1 of 26 (a/z)
frosted fakes-they gggraTe!
2 of 26 (b/z)
Canon fodder
3 of 26 (c/z)
tHere's no there there
4 of 26 (d/z)
a Spike lee joint
5 of 26 (e/z)
a don king Presentation
6 of 26 (f/z)
sandy: "arf-Arf!"
7 of 26 (g/z)
brickbat
8 of 26 (h/z)
virtuous realiTy
9 of 26 (i/z)
zed, said fred
10 of 26 (j/z)
I. [read/write eRror]
11 of 26 (k/z)
II. [read/wrong eRror]
12 of 26 (l/z)
III. [wread/rite error]
13 of 26 (m/z)
stupid is as stupid as dos
14 of 26 (n/z)
daed si luap
15 of 26 (o/z)
united centEr
16 of 26 (p/z)
apParently transparent
17 of 26 (q/z)
all lost in the Supermarket
18 of 26 (r/z)
(f)layers of defuR-all
19 of 26 (s/z)
francophilosophistry
20 of 26 (t/z)
untitled
123456789123456789123456789
21 of 26 (u/z)
global search-anD-replace-
22 of 26 (v/z)
I. prix fixe: man vs man
23 of 26 (w/z)
II. dim sum: man vs himself
24 of 26 (x/z)
wYsiwyg
25 of 26 (y/z)
deep blue or widely re(a)d?
26 of 26 (z/z)
http://www.revOlution.com
ERENTDELIVERYINTHESENSEOFCLASSIC A comment on the specious, sometimes vicious world of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs); a flame is a invecticious (to coin a phrase) e-mail; son of spam is an allusion to Sam "Son of Sam" Berkowitz, New York serial killer, spam I am to Sam I Am of Green Eggs and Ham fame.
A rhetorical question for those throwbacks (me included) who believe in the existence of some sort of literary canon and who persist in outdated reading strategies (eg, straight through a text).
Gertrude Stein, speaking of downtown Oakland (or perhaps, presciently, of hypertext), said, "There's no there there." She also said, "Rose is a rose. . .[etc.]"--in other words, that an elemental rose-ality maintains. Replace "rose" with "word," however, and the "there" of words on paper isn't "there" where electronic words are (wherever they are).
How "great" is "meta"text and its art, its commentarial plunderings of its own text and that text's author and author-ity. The Spike Lee reference applies to Mo better (as in "Blues").
Readers misread, reinscribe a writer's words. Every reading is a Ms. Reading.
Sandy, of course, is the weird dog of Little Orphan Annie; arf is an acronym for those dreaded words "Abort Retry Fail."
brickbat: "an unfavorable remark or criticism"; the computer mouse--clicking, dragging, racing--remakes a text in the reader's image. A bricoleur practices "bricolage," a ten-dollar Frenchified word for collage, for cutting and pasting and creating a postmodern piece from a hodge-podge of collected materials.
Just some playing with virtuous and virtual, as well as simulation and stimulation. Our culture is the s(t)imulated world, the IMAX theater considered more "realistic" than the world outside. Question: is a virtual virgin a computer-generated being or just someone who hasn't really had sex?
zed is British for the letter z, not "zero," but zero doesn't rhyme with fred. This is an another example of form dictating content. The cypher (or "cipher) in cypherspace is zero, as is ought (or "aught," as I ought to have spelled it), as is naught. The joke, if there is one, is that the disk is full of zeros; the nullity takes up space.
The various definitions of reading--and how those actions become, at least in the hands of the hypertext hucksters, equivalent to writing itself.
See the previous description. Poach is a reference to writer M. De Certeau, who developed the metaphor of poaching to describe a reader "encroaching on the terrain of the cultural landowner (or textowner) and 'stealing' what he or she wants without being caught and subjected to the laws of the land (rules of the text)" (Understanding Popular Culture,
John Fiske, p. 143).
See the previous descriptions.
My Hollywood "poaching" (see above): the title plays on the famous Forrest Gumpism, line 2 upon Oliver Stone's celluloid ode to violence.
My Beatles "poaching" (again, see above): the title reveals, of course, that Paul is dead; lines 1 and 2 reference "I am the Walrus," taking the opportunity of the word "egg" to again refer to the concept of poaching. Line 3 references another Beatles song and puns upon a writer backed by paper (e.g., Sven Birkerts).
To be frank, you must change your name to Frank. Frankly/Fredly, I forgot exactly where I was going with this one. . .other than that postmodernism has decentered culture and the traditional boundaries between high art and low art just as it has decentered the self. The united centEr is a sports stadium in Chicago; the "united" refers not to an attitude but an airline.
Transparency and opacity refer to a given technology's ease/unease of use (an easy-to-use one would be transparent), as well as to the ease/unease of of delving beneath its surface to tinker with its structure (again, an easy-to-tinker technology would be transparent--although this very same technology could also be opaque to users). Opaque enough?
Comment on the ease with which MUD/MOO "personalities" are acquired/discarded; they're online tamagotchi, in that they're invested with a similar amount of emotional weight. Title references song by The Clash ("I'm all lost in the supermarket/Can no longer shop happily/Came here for a special offer/Guaranteed personality").
The layers of technology that separate the reader from the text (the consumer from the consumable) contribute to abstraction/distraction in, again, the text (how's it written) and the reader (how she reads). What's flayed and defurred is a text's meaning and significance, and the reader's attention, such as it is amid "the postmodern challenge to the traditional epistemologies of depth" (Turkle, p. 47). Line 3 contains learned literary reference to Jimmy Buffet's "Son of a Son of a Sailor."
Un hommage avec frommage to the French theorists and those who love them, particularly Barthes, hence the reference to s/z land, perhaps better rendered as euro-s/z, eh Mickey? Bricolage is the postmodern concept of pulling various effects/styles/ideas into the mix and creating something new; decoupage is what my mom used to do to anything that didn't move, and some things that did. Jerry is of course Mr "Nutty Professor" himself.
Just playing around; nothing more than what you see here; a transparent verse.
McLuhan, where are your shiny happy people now? Huddled around their flickering blue screens, searching for themselves, replacing themselves with community. Not finding it.
Four terms pulled from Turkle's book that capture the fragmented postmodern experience.
This thrown-together dim sum meal takes apart the previous postmodern prix fixe and finds our hero, Gene, in the throes of "dismultation," sort of a simultaneous dismay and exultation, sort of a self-loathing that dares not speak its name, at the indiscriminate hurling of sexual-preference epithets in line 2.
[This section intentionally left blank.]
Deep or wide? Across or beneath? Blue or red? T.S. Eliot's ragged claws, or a browsing rock? I'm simplifying the books versus electronic text dichotomy, of course--but that's the point. (deep blue is also, of course, the IBM computer that recently beat chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov.)
Electronic text, desktop publishing, etc., are turning everyone into writers (at the expense of reading). I'm also referring obliquely to Gil Scot Heron's rap "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"; in addition, after the revoLution is the title of a poem I have on audiotape (don't know the author), which ends, "After the revolution, there will be no irony." Amen (oops!).
