice from a live person instead of parsing through the information online.

Speaking with an Apple Store attendant made me conscious of what extent we are people, what extent we are machines, and how frequently we navigate between the machine-human-world and the physical world. Walking into a store where someone is engaged in a remote world underlines the simplicity of this interconnectivity.

(Un)Trending: New Google Reader

Today, the Atlantic Wire reported that the e-community was upset over the end of Google Reader. Apparently, changes to the site will entail a redesign that discourages the usage of the share and circulate buttons. The consumer response seems to suggest that the urge towards migration to the relatively-new Google+ is to fault for the unfavorable upgrade. However, what I found fascinating about the article was their uncertain attitude towards Google's abilities as a social network.

The article mentioned, "It turned out Google wasn't so bad at social networking after all." There is still media doubt, apparently, at Google's ability to social network, which suggests the continued unease of internet communication. Perhaps, this sentiment is still popular with the press, but let's look at the mall in future posts.

The mythic poetry of Walter Benjamin stills rings true as long as we have the collective imagination. Benjamin wrote, "the collective dream energy of a society has taken refuge with redoubled vehemence in the mute impenetrable nebula of fashion, where the understanding cannot follow" [Ba1,2].

Thoughts on the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Now, honestly, I don't feel terrible that I'm not present in New York right now.

The video feed from Democracy Now looks emboldening. I have seen footage and notes by other bloggers and individuals in the media industry. I watched people hold up their iPads and document the instance of the young, blond women who were maced on Wall Street. I also observed footage:

If you read the comments on the video, it becomes unclear whether the individuals are affiliated with the banking industry or if they are individuals at a restaurant. The contrast is the fashion of today's documentation on one level. The above scene brings to mind a selection from Benjamin as taken from Ba1,2.

Benjamin wrote, "the collective dream energy of a society has taken refuge with redoubled vehemence in the mute impenetrable nebula of fashion, where the understanding cannot follow."

The need for segregation of space in the video above (the street versus the restaurant) maintains the distance between the perceived ruling and subordinate classes. I find it interesting that the technology is present as a recording device on both levels. There is the level of the street with the media and individual lens as well as the level of the balcony with the personal computing device.

The preoccupation of the subordinate classes with the fashion is obscuring the message. As the message becomes, obscure, I am afraid that nothing will happen from this movement. The school is not the refuge for manifest social change, instead, it serves as a class-regulating institution without the financial aid to address the entire body. The institution is class-regulating in the sense that it reinforces social constructions of value, assigns these a monetary value, and rewards or punishes accordingly. I hope that from this venture the educational system will receive more funding that it can provide more of its students with need-based financial aid.

Now, me, I am not a banker or philosopher. I would not enforce monetary standards on an individual to assign them value, nor would I deign myself well-learned enough to apply gradients of intellect to the individual.

I do not know what is best for the country.

It would be difficult and perplexing for one to express outrage in a way that is not attuned to the sensibilities of the audience. I have been told that is not polite to question the mechanisms of modern society. I can consider a revolution, an ideological change, or the upheaval that makes a nation question its entire basis. The educational system is the most important systemic organization. I am in favor of anyone who has ever wanted to be treated equally, I don't find it entertaining, and I hope the schools become involved in this debate.

Do I find it immaterial?

I don't know.

CITGO Update

The sign was removed after disinterest in selling the sign was expressed. The sign has been moved to a friend's studio.

The CITGO Gas Station Sign I

This evening marked the beginning of an Independent Art Study; may I have your sign for the purposes of art?

The attendant was sitting behind the glass. He wore colored lenses. I asked him if I could have this large, white sign for CITGO gas that was on the side of the business. The signs were next to the trash. I wanted to take the sign to an art gallery for them to hang on the wall. I thought about the movie Trash Humpers.

We picked up some pizza. The pizza joint was located next to Mediterrano and covered in soft lighting. The other structure in the building was for a therapeutic health practice. The first row of parking spaces in front of the Cottage Inn were for the delivery drivers. The row of spaces was empty. We took the food home and talked about Lean 6 Sigma. The sign was waiting near the gas station.

Once, I met a gas station attendant who told me that it was a dream. He made noises like the pow-pow of guns when he was bored. I asked him if anyone there had ever been robbed. He said no one had and pointed at the glass. The glass was thick, rainbow, and looked like light. It was a long walk to head from HQ to a gas station.

The sign turned out to be immensely heavy. A friend and I slugged it on our shoulders to our domicile. We had to stop frequently. I was carrying the sign by the "C" and he was dragging the "O." We tried to walk out of sight behind trees. We had permission to take the sign, but cars kept slowing down. I realized that this sign was going to be site for the misunderstanding of a century. A minivan playing loud music halted in the middle of the thoroughfare.

We crept quietly along a cul-de-sac where sunflowers swayed in the dark rain. He wanted to drop the sign. I took a strap from my jacket and wove it through the "C." The adventure reminded me of what I would have imagined going t.p.ing felt like as an adolescent. On one block, a lady started to walk her two dogs in our direction. They wouldn't stop barking and she went inside her home. She had one of those pumpkins that was carved to look like vomiting. I thought the pumpkin and small dogs were aptly suited to compactness of the sidewalk space.

We were almost there. The big water tower was obscured by the houses. The ground was covered in a film of leaves. I looked relative to my own direction. There was a house where the occupants were all already wearing Halloween costumes.

They said, "Now, that's a scavenger hunt. They stole a CITGO sign!"

The wee little dogs kept yapping, their beer pong game continued into the night, and that is how, I believe, we might have accumulated a sign to pass on. I want to see what happens to this in the same way that I think someone did about dollar bills.

I wonder what it would take to do a geocache about one used gas station sign that's about 10 feet long. I'm thinking of the whole "Where's George" campaign and how that revealed interesting patterns in the flux of human movement with currency. Any further updates about the CITCO sign will be noted in regards to #independentstudyproject and accompanied with a numerical value.

Spot On Spotify: "Let's Talk About Airtime"

Web 2.0 Summit is hosted in San Francisco this year from October 17th to October 19th. There are a variety of speakers including the Sean Parker. Parker is currently dedicating much of his time to develop Spotify in Stockholm.

He suggests that much of the industry being created is influenced by licensing issues. There is also a confluence of media based on the individual user creating social media in the shadow of larger institutions developing such materials.

Parker's interview (below) at the Summit gleans fascinating insight into the creation of Spotify. His public persona is still heavily influenced by his estranged relationship to the music industry. Parker's recent platform development is a collaboration between Facebook and the social music media industries. The brand then purports to bolster its power on the basis of viral distribution packets.



This initial program interview was not without digs at the Boulevard and Parker's persona. The interpersonal drama between Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg is still predominant in their recent press coverage. The press noted that Parker's first tweet, reportedly, was "Sorry, Zuck, I had to do it eventually." But, Parker does makes clear, informative points about his understanding of media in the interview at this conference.

Parker's theories suggest that the media we use and the platforms we adopt characterize more than our consumer profiles. The consumer crowd still searches for a distribution of music without the mediation of existing, top-down structures. The existing structures governed by entrepreneurs like Parker and Zuckerberg might evolve in a similar manner. For now, the strength of Parker's public speaking is that he acknowledges that his interests as a shareholder will temper his opinion. He admits they negate his ability to extensively and publicly critique the organization. He is unable to address whether products like Facebook usher in a level of "creepiness" due to his financial obligations.

Are we, as a public, capable of accounting for this flux of data? Who is keeping track of whatever or whomever is creepin' on our data?

every book on bookshelf one

collected poems 1947-1997 allen ginsberg
the book of promethea cixous
catch-22 joseph heller
sodom and gomorrah marcel proust
italio calvino cosmicomics
the abridged journals of sylvia plath
the invisible man ellison
ulysses joyce
the phantom toolbooth norton juster
gravity's rainbow thomas pynchon
wuthering heigts bronte
cain's book trocchi
slouching towards bethlehem didion
the famished road okri
mrs. dalloway woolf
the night of the iguana williams
girls who wore black johnson and grace
tales of eta hoffman
tropic of cancer
empire of the senseless
great expectations
orlando woolf
the stranger camus
the complete stories franz kafka
the voyage out virginia woolf
motion sickness tillman
richard yates lin
alice's adventures in wonderland & through the looking glass carroll

Guitar Picks from Amnesty International (Recommended)

BAROQUE SPACE

David Beer and Roger Burrows

Scholars Beer and Burrows suggested in the Journal of Consumer Culture in 2010 that there was a new type of consumer influence by Web 2.0. Beer and Burrows hypothesized that there are patterns of capitalism on the web. These trends are similar to the ones reflected in what could be considered physical reality.

They mention that the new consumer should be called the craft consumer. The craft consumer is grappling with the inchoate conception of identity that arises when the traditional lines between the producer and consumer are blurred. Beers and Burrows briefly suggest that this is a stable consumer identity.

I cannot help but compare them to Walter Benjamin when he hypothesizes that the writer Baudelaire is pre-occupied with the self-same individual. The self-same individual is the literary subject and self-subject. who strives for individuality. Incidentally, both the postmodern and modern individual attempts to distinguish their own identity within a miasma of information.

For Benjamin, this was the world of the novel taking place amongst the death of poetry. For Beer and Burrows, it is against the backdrop of the modern web. The literary field has been transmuted to the web. Given the cult-like morning of Jobs that has occurred in the media of this past week, we can assume that the web is the new utopia of our society. In order to further investigate the web, we should look to the scholars who have studied utopias.

Scholar Christine Buci-Glucksmann published a piece back in 1984 that mentioned three types of utopia.

Buci-Glucksmann's Three Types of Utopia:

'Catastrophist' utopia

Anthropological utopia

Transgressive utopia

Her writings and further elaboration on the these themes are discussed in "The Utopia of the Feminine," an essay that appeared in Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Basically, Buci-Glucksman posits that there is a connection between the idea of the feminine and the perception of space, notably, how utopias are presented in writing. I would like to posit that her third type of utopia, the transgressive utopia, is what characterizes the current cultural genesis on the web.

This last type of utopia is contingent upon a "praxis of purely imaginal space" that "forces people to think together a number of apparent opposites" (94). Welcome, then, to the transgressive commericial utopia, emphasis mine with influence cited to Buci-Gluckman, Beer, Benjamin, Burrows, Jobs et al.

Five Tracks for "Computer Scientists Don't Ask Questions," 33 1/3 Records

Track One
"The Gente Decente of Financial Aid Departments, i.e. You 'Old Bastards, I Need Monies for Revolution'"
Track Two

"Auguste Comte Doesn't like You, Either."
Track Three

"Show Me the Crazies in Your Humanities, and I'll Show You Monopoly Money."
Track Four
"I Should Have Gone to Medical School/ When I Don't Know What's Wrong, Baby" (DuWhop)
Track Five
"Clarissa Don't Explain; There is a Subreddit for That"

{{PD-USGov-FSA}}

Marie Brenner, Walter Benjamin and The Six Million Dollar Man

Marie Brenner penned many articles, including this excerpt from "The Man Who Knew Too Much," which preceded her time. Brenner seemed to propose new twists on allegorical concepts, introduced the idea of the whistle-blower perspective in several pieces, and wrote about unprecedented stories. Using Brenner as a standpoint, Benjamin was also ahead of his time. He documented events that were neglected within the academic sphere, but largely due to the influence of the genesis of history.

Benjamin wandered and his descriptions of life on the fringes of WWII remain mysterious. He adopts the position of an impassive watcher of commerce as nations fight over the spoils of war after WWI. The main consistency in his writing is that the wanderer mystique is evoked in many of his passages. Many question his role as an individual. The wanderer mystique is also evoked in the writings of Brenner.

She writes,

"I am a whistle-blower," he says. "I am notorious. It is a kind of infamy doing what I am doing, isn't that what they say?"

The whistle-blower introduces the role of the speaker with a question. Walter Benjamin also investigated the role of the speaker in his writing style. He dabbled with the tropes of Twitter before such a machine were popular on-line. Walter Benjamin's writing style was created before such a machine existed on-line. These citations aside, the implications are, the letter is a representation of material.

Welcome to Twin Peaks

ACTORS (GHOULS) wanted for NIGHT TERRORS at [sic] Orchards [sic]
Date: 2011-09-21, 5:26PM EDT
Reply to: see below [Errors when replying to ads?]
ACTORS (GHOULS) wanted for NIGHT TERRORS at [sic] Orchards.
Earn EXTRA CASH & HAVE FUN! At [sic] we put "Terror in your face" with 6 chilling attractions.
Must be able to work weekends in September & October.
Must be able to "act" and really scare people.
Great part time job for college students looking to earn extra cash!

ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS AND/OR PHONE CALLS WED-FRI ONLY FROM 9:00 TO 5:00

OFFICE CLEANING $10-15 PER HOUR (JACKSON AND [SIC])

NIGHT TIME CLEANING OFFICE,JOB REQUIRES ONLY SWEEPING ,PICKING UP TRASH AND DUSTING,NO TAXES WITHHELD,GET $1150 OF INCOME PER MONTH,MUST HAVE EXP.!!!!!
BUGARIAN ,RUSSIAN SPEAKING OK.. call [sic] FOR INFO..

Recto

End of Borders in Ann Arbor

reblogged

Haiku

accharidesasnewcommoditymaterialsandforlight-convertingsystems:Syntheses,characterizationandprocessing

What is the Future of Electronic Literature?

What is the Future of Electronic Literature?

Writer Kenneth Goldsmith released a key article on the tenth anniversary of September 11th. Goldsmith published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education outing electronic plagiarism. The article discussed popular releases in the burgeoning field of the study of hypertext literature. He mentioned critic Marjorie Perloff who hypothesized that the truly internet savvy individual is one who navigates information online. Perloff suggests that the idea of the alienated internet cowboy is outdated. Goldsmith, however, grappled with the question of whether this is indicative of an over-flowing amount of information. Goldsmith wrote,

it seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing: with an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information... I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it... is what distinguished my writing from yours.

What, then, is the future of electronic publishing in so harried an age? If scholars like Goldsmith and Perloff are right, perhaps it is time that we stop and examine what electronic literature already is before continuing to create more information. The endless stockpiling of information that we are currently producing makes it immensely difficult to keep track of what is actually happening in this field.

After all, you have instruments such as the WayBack Machine. This large database cataloged information in the realm of digital literature. But, how are we supposed to keep track of the WayBack Machine itself when some of the information being added to that database is from 2004? If we consider the year 2004 as the distant past, as evidenced in the way we store it in a database, then this suggests an error in the way we have been recently taught to record information.

The world's approach to public policy has changed dramatically since 2011. For instance, one only has to look at the above Facebook banner to recognize that they way we share information is different. The Facebook community has usurped the concept of the collective memory and changed the way we record current events. An eyewitness account or personal testimony on Facebook can be seen as more reliable than traditional journals. Provided, that is, that consumers rely more on their peer groups for information than commercial products.

This revolution of the transmission of information, which cutout the tradition pulp machines cannot be stressed in importance enough. The global community, in lieu of neocolonialism, has expanded in the digital realm. The world's landscape has changed. People, therefore, have looked to individuals for the purpose of more accurate, eyewitness reporting. After September 11th, it became clear that the information we receive (at least here in the United States) is biased and lacks a personal perspective about world events. It is unfortunate that it took a global tragedy to draw attention to national politics.

September 11th is the birth of a new, electronic consciousness. The Internet became the way that people could learn about one another directly without the bias of traditional print media. The way we communicated, recorded collective memory, and measure the past all changed during this decade. This is so important that the true birth of digital time for the masses should be seen as happening at on September 11th and continuing until two days ago. The first decade after September 11th should be referred to as Y-1, Electronic Literature ([Y-1, EL, or 1ELs]) within academia. What this decade ushers in is still unknown, but we know that life as we know it, has already begun to be recorded differently. Since 2004 is already considered an antiquated time, then surely, we should revisit the aughts and record what has passed in academia and world events.

Jennifer Sussex is a writer, student living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Is this the cure for cancer?

"Loss of cell cycle control is typically an oncogenic process. For cancer to occur, the cells need to replicate beyond any normal physiological control. To answer your question, one factor that in important in controlling the cell cycle is p53. p53 is a checkpoint control in the G1 phase of the cell cycle. Defects in p53 cause a loss of cell cycle regulation and are considered an oncogenic transformation."

Read more:"

"All conceptual writing is allegorical writing"

I am reading "Notes on Conceptualisms" by Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman. On page 15, the authors mention that "allegory implicates Godel's First Incompleteness Theorem: if it is consistent, it is incomplete; if complete, inconsistent (15)." They reference the fact that "writing is necessarily inconsistent, containing elaborations, recursions, sub-metaphors, fictive conceits, projections, and guisngs that combine and recombine both to create the allegorical whole, and to discursively threaten this wholeness." In terms of allegory, they

Wikipedia's entry on this says that "Gödel's theorem shows that, in theories that include a small portion of number theory, a complete and consistent finite list of axioms can never be created, nor even an infinite list that can be enumerated by a computer program. Each time a new statement is added as an axiom, there are other true statements that still cannot be proved, even with the new axiom. If an axiom is ever added that makes the system complete, it does so at the cost of making the system inconsistent."

The Day Job

Review of Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics

This book was one that I found that had been abandoned in a public library in Michigan. I looked it up and it was a Book Crossing book. Book Crossing is like Where's George, except it is an electronic network that captures the location of books instead. Italo Calvino was one of the most-translated writers of the 20th Century.

Calvino spent most of his time in academia and published Six Memos for the Next Millennium in 1993. His work Cosmicomics isn't about comic books, per se, but the structure of the novel is integral to the work's meaning. Calvino's work grapples with existence.

Given that Calvino’s Cosmicomics details the conception and subsequent progression of the universe, it isn’t surprising that the novel’s narrator – Qlwfq – is primarily concerned with form and function. One of his first decisions is to fashion a sign as a marker that is representative of his location. He remarks, “I conceived the idea of making a sign… I made something, meaning to make a sign, it turned out that I really had made a sign, after all” (Calvino 31).

Qlwfq is aware of his sign’s composition as a signifier, but it is not until the sign is destroyed, reappropriated, and finally obsolete that he recognizes its signification. From the sign, the form of the universe becomes “no longer a container and a thing contained [but] scrawled over on all sides” and the signifier’s function is to demarcate space (Calvino 35). The relation between form and function does not only apply to actual signs, but also to the discussion of beauty. As a gastropod, Qlwfq is innately ignorant of form, but wants to “put my love for her – all the things that could be said only in that conch shell,” or “to make” (Calvino 146).

However, since the creature does not have eyes, the imagery of the form that it creates and its aesthetic function is lost. While the artist is “bent over doing the hardest part of the job, that is, creating something to be seen, they were… adapting their lazy” eyes to passively witness the imagery (Calvino 152). Whether signs or shells, the conception of imagery therein remains the “most faithful image [of] our true element which extends without shores, without boundaries” (Calvino 153). Therefore, it is the interplay between form, functionality, and imagery that produces the true reflection of self-hood apart from the entire physical world. Calvino's portrayal of artistry enhances our understanding of identity.

Review of Robert Bringhurst's the Solid Form of Language

In an age of electronic printing, it is challenging to find an author that makes a living text what it truly is: viable. Robert Bringhurst delves into a fascinating world about the history of language. In The Solid Form of Language (2004), Bringhurst, outlines the history of everything from Cyrillic lettering to Arabic script in an effort to understand the evolution of language. He performs an analysis of language in tandem with political dynasties, industrial civilization and the shift away from the Latin alphabet.

He makes an interesting point about design, notably that,

"The same industrial civilization that gave us Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Japanese, and Chinese types with similar characteristic: a global epidemic of Helveticas. No one can determine, by examining these fonts, the religious or political opinions of their designers or manufacturers."

What I find intriguing about this comment is the connection between standardization, typeface, and the economy. In today's society, text and language have been codified into transcript, which makes me wonder, why? Helvetica the standard font in the design world. Those who use and maintain the demand for language as business follow the laws of cool. The laws of cool insist that style is acceptable, homogenized, and then it reverberates into distinctions.

The cover of Bringhurst's book is covered in a papyrus-like sheaf. Like the novel, Tree of Life or The People of Paper, the contemporary model of the text is stylized. Tree of Life features cutouts of poetry, including big, wounded gashes in the storyline. I find that this material posits the book further as a print, visual entity in a physical realm.

Image is from Prêt à Voyager.

Why I Won't Fly

Thought Catalog ran an article by Tereza Jarnikova this morning. She blogged about "(Some Of) The People I've Met On The Greyhound." The writer mentioned that Greyhound is "the net that picks up anyone who needs to go anywhere cheap."

I started using Greyhound as a student with cramped budget. The perks of taking a Greyhound are that the line is less expensive. The latest economic crunch – that has left everyone in a lurch aside from purveyors of gold – makes travel by bus a reasonable alternative to flying. I, however, won't fly if I can help it. What happens on the ground is far more interesting to me.

My favorite passenger was The Tigers Fan Whittler. I refer to him as The Tigers Fan Whittler because he whittled IN THE DARK for a large part of the 22 hour trip. I still wonder about this person three years later.

Here's the cliff notes from the last trip:

what people say there

broken swing creaking around
sound of police cars whooshing up in fleets of directional formation
split level houses with the paint chips not to be seen
the husks of five thousand corpses and the Angelus
as the storm trooper DEA squad disbands to the doorbell
the camera crew zooms onto the sign:
Beware of dog?
(feat shot-gun)
beware of owner
it's the smoking gun of the grim-faced green meth cooker
the arrestee spotted washing his house with a stripped-down barrel
hours before
San Fresno is the city of lies, the crystal meth addiction flourishes
snort smoke shoot slam 20 dime bags 700 dollars a week
the west best coast more sincerely impounded with skinny, slaw-jawed yokels
in a terminology that no less febrile
the academic language is dehumanizing
the little chiquawa dog is chirping
the man has arms tattooed in script the typefaces of the capitalists
reminds me of the UAW gods, chickweed pits, the unfiltered cigarettes
one wary eye upon the green sky camera
a liter of cobra snake gutted like serpent spine
a lime floating on top of the beer bottle
this caustic dude from the BBC is interviewing the meth heads on their cracked out porch
like this accent denotes anything to them except the vast disdain of their listening public
in rural San Fresno, they would not have heard it any other way
as his voice ebbs over the police scanner
this is not anthropology, this crime scene surveillance
they could understand you, but not your accent
you might be living in a plateau there, buddy, but they recognize your tone enough
to hate you
to tell you how many children they have
the state of their marital affairs
their complicity reveals the malingerer of the impervious stare of a judicial system that seethes
they slouch, avoid eye contact, pass the drugs and scale over their heads
much like the prescient scales of the Law and Order dramedy
the cookers, he does a circle around his head, you don't mess with them
you're crazy, man
they inhale leaky cauldron fumes
Fresno is the meth capital of the world
since 11 he's been slammin
where did they just come from, man, thank you man, someone's house
silver stereos houses

you just haven't seen the better places
it's gotten a whole lot worse
it's gotten a whole lot worse
this is one of the better place
I hate not being clean but I hate being clean
it has to do with a single instant in time
to be treated or put in prison and you start to like yourself
you treat yourself well
64% of meth addicts complete, how many are sober is unknown
cook it, sell it make some money
take care of your family
it takes care of you
decide to take a quit

Reading List for 2011: Play Theory, Playing, and Culture

et tenuant vigiles corpus miserabile curae,
adducitque cutem macies, et in aëra sucus
corporis omnis abit; vox tantum atque ossa supersunt:
vox manet.

Her sleepless cares waste away her miserable body;
she becomes skin and bone and all moisture from her
body fades into the air. Only her voice and her bones
remain: then, only her voice.

How to be alone :
by: Franzen, Jonathan.

A user's guide to capitalism and schizophrenia :
by: Massumi, Brian.

Deceit, desire, and the novel :
by: Girard, René, 1923-

Convergence culture :
by: Jenkins, Henry, 1958-

The avant-garde and American postmodernity :
by: Nel, Philip, 1969-

Snow White :
by: Barthelme, Donald.

Tree of codes :
by: Foer, Jonathan Safran, 1977-

American music :
by: Leibovitz, Annie, 1949-

SCUM manifesto :
by: Solanas, Valerie.

Unlovable :
by: Watson, Esther.

Crepuscular dawn :
by: Virilio, Paul.

Systemantics :
by: Gall, John, 1925-

Nothing in my Pockets :
by: Anderson, Laurie, 1947-

Footnote

Shirts from the Kwame heist (understanding + thought = culture). Leftovers will be served with Lean Cuisine and a dollop of chicha.

The Longest Week in the World

The Longest Week in the World


We put up fliers around the neighborhood the first day like tattooed Yakuza bandits. Someone has written "fart air" on The Rock outside of town. The hottest week of summer coincides with the dreaded Art Fair. Art Fair is a community event where vendors line the streets and plug their wares.

I hate Art Fair because it reminds me that families exist outside of the University town. Not only families, but ornery families. Families with babes in compact strollers, families who need precious parking spaces. Families that won’t buy the art my friends are trying to hustle. Families who shop at Whole Foods. Fragmented families.

I smile malevolently when I look at The Rock. It’s out of town and encrusted in a mire of spray paint. The boulder gets painted over every week by disgruntled college students. It’s only fitting, I think, when I look at The Rock.

“I’m glad someone else is feeling disgruntled, after all, we’re stuck here,” Nelson said.

“I’m going to have a party,” I wag in the rock’s direction, “just you wait. And, there’s nothing you can do to stop me,” I said. “Hehee.”

The internet says this about the party. The invitation is billed as the eternal party at the end of summer. The Telephone Callers suggest that we place them on a float and let them drive up and down the block. I tell them that so-and-so has a flatbed truck. They say they’d rather have a show in a kiddie pool. They will tape up the instruments in plastic to keep them dry. They will party in the middle of the street. They want a wet t-shirt poetry contest; I want to sell my clothing on racks in front of my house. You don’t mess with The Family.

The party songs could be sentimental. Somewhere people are keying grandiloquent phrases on their computers. I mix a little coffee and chocolate together. Sing a little song I’ve heard before to another boy. It goes something like, "in the morning time/ is the choffle kind."

The warble could be innocuous enough, but I'm going to wager on this party. I'm going to make a bet on which one of my friends would get arrested. I ponder whether it would be useful to make a whiteout board. I could subdivide their names and reasons for arrest, also, into an Excel spreadsheet. I work on potential storylines.

Name: Crazy Lou

Reason: Spurned by his recent romantic failure. Since he can’t kick it with a girl in The Netherlands, he opts for destruction. Instead of spending the summer with her, he knocks over the keg on screeching under-agers attempting to rager.

Solution: Pays bail by concocting plans to scam Nigerians while in jail. He says he will pull the ‘ole overdraft check on them.

Name: Crazy Ray

Reason: When the keg falls over, it lands on his purple Adidas shoes. Inveigled in grief for the recent death of his cat, Crazy Ray blinds Crazy Lou with the mace that he finds on the ground leftover from when….

Name: Crazy Rita

Reason: When walking home and accosted by a boy in an anarchy shirt recently, she decided to purchase mace. Channel 7 news stayed outside of Community High all last week. The mace fell from her bag when she got in a tiff with…

Name: Crazy Me

Reason: Because I have been nurturing a Free Kwame campaign in lieu of his absence from Detroit. Because I’m bored. Because that might not ever happen. Because I’m afraid of being nice, intimacy, cultivating more than Standards of Cool, engaging in more than rap battles. Because none of that might happen. Because something else could happen at any minute.

I explain it to myself as a means of justifying the time. I write about worlds that accompany this tunnel.

I list names and give reasons. Because, because, because.

There are always reasons.

Sidewalker

For Vincent Gallo

Dear Vincent Gallo,

I heard you like mellotrons. I don't blame you.

For classical minds, literature is the essential thing, not the individuals. George Moore and James Joyce have incorporated in their works the pages and sentences of others; Oscar Wilde used to give plots away for others to develop; both procedures, although they appear to be contradictory, may reveal an identical artistic perception -- an ecumenical, impersonal perception.

Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1982, 12, 6, pp. 444-452

Geocities

7/12/2011

tru confessions of the she-tragedy

I am rewriting all the stories I wrote as a undergraduate.

In college, I basically stayed up all the time partying, working, and writing about partying and working. I had a job in the library. I worked the night shift and typed up things on my computer. I tried to move out to New York. I tried do my undergraduate degree out there. I came back to Michigan because it was cheaper. Because I was a writer, I didn't expect to make much money. I got really depressed because I didn't know how I would do it if I wasn't in New York. I didn't 'have' to be somewhere to write. I just had to do it. Sometimes, you need time.

When I finish rewriting this, I'm going to send it to places. If someone could tell me who to ask, then they should or tell me where to send it in. I guess I will do this on my own, but I don't really know where to start. I will say here, on this blog, when I'm done.

So, therefore, I would like to introduce this as a challenge. I would like to share this piece of truth.

I want to see what happens.

Marcel Proust, Snapdeal.com Nagar and the Interstices of Time

I was thinking of writing a bratty article about "10 Ways to Alienate Family and Friends this Holiday by Insulting America" as a joke for 4th of July/ discontent liberals. Instead, this is a piece about relativity. Happy Birthday, Baby Capitalist America.

Recently, the village Shiv Nagar renamed itself Snapdeal.com Nagar (or Snapdeal.com Town). Snapdeal.com is a website that provides discount coupons for luxury goods. The company decided to sponsor Shiv Nagar and distributed water pumps in the town. They plan on helping the town with various other renovations. I was alarmed that a village changed its name in tandem with corporate marketing.

I wondered whether the Internet-capital-I executives of the dot.com bubble anticipated such a global transformation. I doubt some nefarious troupe of tech wizards sat around playing backgammon, executed high-level programming and plotted the demise of the free world. I surveyed the past and wondered whether it could somehow possess intent.

The past has the luxury of existing in memory, but rarely is it divested of meaning. I compare previous situations to the past in order to conceptualize change. I am equally likely to cultivate nostalgia through the arts to sustain inaccuracies of vision. I begin to think my emotional self exists only to respond to the real or imagined experiences of others. I am keen to transpose past experiences upon the present to engage in an emotional response. I do this to protect myself against becoming desensitized to information in an increasingly hyper-aware environment. But, I hasten to say, that this type of media consumption tends to lose the facts in consideration of emotion.

I decided to reconsider the case of Snapdeal.com Nagar. The facts about Snapdeal.com Nagar is that the residents will now have the ability to use clean drinking water. The town and its civitas reportedly decided on the name change on their own. The reason given for this was that they somehow wished to protest the government’s previous lack of involvement with their plight. They wanted to attribute ownership to the company that helped them. CEO Kunal Bahl had solid rationale and came up with the idea after conversing with some coworkers in a hallway.

Bahl’s point of view was that this was a beneficial service. He said that if all ~640,000 companies in India invested in towns, then they could alleviate water problems for ~64,000 villages and millions of people. His idea was well-received. The press reported that the townspeople responded positively and Snapdeal.com benefited. Snapdeal.com has more value in India than Groupon. This was an achievement from a material perspective.

But, surely there are discontents and it can't just be the technophobic. Any action will have a positive and negative response. There must have been someone, somewhere who was negatively impacted by this change. There could have been an individual who didn’t want their city to change its name. The name change could have been conducted without the consultation of every person who lived in the area. Then, even in instances of consensus, there is still the concept of corporatism to consider.

Neocorporatism evades protest by inveigling itself in the celebration of the individual. Advertising platforms foster loyalty by playing up individual choice in their platforms. I say that the individual must then redefine themselves in contrast to this phenomenon or at least define themselves apart from products. Otherwise, the individual is susceptible to anti-intellectualism, secretarianism and fascism. These schools seem to promote thought, but actually stifle it. They reinforce the boundaries that create the isolation in the first place.

The arts should be most concerned with addressing the alienation that arises from crucial failures in communication. As writers, musicians and cultural workers, we should be more concerned with social contract theory than debating the ethics of Brazilian blowouts. Sharing memes about terrible things that happen faraway won't change more pressing issues of inequality, threats of populism, and the fissures of a capitalist society. But, if all of this only makes us sad in an unstructured or hopeless sort of way, then let us return to the arts.In another riotous time, M. Marcel Proust embalmed himself in his writing. Due to his extreme asthma and distaste for society, he wrote a large portion of À la recherche du temps perdu locked in a sunless writing room. He plugged all of the holes in the room with corks. He challenged himself to situate the individual memory within the spectrum of time. He thought about why he was in that deserted room, political changes sweeping France like the Dreyfus Affair and his own past. Proust ended up writing an eloquent eulogy of himself and his times in repast.

In Sodome et Gomorrhe, Proust’s narrator turned down an invitation to meet up with some friends from the past. The narrator's given reason for this was “because I was now detached from them. From them, that is to say, from myself. We desire passionately that there should be another life in which we would be similar to what we are here below. But we do not reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, but in this one, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we had wanted to remain immortally.”

He is perhaps speaking of the afterlife, but also the lived experience on earth. The narrator also declined because he was fearful of (re)cognition or to become known in difference to his former self. You do not realize that your own pursuit of ideals betrays them. The quandary of Snapdeal.com is that is a prime example of what happens when you allow the status of the communal self to become less than ideal.