alienated.net

Many years ago, I translated bpNichol's first poem, "Translating Apollinaire," into Klingon. Evidently, it made something of an impression, because ever since then, people have bombarded me with links to All Things Klingon. As my uncles used to say, once they find your ass, they never stop kicking it.

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Brian Davis just posted a great piece on status update in the Globe Books section online:

Status update: 'Emily Brontë and her Playstation are overly friendly these days'

Facebook's status update bar may be its most popular, enduring and influential feature (given the rise of Twitter's real time fixes for the focus-challenged). For writers Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy, status updates are also poetry. Or, rather, it becomes poetry after the RRS feeds of thousands of Facebook users have been harvested, shorn of the user names and attached to the names of dead poets or writers.

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Last Sunday, following up on a tip from Ed Pien, Kenny Goldsmith and I stopped by The Textile Museum of Canada to see Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan. Both The Toronto Star and Now listed it as one of the best gallery shows of 2008, and it did not disappoint: curator Max Allen has assembled 118 rugs from the period of the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan (1979) up to the present.

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Last night (January 9), Mercer Union launched "Street Poets & Visionaries: Selections from the UbuWeb Collection" to a packed house. The text that I wrote for the catalogue follows, as does a link to a Flickr set of images of the event.

The quality of mind in the radio telescope is its will to select.
-- Christopher Dewdney, "Parasite Maintenance" [1]

What are the outer limits of appropriation?

Digital culture is obsessed with this question, from both an aesthetic and a legal perspective. On the one hand is an entire century of artistic practices that gleefully encourage the copying and recirculation of cultural materials, from Delta blues and Dada to Flarf and mashups. On the other hand is an increasingly restrictive legal climate, which, as Siva Vaidhyanathan has argued at length, is entirely incapable of dealing effectively with "emerging communication technologies, techniques and aesthetics" [2].

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On November 19, Microsoft relaunched the XBox Live Network with a brand-new (bearing in mind that with Microsoft, new is always a relative state of mind) avatar-based interface, and the XBox-based portion of my online identity received an extreme makeover.

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On the way to theanyspacewhatever, the Guggenheim Relational Aesthetics show, I meet mariachis on the subway between 77th and 86th.

Maurizio Cattelan's "Daddy Daddy" -- drowned yet floating (because wooden? Then how'd he drown?) Pinocchio -- makes it all worthwhile immediately. Father of 4-year-old girl turns it into an object lesson about the importance of lifejackets.

The Guggenheim is a lot of things, but it is pretty clearly not anyspacewhatever. Whatever.

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On November 20th, I was the happy guest of the students of UPenn Kelly Writers House during TAPEWORM: a collaborative exhibition based on Darren Wershler-Henry's the tapeworm foundry (andor the dangerous prevalence of imagination), curated by Kaegan Sparks. Full details are here.

Marshall McLuhan was fond of observing that the content of a new medium is always an older medium. He would likely have taken a certain amount of satisfaction out of the notion that the job of popular music in 2008 is largely to serve as the content for cell phones and video game consoles. Legal downloads of digital songs from the iTunes Store alone outsell most traditional record stores. Downloads of ring tones for cellular phones regularly outsell the singles on which they're based. (Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)

David Foster Wallace died on September 12, 2008. Something I wrote years ago seemed appropriate, so I added a dedication:

jungle
(after David Foster Wallace)

the music was incomprehensible until they realized that at each beat, the instruments were playing every note on the chromatic scale save one, and that the melody consisted entirely of its own delicate absence.

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