As has been widely noted, the 2009 Iranian election was challenged by 140-character blasts. Twitter became a surprisingly effective tool to challenge an oppressive regime. It not only could instantaneously link protestors but did so in a form conducive to our information-overloaded age. As data moves faster, and we need to manage more, we are drawn to smaller chunks. Social network status updates succinctly describe an individual’s current mood or circumstance, whether it be mundane or dramatic, as in the case of the Iranian protests. These updates or tweets have the ability to reduce complicated circumstances down to a sentence. And the popularity of mood-blasting services like Twitter—which allows no more than 140 characters per post—compress language. These short bursts of language are the latest in a long line of linguistic reductions: Chinese ideograms, haikus, telegrams, newspaper headlines, the Times Square news zipper, advertising slogans, concrete poems, and desktop icons. There’s a sense of urgency that compression brings: even the most mundane tweets—what someone is eating for breakfast—can feel like breaking news, demonstrating, once again, that the medium is still the message: the interface of Twitter has reframed ordinary language to make it feel extraordinary.
Social networking updates, which are fast and ephemeral, do not occur in isolation, rather their value is in rapid succession; the more blasts you broadcast with greater frequency, the more effective they are until, like so many little shards, they accumulate into a grand narrative of life. Yet, as soon as they appear, they’re pushed off the screen and evaporate even faster than what used to be referred to as yesterday’s news. In parsing all this information there’s an urge to act, to respond, to click, to hoard, to archive … to manage it all. Or don’t. Tweets scroll in real time across the screen the way tickertape used to spew stock quotes. During the protests, the “hash tag” #iranelection was backed up with so many tweets and retweets that the interface could not keep up. At one point there were twenty thousand blasts in the queue, an echo chamber, packed to the gills with information and disinformation, all expressed in alphanumeric language. Most of us tuning in were trying to make sense of the validity of the ephemera before it slid off the screen, but there are some writers lurking who are harvesting all these tweets, status updates, and other writing on the Web as the basis for future works of literature.1
We’ve witnessed this many times in the last century. The compressed three-line “novels” of Félix Fénéon, which appeared anonymously in a French paper over the course of 1906, read like a mix of telegrams, zen koans, newspaper headlines, and social network updates:
The bread in Bordeaux will not be bloodied at this time; the trucker’s passage provoked only a minor brawl.2
Love. In Mirecourt, the weaver Colas lodged a bullet in the brain of Mlle Fleckenger, and treated himself with equal severity.3
“Why don’t we migrate to Les Palaiseaux?” Yes, but M. Lencre, while enroute by cabriolet, was assaulted and robbed.4
Hemingway famously wrote a short story in just six words:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.5
Or we end up with the wildly reduced language of later Beckett, fusing the terse compression of telegrams with an innate hesitancy to explicate:
Nothing to show a child and yet a child. A man and yet a man. Old and yet young. Nothing but ooze how nothing and yet. One bowed back yet an old man’s. The other yet a child’s. A small child’s.
Somehow again and all in stare again. All at once as once. Better worse all. The three bowed down. The stare. The whole narrow void. No blurs. All clear. Dim clear. Black hole agape on all. Inletting all. Outletting all.6
David Markson, in a remarkable series of late novels, merges the reportage of Fénéon with the compact prose of Beckett, dropping in subjective sentiments of unnamed narrators into the midst of hundreds of shards of art history, most no longer than a line or two:
Delmore Schwartz died of a heart attack in a seedy Times Square hotel. Three days passed before anyone could be found to claim his body.
James Baldwin was an anti-Semite.
Not sorting book and phonograph records merely, but the narrowing residue of an entire life? Papers, files of correspondence?7
Like a Twitter stream, it’s the slow accumulation of tiny shards, which cohere into a fractured narrative by the book’s end. Markson is a compulsive cataloguer: One can imagine him combing through the annals of art history, boiling down long and complicated lives into essential quips. He uses names often as shorthand—tiny two-word headlines. Running your eyes down a page of a Markson work at random produces an incredible list of well-known artists and thinkers: Brett Ashley, Anna Wickham, Stephen Foster, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roman Jakobson, Michel Leiris, Jullia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, Louis Althusser, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan, Yannis Ritsos, Iannis Xenakis, Jeanne Hébuterne, Amadeo Modigliani, David Smith, James Russell, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Markson’s lists evoke the way gossip columns function, with where names printed in boldface signify importance.
The essayist Gilbert Adair articulates the explosive power of names printed on a page:
What an alluring entity is the printed name! Consider the following: Steffi Graf, Bill Clinton, Woody Allen, Vanessa Redgrave, Salman Rushdie, Yves Saint Laurent, Umberto Eco, Elizabeth Hurley, Martin Scorsese, Gary Lineker, Anita Brookner. Practically the only thing they have in common is that this essay happens not to be about any of them. Yet how their capital letters glitter on the page—so much so, it is not inconceivable that more than one reader, scanning the essay to see whether it contains anything worth reading, will have been arrested not by its opening paragraph, which is how these things are supposed to work, but by this fourth paragraph, merely on the strength of the names above. It scarcely matters that nothing at all has been made of them, that nothing new, interesting or juicy has been said about them, that the cumulative effect is akin to that produced by some trompe l’oeil portrait by Gainsborough in which what seems from a distance to be an intricately, even finickily, rendered satin gown turns out, on closer inspection, to be nothing but a fuzzy, meaningless blur of brushstrokes—it is, nevertheless, just such a bundle of names that is calculated to attract the lazy, unprimed eye. And it has now reached the point where a newspaper or magazine page without its statutory quota of proper, and preferably household, names is as dispiriting to behold as a bridge hand with nothing in it but threes and fives and eights. Household names are, in short, the face-cards of journalism.8
In 1929 John Barton Wolgamot, a somewhat obscure writer, privately published a book in a tiny edition consisting almost entirely of names called In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women. The book is nearly impossible to read linearly: it’s best skimmed, your eye darting across the names, resting on the occasional familiar one, similar to the way Adair shows us how scanning the gossip, society, or obituary columns of a newspaper work.
While listening to a live performance of Beethoven’s Eroica in New York’s Lincoln Center, Wolgamot had a synaesthetic response to the music and heard within “the rhythms themselves, names—names that meant nothing to him, foreign names.”9 A few days after the concert, he checked out a biography of Beethoven from the library, and, in that tome, he found, oddly enough, one after another, all the names he had heard ringing throughout the symphony. And it dawned on him that, “as rhythm is the basis of all things, names are the basis of rhythm,” hence deciding to write his book.10 The entire text consists of 128 paragraphs. the following of which is an example:
In her very truly great manners of Johannes Brahms very heroically Sara Powell Haardt had very allegorically come amongst his very really grand men and women to Clarence Day, Jr., John Donne, Ruggiero Leoncavalo, James Owen Hannay, Gustav Frenssen, Thomas Beer, Joris Karl Huysmans and Franz Peter Schubert very titanically.11
When questioned about Sara, Mencken, Wolgamot said that he had spent a year or two composing names for the book, but that the connective sentence—the framework in which the names exist—took him ten years to write. Wolgamot described to composer Robert Ashley (who later used the text as a libretto) how he constructed the sixtieth page of the book, which lists the names of George Meredith, Paul Gauguin, Margaret Kennedy, Oland Russell, Harley Granville-Barker, Pieter Breughel, Benedetto Croce, and William Somerset Maugham: “Somerset has both summer and set as in sun-set, and Maugham sounds like the name of a South Pacific Island, and Maugham wrote a biography of Gauguin, which name has both ‘go’ and ‘again’ in it, and Oland could be ‘Oh, land,’ a sailor’s cry, and Granville sounds French for a big city, which Gauguin left to go to the South Pacific.”12
In 1934, five years after Wolgamot began Sara, Mencken, Gertrude Stein described the way in which she wrote the name-laden The Making of Americans “from the beginning until now and always in the future poetry will concern itself with the names of things. The names may be repeated in different ways … but now and always poetry is created by naming names the names of something the names of somebody the names of anything.… Think what you do when you do do that when you love the name of anything really love its name.”13
Fully aware of this history, two Canadian writers, Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy, have recently fused compressed forms with the power of proper names, giving it a digital spin, in their ongoing work called Status Update. They’ve built a data-mining program that combs social networking sites, collecting all users’ status updates. The engine then strips out the user’s name and replaces it randomly with the name of a dead writer. The result reads like a mashup of Fénéon, Beckett, Markson, and Wolgamot, all filtered through the inconsequential vagaries of social networking feeds:
Kurt Tucholsky is on snow day number two.… what to do, what to do? Shel Silverstein is gettin’ in a little Tomb Raiding before going into work. Lorine Niedecker is currently enjoying her very short break. Jonathan Swift has got tix to the Wranglers game tonight. Arthur Rimbaud found a way to use the word “buttress” as well.14
The program authors the poem nonstop, constantly grabbing status updates as fast as they are written and then automatically posts it to a homepage every two minutes. Each proper name on the page is clickable, which brings you to an archive of that author’s status updates. If I click, for example, on Arthur Rimbaud’s name, I’m brought to the Rimbaud page, an excerpt of which reads:
Arthur Rimbaud is on a goofy musical nostalgia trip. Arthur Rimbaud just picked up a sweet old studio convertible table for 10 bucks at a yard sale round the corner. Arthur Rimbaud is at the shop and assembling a window display with huge budding branches found at the side of the road! Arthur Rimbaud can finally listen to the wonderfulness of vinyl! Arthur Rimbaud would like to learn to read while sleeping. Arthur Rimbaud is so sleepy! Arthur Rimbaud is realizing if not now then when? Arthur Rimbaud is kinda drunk and preparing for his accountant.15
At the bottom of the Rimbaud page is another feature, something that might have dreamed up by the nineteenth-century spiritualist Madame Blavatsky, who had a penchant for communicating with the dead, had she the technology: “Arthur Rimbaud has an RSS feed. Subscribe now!” In a deliciously ironic gesture, Wershler and Henry make these legends participate in the flotsam and jetsam of today’s online life, pulling them down from their pedestals, forcing them against their will to join in the ruckus. What Status Update does is sully the aura of these legends, reminding us that in their own day, they too would have been left wondering why “the cubicle gods are mocking his cleaned-up desk.”
Wershler and Kennedy seem to be emulating what the mathematician Rudy Rucker calls a “lifebox,”16 a futuristic concept whereby one’s lifetime of accumulated data (status updates, tweets, e-mails, blog entries, comments one made on other people’s blogs, etc.) will be combined with powerful software that would permit the dead to converse with the living in a credible way. The digital theorist Matt Pearson says, “In short, you could ask your dead great-grandmother a question and, even if she had not left record of her thoughts on that topic, the kind of response one might expect from her could be generated.… It is autobiography as a living construct. Our grandchildren will be able to enjoy the same quality of relationship with the dead as you might do now with your warm bodied Facebook/Twitter chums. And as the sophistication of semantic tools develop, the lifebox could become capable of creating fresh content too, writing new blog posts, or copy-pasting together video messages.17 In fact, Pearson had a coder build a rudimentary lifebox of his living self in the form of a Twitter feed,18 which he claims, “this undead clone of me may not be as coherent or relevant … but it sure sounds like the kind of shite I come out with.”19 (One self-referential tweet reads: “The contestants on Britains Got Talent are victims, toying with this idea I decided Id have a go at creating my own rudimentary lifebox.”)20 Certainly there must be enough data trails coming off the dozens books written about Rimbaud, his reams of correspondence, the papers written about him, and his poetry as well to reanimate him in a similarly credible way some time in the future. But, for the moment, Wershler and Kennedy are propping up his corpse and forcing him to join our digital world, all of which is to drive home the point that these “ephemeral” wisps of data might not be so ephemeral as we think. In fact, our future selves may be entirely constructed from them, forcing us to perhaps think of such writing as our legacy.
An earlier Kennedy and Wershler electronic writing project has similar concerns. The Apostrophe Engine also culls, organizes, and preserves chunks of language from the Internet, yet this program unleashes smaller programs to go out and harvest language en masse, creating what could be the largest poem ever written, and it will keep on being written until someone pulls the plug on the hosting server.
The homepage of the piece is deceptively simple. It reproduces a list poem, written by Bill Kennedy in 1993, in which each line begins with the directive “you are.” Every line, it turns out, is clickable. Kennedy and Wershler explain what happens next: “When a reader/writer clicks on a line, it is submitted to a search engine, which then returns a list of Web pages, as in any search. The Apostrophe Engine then spawns five virtual robots that work their way through the list, collecting phrases beginning with “you are” and ending in a period. The robots stop after collecting a set number of phrases or working through a limited number of pages, whichever happens first.”
Next, The Apostrophe Engine records and spruces up the phrases that the robots have collected, stripping away most HTML tags and other anomalies, then compiles the results and presents them as a new poem, with the original line as its title … and each new line as another hyperlink.
At any given time, the online version of The Apostrophe Engine is potentially as large as the Web itself. The reader/writer can continue to burrow further into the poem by clicking any line on any page, sliding metonymically through the ever-changing contents. Moreover, because the contents of the Web is always changing, so is the contents of the poem. The page it returns today will not be the page that it returns next week, next month, or next year.21
The result is a living poem, being written as the Internet is being written, completely parsed by robots which continues to grow even if no one is reading it. Like Status Update, it’s an epic of language writ in short bursts, a Marksonian compendium, the nature of which is exactly what Wershler and Kennedy are exploiting:
The catalogue is a form that struggles with excess. Its job is to be reductive, to squeeze all the possibilities that a world of information has to offer into a definitive set.… Its poetic effect, however, is the exact opposite. A catalogue opens up a poem to the threat of a surfeit of information, felt most keenly when the reader wonders, politely, “How long can this go on?” It can, in fact, go on for a very long time. In 1993, when the full implications of the nascent World Wide Web were only beginning to occur to us, the catalogue and its paradoxical struggles were already becoming the forum for addressing the fear that we are producing text at a rate beyond our collective ability to read it.22
But what happens when this dynamically generated text is bound and frozen between the covers of a book? Wershler and Kennedy published a selection of 279 pages, and the result is a very different project. In the book’s afterword, the authors make a disclaimer that they have massaged the texts for maximum effect in print: “The Apostrophe Engine has meddled with the writing of others, and we in turn have done the same with its writing.… The engine provided us with an embarrassment of riches, an abundance of raw material, beautiful and banal at once and by turns.”23
Raw material is right. Here’s an excerpt of what The Apostrophe Engine on the Web returns to me when I click on the line, “you are so beautiful to me,” taken from Joe Cocker’s hit pop song:
you are so beautiful (to me) hello, you either have javascript turned off or an old version of adobe’s flash player • you are so beautiful to me 306,638 views txml added1:43 kathie lee is a creep 628,573 views everythingisterrible added2:39 you are so beautiful 1,441,432 views caiyixian added0:37 reptile eyes • you are so beautiful (to me) 0 • you are so beautiful 79,971 views konasdad added0:49 before • you are so beautiful to me 19,318 views walalain added2:45 escape the fate—you are so beautiful 469,552 views darknearhome added2:46 sad slow songs: joe cocker—you are so beautif • you are already a member • you are so beautiful (nearly unplugged) hello, you either have javascript turned off or an old version of adobe’s flash player • you are so beautiful 1,443,749 views caiyixian featured video added4:48 joe cocker~you are so beautiful (live at montre • you are so beautiful 331,136 views jozy90 added2:32 zucchero canta “you are so beautiful” 196,481 views lavocedinarciso added3:50 joe cocker mad dogs—cry me a river 1970 777,970 views scampi99 added5:18 joe cocker—whiter shade of pale live 389,420 views dookofoils added4:49 joe cocker—n’oubliez jamais 755,731 views neoandrea added5:22 patti labelle & joe cocker-you are so beautiful • you are the best thit was very exiting> akirasovan (5 days ago) show hide 0 marked as spam reply mad brain damage
It’s a rambling mess: the signal to noise ratio is very low. Yet, in print, an excerpt from the same passage is a very different animal:
you are so beautiful • you are so beautiful • you are so beautiful • you are so beautiful artist: Babyface • you are so beautiful • you are so beautiful, yes you are to me you are so beautiful you are to me can’t you see? • you are so beautiful the lyrics are the property of their respective authors, artists and labels • you are so beautiful • you are so beautiful artist: Ray Charles • you are so beautiful • you are so beautiful • you are so beautiful to me • you are so beautiful • you are so beautiful • you are so beautiful • you are so beautiful• you are so beautiful to meee • you are so beautiful, would you please24
The spacing has been normalized, the numbers have been taken out, the dead lines have been removed; it’s been heavily edited to good effect. The printed edition reads gorgeously, full of jagged musical repetitions rhythms, like Gertrude Stein or Christopher Knowles’s libretto for the opera Einstein on the Beach. And there’s careful placement of different types of content such as the copyright warning, which comes crashing down just as you are lulled by the rhythms of the repeating phrases. The two “boldfaced” proper names, Babyface and Ray Charles, each with an identical preceding phrase—“you are so beautiful artist”—are placed far enough apart so as not to interfere with one another, resulting in a perfectly balanced text.
While the computer has harvested the raw material for the poem, it’s the authorial hand of Wershler and Kennedy that wrangles the beauty out of the surplus text, making for a more conventional rendition of the work, one predicated upon a skilled editorial hand. Yet the page-bound version lacks the ability to surprise, grow, and continually reinvent itself the same way the rougher Web version does. What emerges, then, in these two versions is a balance that embraces both the machine and the printed book; the raw text and the manipulated; the infinite and the known, showing us two ways of expressing contemporary language, neither one of which can be crowned definitive.
Having a computer write poems for you is old hat. What’s new is that, like Wershler and Kennedy, writers are now exploiting the language-based search engines and social networking sites as source text. Having a stand-alone program that can generate whimsical poems on your computer feels quaint compared to the spew of the massive word generators out there on the Web, tapping into our collective mind.
Sometimes that mind isn’t so pretty. The Flarf Collective has been intentionally scouring Google for the worst results and reframing it as poetry. If people claim that the Internet is nothing more than the world’s greatest linguistic rubbish heap, comprised of flame wars, Viagra ads, and spam, then Flarf exploits this contemporary condition by reframing all that trash into poetry. And the well is bottomless. The Wall Street Journal, in a profile of Flarf, described their writing methodology: “Flarf is a creature of the electronic age. The flarf method typically involves using word combinations turned up in Google searches, and poems are often shared via email. When one poet penned a piece after Googling ‘peace’ + ‘kitty,’ another responded with a poem after searching ‘pizza’ + ‘kitty.’ A 2006 reading of it has been viewed more than 6,700 times on YouTube. It starts like this: ‘Kitty goes Postal/Wants Pizza.’ ”25
What began as a group of people submitting poems to a poetry.com online contest—they created the absolutely worst poems they could and were naturally rejected—snowballed into an aesthetic, which Flarf cofounder Gary Sullivan describes as “A kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. ‘Not okay.’ ”26 Typical of a Flarf poem is Nada Gordon’s “Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas.” An excerpt reads:
Oddly enough, there is a
“Unicorn Pleasure Ring” in existence.
Research reveals that Hitler lifted
the infamous swastika from a unicorn
emerging from a colorful rainbow.
Nazi to unicorn: “You’re not coming
out with me dressed in that ridiculous
outfit.” You can finally tell your daughter
that unicorns are real. One ripped the head off
a waxwork of Adolf Hitler, police said.
April 22 is a nice day. I really like it.
I mean it’s not as fantastic as that hitler
unicorn ass but it’s pretty special to me.
CREAMING bald eagle there is a tiny Abe
Lincoln boxing a tiny Hitler. MAGIC UNICORNS
“You’re really a unicorn?” “Yes. No
kiss my feet.” Hitler as a great man.
Hitler … mm yeah, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler,
Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.… German food is so bad,
even Hitler was a vegetarian, just like a unicorn.27
By scouring online forums and arcane cult sites, Gordon uses the debased vernacular of the Web to create a poem whose language is eerily close to her sources. Yet her selection of words and images reveal this to be a carefully constructed a poem, showing us that the rearrangement of found language—even as nasty and low as this—can be alchemized into art. But in order to make something great out of horrible materials, you’ve got to choose well. Flarf’s cofounder, K. Silem Mohammad, dubbed Flarf a kind of “sought” poetry, as opposed to “found” poetry, because its makers are actively and constantly engaged in the act of text mining. In Gordon’s poem, every hot button is purposefully pushed, from the cheesy image to the cliché: fatwas, abortions, and Hitler’s birthday; nothing is off-limits. In some ways, Flarf takes its historical cues from the coterie-based poetics of the New York school, whose poems were filled with in-jokes intended for their friends. In Flarf’s case, many of its poems are posted onto its private listserv, which are, in turn, remixed and recycled by the group into endless chain poems based on Internet spew, which are then posted back on to the Web for others to mangle, should they choose. But the New York school—for all their ideas of “low” and “kitsch”—never went as far as Flarf in their indulgence in “bad” taste.
Flarf, by using disingenuous subjectivity, never really believes in what it’s saying, but it’s saying it anyway, acutely scraping the bottom of the cultural barrel with such prescience, precision, and sensitivity that we are forced to reevaluate the nature of the language engulfing us. Our first impulse is to flee, to deny its worth, to turn away from it, to write it off as a big joke; but, like Warhol’s “Car Crashes” or “Electric Chairs,” we are equally entranced, entertained, and repulsed. It’s a double-edged sword that Flarf holds to our necks, forcing us to look at ourselves in the blade’s reflection with equal doses of swooning narcissism and white-knuckled fear, and in this way is typical of the mixed reactions our literary engagement with these new technologies engenders. Flarf and Wershler/Kennedy’s practices posit two different solutions for how poets might go about creating new and original works at a time when most people are drowning in the amount of information being thrown at them. They propose that, in its debased and random form, the language generated by the Web is a far richer source material—ripe for reframing, remixing, and reprogramming—than anything we could ever invent.