Ginsberg's Tweet: Howl Revision via Twitter

On June 3rd I performed Ginsberg's Tweet, a retweeted revision of Howl, on Twitter @GinsbergsTweet. Using the Howl text as a foundation, I went through the original work, line by line and comma by comma, and searched specific keywords in recent tweets, Twitter-wide. Utilizing the most angry, upset, overwhelmed, and hopeful of the search, I retweeted these results in succession as they were presented in Howl.

Ginsberg's Tweet remains viewable on Twitter @GinsbergsTweet. You will need to scroll through the retweets to find the beginning, which is clearly marked.

Straight reading from beginning to end (especially when one is familiar with Howl) reveals an honest, crowdsourced (oh boy...) retelling of current fear and hope in much the same vein as Ginsberg himself did. Sometimes the succession of retweets is more relevant to the next/last than others, and sometimes it's as though the authors of these tweets are speaking to each other. Reading Ginsberg's Tweet aloud is something I would like to try alongside a concurrent reading of Howl.

However, I chose the Twitter platform more for its hypertextuality and its relevance to our digital culture. In Allen Ginsberg's time, words you might see scribbled on walls are now presented and archived (limitedly on Twitter itself, at least) as tweets for anyone with internet access to view. Instead of inscribing shocking headlines into concrete, a tweeter may simply display a link to a troubling article. Instead of wondering who wrote such words upon the wall, all one must do now is click on the tweeter's profile, straight to a bio and a comprehensive list of every tweet they've been making. This is the beautiful part.

The pathways that clickable words create within Twitter are so dendritic that I have yet to get through Ginsberg's Tweet fully by following the hypertext. Now, if I'm wondering just who wrote a particular tweet, I can view their bio, their tweets, the conversation that the tweet may have been part of, (their Twitter wallpaper!), who they're following, their bios and tweets, as well as read online articles (discovering their author, raging at the comment section, finding related articles), view pictures embedded within the retweets, and on and on so that to engage Ginsberg's Tweet fully is to peruse what seems like the entire internet. So I wonder: What would a full, critical reading of Ginsberg's Tweet look like?

I'm not asking anyone to do this, just merely trying to wrap my head around the expansiveness of hypertextuality.

What I will ask, however, is that you take a look at Ginsberg's Tweet, and explore it as fully as you are able.

Overall, I am very pleased with the result of this experiment. When I began this project, I never realized the expansive narrative it would create. I was mostly hoping that it would be relevant to Howl, as well as appreciated by the man whose birthday it was to commemorate.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Allen Ginsberg.

Also, to the Twitterers who unwittingly wrote this entire thing: Thank you.

-SRT

@GinsbergsTweet

Ginsberg's Tweet is a re: vision of Howl that I will be performing live on Twitter (no bots) on June 3, 2012, in honour of Allen Ginsberg's birthday. It will be an arrangement of voices that mirrors the text of Howl in its entirety. The show will begin at 8 pm EST on Twitter @GinsbergsTweet.

-SRT

Zork N plus 9

"In the bisexual's nest is a large eiderdown encrusted with precious jingles, apparently scavenged somewhere by a childless sore." 

Zork N+9

Zork N plus 9 is an Oulipo-ly rewritten version of the classic text adventure. Utilizing Dean Merenzes' Inform7 port and http://www.spoonbill.org/n+7/ , each noun is replaced with the ninth noun from the original in the dictionary.

Some basics for those who are unfamiliar:

Inform7 is a programming language that uses English in a natural way, without the oft intimidating

function {
  math-like code;
}

that may prove difficult (though not impossible, see Mez Breeze) to render into a poetic form. Therefore, the process wasn't as simple as pasting the entire code into the website above, catching all the "irregular" nouns. I needed to select each noun carefully, because altering the wrong noun would cause errors.

This project was more an exercise in tenacity than it was in coding.

For example, the phrase "twisty little passages" could easily become "twisty little pastels" because the Inform7 interpreter doesn't use "passage" as a command. However, changing a noun such as "man" would cause a little trouble, because defining the Cyclops as a "mandrake" instead is something Inform7 cannot handle semantically (at least that was my experience; I'm not deeply familiar with Inform7).

I could have only altered the displayed text outputted by the program, though the player would need to input the same nouns as the original Zork, which would render the displayed text irrelevant. If the White Housekeeper has a semi-open "wink" through which to enter, the player should not need to enter "open window" to do so.

What drove me to complete this piece was to discover if the (N+9) replacement method makes the adventure any more or less exciting, or if it merely serves to add absurdity. I appreciate the Oulipo methods and the reader-driven mechanisms of interactive fiction, so I mostly wanted to play with colliding worlds.

I haven't played through the work entirely, but I've been through enough to know that it may cause a type of literary vertigo, the kind you might experience in a dream if you've fallen asleep after too much caffeine. Best I can say is: Make a map.

If you cannot navigate the newly-obscure vocabulary, I encourage you to browse the source text. If nothing else, reading the Inform7 source (esp. as (N+9)) is a remarkable poetic experience.

And thanks to the generous hosting donation from Mark Sample, we are now able to play Zork N plus 9 directly from our browser: Zork N plus 9

Next up: Oulipo-ly, a board game; or Monopoly (N+7)

Just kidding.

Maybe.

-SRT

Camel Tail: Generating Narrative in Metal

It's been 30 years, Metallica; what is the story you are trying to tell?

Camel Tail is a generative poem using every line from Metallica's 9 major studio albums, and is my attempt to find an overall narrative within Metallica's prolific work.

I was pleased to discover that often the lines become arranged in mutually relevant ways. At times, the verses share rhyme and meter, with the resultant stanzas grouped thematically, even though the songs could be written decades apart. Out of their original context, the lines become more personal, and seem to speak of hate bred through pain and loss. The scenes seem more grey without the pounding rhythm. The man behind the words becomes more contemplative, almost pitiful.

And other times it doesn't make any sense at all.

You can find it online here: Camel Tail

All words were written by Metallica (please don't sue me).
All lines are rearranged at random by your browser.
All lyrics are sic from http://www.encycmet.com/ (except for gross misspellings which I corrected here and there).

The javascript is based off Nick Montfort's generative poetry.

-SRT

one [seed] - Bonsai Grass for Atari 2600

The fruit of one [seed]

From the UnderAcademy files:

one [seed]
nō joystick required

one [seed] grows one blade of grass from your Atari VCS.

[]

Bury one [seed] about an inch deep into your Atari VCS cartridge port. Power on.

Within an hour, a single blade of grass will sprout.

Make sure to give it plenty of sunshine (colour); your blade of grass will not grow in the dark (b/w).

Water your blade of grass at least once a week (reset). Without water, your blade of grass will turn brown and die.

Within about a week, your blade of grass will be fully grown.

At any time, you may trim your blade of grass (game select) to a desirable level. The height and the reason are yours.

With proper care, attention, and focused meditation, your blade of grass will last as long as you do.

Download .bin file here: one [seed]

-SRT

UnderAcademy & Press

For the past few months, I have been participating in online courses taught at UnderAcademy College. Here is their mission statement:

UnderAcademy College is an unaccredited undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate anti-degree institution (of absence). UnderAcademy College situates itself as a shadow-academic environment offering alternative courses and anti-degree programs in a variety of subjects. The primary mission of UnderAcademy College is to remain open, marginal, and unaccredited

The classes at UnderAcademy tend to experiment with digital media (I have focused mostly on digital poetics), are taught by college professors and others from around the world, and are campus and tuition free (for me the ideal situation). Without going on and on about how ^_awesome_^ this unaccredited (take that, permanent record) institution is, I will leave it to you to explore their website, as well as some of the work that I generated during the first cycle:

Ionic Mascara Precinct - A selection of works by the students of Talan Memmott's Advanced Macaronics course.

[NŌ CODE (DEPROGRAMMING 101)] - An exploration/explanation of my compiled works for Eric Snodgrass' class. Includes: generative poetry, interactive fiction, books, a board game, Atari 2600 pieces, and even more!

Student Work - Et al projects from selected classes.

I was very pleased to be able to (non)attend UnderAcademy's first cycle, graduate with a CALLIDUS PARVULUS degree in Applied Marginalization &c., and am now honoured to be their first ever (in)valedictorian, as well as invitee to speak RE: my experience at the ELO (Electronic Literature Organization) conference in June. I look forward to letting you know how that goes.

In the meantime, I am currently taking another Memmott-led course entitled: Catabolic Poesis, the blog of which may be found here: Catapo

In other news, I also had the honour of being included in a Kill Screen Magazine article RE: William S. Burroughs and cut-up, generative poetry. You can find that here: Gunning with Scissors

Finally, I have been asked to once again begin broadcasting Daily Moment Art exercises. Therefore, some time in the near future, I will be splitting this website in two, allowing one side to focus on moment art, and the other to focus on my experiments. I apologize for letting this blog take a narcissistic turn. I'll make it up to you.

For those of you disinterested in Moment Art but are following along with my digital poetry experiments, until I have a dedicated website for it, I will likely hold off posting my experiments in Sonny's Work page separately, though you can still find everything by browsing the blog posts (ugh...).

Thank you, come again!

-SRT

abbr. Game Poem for Atari 2600

abbr. is the final Atari game poem in my Monday triptych.

It was premiered at the Louisville Arcade Expo, March 2-4. Over a dozen people were genuinely interested! I want to thank everyone who was courageous enough to try it out.

I will have a postmortem in some form in the near future. Until then, however, I would like to offer you the game poem, the source code, as well as directions on how to build the bridge rail controller*. These can all be found at the Sonny's Work page, or by clicking here.

The directions to the game poem are found on the cartridge itself (look at the main label).

* though you could just use the right player's fire button. Remember, to simulate standing on the railing, you must hold the fire button in, and to simulate jumping, you let go.

Now, here's the spiel I used at the expo:

"Okay, now: You've spent eight hours at a job you loathe. You've spent hours more in traffic just getting you to and from this job. It is at this point where this day, this Monday, you find yourself on" [turns game poem on] "the 2nd Street Bridge.

"That little line there is you. You stand there amidst traffic. You have no money. You're topped out in anger. These are the only things you can think about, and you do so obsessively. Impulsively, you stand on the railing." [instructs player to stand on bridge rail controller]

"See you now, standing on the bridge railing? Now, just close your eyes and listen to your heartbeat. Breathe. Can you imagine being at a point like this in your life where this is the best alternative?

"Your time has come; jump off the bridge." [player jumps off controller; character jumps off bridge to blackness]

"And that is the end. It's over." [player reacts]

"Now, since this is my creation, my re-imagining of my world, I can do something about it. Since this is on the Atari, I can do what I've always dreamed of: I can put the difficulty switch to easy," [switch difficulty to easy] "hit reset," [hit reset] "and boom: I'm on the beach.

"I'm on the beach, where the world is black and white, everything is right or wrong, and I know exactly where I fall morally and ethically. Simple.

"The storm is always off in the distance, and all I can do now is pick up rocks, and chuck them into the water. Listen to the ocean roll, and throw rocks into the water.

"A perfect life."

-SRT