Generation and Poetry

Briefly considering the issue of those who saw the invention of the desktop and those who grew up with them as appliances.

And to keep the juices going, I think I’m going to write a poem for every Carianne piece posted here. Some catch-up to do.

Yard Bears

Here’s the bear who came for a snack this afternoon about 3:45 or so.

Red tag number 57 on the right ear. Cool, calm, and enjoying the sunflower seeds.

Bear02Small.jpg

Bad Writing

You know you’re in trouble when a politician begins an essay this way:

Skyrocketing energy prices have left most Americans with pinched wallets and anxiety about how to make ends meet. To address this problem, Democrats and Republicans must work together to find real solutions to our energy problem.

The last part is one of those sentences yanked out of a hat of prefabricated clauses. The first part diminishes the human costs to “pinched wallets” and “anxiety.”

The politician then goes to potential solutions:

There are many steps that the government can and should take now to help Americans stretch their hard-earned dollars during this difficult time. I will support measures to investigate the record profits of oil companies, introduce added competition to the oil market, protect consumers from price-gouging, increase transparency in energy trading markets, support a temporary gas tax holiday and delay deposits to the strategic petroleum reserve.

The trick here is to say that one “will support” in a sneaky future tense when the writer could propose something tangible, such as supporting a bill that would put the country into “infrastructure rebuilding” and converting all government buildings to solar power, which would negate the need to “investigate” anything other than a real solution.

Of course, you know you’re in trouble when a blog post begins “You know you’re in trouble when . . . “

Units of Meaning

Is Courbet’s The Stone Breakers a unit of meaning?

No is my answer. It is a potential universe of possibilities though. It is a whole within a greater assemblage, as is Bill Kluba’s Two Tables.

On the poet and the poet’s language, Shelley writes:

Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.

One reading of this passage suggest that we cannot end the conversation with Kluba and Courbet and Timmons or Weishaus’ The Way North or François Coulon’s The Reprover. Although well known, it is worth remarking that the significance of Shelley’s observation has to do with the “unapprehended relations of things” and the human need to persist in the search. In Ornans, we learn that Courbet found significance in the power of the moment “in between,” as Eliot and Joyce would build on later, and that Arnold found power in the act of striking out the center, envisioning a world where every human act has the force of relation. Courbet did not paint a funeral. Arnold did not write “lust.” But these are not works of “negation.” They are additive, bringing to light the “unremarked” and “unapprehended,” the dark matter of human experience.

Kafka’s The Trial never grows stale. The Kafkan, however, as a descriptive modifier, has become a cliche. The Borgesian suffers similar potential for emptiness, while the fictions live on with every encounter. And what political commentator hasn’t used Yeats to describe the current state of affairs? In my view, Victory Garden must not “prove” anything. There is something implicit in the voice and feel of interactive fiction, something impressive in its often powerful imagery and relationships, something impressive in its infinite possibility of forms, and, finally, something in its ideas that can be expressed in no other form, something that will “create afresh the associations.”

It’s time to close this first section of the series on reading hypertext. Some structure and language has been found, I believe. An idea that might act as a guide: hypertext as a confluence of a universe of human experience in space and time.

Time to get back to reading.

Reading Hypertext: Reading Art Part 2

In this next Gallery Talk, John Timmons and I sit in the office and talk Courbet, realism, and reading process. It really gave us a chance to continue on some of the idea we roundabouted on the Saint Francis piece.

In terms of the “Confluence” thesis, much of this is laying down ground work for much of the ideas that I had been pursuing in other essays on lingering, slowing down in the act of reading, and considering what constitutes the subject of the confluence: images, actions, events, choices (which are kinds of actions). One of the conclusions that I’ve come to over the past month is that in the context of reading hypertext, the range of objects one can consider is vast: deep and generous readings of hypertext will depend not just on the scope of reader experience but also on historical relationships. The reader must relate, which ties in Susan Gibb’s notion of the relation between mind and hypertext.

[display_podcast]

Reading Hypertext: Reading Art

The next Gallery Talk sessions took place over the course of last week, with John Timmons stepping into the office to cover Bonaventura Berlinghieri’s Byzantine altar piece on Saint Francis and Gustave Courbet’s work. We read, we talk, and follow where ever things lead.

The first vidcast covers certain reading issues and relationships. “What do we do with this stuff and what happens when we read it?” is an operative question. The podcast that follows sets up the next vidcast (coming soon) on Courbet and is a slice of the final leg of the conversation, so it jumps into he middle of something. In it we step through certain issues that come up with “newness” and subject matter.