Blue Company; E-mail Fiction

Thanks to Words’ End blog by Vika Zafrin I discovered Blue Company 2002 Archive which was apparently distributed by e-mail. The notes combine text (formatted) and drawings into original mixed media fiction. Another idea for images and text on the net.

The author’s blog is at robwit.net. There are more experiments there. I can’t help wondering if the web has freed writers to be able to work with images cheaply (without having to worry about publication costs.) Its the future of futurism and futurist typographic poetry.

Untitled #4

How to write about the relationship between programming and coding? In the dialogue that Steve Ramsay and I gave at the ACH in Georgia we delivered a dialogue called Untitled Number 4: A Brechto-Socratic Dialgoue. This was actually based on a series of playful experiments at writing code that could be read which led to literary program in Ruby that could be read or run. See the IE web archive of what the print version of the program looked like this – Untitled Number 4. A literary program is written like prose with code fragments woven in the flow of the text (as opposed to comments in the flow of the code.) Software can then generate the documentation or the code to be interpreted.

Some of Matt’s students commented on the dialogue. See Code as Writing as Code.

Media Analysis and Computer Games

How are computer games presented to parents and teachers? The Concerns About Video Games | Excessive Playing is one in a collection of resources available for parents and teachers at the Media Awarness site (search for games and you get more). See especially the work by Stephen Kline from the Media Analysis Lab at SFU, Video Game Culture: Leisure and Play Preferences of B.C. Teens | Study. The study comments on the disparity between the economic importance of games and the amount of research into the effects of computer games. On the whole Kline’s study and the Awareness site seems balanced – they avoid the sort of hyped criticism of “we’ve found another bad thing you didn’t know about” journalism.
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Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre

Just finished Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre – a disturbing book that won the Man Booker Price in 2003. See an Extract. The main character is a teenager that everyone suspects was an accomplice in a school murder spree. The language makes the book – it starts as trailer-trash talk, but you begin to realize that Vernon is brighter than the awful people of his Texas town almost all of whom are disgusting, overweight, twisted, or manipulative. The end gets surreal as Vernon manipulates others once a fellow death-row inmate teaches him about God and working with people’s wants. It is not clear if the final part is a hallucination brought on by the drugs that kill him, or real events after an unlikely pardon.
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Latour; The Last Critique

Harper’s Magazine for April 2004 has reprinted an essay by Bruno Latour on “The Last Critique” that examines the role of critique. Latour starts by noting how “social construction” has been coopted by the right to undermine calls to deal with global warming. The right uses critical arguments to call good science into question in a way not anticipated by critical theorists. The problem is a general one with the left – what do we do when our methods are used against us? What do we do when criticism and dissent become reactionary?

What I don’t understand is Latour’s turn at the end to Turing. He sees in Turing’s paper on AI a way forward for critique.
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