Introduction
1. Douglas Huebler, Artist’s Statement for the gallery publication to accompany January 5—31, Seth Segelaub Gallery, 1969.
2. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” http://radicalart.info/concept/LeWitt/paragraphs.html; accessed July 15, 2009.
3. Craig Dworkin, introduction to The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing. http://ubu.com/concept; accessed February 9, 2010.
4. Cut-ups and fold-ins refer to a process whereby one takes a newspaper, slices it into columns, then glues those columns back together in the wrong order and reads across the lines, thus forming a poem.
5. In the art world—where such gestures, far from being merely philosophical, can be worth millions of dollars—there is blowback. In March 2011, a Federal judge ruled against Richard Prince’s appropriating photographs from a book about Rastafarians to create a series of collages and paintings. The case is currently being appealed by Prince and his gallerist.
6. When Koons finds himself in legal trouble, it’s that he sometimes doesn’t bother giving credit for what he appropriated (for example, when he turned of a photograph a couple holding eight puppies in their arms into a sculpture called String of Puppies), yet it is well understood that everything he does is based on a preexisting image—it’s just that the folks from whom he borrowed rightly wanted to share in Koons’s payday.
7. Perhaps the tide is turning. A young German writer, Helene Hegemann, published a best-selling memoir in 2010 that was found to be largely plagiarized. After being busted by a blogger, the writer fessed up and did the typical rounds of apologies. Yet, even after the book was outed, it was selected as a finalist for a prize at the Leipzig Book Fair in fiction. The panel said that it had been aware of the charges of plagiarism. The New York Times reported that “although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. ‘There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,’ said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.” Nicholas Kulish, “Author, 17, Says It’s ‘Mixing,’ Not Plagiarism,” New York Times, February 12, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/world/europe/12germany.html?src=twt&twt=nytimesbooks&pagewanted=print; accessed February 12, 2010.
8. Laurie Rozakis, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creative Writing (New York: Alpha, 2004), p. 136.
9. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 119.
1. Revenge of the Text
1. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 [1974]), p. 32.
2. Charles Bernstein, “Lift Off,” in Republics of Reality (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 2000), p. 174.
3. Stephane Mallarmé, 1897 preface to Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice will never abolish chance), http://tkline.pgcc.net/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.htm; accessed February 9, 2010.
4. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 716.
5. Neil Mills, “7 Numbers Poems,” from Experiments in Disintegrating Language/Konkrete Canticle (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1971), http://www.ubu.com/sound/konkrete.html; accessed February 9, 2010. Transcribed from an audio recording by Kenneth Goldsmith. It appears that no typographical version exists.
6. Public Computer Errors, Group Pool on flickr, http://www.flickr.com/groups/66835733@N00/pool/; accessed May 27, 2009.
7. I can think of hand-painted films, like Stan Brakhage’s later works, that could contain letters, but the effect was overlay rather than disruption at the operational level. There were also gallery-based text works, such as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, but these, too, were analog-based projects, consisting of stenciling and painting walls and/or nondigital photographic reproduction.
8. Nick Bilton, “The American Diet: 34 Gigabytes a Day,” New York Times, December 9, 2009, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/the-american-diet-34-gigabytes-a-day; accessed December 25, 2010.
9. Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short, How Much Information? 2009: Report on American Consumers, Global Information Industry Center, University of California, San Diego, December 9, 2009, p. 12.
10. Marvin Heiferman and Lisa Philips, Image World: Art and Media Culture (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989), p. 18.
11. Mitchell Stevens, The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xi.
12. All passages quoted from James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1934); here, p. 655.
13. Bohn and Short, How Much Information? p. 10.
14. Some points of comparison between the water cycle and the textual cycle can be made:
• The water cycle uses evaporation from the oceans to seed the clouds with precipitation, which in turn falls to the earth to reseed the water supply.
• The text cycle uses text stored locally to seed the network with language, which in turn can travel back down to the home computer, only to be sent back out to reseed the data cloud.
• Water can change states among liquid, vapor, and ice at various places in the water cycle.
• Language can change states among text, video, code, music and images at various places in the textual cycle.
• There are states of stasis and storage: ice and snow, underground, freshwater, and ocean storage.
• There are states of stasis and storage: hard drives, servers, and server farms.
• Although the balance of water on Earth remains fairly constant over time, individual water molecules can come and go.
• The amount of language on the network is exponentially increasing over time, although individual bits of data come and go.
2. Language as Material
1. Jordan Scott, a Canadian writer who is a chronic stutterer, has written blert (Toronto: Coach House, 2008) a book that is comprised of the words he most commonly stumbles over, thus creating a self-imposed linguistic obstacle course when he performs the piece.
2. Guy Debord “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” 1955, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm; accessed February 25, 2010.
3. Ibid.
4. Acconci’s piece could be performed on the Web, clicking through blind links until you hit a password-protected page or 404 Page Not Found.
5. Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” 1956, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm; accessed February 25, 2010.
6. Asger Jorn, Detourned Painting, Exhibition Catalogue, Galerie Rive Gauche (May 1959), trans. Thomas Y. Levin, http://www.notbored.org/detourned-painting.html; accessed February 26, 2010.
7. Debord and Wolman “A User’s Guide to Détournement.”
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Guy-Ernest Debord, “Theory of the Dérive” (1956), on http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/all/display/314; accessed August 5, 2009.
11. The Times, seeing that their structures were being pulled into an unauthorized format, issued Stefans a swift cease and desist.
12. http://www.foodincmovie.com/; accessed August 10, 2009.
13. Andy Warhol, America (New York: HarperCollins, 1985), p. 22.
14. Language Removal Service’s investigations mirror the concerns of sound poetry, the mid-century aural counterpart to concrete poetry, where the emphasis was on the way words sounded, not what they meant.
15. I owe these thoughts to Douglas Kahn’s great study, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
16. Charles Babbage, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatiste (London: Cass, 1967 [1837]), p. 110.
17. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klangfarbenmelodie (August 5, 2009).
18. Joseph Kosuth, “Footnote to Poetry,” in Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 35.
19. Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge: MIT Press), pp. 138–139.
20. Eugen Gomringer, The Book of Hours and Constellations (New York: Something Else, 1968), n.p.
21. Mary Ellen Solt, ed., Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p. 10.
22. Noigrandres Group, “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,” in Solt, Concrete Poetry, pp. 71–72.
23. Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoön,” Partisan Review 7.4 (July August 1940): 296–310.
24. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdana; accessed September 7, 2007.
25. Noigrandres Group, “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,” in Solt, Concrete Poetry, pp. 71–72.
26. Solt, Concrete Poetry, p. 73.
27. Ibid., p. 8.
28. Morton Feldman, “ The Anxiety of Art” (1965), in Give My Regards to Eighth Street, ed. B. H. Friedman (Cambridge: Exact Change, 2000), p. 32.
3. Anticipating Instability
1. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 203.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillian, 1958), p. 197e.
3. “Language as Sculpture”: Physical/Topological Concepts, http://radicalart.info/concept/weiner/index.html; accessed February 12, 2009.
4. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm; accessed December 25, 2010.
5. As of February 2010, there were some forty billion photos on Facebook. Kenneth Cukier, “Data, Data Everywhere,” Economist, February 25, 2010, http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15557443, accessed February 26, 2010.
6. Lawrence Weiner as told to the author in conversation, August 9, 2007.
7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillian, 1958), p. 226e.
8. “Rouge,” a rather traditional sound poem, is quite unlike the type of electronic work based on bodily sounds with which he would later be closely identified.
9. Henri Chopin, “Rouge,” unpublished, transcribed from the audio by Sebastian Dicenaire.
10. Hundermark Gallery, Germany, 1981. It’s since been released many times on various compilations.
11. Chopin’s energies as a publisher and enthusiast for electronic sound poetry were highly visible throughout the 1950s and sixties, culminating in 1964 when his Revue Ou began publication and its work regularly aired on the BBC.
12. For examples of such PDFs, there are many sites such as Monoskop, http://burundi.sk/monoskop/log/; accessed August 10, 2009; and AAAARG, http://a.aaaarg.org/library; accessed August 10, 2009.
4. Toward a Poetics of Hyperrealism
1. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Routledge, 1982), pp. 82–83.
2. Robert Fitterman, “Identity Theft,” in Rob the Plagiarist (New York: Roof, 2009), pp. 12–15.
3. Mike Kelley, Foul Perfection (Boston: MIT Press, 2003), p. 111.
4. “Obama Receives Hero’s Welcome at His Family’s Ancestral Village in Kenya,” Voice of America, http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2006–08/2006–08–27-voa17.cfm; accessed August 5, 2009.
5. Ara Shirinyan, Your Country is Great: Afghanistan-Guyana (New York: Futurepoem, 2008), p. 13–14.
6. Ibid., pp. 15–16.
7. Claude Closky, Mon Catalogue, trans. Craig Dworkin (Limoges: FRAC Limousin, 1999), n.p.
8. Alexandra Nemerov, “First My Motorola,” unpublished manuscript.
9. Lev Grossman, “Poems for People,” Time Magazine, June 7, 2007, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1630571,00.html; accessed August 13, 2009.
10. The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, Ed. Donald Allen (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 175.
11. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 101.
12. Tony Hoagland, “At the Galleria Shopping Mall,” Poetry 194.4 (July/August 2009): 265.
13. Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” in Project on the City (Köln: Taschen, 2001), n.p.
14. Ibid.
15. Robert Fitterman, “Directory,” Poetry 194.4 (July/August 2009): 335.
16. Koolhaas, “Junkspace.”
17. Donald Hall, “Ox Cart Man,” http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19216, April 16, 2010.
18. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/264; accessed June 5, 2009.
19. http://seacoast.sunderland.ac.uk/∼os0tmc/zola/diff.htm; accessed May 21, 2009.
20. Message sent to Conceptual Writing Listserv: Mon Jun 15, 2009 5:25 pm.
21. Message sent to Conceptual Writing Listserv: Tue Jun 16, 2009 1:11 pm.
22. E-mail correspondence with the author, May 17, 2009.
23. E-mail correspondence with the author, May 17, 2009.
24. http://www.davidleelaw.com/articles/statemen-fct.html; accessed May 18, 2009.
25. Vanessa Place, Statement of Facts (UbuWeb: /ubu, 2009), http://ubu.com/ubu; accessed August 10, 2009.
26. Gene R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I” originally published in ARTnews, November 1963; reprinted in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 19.
27. E-mail to author, May 17, 2009.
28. The first volume was published in 1934, and the collected poem as a whole finally made an appearance in the late seventies.
29. Charles Reznikoff, from Testimony, reprinted in Poems for the Millennium, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 547.
5. Why Appropriation?
1. Richard Sieburth, “Benjamin the Scrivener,” in Gary Smith, ed., Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 23.
2. Ibid., p. 28.
3. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectis of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 54.
4. As of this writing in 2010, seven years after the book was published, there’s still about fifty unsold copies in my publisher’s warehouse.
5. Ron Silliman blog entry dated February 27, 2006, http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/silliman_goldsmith.html; accessed July 30, 2009.
6. Ron Silliman, blog entry dated Sunday, October 5, 2008, http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2008/10/one-advantage-of-e-books-is-that-you.html; accessed October 20, 2008.
7. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/silliman/sunset.htm; accessed December 29, 2010.
8. Bob Perlman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 186, 26.
9. John Lichfield, “I stole from Wikipedia but it’s not plagiarism, says Houellebecq,” Independent, Wednesday, September 8, 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/i-stole-from-wikipedia-but-its-not-plagiarism-says-houellebecq-2073145.html; accessed September 15, 2010.
6. Infallible Processes
1. Larissa Macfarquhar, “The Present Waking Life,” New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/11/07/051107fa_fact_macfarquhar; accessed July 13, 2009.
2. Kwame Dawes, “Poetry Terror,” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/03/poetry-terrors/#more-66; accessed July 13, 2009.
3. Andrea Miller-Keller, “Excerpts from a Correspondence, 1981–1983,” in Susanna Singer, Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings 1968–1984 (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1984), p. 114.
4. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp: The Documents of Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Viking, 1976), p. 72.
5. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (New York: Praeger, 1973), pp. 112–113.
6. Ibid., p. 162.
7. Sol Lewitt “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” http://radicalart.info/concept/LeWitt/paragraphs.html; accessed July 15, 2009.
8. Yoko Ono, Grapefruit (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000 [1964]), n.p.
9. LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” http://radicalart.info/concept/LeWitt/sentences.html; accessed October 22, 2009.
10. Lippard, Six Years, pp. 200–201.
11. Sol LeWitt “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” http://www.ddooss.org/articulos/idiomas/Sol_Lewitt.htm; accessed October 22, 2009.
12. Lippard, Six Years, p. 201.
13. Ibid., pp. 201–202.
14. Ibid.
15. John Cage, “Four Statements on the Dance,” Silence (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), p. 93.
16. Richard Kostelanetz, Conversing with Cage (New York: Limelight, 1988), p. 120.
17. Ibid., p. 263.
18. Holland Cotter, “Now in Residence: Walls of Luscious Austerity,” December 4, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/arts/design/05lewi.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all; accessed October 23, 2009.
19. Lippard, Six Years, pp. 200–201.
20. Cory Doctorow, “Giving It Away” Forbes, December 1, 2006, http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tech-media_cz_cd_books06_1201doctorow.html; accessed October 21, 2009.
21. At Dia:Beacon, they have a “civilian” LeWitt drawing activity as part of their education program for visiting school groups where the kids execute drawings following LeWitt’s instructions.
22. http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/33006/the-best-of-intentions/; accessed October 23, 2009.
23. Michael Kimmelman, “Sol LeWitt, Master of Conceptualism, Dies at 78,” New York Times, April 9, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/arts/design/09lewitt.html?pagewanted=all; accessed July 13, 2009.
24. “USA Artists: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein” transcription of television interview, produced by NET, 1966, in Kenneth Goldsmith, ed., I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), p. 81.
25. Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (New York: Viking / Penguin, 2001), p. 3.
26. Anne Course and Philip Thody, Introducing Barthes (New York: Totem, 1997), p. 107.
27. Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, ed. Pat Hackett (New York: Warner, 1989), p. 455.
28. Ibid., p. xx.
29. Ibid.
30. Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, pp. 87–88.
31. Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara Poet Among Painters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 178.
32. Frank O’Hara, “Biotherm (for Bill Berkson”), in The Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Vintage, 1974), p. 211.
33. Warhol’s book unconsciously draws inspiration from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses, yet, unlike Joyce, there was no element of fiction or trace of literary pretense in it.
34. Andy Warhol, a: A Novel (New York: Grove, 1968), p. 333.
35. Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, Popism: The Warhol ’60s (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 291.
36. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen, http://ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes; accessed August 10, 2009.
37. Ibid.
38. G. R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part 1” in Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror, p. 18.
7. Retyping On the Road
1. Walter Benjamin, Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1978), p. 66.
2. http://gettinginsidejackkerouacshead.blogspot.com/2008/06/projectproposal.html; accessed February 8, 2009.
3. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 113.
4. http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2009/01/the-inaugural-poem-remix.html; accessed July 27, 2009.
5. See my introduction for an extended discussion.
6. Jeremy Millar, “Rejectamenta,” in Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz, eds., Speed—Visions of an Accelerated Age (London: Photographer’s Gallery and Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1998), pp. 87–110, at 106.
7. This form of guerrilla publication reminds me of the way books used to get bootlegged years ago on Amazon when someone would cut and paste or retype, say, a Harry Potter book in chunks under the guise of a review; each successive “review” would reveal subsequent pages of the novel until it was finished.
8. Parsing the New Illegibility
1. In the early days of the Web, a typical April Fool’s Day joke was someone offering the complete text of the Internet on a CD-ROM, which was, even as early as 1995, clearly impossible. “According to one estimate, mankind created 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, it will create 1,200 exabytes.” “The Data Deluge,” Economist, http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15579717&source=hptextfeature; accessed February 26, 2010.
2. Susan Blackmore, “Evolution’s Third Replicator: Genes, Memes, and Now What?” New Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327191.500-evolutions-third-replicator-genes-memes-and-now-what.html?full=true; accessed August 6, 2009.
3. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 113.
4. Samuel Beckett, Now How On: Three Novels (New York: Grove, 1989), p. 89.
5. Frédéric Paul, “DH Still Is a Real Artist, in <<Variable>>, etc. (Limousin: Fonds Regional D’art Contemporain, 1993), p. 36.
6. Joseph Mitchell, “Professor Seagull,” in Up in the Old Hotel/McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 626.
7. Ibid., p. 58.
8. Ibid., pp. 58–59.
9. Gertrude Stein, The Making of Amercians (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1995), p. 177.
10. Craig Dworkin, Parse (Berkeley: Atelos, 2008), p. 64.
11. http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2008/12/parse-by-craig-dworkin-at-elos-2008.html; accessed July 31, 2009.
12. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 113.
13. Had Dworkin chosen to render Abbott’s text visually, it might have taken the form of a parse tree, a visual method of diagramming sentences.
14. Dworkin, Parse, p. 283.
15. Matthew Fuller, “It looks like you’re writing a letter: Microsoft Word,” http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0009/msg00040.html; accessed July 29, 2009.
16. Louis Zukofsky, A (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 807.
17. Ibid., p. 823.
18. Dworkin, Parse, p. 217.
19. Translated by Craig Dworkin and e-mailed to the author, on August 9, 2009.
20. Dworkin, Parse, p. 190.
21. Jonathan Ball, “Christian Bök, Poet,” Believer 7.5 (June 2009), http://www.believermag.com/issues/200906/?read=interview_bok; accessed December 25, 2010.
22. Christian Bök, Eunoia (Toronto: Coach House, 2001), p. 60.
23. Ball, “Christian Bök, Poet.”
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
9. Seeding the Data Cloud
1. In April 2010 the Library of Congress announced that it was archiving the entire Twitter archive: “That’s right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.” http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/; accessedJuly 13, 2010.
2. Félix Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines (New York: New York Review of Books, 2007), p. 113.
3. Ibid., p. 147.
4. Ibid., p. 26.
5. Wired magazine ran a contest of Hemingway-inspired six-word stories. Nearly one hundred of them can be found at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/sixwords.html; accessed August 10, 2009.
6. Samuel Beckett, from “Worstword Ho,” in Nowhow On (London: Calder, 1992), p. 127.
7. David Markson, Reader’s Block (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1996), p. 85.
8. Gilbert Adair, “On Names,” in Surfing the Zeitgeist (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 2.
9. John Barton Wolgamot, In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women (New York: Lovely Music, 2002), p. 15, written and published privately in 1944, in the CD booklet accompanying Robert Ashley’s setting of Wolgamot’s work.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 48.
12. Ibid., pp. 38–39.
13. Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” in Writing and Lectures 1909–1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 140.
14. Status Update, http://www.statusupdate.ca; accessed July 16, 2009.
15. Status Update, http://www.statusupdate.ca/?p=Arthur+Rimbaud; accessed July 16, 2009.
16. http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/galaxy/webmind3.htm; accessed August 16, 2010.
17. Matt Pearson, “Social Networking with the Living Dead,” http://zenbullets.com/blog/?p=683>; accessed August 16, 2010.
18. http://twitter.com/dedbullets; accessed August 19, 2010.
19. Matt Pearson, “Social Networking with the Living Dead,” http://zenbullets.com/blog/?p=683>; accessed August 16, 2010.
20. http://twitter.com/dedbullets/status/21570100860; accessed August 19, 2010.
21. http://apostropheengine.ca/howitworks.php; accessed July 23, 2009.
22. Bill Kennedy and Darren Wershler-Henry, apostrophe (Toronto: ECW, 2006), p. 286–287.
23. Ibid., p. 289.
24. Ibid., p. 128.
25. Gautam Naik, “Search for a New Poetics Yields This: ‘Kitty Goes Postal/Wants Pizza’” Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704912004575252223568314054.html; accessed August 19, 2010.
26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flarf; accessed March 20, 2010.
27. Nada Gordon, “Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas,” Poetry 194.4 (July/August 2009): 324–325.
10. The Inventory and the Ambient
1. An early example of this is the illusory delete button on Gmail, which doesn’t automatically delete your mail, it holds it for thirty days, then deletes it. And if you want to “permanently” delete a message immediately it takes several clicks to do so. But more relevant is the more prominently featured boldfaced Archive button, which allows you to clean up your inbox without deleting anything. Similarly, on Mac OS X, when you “empty the trash,” files are recoverable. It’s only when you click Secure Empty Trash that you actually delete once and forever.
2. Ibid.
3. Motko Rich and Joseph Berger, “False Memoir of Holocaust Is Canceled,” New York Times, December 28, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/books/29hoax.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=False%20Memoir%20of%20Holocaust%20Is%20Canceled&st=cse>; accessed August 13, 2009.
4. A typical Web project in this manner is Ellie Harrison’s “Eat 22,” in which Harrison documented everything she ate for a year between March 2001 and March 2002. See Georges Perec’s “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four,” http://www.eat22.com; accessed May 21, 2009.
5. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D., vol. 3 (London: Limited Editions Club, 1938), p. 280.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., pp. 33–34.
8. The Monthly Letter of the Limited Editions Club, no. 109 (June 1938).
9. M’s The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, published in 1897, is one thousand pages of equally obsessive recording of every move the Hindu saint made. Like Johnson, the Master spouts truisms of the deepest profundity amidst the flotsam and jetsam of trivial description: there are countless instances of Ramakrishna waking up, getting in and out of boats, beds getting repaired, and recollections of dialogue in minute detail.
10. E-mail to author, April 1, 2008.
11. Caroline Bergvall, “Via: 48 Dante Variations,” unpublished manuscript.
12. Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Conversing with CAGE (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 237.
13. Brian Eno, liner notes to the 1978 release of Music for Airports, http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/MFA-txt.html; accessed August 13, 2009.
14. Tan Lin, from “Ambient Stylistics,” Conjunctions 35 (Fall 2000).
15. http://ambientreading.blogspot.com; accessed June 5, 2009.
16. Kurt Eichenwald, “On the Web, Pedophiles Extend Their Reach,” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/21/technology/21pedo.html?scp=1&sq=Their%20Own%20Online%20World,%20Pedophiles%20Extend%20Their%20Reach&st=cse; accessed August 10, 2009.
17. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, eds., Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing (Evanston: Northwesten University Press, 2011), p. 138.
18. Ibid., pp. 138–140.
19. Tom Zeller Jr., “AOL Acts on Release of Data,” New York Times, August 22, 2006, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940CEFDA123EF931A1575BC0A9609C8B63; accessed August 10, 2009.
20. Chris Alexander, Kristen Gallagher, and Gordon Tapper, “Tan Lin Interviewed,” http://galatearesurrection12.blogspot.com/2009/05/tan-lin-interviewed.html; accessed August 3, 2009.
21. Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 240–245.
11. Uncreative Writing in the Classroom
1. As quoted in David Toop, Ocean of Sound, Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound, and Imaginary Worlds (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2000), p. 143.
2. Herbert Marcus, An Essay on Liberation (Cambridge: Beacon, 1969), p. 22.
Afterword
1. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 1726. Project Gutenberg eBook #829, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm; accessed August 22, 2010.
2. Bill Chamberlain (1984), The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed, UbuWeb, Warner Books, ISBN 0–446–38051–2, http://www.ubu.com/historical/racter/index.html; accessed August 22, 2010.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.; accessed October 1, 2010.
5. Ibid.; accessed August 22, 2010.
6. Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Objects Outpace New Human Subscribers to AT&T, Verizon,” http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/objects_outpace_new_human_subscribers_to_att_veriz.php; accessed August 19, 2010.
7. Richard MacManus, “Beyond Social: Read/Write in the Era of Internet of Things,” ReadWriteWeb, http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/beyond_social_web_internet_of_things.php; accessed August 22, 2010.
8. Christian Bök, “The Piecemeal Bard Is Deconstructed: Notes Toward a Potential Robopoetics,” Object 10: Cyberpoetics (2002), http://ubu.com/papers/object/03_bok.pdf; accessed June 19, 2009. This afterword owes much of its thinking to the work of Bök, who presents his notion of Robopoetics much more elegantly than I ever can. Bök is also more optimistic than I am, but his work in the field, particularly with his latest genomic project, is convincing enough to make any skeptic rethink her position.
9. Ibid.
10. Susan Blackmore, “Evolution’s Third Replicator: Genes, Memes, and Now What?” New Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327191.500-evolutions-third-replicator-genes-memes-and-now-what.html?full=true; accessed August 3, 2009.