Haiku Machines
If you'd like to share some output from your Haiku machine, feel free to do so below!
Introductions
Please use the comment function below to tell us a little about yourself: your year and major, where you're from, what attracted you to this course, and anything else that you'd like us to know about your background and interests.
Art of Participation
Something I'm recommending to all my classes:
Please read this excellent handout on the Art of [Class] Participation.
Mark Saporta's Composition No. 1
Here's a detailed description of a reading of Mark Saporta's recombinant novel Composition No. 1, which Marie-Laure Ryan cites as perhaps the only actual example of a Complete Graph. The description, incidentally, is by Nick Montfort, whose work we'll be encountering again during the semester.
Freedom and Constraint
"The classical playwright who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules is freer than the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant."
--Raymond Queneau
Oulipo Comix
Exercises in Style was inspired by a work of the same name by the French writer Raymond Queneau. In that book, Queneau spun 99 variations out of a mundane, two-part text about two chance encounters with a mildly irritating character during the course of a day. He started by telling it in every conceivable tense, then by doing it in free verse and as a sonnet, as a telegram, in pig latin, as a series of exclamations, in an indifferent voice... you name it.The goal of this project is to apply the same principle to comics by creating as many variations as possible on a simple one-page non-story: different points of view, different genres, different formal games, and so on.
Exam Review
Please (everyone) post at least one term or name from readings or class discussions that could serve as a potential identification question on the exam.
A Word About Comment Spam
A quick word about something we'll all be seeing more of, unfortunately: from time to time you may check the blog and find "comment spam." These are automatically generated comment messages, with active links to commercial, sometimes pornographic, Web sites. Comment spam targets blogs with high Google page ranks; the logic, such as it is, is that by linking to a page ranked on Google the spammers' own pages will likewise climb in the Google ratings. Pretty sad, huh?
This blog is protected by a "blacklist" which filters the spam--most of the time. Some times it gets through, and I have to manually clear it away as soon as I can. If you find comment spam here the best thing to do is simply ignore it, even if it is gross and offensive. If it lasts for more than a day or two let me know, as I may have missed it. Thanks.
The Game of Life
The Game of Life is one of the most famous formal systems ever devised, by the mathematician John Conway.
Play the Game of Life by clicking the button in the top right-hand corner, drawing a starting pattern with your mouse, and then clicking Go. Try zooming out to see how your system proliferates.
The Numerist Fallacy
A terrific thread over on the GrandTextAuto blog that ties together much of the high-level theory about formal systems and the nature of the digital we've been doing this semester. Go take a look, you'll see that your prof isn't the only one who obsesses over this stuff!
Computers as Authors?
"Computers as Authors? Literary Luddites Unite!" in the NY Times (may require free registration). Here's a taste:
"Dave Striver loved the university - its ivy-covered clocktowers, its ancient and sturdy brick, and its sun-splashed verdant greens and eager youth. The university, contrary to popular opinion, is far from free of the stark unforgiving trials of the business world: academia has its own tests, and some are as merciless as any in the marketplace. A prime example is the dissertation defense: to earn the Ph.D., to become a doctor, one must pass an oral examination on one's dissertation. This was a test Professor Edward Hart enjoyed giving."
That pregnant opening paragraph was written by a computer program known as Brutus.1 that was developed by Selmer Bringsjord, a computer scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and David A. Ferrucci, a researcher at I.B.M.
No Contest
I've known for a long time that a lot of the boys in my English classes are more interested in connecting with their Xboxes in the evening than with the next three chapters of Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon." But ever since I observed their mounting hysteria over last month's "premiere" of Halo 2, the new combat game from Microsoft, I've been trying to find out what's behind the lure of video games. As the boys I teach have endeavored to enlighten me, I haven't known whether to laugh, cry, or go find a new job. What they told me has me wondering how what I teach can possibly compete with the fast-paced razzle-dazzle of this ever-evolving entertainment form and worrying about the young guys who spend so much time divorced from reality and the life of the mind as they zap away the hours before their video screens.
Free registration required.