Come on and Slam, and Welcome to the Jam

God bless the Space Jam website. What other company aside from Warner Brothers has had the incredible foresight (or the fortuitous lack of organization) to keep an artifact from 1996 up on the Internet forever? Here we may learn How It Was, especially when we investigate the source code for each page.  There is no cascading stylesheet and no DOCTYPE. What there are plenty of, however, are jokes, usually in that 1990s WB wise-ass timbre that feels dated but oddly affecting in an irritating way. A throwback to my own childhood, when kids’ entertainment was crass and smart-alecky and consequently I was forbidden from partaking in any of it. Exhibit A: the tag, <!– Technology, Shmechnology. –>. When I say that I want an archaeology of the Internet, this is what I mean. Indeed, this not-even-twenty-year-old site is already valuable for the insights it provides about information technology on the very cusp of its great transformation – especially for those of us who were not exactly paying the most minute attention the first time around. Note the extraordinarily quaint and dear instructions:

Here’s a list of some radio stations currently playing the first single from the Space Jam Soundtrack, Seal – “Fly Like An Eagle“. Check back here for an up-to-date list of where to listen when you’re off-line.

Given that many of us now scour Amazon for vinyl LPs, I perhaps have little right to chortle at this confluence of old and new (although it’s interesting how they assume that one won’t be listening to the radio while using a computer – was the frenetic multitasking we all do now still years away?). In any case, sites like this can serve as an extremely useful distorted mirror against which we can hold our own assumptions about web design and use.

Above: a painted butt, found on the page entitled “Neat Stuff to Look At”

 

On Blogging Itself

This post has all the meta cop-outery of Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essay about procrastination, written while the printer’s boy waited outside for the copy. But I think that there is no reason why the means by which I disseminate content shouldn’t also be that content.  Blogging, friends, is difficult – for me. So too was Tumblr (gave it up after a few fitful months that began with original writing and degenerated into reposts of pictures of Scandinavian trees) and Instagram was even harder. I snapped only one picture that I genuinely liked:

 

Why should I be so resistant to any of these forms of public self-archival? What, exactly, do I find hard about it? I wonder if it comes from a place of deep bashfulness. In person, things are different; I can talk any and all ears off. But the digital archive of Things I Have Said and You Can See gives an eerie permanence and pressure to what would otherwise just be table-talk. How did Johnson feel about Boswell copying down all his good lines? The truth is that I’ve revised nearly everything I’ve posted almost immediately, in the hope that it will be more…what? Closer to me? Further away? 

The blog form demands that I be both Boswell and Johnson, writer and curator, wit and amanuensis. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to like the sound of my own voice (I don’t), but it does mean that I have to listen to it – or rather to the new persona that I concoct, half on purpose and half unconsciously, for the occasion. I am beginning to understand why Christian Vandendorpe cites Pascal’s “The I is hateful” (18) in From Papyrus to Hypertext. Turns out – in contravention to what I may have said a couple of months ago – it kind of is. 

“Overly Honest Methods,” Markup, and Full Disclosure

The suitability of markup languages, largely conceived by coders with STEM backgrounds, for the needs of humanities computing seems to be perpetually at issue. Desmond Allan Schmidt raises his objections to markup in “The Inadequacy of Embedded Markup for Cultural Heritage Texts,” remarking that

Digital humanists chose generalized markup as
an off-the-shelf industrial tool, not as something
that was built according to their specifications. (342-3)

Although there is no need not to be optimistic about the possibilities of digital tools “built according to [humanistic] specifications,” I nevertheless do not think that markup’s limitations must be perceived as insurmountable. Humanists are also ironists, and when any given form – be it the codex or the blog post or the spoken-word poem – presents limitations, we are rather well-situated to acknowledge these limits in a spirit of levity and creativity.  If markup can say what we want it to say, then why not mark up a limit, a failure? Why not mark with waggish tags, like, <I_am_saying_this_is_the_end_of_the_poem_only_because_it_is_easier_to_say_that>?

Our brethren in the sciences have already conceived of an ingenious corrective to the pressure to be definitive, neutral, or “scientific” within their own discipline. This corrective is called “Overly Honest Methods.” The images show the enthusiastic faces of graduate students and scientists hard at work, photos presumably culled from departmental webpages and graduate-program brochures. While I’m concerned about the problematic implications of the word “overly” – as though all this full disclosure is, in the end, a bit naff and unprofessional and while we’re all having a laugh now we shouldn’t make it general practice – the image series nevertheless captures an attitude that markup can enable. Intentionally daft tags, a healthy skepticism towards markups that are obviously placeholders or heuristics, and the willingness of humanities coders to trust their readers’ intelligence are, I think, the way forward if we must operate within the confines of conventional XML.

 

Amazon, Big Data, and “The Worst Things for Sale”

George Packer, in a recent article for the New Yorker, explains that Amazon began as an online bookstore not because founder Jeff Bezos had any special emotional investment in literature but rather because he perceived books to be 1) easy and profitable for a new online distributor to sell and 2) because the data that he gathered about the book-buying habits of his customers could then be used to infer what other kinds of products they might want, and thus aid in advertising, search algorithms, etc. This is the dark side of the semantic web: the accumulation of as much consumer data as possible in the interests of a capitalism desperate to pawn off all the surplus junk it has lying around. Amazon, in particular, has made use of its dubious archival and algorithmic powers in a way that allows them to browbeat book publishers, as Packer explains:

Many publishers had come to regard Amazon as a heavy in khakis and oxford shirts. In its drive for profitability, Amazon did not raise retail prices; it simply squeezed its suppliers harder, much as Walmart had done with manufacturers. Amazon demanded ever-larger co-op fees and better shipping terms; publishers knew that they would stop being favored by the site’s recommendation algorithms if they didn’t comply. Eventually, they all did. (Few customers realize that the results generated by Amazon’s search engine are partly determined by promotional fees.) Sales meetings in Seattle were now all about payments, not new books, and the size of orders was predicated on algorithms, rather than on the enthusiasm of the publishers’ sales staff and Amazon’s own buyers, who were rebranded as “inventory managers.” Brad Stone describes one campaign to pressure the most vulnerable publishers for better terms: internally, it was known as the Gazelle Project, after Bezos suggested “that Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” (Company lawyers later changed the name to the Small Publisher Negotiation Program.)

But back to the surplus junk. Given Amazon’s attempts to master the desire of the Other (that is, the paying customer), there is something deeply refreshing about “The Worst Things for Sale.” A creation of the very funny webcomic artist Drew Dee, the site catalogs various bizarre, redundant, or in cases even unsafe or unhealthy (Drew has a chemistry background) products to be had on Amazon. Because readers of Drew’s site are given links to the actual Amazon product, and because his readers will tend to look at multiple items, they often cause a delightful clinamen in the recommender algorithms. If, for instance, I were curious about the “Self Balancing  One Wheel Electric Scooter,” I would learn that those who viewed it also viewed not only the “Vomit Oval Sticker” but also the “Anti-Vomit Oval Sticker” and the “Anti-Vomits Oval Sticker” – in case you felt like pluralizing. Also on offer in the same list are an erotic novel and something called “Original Medium Sapphire Blue YogaToes,” a device which stretches your toes further apart, apparently for reasons.  These garbled recommendations are identifiable human traces. They exist despite Amazon’s archive, and disrupt it ever-so-slightly. If the Internet becomes an object of intense scholarly study over the next hundred years, I suspect that it will be the deeply personal and individual disruptions that stand out and acquire meaning, not grand-scale corporate efforts to divine everything there is to know about customers.

For the Least Impersonal Writing Ever! <3 <3 <3

Hey friend, it’s time I addressed the act of addressing.

 

Christian Vandendorpe, in the “Standards of Readability” chapter of From Papyrus to Hypertext, makes some claims which don’t quite sit right with me. Regarding the development, in European letters, of “the erasure of any references to the person of the author and the adoption of an instance of historical utterance stripped of all traces of the subjectivity of oral discourse” (18), Vandendorpe suggests that

The reading mind clearly functions best when the text is devoid of any trace of subjectivity and completely detached from its author. The text can thus be more easily examined from the outside and readers will not feel the gaze of the other, whose effect can be as paralyzing as that of the Medusa. By excluding effects and emotions, the neutrality of the text facilitates its appropriation by the intellect….once stripped of the subjectivity inherent in physical interactions, the text can become the site where the reader exercises intellectual concentration without hindrance or psychological pressure of any kind; the data will then be directly accessible to the intellect as pure semiotic material, without interference from the emotions. (18-9)

 

When I reflect on the way that my own “reading mind” works, I tend not to find the mere presence of a personal touch, as such, to be a hindrance at all. I say “as such” because there are definitely particular writerly personas that I dislike, and that dislike is an impediment. I flatly can’t read figures like Norman Mailer or Irving Layton for that reason. All other things being equal, though, the opposite to Vandendorpe’s claim seems true for me – I find Kant hard because he so often lacks the memorable rhetorical linchpins of other thinkers (Hume is easier because he says things like “nothing so like as eggs” when he’s trying to prove a point about inductive reasoning).

I’m skeptical of the existence of “pure semiotic material,” nor do I get the sense that it would be desirable could it exist. Doesn’t emotion aid memory, rather than hinder it? Isn’t a reader thrilled, rather than petrified, by the presence of a scholarly voice that sounds like a distinct, human, speaking subject? Part of the reason why I love the literary criticism of folks like Susan Sontag, Anne Carson, or Colm Tóibín  is because, even in their nonfiction writing, they sound like personalities. These voices alleviate, rather than apply pressure.

I am even curious if there’s a place for such voices in the supposedly “neutral” textual environments of science and technology. Vandendorpe alludes to the Royal Society’s 1666 banning of rhetoric in scientific writing (19), but it seems to me that science will always involve rhetoric to some degree – if not in scientific texts themselves then in the arguments over how best to interpret them. The banishment of rhetoric in this context risks driving underground something which should instead be acknowledged and openly negotiated.

Questions, going forward: why does Vandendorpe seem so invested in the speaking/writing binary? The emotion/”intellect” binary? What’s at stake in believing or disbelieving them?

Why I Feel Indifferent About my Windows 8 Touchscreen: Notes on Interface

My laptop has a touchscreen. This was not exactly the reason I bought it, however. I wanted something light and cheap, and the only one lighter and cheaper was, in the words of the man at Best Buy, “a really slow computer. Most phones are faster.” Apparently Windows 8, with its peculiar, sliding-rectangle start interface, was designed for use with such screens – but I remain unconvinced that touchscreens genuinely are the way forward for computer interfaces. Indeed, I wonder if the Windows 8 touchscreen project represents a perverse return of the mistakes of Microsoft Bob, described by Joanna Drucker in Reading Interface as follows:

The doomed interface Microsoft Bob, from 1995, with its kitschy replica of an office, was a quintessential demonstration of how literal representation is less effective than abstraction. (214)

Interface being artifice at heart, any “literal representation” that tries too hard to emulate the familiar world of the physical simply patronizes the user. Bob redundantly encourages the person sitting at the computer, presumably already in an office, to duplicate that experience. Windows 8, meanwhile, gestures towards Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s desire, in “So the Colours Cover the Wires,”  for a hyper-tactile “magic carpet”:

Applications, both local and remote, appear on its surface like the tiles of a mosaic. I move them about physically, dragging, shrinking, or enlarging them with my hands, pushing and pulling them through the information space. (Kirschenbaum)

Yet I opt to use the more traditional, desktop-style interface every time, finding the injunction to push and touch my screen as redundant as I would a graphical rendering of an office – even if it was nicer than my own. Conversing about this topic with my colleague Mike Gyssels, I was very persuaded by his characterization of the touchscreen as a simplistic appeal to our early developmental instincts to poke and prod. It seems that we need, if anything, more mediating frames between ourselves and our computers, and that the supposed decrease of mediation a touchscreen appears to provide is rather disingenuous. We brush up against a screen, nominally smooth and cool but inevitably smudged with dust and grease, and feel, in the end, less embodied, less connected, more awkward.

Twine, the Poetics of Gaming, and the Game of Poetry

Last summer, a close friend of mine, an indie game developer, told me about something called “Twine.” Twine is a remarkable, free program which makes it easy to write text-based, choose-your-own-adventure style — games? — stories? — prose-poems? Each word seems partly right. What makes the program so exhilarating is that it allows people who are more familiar with creative writing than coding to produce narratives in a new, interactive form, one with new constraints, limitations, and possibilities. Scrolling through the impressive repository of Twine games on freeindiegam.es suggests the versatility of the medium: authors have created powerful games about social justice, identity, sexuality and body positivity, used the form to critique the conventions of traditional gaming, and produced works that channel interactive weirdness into a delirious kind of beauty.

Two of my favourites are Tower of the Blood Lord and Mastaba Snoopy. The former comes from Michael Lutz, who describes himself on his blog as follows: “I am a graduate student in English literature at a midwestern university.  Principally my interests are Shakespeare and early modern drama, and historical and contemporary theories of (post)humanism.” As an early modernist myself, I was excited to learn that this excellent piece came from one of our own. Without giving too much away*, the game begins with a text-based reconstruction of the beginning of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, but, if a player explores the stock landscapes of barracks and storerooms diligently enough, they will find themselves on an altogether different quest – an exquisitely-written tale incorporating fantasy-fiction courtly intrigue, Lovecraftian horror, confessional monologue, and even a sweet and totally unexpected love story with a bashful amphibian. At the end of the game, one is jettisoned back out into Call of Duty, which naturally seems paltry by comparison.

Mastaba Snoopy, the work of gods17, operates on the brilliant conceit of a horrific alien world created by a metastasizing sentient entity who erroneously takes a Peanuts book to be a manual for “proper protocol for interaction with the human world.” gods17 writes with a confident poetic seriousness (different from mere “deadpan,” which is always itching for the joke to be recognized) that resembles a Borges or a Barthelme story :

“End result: There exists an infinite, nonsensical world with all locations, living things, and social interaction based on half-remembered dreams.

Thousands of years to fester and the memory is going bad, the original book having been long since lost in the constant churning reshaping. This new, living world has been dying for millenia.”

This world should remind us of all text, all narrative or poetic “reshaping.”** Walter Benjamin’s well-known formulation that “[t]he work is the death mask of its conception” is entirely applicable here; we create new poetic life out of the death-vapours of inspirations we no longer really remember. That which Mastaba Snoopy describes – a voracious consciousness that reworks everything it can into a blossoming, rotting organic whole – is also what it effects in the world. After reading/playing, I immediately wanted to write something of my own.

Both Tower of the Blood Lord and Mastaba Snoopy are works which engender more works.

I do not want to belabour the semantic distinctions between “games” and “poems” too much today, but I do at least want to suggest that the collapse of the two terms need not be bad thing, and that it has a longer precedent than we might think. Naturally a contrary, more traditional view exists. T.S. Eliot, writing of Milton’s style, states, “I can enjoy the roll of [there follows nine lines of Milton’s verse] and the rest of it, but I feel that this is not serious poetry, not poetry fully occupied about its business, but rather a solemn game” (264). Gamey poetry, for Eliot, presumably fails to resonate at some crucial emotional or intellectual level, and simply “rolls.”

I am not sure what Eliot would make of the Elizabethan poet Arthur Gorges’ poem, “Her Face.” Jorie Graham very perceptively includes it in her Earth Took of Earth anthology, and I believe it deserves to be widely known. I quote the first “two” “stanzas” to give a sense of its structure:

Her face          Her tongue       Her wit

so fair             so sweet          so sharp

first bent         then drew         then hit

mine eye         mine ear          my heart

Mine eye         Mine ear          My heart

to like             to learn            to love

her face          her tongue       her wit

doth lead         doth teach       doth move

One may read left to right, as usual. One may also read each of the three columns independently. Even more excitingly, one can read only the pairs of words one wants to use, and build an entirely new poem. This poem is a game in the fullest sense, a kind of textual LEGO. Yet I am nevertheless convinced of its seriousness. To play “Her Face” is to learn how to write poems of its kind (specifically, Elizabethan love-lyrics) and to realize the put-togetherness of all verse, all utterance. But to play is also to learn to be at ease with such assembledness. There is no reason why a reader cannot extract something that resonates with them emotionally from the constituent parts Gorges provides for us.

* I could very well devote another post to the relationship of the Twine game to notions of narrative surprise, “spoilers,” and replayability, and whether this relationship inhibits (or should inhibit) critical practice.

** Is it especially or distinctively true of digital text?