In class response to Blogging

2. "...After reading Lovink's article, are you convinced that blogging is truly the nihilist impulse? Why or why not?"

I disagree that blogging is the nihilist impulse. If I were to make an intuitive guess, I would guess that only half of blogging is nihilistic. It has been my experience reading blogs that some of them do go against social norms and expectations, but the other half of blogs really are pop culture and agree with social norms and practices. A blog is an expression of one's self, therefore the blogs to be found will be just as varying as the people. Not everyone hates our current politicians, but some do. I can find blogs that hate the current political system, and others that advocate it and praise it. To call blogging "nihilistic" and use this single term to describe it is just not broad enough. It all depends on the person, and there are millions of blogs on the web. I will say, though, that many people wish to be "different." They wish to express themselves in a way that makes them stand out, and so in this case blogging may be nihilistic. Although sometimes when people try to be different and buy the latest new indie fashion or something, they just wind up being the same. But back on topic, I agree that reading an article or blog post that is bashing something as opposed to praising something is more enjoyable to read. It must be the nihilist in me...

Web 2.0: Blogs and Social Sites

On a side note, I find it funny that I have to talk about blogs... on a blog. Anyways! :

In Blogging, the nihilist impulse, Geert Lovink attempts to "make general statements about their 'nature' and divide them into proper genres" despite his acknowledgement of the impossibility to accomplish such a task. He defines a blog as: "... a frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links, a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web and in the world out there." I do think this is close to being accurate, except that sometimes people do make blogs that focus on one topic (like cake making...) or a blog may exist that does not focus on both the web and events in one's personal life. So I don't think that his definition is perfect, but it is still better than I could have done. Additioanlly, he does talk about the varieties of blogs that exist and their purpose for existing throughout his piece.

Lovink goes on to describe the relationship between blogs and mainstream media. What blogs do that networks like CNN fail to do, he writes, is to integrate open, interactive messages from their constituencies. They are "feedback channels" which means they allow anyone to hastily write their opinion-- whether they agree or disagree, what was interesting and what was not-- on a popular (or not so popular) topic. He notes that, aside from a few, bloggers do not have time to research. The posts are not "scholarly." In general, this is probably true. A lot of the blogs I have seen are all narcissitic in nature (again, said a lot, not most or all)-- ex: "I like this, I don't like this... you care about what I have to say because I'm awesome... " (slight exaggeration). I agree with Lovink when he says that bloggers rarely add new facts to a news story.

It is rather simple yet true: Blogs do make up the public opinion. But that's OK. There is nothing wrong with that. As Lovink writes, blogs mirror conversations that occur in cafes and bars and that blogs are not actually a new format of writing, but digital orality.

I also want to discuss "truth-finding" on the Internet. Different people will hold different beliefs to be true, and it is improbable that there is any one truth out there(besides what science tells us, anyways, but then again even scientific conclusions come from observations which still could be wrong), but I think the Internet is the best at being a conglomeration of opinions on any topic.

The Internet connects me to information all over the world. I do not usually start with a book when I want to know about something. I like to see many differing opinions so I can choose for myself which seems more rational, so I start with Google. It is impossible to have completely objective opinions or information, but I try to be open-minded and learn about as many opinions as I can. Like Lovink writes, "blogs assist users in their crossing from Truth to Nothingness." Older generations, he notes, used to find truth in whatever the TV said. Now, we just watch TV for entertainment and take everything for a grain of salt.

I think there is something very special about what David Kline said in Lovink's piece:
"bloggers are often eloquent in the way that those who are not self-consciously polished often are – raw, uncensored, and energized by the sound of their newly awakened voices. And by keeping a daily record of their rites of passage, bloggers often give a shape and meaning to the stages and cycles of their lives that would otherwise be missed in the helter-skelter of modern existence."

Despite what I said earlier about bloggers having a narcisstic aspect to their writing, they often do write with an unparalled enthusiasm and insightfulness that cannot be found in mainstream media. And if they didn't keep blogs, their knowledge would only exist in their brains. It feels great to live in an age where knowledge is so accessible and varying.

April 20, 2009 Group presentation question

To what extent do you think that the technotext is as much a literary work in the same sense that a book is? If you do not believe that technotext can be a literary work, what is it lacking? If you are a supporter, then what does it have?

Technotext can be a literary work and more. Whereas a book is non-mutable, or, rather, not meant to be mutable (because one could technically cut up a book and rearrange the words/letters), technotext is meant to be mutable. Technotext may have multiple beginnings or endings, yes, which allows the text to be more interactive with the reader. In some sense, the reader chooses what happens in the story. Depending on how advanced the technotext is, words can move around the screen and therefore be a just like a book but with added features. What a technotext is lacking is the fact that it may not give a reader closure. What I mean by this is that if it has multiple endings, the reader may not have a sense of what the "real" ending is meant to be. Obviously, with technotexts with multiple endings, perhaps there is not meant to be a "real" ending and that is the beauty of it. However, I know some people who would be bothered and question "but which one is the real ending?" and hate the alternative endings (and, one could say, similarly, cliff hangers). Technotexts also lack the ability to be printed and bought in a bookstore. They rely on the computer to live, or they do not exist. Despite this fact, I still like technotexts. I like the interaction. However, I will admit that for the simple fact that these technotexts live on the computer I am more impatient with them than when reading books. There is a sort of immediacy that comes with anything I view on the computer.

TechnoText

I am not exactly sure what makes a GOOD technotext, but I think some of what I viewed should not be categorized as good ones. For instance, Red Spider/Razor Burn has two different stories that can be read. One has two options to choose from. However, after that, there are no more options. It is a linear path until the end, just like a regular book. I am not sure how this is very interactive, to be honest. The same goes for some of the other poems at the BeeHive Archive. David Hunter Sutherland and Janet Buck's technotexts are just... small poem books on the internet. There is nothing special about them that is obvious to me. It is not that the stories were not interesting, because they were, but there was just no difference between reading them online and reading them in a physical copy of a book.

I think my favorite one, out of the ones that I viewed, is The Girl and the Wolf by Nick Montfort. Basically, there is a very short introduction to the poem that sounds a lot like the introduction of Little Red Riding Hood. However, depending on which square you choose on the grid, with each square representing a different amount of sex and violence, the rest of the story will be completely different. This is very good at interacting with the reader while at the same time, it is not really the reader who wrote the story.

So now that I think about it, a good technotext is one that interacts with the reader on more than the level of "oh, I need to click here to read the rest and have no other options..." There is a lot of freedom with technotexts and anything an author does to one, I am sure I would find interesting. At the same time, because there is a lot of freedom with technotexts, I expect more out of one than the previously mentioned Red Spider/Razor Burn and the like.

Technotexts and Virtual Words

I thought that the Anipoems, by Ana María Uribe, were completely fantastic! My favorite one was probably the "Gym 3" where the P's change into R's, which looks like humans working out by kicking out their leg. I thought it was a very creative idea. I thought the whole site of anipoems was really quite cool, but I did not really believe these were "poems." They were cool animations, but poems? "Oh, come on!" I thought.

However, when reading The Dreamlife of Letters, by Brian Kim Stefans, I realized, when he said that poetry should be interactive, that this is another one of those subjects that challenge traditional connotations(which makes Honors 353 a great thinking and debate class). Anipoems, and especially Stefans' The Dreamlife of Letters, challenges what a poem really is, or in other words, my preconceived notions of poetry. I used to think of it as non-mobile words that make sentences that elicit deep emotions from humans. However, mobile text can elicit greater emotions from humans; there are less limitations when it comes to mobile-text-- so why should mobile text not be poetic? That is right, mobile text is extremely poetic! There were a lot of interesting interpretations that can be made by watching Stefan's anipoem-- for example, one part I liked was "Pride" that started at the top of the screen then dropped. I take it to mean that someone lost their pride because something bad happened in their life. I think the "flashyness" of anipoems just threw me off at first. When I see flashy, I generally think movies or cartoon, not poems.

I also find it interesting that these anipoems could not exist as printed material, although making them into a flipbook might work. I do agree with Hayles in My Mother Was a Computer on page 38 that print tradition does not create more masterful pieces of literature than electronic means can. They are certainly different, but this does not make one better than another. Additionally, digitization is still fairly new so I do not think it should be judged quite yet against Shakespeare and the like. The last thing I want to comment on is the general topic Hayles writes about: the similarities between code and writing/speech and why code should matter to us. I am not sure if code in the basic sense really matters that much-- I took a class on Python and let me tell you, it was not fun. But in the more abstract sense, yes, I think it matters. We did not have to read the beginning of the book, but I did anyways to figure out exactly what Hayles was getting at, and she makes an interesting point-- just like the motherboard of a computer runs everything in our computers and eventually connects to cyberspace, "Mother Nature" controls our world. It is a scary analogy, really, because it is like we live in a type of cyberspace or something. Basically, code represents a complex world (Hayles notes this around page 41), like our world, although code itself is not so complex. We should care about code because it models our real lives. It is also similar to writing/speech because just like a little change in code can change something big in the computer process, a little change in my semantics would change the meaning of my sentences as well.

The Century of Artists' Books and Writing Machines

Growing up, I often heard the phrase, "don't judge a book by its cover," but something I realized while reading the Introduction of The Century of Artists' Books, by Johanna Drucker, is that sometimes I just can't help it! It seems to be an instinct in humans to go with what looks good, what is aesthetically pleasing. As I learned earlier in Hnrs 353, form is part of a text's message. Therefore it comes as no surprise to me that Kaye, in Writing Machines, wanted to shout "Materiality is content, and content is materiality!" (pg. 75)

Despite this knowledge, at first I was unsure what an "artist's book" was when I started reading The Century of Artists' Books. The first thing I thought about when I tried to discern what exactly an "artist's book" is was a certain book featured on Seinfeld. It was a book about coffee tables that can be morphed into a coffee table itself. Chapter One of Drucker's book, however, explains that just because a book is artistic does not mean it is an artist's book. Artist's books communicate with people. They should be mutable and have "some conviction... to be a book in order to succeed" (pg 25). They are usually not for financial gain (this is one reason artist's books are separate from livres d'artists). They can be used for political activism. Generally, they are also published independently, not in publishing firms.

But most importantly, from reading Chapter Two, I think I finally understand what an "artist's book" is: "[it] should be a work by an artist self-conscious about art form, rather than a merely highly artistic book" (page 21). Additionally, in Artists' Books: The Book As a Work of Art, by Stephen Bury, an artist's book is described as "books or book-like objects over the final appearance of which an artist has had a high degree of control; where the book is intended as a work of art in itself." So I would classify the book about coffee tables as an artist's book. It physically embodies the content it tries to teach. It is its content. It is a work of art in my opinion. The author was certainly self-conscious about what he (Kramer) wanted his book to look like. Maybe what would have made the book even better was if all of the text formed the specific coffee tables they were describing. The coffee table book really elicits no drama and has nothing to do with political activism, but it does question what a book can be.

William Blake is an obviously excellent example whose works, mostly speaking on religion, had an "effect of unity" (pg 25). He was able to "mobilize the space of the page, the tones of the paper, the colors of ink and paint,..." and created books where images and text were in dialogue with each other (pg 25). Where I can see how all of the examples are artist's books, I must say I do not believe one can give a complete, accurate definition of what an artist's book is (even though I tried to earlier in this post). It is probably best to explain what an artist's book is not.

That Pachebel's Video we saw in class-- READ!

I have an important comment to make about the Pachebel's video we saw in class. I didn't get to say what I wanted to say after it ended because the group's presentation pretty much ended after it. I felt like it was too late for me to speak up (I take some time to get the courage to raise my hand...)...

I DISAGREE that all music has a formula. The video was supposed to give that message. More generally, the video was supposed to give the message that literature, dance, music, etc., all have some sort of copied formula.

I analyze music all of the time and will give my input:

When we write music, we are dealing with 12 notes (well, with the traditional music keyboard). 12 notes. I repeat: 12 notes. Of course there are going to be some similarities, some songs having more than others. However, there are also many different things that can be done with rhythm, chords progressions, different combinations of melodies with harmonies, etc.(I think Alex DID make this point, actually).

Basically, my point is that the ones that really are similar are POP songs, or even jazz songs for Christ's sake. One can find generic songs for any genre of music(they can be good/okay songs, but it's not what I would want to listen to. They are not spectacular). Anything that really fits clearly into a genre, and has the generic genre sound, was made from a formula(i.e. jazz: walking bassline, all the same characteristics as any other jazz song, no spectacular melody, does not add anything else). But I don't like this kind of music. I kind of like songs that takes influences from genres but is... just not that genre. It has few similarities with other songs since(few because similarities are inescapable with 12 notes), but is really not from a formula. Every song that the Pachebel's Canon video guy played were very recent, pop songs, none of which I like. Additionally, this is not to say that I don't like the occassional pop song, or jazz song, whatever, I do, but the songs I like go "above and beyond" and are songs that I believe are not completely from the formula. There are ALWAYS going to be some similarities, of course, but some wonderful songs ARE different, very different, and these are the songs that I tend to like.

I did not choose to like these songs. I came to this conclusion after I started analyzing why I like what I like. Even the music I compose I do not believe sounds like anything else. Sure, one could say "well it has elements of techno... da da da..." but I think it is new and different. I don't particularly like my music (yea...) but I at least can say it does not distinctly fit into one category. It is human nature to put things into categories, though, which is why all songs wind up in one. There are many less-formulated songs out there, though, and I think the same goes for literature, too.

I remember Meg saying that there are a certain amount of categories of plots that exist, but I want to find those categories and challenge it. I do believe what my past professor said that all writing is stolen, but I think that every once in a while things are added and changed around, which makes it completely different.

Back to dealing with music, I mean... when one writes music, they can only write with the skills they possess-- these skills come from previous heard music. Composition is about knowledge of music, and associations with different notes. If no one ever experiments, then there will never be anything different. The "experimenters" are the ones who want to write what they think sounds good and does not try to be "rock" or "pop" or anything, and these are the ones who make great music.

Oh, and I never liked Stars Wars and Harry Potter (or the new Twilight). The fact that they have a certain formula may explain it. Thanks group today who presented that brought this to my attention!

Sorry, this whole thing must not make sense. I'm typing really fast and thinking really fast (I'm not a fast thinker) because I have to study for a geology test.... but it makes sense in my brain :(

Uncreative Writing Class Blog Entry

2. Do you agree with the belief that, "If it's not on the Web, it doesn't exist” ? Consider all aspects of life including people, places, history, knowledge, and mundane realities.

I absolutely do not agree with that statement. There are many things that are not on the web. For instance, one cannot find all books on "Google Books." The title of the book may pop up, but it could say there is no preview available and, thus, one must actually get the physical copy of the book if they wish to read it. Secondly, I have a lot of thoughts inside of my head that I could turn into literature. I have not written down all of my thoughts, though, and put them on the web. They are stored in my brain. My friend keeps a diary, as well, that is not in the form of a blog-- I am talking about a hard copy of a diary, the way everyone used to write. Some people also do not have access to the internet-- does this mean that their writing does not exist? Of course not! Some literature may also be buried in the ground somewhere because of an earthquake or otherwise, and has never been found. It still exists, just no one today knows it is there. Very old, out of print books generally do not become uploaded to the internet, either. It is either because it has outdated information or it has just been forgotten about. There are seemingly infinite possibilities of literature that is not online!

Uncreative Writing

Half way through reading "Winter," a section of Weather, I felt like killing myself. It was all just meaningless to me. I couldn't go on and yet I forced myself to. I skimmed the rest of it and clicked on "Spring." I made my way, slowly and painfully, through the rest of the seasons. I did not enjoy reading Weather, and yet I am oddly happy for its existence. If someone could help explain to me why I feel this way, feel free. I look forward to discussion in class to help me better understand my feelings here.

But reading this made me realize that we can only take in the weather in small doses otherwise it becomes meaningless. Well, it is meaningless once the day has passed as well.

There is a form to Weather. It seems to be a paragraph for each day of the year, in order, but I cannot be sure for there is no date mentioned which seemingly makes it more useless. I found it interesting that each paragraph was generally about the same size. This must mean that newscasters must fit the weather in a certain amount of time, regardless of how much there is to say. The same-size paragraphs did help to keep the piece unified. As Kenneth Goldsmith writes in "Sentences on Conceptual Writing," : "...it is best that the basic unit be deliberately uninteresting so that it may more easily become an intrinsic part of the entire work. Using complex basic forms only disrupts the unity of the whole." He succeeded in having a unified piece, for sure.

The many "uh's" also made the reading more painful. I am not used to that. This is something that is generally only said orally. In writing, we do not have to type "uh" because we have time between words to think and write. Orally presenting, one feels the need to fill in the gaps of silence and I can usually ignore it. I could not while reading.

I also did a little experiment with the work. I searched the work for repetition using the "ctrl F" method because as I read, I felt like I was reading the same words over and over. To my surprise, there was hardly any repetition! Well, there were 70 "sunshine's" in Winter, but "rainy" appears only once, and there are few mentions of "cloudy" and other words that one would expect to hear (or see, in this case). I think I am analyzing this piece of work more than it is supposed to be. Most people don't read it at all. But in this modern era (or post-modern era), I am used to analyzing things way too much. My generation has been trained to be so creative that it ends up not being creative at all. Some people have formulas that they use to create things (In Petty Theft, Britney Spears is mentioned as an example, which I agree with). Kenneth G., as quoted in Anne Henochowicz's article Petty Theft, says, "What passes for creativity in our culture is actually vastly uncreative.Think of the flood of worn-out narratives, passing for originality, be it novels, films or music, and you'll find that what we term creative is nothing more than repetitious formulas, spun over and over." What comes to my mind for recent work that is deemed as "creative" and is not is Twilight. Don't hate me. The truth hurts.

"To work with a plan that is preset is one way of avoiding subjectivity" is another quote from Kenneth G. Part of me wonders what he means by this-- is he saying that avoiding subjectivity is a good thing? Or is he trying to say that controversy and subjectivity are good things because without it, you get a book of stock quotes or a book on last year's weather reports. I think he meant the latter :) Or it is how I would like to interpret it.

Additionally, I know that Soliloquy, mentioned in "Petty Theft," a record of everything Kenneth said during one week is supposed to be uncreative writing, but I think it might be interesting!