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I don't have much mind or time to write anything write now -- so here is the text of my inaugural St. Mark's column on internet poetry, titled "Surfin' Scheherazade":
“Saga on moody doom? No, a gas!” writes Ross (Essay Assessor) Eckler about 2002: A Palindrome Story – whose 2,000+ odd words read the same forwards as backwards. (“2002 is not only a marvel of ingenuity: it is also funny, sexy, and full of surprises,” chimes in Harry Mathews with a more sober assessment.) When the cowards at Spineless Books finally get to producing a print version, you will miss the ability to hyperlink between the appearances of the many characters (with names like Bob, Otto, and Babs – no Nada!), which helps in this brief, convoluted story that includes 3 plot summaries. But unlike James’ The Ambassadors, there are no chapters to print out of order!
The latest thing to fall onto my welcome mat, next to the free daily “Happy Mail” lessons in the Korean language that come out prismatically scrambled in my xenophobic Outlook but for a few shards of English (“field trip / in trouble // feed / ostrich” seems intended for some other Manchurian candidate than myself), the cleverly disguised ads for bootleg Viagra and anti-spam software (disguised as… spam?), and, just today, a website that will help me buy Andy Warhol prints from French auctioneers (the same people that brought us David Bowie’s watercolors, no doubt)…
Anyway, here’s a gorgeous, richly decadent thing called Oculart that might resemble the book cover of a recent edition of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita initially but, to us Flash folks and to anyone willing to surrender during work hours, has an engrossing charm — the best thing since Neverending Story, she said — and the soundtrack, moody and variable at first, happily dies away after a few minutes. As one half expects on a site as visually rich as this – ditto for the various incarnations of Aurelia Harvey’s legendary entropy8.com – the writing is so-so, of the “we planted truth roots on an odd date palm” variety (and I quote) – but I likes anyway. The later sections, like “nake brunch” (is this a rye typo?) and “luxe pattern” are the most writing-heavy, but I somewhat prefer the simpler sections like “cat whisky,” starring a Garboesque feline with a Mannerist neck, because it does… nothing… one just stares at it… clicks around… and scratches. (For fast connections only – the downloads are huge!)
So you like to read? Well, people have been asking me about alienated.net — the postnuke site geared toward chat-room-like discussion about “poetechnology” or anything worth soap-boxing about — which started with a lot of promise a year and a half ago and which we ubu listservers thought would inspire us to work together to create some über-site for visual poetics… this seems like decades ago now, before 9/11, Martha Stewart, the rattling of the small press industry in Canada – Darren Wershler-Henry, creator of and most active contributor to the site, got swamped by the mess, being the engagé editor of Coach House Books – not to mention my shoulder going out with Patrick-Rafter like pains, thus keeping me from typing more than a few monosyllables a day. But the site’s still going – “Now We're Talking Vulva?” reads the title of the latest announcement (I’ll pass on explaining, but it’s an mp3 site!).
In my time of visiting alienated.et, the most active conversation has been one of the more recent – the red hot hunt for the author “Annoya,” a parody of Christian Bök’s Griffin Award winning Eunoia (C$80,000!), the hardcore Oulipian poem that is all the rage north of Loss Glazier. Young ubu starlet Angela Rawlings seemed hot on the trail when last I checked — tattooing clues to her abdomen lest her hard drive crash — but it’s been quieter lately. Steve McCaffery and Gregory Bett’s North American Centre for Interdisciplinary Poetics, while a bit less hip – Archibald Lampman, anyone? – is also kicking, with prose styles ranging from the vertiginously purple to the Perloffian modernisms-r-us and much in between. I’m happy to see Pierre Borduas’ Automatiste “Refus Global” manifesto there myself: “To hell with holy water and the French-Canadian tuque!” Yes, I haaate that tuque!
But I’m afraid of Canadians, so when I want to relax I turn to Tom Raworth’s great “doodles” where you can overhear Jennifer Moxley and Steve Evans as they discuss the fate of the “dominant poetic” over yogurt and muesli, or maybe saunter over to Floating Sushi to test my typing against a Tetris-meets-rebus-like-game-thing (ok, I don’t know how to describe it) that is based on actual street signs from San Francisco (i.e. “juiceit,” “discoland,” etc.). Unless you’ve never flipped on a computer, you’ve probably already heard of Yong Hae Chang Heavy Industries – the best thing to happen to Korea since, well, the Happy Mail – and witnessed in English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese or Korean (your pick) one of this Whitmaniac artist’s fast-downloading, jazz-propelled and highly charismatic Flash pieces that make you want to take to the streets with a bottle of Samantha’s algee drink and fake dreadlocks and shout (in six languages) “I’m not going to take it anymore!” Or: “Let’s LOVE!” Or: “Chet Baker was suicided by society!” Yeah.
So I haven’t hit any sites that could be called “poetry” proper, but I promise that next time, should there be a next time, I will – I just need an angle, friends. It’s no secret that some of the best things on the net are also the stupidest, but there’s nothing worse than stupid poetry, even when recited by a talking vu… by a talking computer (cough). But the great thing about the web is how some really bad ideas – for “art,” for “design” – are just there before you know it, troubling any certainties, should you let them be troubled, about what’s Richter and what’s clutter in this fluctuating world of taste, value and habitas. Maybe not. But I’m approaching a thousand words with this thing, and have to catch a bus to New Jersey. Please do check out the Yong Hae Chang site (now why didn’t I start with that?) – I’ll be more organized next time!
We can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Posted by: Jane at January 19, 2004 02:44 AMNote first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.
Posted by: Ebotte at January 19, 2004 02:44 AMWhen compared to the Stack, the Heap is a simple thing to understand. All the memory that's left over is "in the Heap" (excepting some special cases and some reserve). There is little structure, but in return for this freedom of movement you must create and destroy any boundaries you need. And it is always possible that the heap might simply not have enough space for you.
Posted by: Laura at January 19, 2004 02:46 AMEarlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.
Posted by: David at January 19, 2004 02:46 AMWhen a variable is finished with it's work, it does not go into retirement, and it is never mentioned again. Variables simply cease to exist, and the thirty-two bits of data that they held is released, so that some other variable may later use them.
Posted by: Cesar at January 19, 2004 02:47 AM