Dear Melts, Digital Humanists, and others,

So, in preparation for my presentation on Friday — for which I had planned on assembling an annotated bibliography of books that fell within my understanding of the field of “digital humanities” (and/or “digital literature”), I decided to assemble the books as Amazon “lists” via the site’s “listmania” feature — seductive capitalist trap that it is! I got a little manic.

What appears below are five lists of 40 books each (that’s the max per list) that more or less circumscribe, for the moment, my understanding of the field of new media studies as it relates to literature. The titles of each of the lists are provisional — certainly any number of the books could end up on another of the lists — but in general I think it gives a pretty good idea of how I approach things, and I hope, if you have several hundred dollars to spare, that you decide to pick a few of these up. I’m going to petition the library to purchase copies of these if they don’t have them already.

If you have additional books to recommend to me for a more formal list for English graduate students, then send them my way! Most likely they won’t end up on the Amazon lists unless I can swap them out easily, given the limitations, but I’d like to have some lists on hand for future part 1s.

The good news is that I won’t blab on for hours on Friday about 100 books from my library, but I will describe my reasoning behind each of these lists and point out a few of the more unusual inclusions. It’s a very idiosyncratic assemblage (Lipstick Traces anyone?).

Best,
Brian

PS. BTW, several of the more adventurous publishers are offering their books online as downloadable PDFs. I’ve found a few of the titles below (such as Harman’s book on Latour, Prince of Networks, and Marcus Boon’s book In Praise of Copying), for free. This is kind of the companion post to my earlier Freeware Guide, Introduction to Electronic Literature.

1. Foundations and Surveys

2. Graphic Design and Visuality

3. Ludology and Narrative Theory

4. Poetry and Poetics

5. Politics and Philosophy

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I grabbed this list of punk and post-punk bands from the website (the name of which I can’t remember… seem to have lost the link), dropped it into an Excel spreadsheet, did a lot of search and replace, and voila!

Part of my on-going side project to create an anthology of obscure, and not so obscure, punk, post-punk and early hip hop singles by L.A. musicians. A Google search turned up yet another amazing photo of Su Tissue of Suburban Lawns.

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Just discovered this amazing review on Sustainable Aircraft of my polemic, Bank of America Online Banking: A Critical Assessment. It manages to say some poignant, provocative things about the state of “avant-garde” literature in the US and Canada.

I did actually put it back up on Lulu (free download), but took down the WordPress site since it seemed redundant. Bank of America changed their fee policies soon after I posted this, but certainly not because of me. I’m pretty sure that my assessment of their website still stands, though, but I’ve moved my account to Wells Fargo, which has a much more helpful, unadorned site.

Thanks, Marie, this very thoughtful and, in many ways, encouraging.

Bank of America Online Banking: A Critical Evaluation
Brian Kim Stefans
Citoyen Press: Los Angeles, 2010
Review by Marie Buck

Last January, the poet Brian Kim Stefans released a pamphlet entitled “Bank of America Online Banking: A Critical Evaluation” as a series of posts on his blog Free Space Comix, on a WordPress site, and as a downloadable file or purchaseable print copy on Lulu. (The WordPress site and Lulu page seem to have been removed, but the pamphlet is currently available as blog posts here. As Stefans writes in the press release, the pamphlet “argues that the great portion of the bank’s revenue accrued through overdraft fees is often the result of the deceptive and confusing nature of the online banking site.” Over the course of an introduction and ten brief chapters, Stefans demonstrates that several specific aspects of the website—which Stefans notes is in fact a software program which ought to be compared to other handier and better-designed software programs—are arranged to give misleading information, to advertise the ease of the site to customers (who are, in fact, already using the site) rather than warn them of potential hazards, and to obfuscate information that might help customers avoid overdraft fees. Stefans also crunches some numbers and suggests that the average person making less than $100,000 a year incurs $145 in overdraft fees each year.

Over the course of the pamphlet, Stefans implies that in continually insisting upon its own ease, the Bank of America website not only likely garners millions in overdraft fees, but also suppresses customer conversation and outrage about the fees. The site—containing such cutsey and condescending phrases as “[w]e’re all guilty of overspending from time to time, even though we know we shouldn’t”—is designed to make customers feel guilt, even shame, about overdrafts incurred when the site itself actively obscures information that anyone with a small balance needs in order to ensure s/he does not overdraft. The only ways to have all the information you need to make sure you don’t overdraft are to keep an old-school checkbook (when one function of the site seems to be precisely to replace such a checkbook) or to make sure you never let your balance get low—basically, to have a decent chunk of money in there at all times, to compensate for holds on your account and the like. In other words, to be wealthier.

Clear and well-researched, the pamphlet is recommendable for the information it provides about online banking and about the rhetoric of software and web design. However, it is also recommendable to read the pamphlet as an intervention into the contemporary poetry community of which Stefans is a part. The pamphlet begins with a Frank O’Hara quotation—“I go on to the bank / and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) / doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life…,” suggesting that Stefans might have poets in mind. And given the pamphlet’s avenues of distribution, it’s safe to assume many of the people who have read it are poets. (I, for one, started reading it thinking I was beginning some sort of conceptual poem.)

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Here is a short list of books available for free download online that I’ve discovered over the past month (along with a few oldies). Just type in “pdf” after a book you are looking for and there are fair, if not great, chances you’ll find it. Not that I’m trying to kill the publishing industry… I’m just finding it quite easy to read and annotate chunky texts like this on my tablet (my penmanship sucks).

There are several titles at re.press that are available for free download, including a volume of Hegel’s introductions. I’d be interested in compiling a list of publishers that make most or all of their material available online. Please let me know!

• Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying
• Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb
• Lev Manovich, Software Takes Command
• Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
• Graham Harman, The Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics
• Florian Cramer, Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination
• Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
• Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire
• Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas
• Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek & Graham Harman (editors), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism
• Robert Duncan, The H.D. Book
• Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice (eds.), Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity

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This is something I posted on netpoetic recently. Thought I’d put it here as well.

I’ve actually been scanning the internet, trying to find new (and old, forgotten) projects to include in a class I’m calling “Poetry in the Age of New Media.” I wish I had used “time” instead of “age” in the title, but I think there was a hint of satire in the use of “age,” like we were all Victorians or something (it would have been hilarious if I had used “era”). I think “time” would have been perfect, actually, as time is not only the subject but the content, the material, of so much new media art.

I’m sure much in this list is known to readers of this site. It’s mostly things that have not appeared in the ELC1 collection or which have not gotten much play (such as Facade), and mostly from artists outside the purview of “e-literature,” though not exlusively. This isn’t highly edited or exhaustive — really just pasted notes.

The Gates of Paradise, David Daniels
http://www.thegatesofparadise.com
Total outsider stuff, pdfs, some of which are animated. Links somewhat with the idea of “conceptual writing” that is promoted by writers such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin (see the conceptual writing anthology on ubu.com). David died about a year ago.

Dagmar Chili, Toadex Hobogrammathon
http://dagmar_chili.pitas.com
More total outsider stuff, by someone who I had a small correspondence with years ago, but whose identity I still don’t know. I’ve blogged about Toadex quite a bit on www.arras.net/fscIII.

New Digital Emblems, William Poundstone
http://williampoundstone.net
Actually, Poundstone has a number of substantila projects, but I think the emblems are the most neglected as the piece is involved and seems to be non-fiction. I haven’t looked at his new pieces. I’m having lunch with him on Monday (never met him before). [P.S. The lunch went swimmingly, he's a cool guy.]

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This blog post title is taken from one of the links below, a new slew of minor hits, this time using the single word “Toadex” in Google.

Nothing incredibly revealing here except that there is a “Toadex” appearing on a few forum pages (Newgrounds, for example), and there seems to be more evidence of actual correspondence between Mr. Toadex and a few blog authors.

These links are a mess; some are already from my previous post but I don’t feel like weeding out the doubles.

Geegaw
Some literary analysis of a recent Dagmar Chili post:
http://www.geegaw.com/archives/0111.shtml
Correspondence with Toadex?
http://www.geegaw.com/archives/0302.shtml

Apathy
I think these are in the previous post:
http://apathy.pitas.com/06_18_2000.html
http://apathy.pitas.com/04_09_2000.html

Newgrounds
Someone named Toadex contributed to these forums (probably more if I really searched):
http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/128663/14
http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/310812

Sylloge
More correspondence:
http://www.sylloge.com/the_past/2001_03_01_not_recent.html

Amiright
Nothing to do with our author, I think, but the cane toad chemical called Toadex:
http://www.amiright.com/parody/70s/johndenver44.shtml

Synthetic Zero
Another Toadex watcher from back in the day:
http://69.93.195.170/may2001a.html
And folllowing, some correspondence:
http://www.syntheticzero.com/jan2002.php
http://www.syntheticzero.com/dec2001.php

Webwasp
Someone named Toadex contributes to this as well:
http://www.webwasp.co.uk/forum/index.php

Metafilter
This has nothing to do with our author, but the great line that forms this post title is from here. Bonney’s translations of Baudelaire are interesting.
http://www.metafilter.com/63023/Sean-Bonneys-Translations-of-Baudelaire

Green in Australia
Information on “Toadex,” a spray for killing cane toads:

Control of cane toads is extremely difficult. Reproductive potential is high. Traditional techniques of dispatch are painful for the animal. Toadex is a new commercial spray product specifically for cane toads. However freezing is the most humane way to kill them. A CSIRO research program to investigate possible biological control options is in progress.

Evon Evonchoo
The Google search for Toadex led me to this blog which also engages in some strange language play, for example:

toadex went sch , supposed tuu miit ddear e lorhx , bud she cant make iit , den neber go , ad fiirst iintend tuu skiip sch and go shopshop wiiv her !!! L0ls ..
had sum funn iin e recess , chungg told miie tat e church hab dunnoe wad iindustriiex programme , den she saex iie can joiin e fashiion iindustriiex , bud e fuckiin edna saex tiis : afta e LV iinciicdent , can she stiilll make iit ? iie wanna roar !! iie hab alreadiiex regreated wore lyetat and euur hab been laughiin ferr almost 1weeks le lehx !!! L0ls .. home-ed and catch sum tv and chated on phone wiiv edna jux nao ..

Athica
Dagmar Chili included in an online web gallery — without permission, of course — created by a group in Athens, Georgia.
http://www.athica.org/virtualart.php

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Some time ago, when I posted a .pdf version of “Name: A Novel” on /ubu editions, I noted that there were exactly 4 Google hits for the author of the book, Toadex Hobogrammathon. Memory being what it is, I can’t remember what those links were, but I gave it another shot recently to see if I could dig up something about this mysterious personage. To date, I know of only the following which can be directly attributed to him/her, or at least to this pseudonym — there might be others out there. Two are weird blogs, one is the novel.

The primo blog to read by Toadex H. is Dagmar Chili Pitas. I’ve already linked to this blog from FSC, but haven’t as yet done any serious writing about it. The real title might just be “Dagmar Chili,” “Pitas” being simply the name of the service provider. But like Kleenex and Xerox, the name seems to have stuck.
http://dagmar_chili.pitas.com/

What appears to be a test run up to Dagmar Chili Pitas is Doxo Wox. I found out about it on a blog that seemed to be following Toadex H. back in the day. I haven’t seen proof, other than a similarity of style, that this is by Toadex H., but the similarities are strong (or more particularly, with the early part of Name, the next link).
http://doxowox.org/

And then there is Name: A Novel, which I describe in some detail on the following page.
http://ubu.com/ubu/toadex_name.html

I can’t find the original page on which “Name” first appeared. I don’t remember who among us (mostly like one of the ubuweb folks) discovered it. But I do remember exchanging an email or two with Toadex about putting it up, all lost in one of several crashed or stolen hard drives.

In any case, I’m trying to, uh, research Toadex Hobogrammathon for some writing I hope to do on digital poetry and the whatnot. Below are the only links (not including links to the ubu page, of which there are several) that come up with “Toadex Hobogrammathon.” Appears that, at some time, he/she occasionally dropped a note on some blogs regarding some issue (Zukofsky one time) that needed addressing, though in typically off-beat fashion.

One poster writes that “Mr. Toadex is a friend” of his/hers, that person being listed only as “a” (with no email address). So I’m hardly hot on the trail. But if any of you out there (does anyone read this blog anymore? If not, I understand, it’s sucked for so long) know anything about Toadex, drop me a line.

Erswhile.net
http://erstwhile.net/?t_z=1091343600&t_s=2678400

Apathay
(Hmmm… didn’t realize that apathy was housed at pitas.com, maybe this is the break I needed.)
http://apathy.pitas.com/compconc.html
http://apathy.pitas.com/04_09_2000.html

Bellona Times
http://www.pseudopodium.org/ht-20011014.html

It’s at this website that Toadex asks about Zukfosky:

thro yr Ardent urgency, have I can come to Z;
accidental Ctrl-b, close window, I wrote a something to Ray, … ;;;; What may I be writing an Rutgersial anthological comment on Zukofsky, do yo have any bookings to recomment,?? Or articles?? Are you attributed to him?
I mean, I’m drafted by class, to write by an anthology of Rutgers, what Z did and said, and so forth. I got a goddamn refridgerator the last guy had to assault me with some whirr less than buzzing, when one dranks enough to listen.

And before a four days ago, I didnaot know tha te emoeuseic of A24 is H via C, so enough of tracking up and through the left,

good days to you and thakn yuo of all the

Gewgaw
http://www.geegaw.com/archives/0111.shtml

Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast
(It’s in this one that one of the commentors mentions that Mr. Toadex is a friend, in the same sentence as recommending Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget for a conceptual audio project.)
http://www.miettecast.com/2006/09/30/the-scarlet-ibis/

[Postscript: the word "Toadex" brings up several more hits that are relevant, but I don't have the time right now to post them. Will soon.]

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Here are some recent, and not so recent, things written about my books and chapbooks over the past years.

I try to keep track of this stuff once in a while, since these books and things often seem to disappear into oblivion, and I like to think my poems and things are meaningful to someone… sigh. I’ve also moved four times in four years, now, and feel pretty out of touch with readers and writers, though finally settling in LA and meeting the poetry folks here and in San Francisco has been pleasurable (and a relief). “Stabilizing” might be more therapy-session way of putting it.

There are two interesting shout-outs tacked on at the end. First, is a poem by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, in which my Flash animation “The Dreamlife of Letters,” which borrowed liberally from a text of hers, is discussed at length in the footnote and poem itself. (She didn’t like the project at all, from what I understand, when she first heard about it and saw the poem, but I think she’s ok with it now. Maybe.)

The second is from the intro to the Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry, in which my playful co-option (or “liberal borrowing”) of Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” (along with other works by other poets like Ashbery, Muldoon and Lisa Robertson) is given as proof that British Romantic poetry is still very much alive and useful to poets of today (or something like that). Anyway, I thought it was funny.

Noah Eli Gordon
Boston Review
microreview of Kluge: A Meditation, and other works

Clive Thompson
Collision Detection (blog)
“Why Interactive Poetry Beats Interactive Fiction”

C St Perez
Tarpaulin Sky
review of What is Said to the Poets Concerning Flowers

Jason Morris
Jacket Magazine
“The Time Between Time: Messianism & the Promise of a ‘New Sincerity’” (general aesthetics essay discussing a number of poets)

Michael McDonough
Electronic Book Review
review of Before Starting Over: Selected Essays and Interviews

Michael McDonough
Econoculture
review of Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics

Stan Mir
Fascicle
“Matter Ordered to be Made” (review of several chapbooks)

Ben Basan
Luminations (blog)
notes on Fashionable Noise and some digital work

Mark Mendoza
Verse Magazine
review of “The Window Ordered to be Made”

Ron Silliman
Silliman’s Blog
review of “Jai-alai for Autocrats”

Jack Kimball
Talisman (print edition)
“Review of Carter Ratcliffe’s Arrivederci Modernismo, Laynie Browne’s Daily Sonnets, Brian Kim Stefans’s Kluge: A Meditation and Other Works”

Mark Wallace
Verse (print edition)
review of Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics

K. Silem Mohammed
The Consequence Of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (ed. Craig Dworkin, print)
“Creeping It Real” (this might be on his blog, Lime Tree, somewhere)

Rachel Blau Du Plessis
P.F.S. Post (blog)
Draft 59: Flash Back

James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane
“Introduction: The Companionable Forms of Romantic Poetry”

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Here’s an interesting development in the world of Debord and plagiarism… I’ve just downloaded the beta version of the game. The story is from Rhizome — here’s the rest.

“Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.”

So wrote Guy Debord, prominent member of the Situationist International and major instigator of the infamous Paris uprisings of May ’68. In his most famous text The Society of the Spectacle, Debord articulates the belief that free trade of thoughts and ideas is not only acceptable, but necessary for the intellectual advancement of culture. He did not simply advocate plagiarism as a means of reference, but as an active way to critically engage and subvert dominant media images — what he and his fellow Situationists referred to as ‘détournement.’ Put simply, détournement is the appropriation of these prevailing images for meanings in opposition to their original intent — a strategy that has influenced generations of activists, academics, and artists. So when the estate of Guy Debord recently sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter to a group of American artists for copyright infringement, people familiar with Debord’s oeuvre were rightly shocked. Beyond the obvious irony of the situation, this particular case has raised questions about the complexities of copyright, monetary compensation and the historical legacy of our anti-establishment icons.

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Nice set at onedit by the English poet Sean Bonney called “Baudelaire in English.” Suggests Steve McCaffery’s “Carnival” crossed with Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden.

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