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Entries from November 16, 2008 - November 22, 2008

Saturday
Nov222008

Gutted

The Guardian:

Leading scholars at the library are at a loss to explain why Farhad Hakimzadeh, a Harvard-educated businessman, publisher and intellectual, took a scalpel to the leaves of 150 books that have been in the nation's collection for centuries. The monetary damage he caused over seven years is in the region of £400,000 but Dr Kristian Jensen, head of the British and early printed collections at the library, said no price could be placed upon the books and maps that he had defaced and stolen.
More supporting evidence for my campaign to have armed guards stationed outside and within the British Library. Would add a little piquancy to the proceedings don't you think?

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Saturday
Nov222008

Dead and in this Painting

John Sparrow:

This piece is an experiment which considers the fusion of visual and textual elements – a synaesthesia which I thought was interesting in looking at Beth Ames Swartz's paintings. The piece is a counterpart to the pieces I wrote for the The Word in Paint book, and uses similar fragmentary techniques as a basic composition method.
Read the working note or go straight to the work.

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Saturday
Nov222008

Issue 2

Latest news in Stuff That Just Won't Go Away:

In October 2008, Stephen McLaughlin, Gregory Laynor, and Vladimir Zykov published Issue 1, a 3,785-page document featuring almost as many poets. The pdf was posted at forgodot.com. The poems were produced by a poem generator called Erika, or Erica T. Carter. The ISSUE 2 document is a collection of the blog posts and comments that responded to the project and/or responded to responses about the project and/or responded to issues that were raised within the discussion (419 pages).
I'm still trying to figure out why it got almost everyone's attention, including my own.

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Friday
Nov212008

Europeana [Updated]

UPDATE: European online library crashes BBC:

The British Library in London is among more than 1,000 cultural organisations making contributions to a European online library. The free multimedia venture, Europeana, will also see input from the European Commission and the Louvre Museum. Internet users will be able to access more than two million books, maps, recordings, photographs, archive documents, paintings and films. These will be sourced from institutions across the EU's member states. Further expansion for the project, which was created by the European Commission and is run by the European Digital Library Foundation, is planned for 2010.
Now that the internet is starting to foster international partnerships based on ideals of free, distributed knowledge (Wikipedia kickstarted this fantastic craze, now it seems governments are catching up) there are some issues this raises. With the democracy of publishing that the internet allows, and the uncertain future of print (not whether it will exist but what form it will take) how will ventures such as the above vet newly published material for suitability? As the boundaries between print and online publishing spheres blur evermore, will traditional structures of publishing follow, or will something undeniably more open but undeniably more difficult to navigate take its place? And if so, on what criteria will material find its way into our libraries, into our online archives and into our academia?

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Friday
Nov212008

The New Post-literate

A gallery of Asemic Writing. Currently seeking submissions. More information about asemic writing here. via DBC

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Friday
Nov212008

Louis Zukofsky PennSound Page

PennSound introduces more excellence:

Today, we're extremely proud to announce PennSound's newest addition: an extensive author page for the highly-influential American Objectivist, Louis Zukofsky. Nearly six months in the making, this page brings together nearly twenty full-length recordings by the poet, including important readings, conversations and lectures, along with supplementary materials responding to Zukofsky's work.
via Charles Bernstein

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Thursday
Nov202008

Mendoza

Friday 21st November, 8.30pm Dublin Castle (Map) £7/£6 with flyer  Mendoza are playing. I will be reading an old and paranoid poem over the end of one of the songs. See the band and my pitch bent voice here.

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Thursday
Nov202008

U B U W E B Anthology of Conceptual Writing

Craig Douglas Dworkin:

...what would a non-expressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with "spontaneous overflow" supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process? In which the self-regard of the poet's ego were turned back onto the self-reflexive language of the poem itself? So that the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better (the question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done otherwise. The works presented here provide one set of answers to those questions.
View the anthology here.

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Thursday
Nov202008

Interesting Symbols You Can Type On Your Keyboard But Never Use

± 'The plus-minus sign is a mathematical symbol commonly used to indicate the precision of an approximation, or as a convenient shorthand for a quantity which has two possible values opposite in sign.' § 'The section sign is a typographical character used mainly to refer to a particular section of a document, such as a legal code.' ^ 'Caret, sometimes spelled phonetically, Carat, is used by an author or editor to indicate where something is to be inserted into a text.' { } 'Curly brackets (also called braces) are sometimes used in prose to indicate a series of equal choices: “Select your animal {goat, sheep, cow, horse} and follow me”.' ~ 'The tilde is a mark placed over a letter to indicate a change in pronunciation.' | 'The vertical bar has various names including the pipe, verti-bar, vbar, vertical line, vertical slash, or divider line by others. It has various usages in mathematics, where it can be used to represent absolute value, among others; computing and programming; and general typography, as a divider not unlike the interpunct.' Definitions via Wikipedia. Where else?

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Thursday
Nov202008

EPC Sound Poetry

The EPC Sound Poetry page is back online. This is like that moment when you think there are no more After Eights left and then you find one right at the end of the box. via Charles Bernstein

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