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words by jace.

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юли 20 2005 lit K K K + DATABREAKERBILDUNGSROMAN








I was talking to Pedro the other day. We got on the topic of how blogs can be like TV, insofar as images-information-sounds flash at you, fast and fragmentary, a type of fast-food consumer culture experience. I was telling him about how I never use the search functions on people's blogs, never browse through the archives. Perhaps that reflects the amount of free time I have, perhaps it is how most people extract info from bloglandia-- on the daily, fast, faster, and fastest. Overvaluing newness. A week is old.


But then Pedro brought up the example that someone will be researching  or trying to find out more about, say, grime, and all of the sudden several blog archives become quite useful resources, full of info, annotated snapshots of music-loving fandom & DIY kritical nosekrinkles. If fast-moving subcultures necessarily produce & are defined by ephemera, then blogs crystallize that; digital ephemera can easily turn permanent. He took it further, saying that some bloggers will offer guided tours through their own blogs. You know, a path thru a certain idea or style, even just a walk beside entries the author likes best-- read this post, then this one, then this one...


Currently, blogs use time to organize themselves (the new main page, the monthly archives). Some can subdivide the content into categories like posts on 'music', 'tech', 'politics', so you can just read/search the topic you like. Handy, but it's still not narrative. Language ensures that our brains crave storylines, the unstoppable constant telling rethinking performance of things done or not done. The first-person windowframe we can't break. Guided tours -- the phrase isn't ideal because i think of sunbunrt tourists squinting through their cameras -- present the idea of narrating the endlessly birthed rhizomatic weed-like little self-encyclopedias we call blogs. Basically,  I never browse blog archives but probably would from time to time of folks threaded a sharp story through their mountains of text.


Google can't create stories (it only harvests & documents each searcher's story: what you want, what you need to find & how you phrase your desires; far from anonymous, Google records everything you type into it, even--especially--your path through its links...) Unarranged data is useless, chronologies order things but not in a useful way. The tool happens (the story gets told) when you receive (or reshape) the right info in a functional order. Language as tool, telling as weapon: Leftenant's fine recommendation: Samuel R. Delaney's Babel-17.

[ragudave] () - юли 20 2005

Guided blog tours sounds like a great idea - but a random walk around a blog is also a great idea. Now if only the author Stuart Home (http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/) would do a blog and tour!

Kopying Kills Kapitalism - well not according to Carbob Silica...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/46..

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left () - юли 20 2005

SAT analogies, hell yes!

if language functions as tool, and telling as weapon, what is the relationship between narrative and poetry?

reminds me of reading one of ocatvio paz's longer poems side by side in english and spanish in high school.

the english version i had translated a line i think as "words which are flowers become fruits which are deeds,"

but the original spanish simply linked them like this:

"palabras que son flores que son frutas que son hechos,"

which posits an entirely different (anti-)causality. linkage without the implied veritcality or chronology.

smacks of a poor man's deleuze? you bet, but what struck me experientially (if poetry provides that) and for the first time was the gap in translation itself. and the translator provided a clear example as reading as reading into, something delaney gives generally gives you a head start by opening up those routes.

so i offer up again for fellow nerds to nibble and spit up: if language functions as tool, and telling as weapon, what is the relationship between narrative and poetry?

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bryan - юли 21 2005

i always thought of poetry as a sort of meta-narrative concerning text, a riff using language's more slippery metonymic qualities to represent language, reality, and the relationship between the two in a fashion that's both novel and engaging (engaging in part because of its novelty) i'm not so sure what 'narrative' means in this context though. if narrative is what j says, a beginning, middle, and end, i.e. in the most basic sense, a story, then poetry, to my mind, is a narrative concerning language's use as a tool. structure is itself the narrative. as beckett claims for joyce's Untitled, "form is content and content form." all very modern...

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left - юли 22 2005

psyched someone picked up on this thread!

there's a long ass essay available in english in book form by lacoue-labarthe called poetry as experience that basically traces paul celan's investigation of heidegger's involvement with the nazi's. dense but worth checking. celan's obsession takes him as far as reading the guest books of lodges in germany where nazi meetings took place.

abstracted from that though, what is the difference between the writing of poetry and the writing of narrative in relation to experience? and what about the reading of both? if narrative is defined by chronology, can it only take place after experience so chronology can be written into it ex post? what about flashbacks and other time-tweaking devices? we generally read poetry and narrative left to right and top to bottom, but do we go back more with poetry to re-read while reading? and writers always jump around to revise and add things in the process of writing itself.

i feel like the episode of news radio where jimmy james tells beth that one of the cardinal rules of negotiation is to always answer a question with a question, to, of course, hilarious results...

in the context of babel-17 though, alien poetry is a code which makes enemy computers temporarily malfunction; a weapon. but for celan poetry was always a way of dealing if not healing, with the holocaust, his disappointment with heidegger, and trauma/ living in general. i guess it cuts both ways!

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