Letteratura elettronica postmoderna (credo).

Posted on October 25, 2010 by Beniamina

 

[In questo post: Soliloquy]

Non so se sia effettivamente definibile “postmoderno”. Sicuramente è un esperimento singolare, e in barba a tutti quelli che dicono: bè, che ci vuole, potevo farlo anche io. Oh sì, potevi farlo anche tu. Ma non ti è mai venuto in mente, perciò apprezza lo sforzo e non cercare di passare per il creativo di turno perché è chiaro che non lo sei. No, a parte gli scherzi. Il signor Kenneth Goldsmith deve aver letto Joyce o comunque averne sentito parlare un bel po’ per farsi venire in mente un’idea del genere: prendi un registratore, infilaci una cassetta (siamo nel 1997), premi la magica combinazione di tasti REC+Play e appendi il tutto al collo. Non separartene per una settimana. Lascia che ogni tua parola si stampi sul nastro. Qualsiasi cosa tu dica, qualsiasi, senza censure. L’altra regola del gioco è che solo le tue sillabe hanno il diritto di essere registrate.

L’eco dell’ Ulisse si sente forte e chiara: come Joyce segue Leopold Bloom da mattina a sera per circa 600 pagine di quasi ininterrotto flusso di coscienza, allo stesso modo il nastro del registratore è il torrente di parole che Goldsmith pronuncia in una settimana. Niente di più naturale, ovvio  e scontato, direbbe il nostro amico di cui sopra. E invece non c’è niente di più artificiale che sentire dei dialoghi mozzati in cui solo una voce è udibile, un romanzo in cui autore, narratore e protagonista non potrebbero coincidere meglio, un soliloquio (come il titolo stesso del lavoro di Goldsmith) in cui ogni frase ci viene data sempre fuori contesto. Per giunta, come spiega in un saggio semplice e brillante Marjorie Perloff, “non abbiamo accesso ai pensieri nascosti del narratore, ai suoi movimenti fisici . . . ai suoi sogni ad occhi aperti . . . questo è come sarebbe la vita se gli uomini non potessero fare altro che parlare” [mia traduzione].

Qualche giorno fa ero ad una lezione di critica e teoria letteraria tenuta dal prof. Aciman, un grande scrittore oltre che un grande uomo di cultura. Insomma, parlavamo di Castiglione e di “sprezzatura”, cioè del fatto che la classe e l’apparente eleganza dei gesti spesso non sia così naturale, ma richieda una certa cura, un’attenzione e un’abilità a non sembrare affettati e costruiti negli atteggiamenti e nel modo di porsi. Lo stile, in sostanza, richiede fatica per sembrare naturalmente così. L’esempio lampante è Twitter: solo 140 caratteri, che ci vuole? Bè, una regola tanto semplice può causare serie difficoltà. Esprimi un pensiero in 140 caratteri. Finché si tratta di dire “voglia di studiare saltami addosso, dimmi quando salti che mi sposto” (70 caratteri) o “Stamattina stavo per investire uno scoiattolo, ho dovuto inchiodare in mezzo alla strada a momenti ci lasciavo la pelle, sto cretino” (132 caratteri), allora 140 vanno più che bene. Ma cosa succede se volessi scrivere, che ne so, il riassunto di un film che ho visto in così poche parole? O la recensione di un libro? Si fa, ovviamente. Questione di stile.

Ma tornando al nostro caro Kenneth: originariamente il suo Soliloquy era un’istallazione museale. Dopo 8 settimane di ritiro nella campagna francese, lavorando otto ore al giorno, trascrisse parola per parola tutto quello che aveva registrato, stampò il tutto e i 314 fogli risultanti furono appesi fino a coprire interamente le pareti di una sala della Bravin Post Lee Gallery di New York.

Successivamente ne è stato fatto anche un libro – non m’immagino comunque abbia riscosso un grande successo, e da ultimo è arrivata la versione web. È strutturata secondo 7 capitoli, uno per ogni giorno della settimana. Ogni capitolo ha poi 10 microsezioni al suo interno, in cui al passaggio del mouse compaiono le frasi pronunciate da Goldsmith. Solo la prima è stabile sulla pagina, le altre vanno fatte emergere una dietro l’altra. Se si ha pazienza e mano ferma per seguire una sorta di linea retta, è possibile seguire il filo del discorso, altrimenti (e il bello è questo secondo me) si può semplicemente vagare per la pagina e curiosare qua e là.

Buona lettura!

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Typewriter

Posted on October 19, 2010 by Beniamina

 [In this post: various Anipoems and Typoems]

I’m sure that many of you remember this scene from “Who’s minding the Store”, in which Jerry Lewis performs the famous typewriting scene. This is just one of the various ways in which a typewriter can be used. For instance The Boston Typewriting Orchestra is totally based on this vintage writing tool.

                                                 

But apart from this undoubtedly original use of a typewriter, I’m going to introduce you a poet whose work is based on typewriting, too, but in a way that I am sure will astonish you. We see Jerry Lewis typing but no letter appears. We don’t see Ana Maria Uribe typing her letters, too, but what we see is a crowded cloud of “h” that become a herd of centaurs, while a rapid series of intermitting R, I and P become a rhythmic Pas de Deux.

Ana Maria Uribe started her career as a poet during the period of Concrete Poetry, a widespread movement in Brasil, and through her production we can see how the advent of the computer and of the Internet in particular has changed the way of literally “making” poetry. In her website her first works, the Typoems, and the later, the Anipoems, are clearly distinguished. The name “Typoems” refers to the fact that the poems were literally typewritten: 

“. . . I wrote “Typoems”, a series of visual or typographic poems which I typed with an old machine called Lettera 22.”

(Source: http://vispo.com/uribe/datos/aboutAnaMariaEnglish.htm)

 

From 1997, though, her poems had the chance to come to light thanks to many new animation softwares. Sound has become a recurrent when not fundamental part of the Anipoems. Moreover, animation made the construction of a plot possible (it doesn’t really make much sense building a plot just using letters on a screen).

Ana Maria was an affectionate traveler and her competence in many languages reflects in her works. She herself provided the translation for most of them and in some cases, such as “Deseo - Desejo – Desire“, the different translations of the same word work as a standpoint for the structure of the poem. It is organized in three movements, one for each version of the word.

There’s a different music for each of them. A sharp attention should be paid to the final “Desire” in particular. Here there’s the key to read her works, which are never just letters on a screen, but she usually tried to let the letters be at the same time signs and signifiers for something else. Thus he final tango between S and I is not only evoking her native land, Argentina, and the probably one of the most sensual dances we can think about, but it also refers to the lovers accepting to surrender to this desire, that is saying “Si”, “Yes” in Spanish. (Source: http://vispo.com/uribe/datos/aboutAnaMariaEnglish.htm).

Another work worth of mention is the series “Spring” compared to “Winter”.

In Spring and Spring 2 we see respectively a column of Ps and Qs forming a  tree brench with leaves and buds sprouting from it. In Winter and Winter 2, though, these signs of a renewed nature disappear. The Ps fall down and square brackets are the naked branches, and Qs transforms into Y.

A strange thing happened while I was watching this letters moving on the screen: it took me a couple of seconds to realize that they were actaully letters. So smartly Ana Maria make them floating in the black background and interacting that you almost forget what they are. You only perceive a shape and, influenced by the title of the piece, your fantasly makes you see things that actually don’t exist. Is a V jointed to another V  a W or a zipper?                                                                                                          

                                    

        

 

 

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What do they have in common?

Posted on October 18, 2010 by Beniamina

[In this post: Blue Hyacinth]

 

Let’s play a little trivia quiz and try to answer my question. I’ll give you some clues:

  • The man on the left is William Burroughs, a famous American writer. His biografy is pretty interesting, if you consider that he moved to South America only to get a special drug which was supposed to gift the user with telepaty, committed an homicide and was a great friend of Jack Kerouac. His most famous work is Naked Lunch, which was written according to a particluar tecnique…
  • The other man is Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dada movement. Among the manifestos which appeared in the collection Les sept manifestes Dada, you should pay attention to one in particular, called Dada Manifeste sur l’Amour Faible et l’Amour Amer (Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love). In the section VIII of this manifesto, Tzara gives the instructions for making a dadaist poem. The “raw material” for a dadaist poem is…
  • The tecnique used by the English rockband Radiohead to write some of the songs contained in their album Kid A follows faithfully the method pursued by Burroughs, who evidently enough had in mind Tzara while writing Naked Lunch…

Is everything clear now?

What Tzara, Burroughs and the Radiohead with Kid A’s lyrics do is creating new texts starting from existing texts. They are chunked in small parts, according to the words or the sentences that compound them, then randomly selected and recombined together.

Tzara used to choose an article from a newspaper, cut the words and pick one by one after “shaking gently” them into a hat. Burroughs did something similar for a whole novel. The Radiohead mixed up verses in a hat and then put them together to form new songs.

The same recombination of words we can find in Blue Hyacinth, by Jim Andrews and Pauline Masurel. The dominating color is, of course, blue and its various shades. Clicking on one of the four squares you can choose the starting blue but then, mousing over the text, its phrases and sentences change their shade of blue and their words, too. The mechanism which underlies under this transformation is called “stir fry”. Basically it’s the same thing as Tzara & C. but transported into a computer, so that the recombination of the various chunks is immediate and constantly mutable, and the total amount of the possible new texts that can be generated is impressively high.

The effort that is required to read it is I think as tough as the one they put in writin it. The basic texts from which the cuts come from had to be built so that “the syntax is usually still fluid after deranging the text”. I guess it’s not easy to find the perfect formula to create coherent texts out of other texts which are virtually teared apart and glued together again.

PS: I’d like to add a couple of things before moving onto the next post. First of all: my grandmother used to have a blue hyacinth in her garden. When I was a child I was really fond of gardening – read: uprooting every kind of flower that appealed my sight and fascinated my nose with its smell. I was a pretty generous girl too, so I usually gave these flowers to my mother and my aunt as presents. I used to give flowers to my grandmother too, but she didn’t seem like she really appreciated my green thumb.
But anyway, I’ve always had a kind of sacred awe of hyacinths. If they aren’t in our garden anymore is our cat’s fault, not mine.

Secondly, if you want to try and create your own dadaist poem but all of sudden you realize that you dont’t have the appropriate tools, try this. (I strongly recommend to try to do it with your own hands, though. I know I am writing about electronic literature, but the pleasure of creating something out of glue and paper and messing around words is absolutely incomparable).

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3 x Play

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Beniamina

  

[In this post: Façade]

This word has always fascinated me for its multifaceted nature. The same happens in many other languages, like “jouer” in French, or “spielen” in German: the concept of “playing” as to “play a game” becomes strictly connected with the idea of playing an instrument as well as playing a role in a drama. Maybe these ludic activities conceal some common roots, there must be something in our human nature that subconsciously and archetipically links them.

  .

 This cannot be truer considering electronic literature: once words move from page to screen, they acquire a new consistence, the matter which constitutes them is not ink and paper anymore, it’s much more virtual but malleable. As Espen Aarseth says,  in a slightly different context though, a “nontrivial effort” is required by electronic literature, that is going beyond the act of reading and starting to experiment and interact. In one word, we have to play with it, in every sense: we have to play it, as it was an istrument we are learning to use; we have to interact with it as we were act-ors, that is actively participate in it; and above all, as literature is pleasure by nature, we have have to enjoy it.

Moreover, a clear sign of how playing and electronic literature are connected relies on the fact that many electronic writers come from different fields of information technology, such as graphics and, of course, video game programming. 

Discovering those things was absolutely illuminating: the idea of opening literature to a new dimension is what I was looking for. But then, a question came into my mind: what about drama? I mean, if we think about electronic literature as something that has to be played, and we are supposed to evolve from readers to inter-actors, then what happens to drama as a genre? Is it still possible? In what ways?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

I started to look for an answer and this is what I have found: Interactive Drama.

“It might contain artificial people you could converse with, get to know, and love or hate. It might engineer dramatic situations, complete with revelations and reversals. Entering this world, you would feel as if you had been thrust into the midst of a soap opera or a reality-Tv show”.

(Jonathan Rauch, Sex, lies and video games, in The Atlantic Monthly, number 4, vol. 298, Nov. 2006)

What Jonathan Rauch is referring to is Façade, one of the first examples of interactive drama. Again electronic literature modifies the idea of drama, it tears words away from the stage or the page, and puts us inside of the playwright itself. We become the characters of a story and we are asked to interact with the other actors until the play gets to an end. And it’s not an happy ending, usually. Well, I think it can be, but as far as I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to help Grace and Trip to fix their relationship. The first time he believed that I was trying to pick him up, and consequently Grace was not treating me exactly “gracefully”.

 

So, I definetely encourage you to try Façade and see how you like it. Try to interact with Grace and Trip, go and visit them for dinner and help them with their marital crisis. It’s not like every other interactive game. Maybe because their voices are recorded by real actors, so you perceive an intonation and some find of feeling in their voices, maybe because in one way or another we know what happens when a couple is facing a crisis so we can imagine how they’re feeling…sometimes they act like machines and there’s a kind of fake reaction to what you say. But it’s fun to type in words and see how you can play the role of the actor who plays the role of a friend of them. Chinese boxes.

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When the surface becomes complex

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Beniamina

  

[In this post: Lens -  please select it from the left column of the linked page, there's no way of directly linking it]

“The surface of writing is and has always been complex. It is a liminal symbolically interpenetrated membrane, a fractal coast – a borderline, a chaotic and complex structure with depth and history”.

(John Cayley, “Writing on complex surfaces”, 1) 

When I first saw Cayley’s article, I was hooked by its title. I thought: “Finally someone who realizes that writing is tri-dimensional, if not multi-. Especially if we talk about electronic literature, it must be so. Just think about all the media that you can embed, all the fonts you can choose, all the colors that backgrounds can have. Texts seem to become alive”.

But then, when I started reading, the name that kept popping out was Saul Bass. Who is Saul Bass? I didn’t know him either, as you are probably thinking. Then I checked his name up in Wikipedia (of course, where else?) and here it is what I’ve found:

“Saul Bass (May 8, 1920 – April 25, 1996) was an American graphic designer and Academy award-winning filmmaker, but he is best known for his design on animated motion picture title sequences.”

So what do a title sequences designer and electronic literature have in common? According to Cayley,  the use Bass made of graphics was one of the first examples of how a writing surface can become complex making letters, numbers and other geometric shapes material and interactive between themselves and with their background.

His distinctive feature was the rule, which was used not only to manage the spaces in which words appear, but interfered with the surface of writing and became a surface of writing itself (4). According to Cayley, Bass’s most successful work was the title sequence for Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest”, for its transformation of the green ruled background in a skyscraper’s façade ”in a continuum (italics mine) of retorical possibilities and signifying strategies that cross and recross from graphic to linguistic media and back [. . .] without loosing a grip on their specific materialities” (5).

 

 

 

As the sequence of picture shows, the passage from the initial green background to the final image of glass and steel reflecting the hustle and bustle of a crowded city is absolutely gradual and continuous while words keep moving up and down as they were elevators. Cayley points out that the link with Concrete poetry is almost obvious (5) but he doesn’t insist much on this. Maybe it could have been a good point to show that even when literature could only be printed, it tried to go out from the surface of paper and communicate something not only through the meaning of the words but also through their shapes, fonts and disposition on the sheet.  Anyway Mr. Cayley, I do appreciate your original approach to the subject starting from a kind of art, that is graphics, which personally I am not well aware of, but for sure its development in the same years in which Concrete poetry, computers and post-modernist avanguardist movements were spreading is not a chance. It’s part of the innovative and cutting-edge ambience of that years.

Graphics aside, in the second part of his essay Cayley deals with much more literary-specific topics, that is the Screen virtual reality experiment held at the Brown University Cave some years ago (about which you can read more here) and some other works which have been experimented in the Cave but that you can find on the Internet now. The only negative aspect of these latter, well, not negative, but a little bit annoying, is that you need the last version of Quicktime and, in some cases, you have to download a couple of sound files. But anyway, it takes no more than 5 minutes.

My favorite is absolutely “Lens“, as it perfectly matches the idea of “continuum” in the sense that words through graphics open different layers of text, which otherwise would have been hidden.

Cayley focuses mainly on overboard and translation, which are actually examples of texts emerging from and sinking in the page. Translation is conceptually based on Walter Benjamin’s theories on translation, and I believe that it’s a perfect way of rendering the metaphor of translation as a discovery of different meanings and senses from one language to another.

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Digital poetry/digital art

Posted on September 24, 2010 by Beniamina

 

[In this post: Letters demand things; Young-Chae Heavy Industries]

When a text becomes a work of art, when we look at an ordered string of letters not for the meaning it carries but just as curve and straight lines combined together, are we still entitled to talk about literature? Or is it already something that trascends literature itself?

This is the question that I am asking myself since I saw Michael Madsen’s “Letters demand things“. I believe that it is a perfect example of how art and literature easily intertwine in the realm of the digital media. This project makes you play with the sound and the shape of the letters as if the reader is the one who can free them from the obligation of composing words that carry meaning. Letters want to live just as signs, they need to be looked at for what they are without the burden of something to communicate, they are longing for a sort of reification: “they now demand to be typed, spoken, traced, heard, and related to in specific ways. And yet, for all their demands, they only exist as reflections of human handwriting and visual echoes of muscles and air working in concert to give them life as sound waves”,  Madsen declares in his initial statement.

Art that deals with letters, words that lost their meaning.

This reminds me about Concrete Poetry and its attention for the graphic aspect of poems. But it was still labelled as Poetry. Boundaries are blurring.

Another interesting work which poses itself in between for being an artistic approach to words and poems, as its very creators say, is Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. This artist duo set in South Korea but influenced by manifold cultures and traditions has exhibited its masterpieces in many famous museums and galleries, such as the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London and the New Museum here in New York. They use a simple graphics, mainly just black letters against a white background, combine it with marvelous jazz music, and as a result you get a poem that line by line, and sometimes word by word, jumps, bounces and floats on your screen. No links and no hypertexts. Even though I feel less iffy about seeing it as literature than Madsens’s work, it is not “electronic literature” in its common sense. There are no links, no hypertexts, no different paths to choose among. The only choice the reader has – and they are absolutely aware of that – is pushing the  “Back” button. According to them, it doesn’t mean that the reader is a passive receiver because she has in her hands the strongest power of choice, that is to say Stop.

I believe that this power is the same as the one of closing a book when we do not want to read it anymore. Or better, it is more than just a power, it is an Inalienable Right of the Reader.

But is it what we really want from electronic literature? One can argue that what they are doing is miles away from what we mean with that. Personally speaking, I really like Heavy Industries’ works but I feel that there it lacks the “playable”and interactive part of electronic literature.

But there is a subtle mistake in all this reasoning: we should avoid a perspective which is too literary-bounded and take into account that one of the added values that media art has is combining different fields and perspectives, such as literature and art, so to create a unique intermingling matter. Sometimes we like it, sometimes we don’t, but its value lies in its capacity of astonishing and surprising us.

One thing that this research about electronic literature seems to desperately want to teach me is that I have to be ready to have my expectations unmatched and marvel at mundane things as it was the first time. Even if it seems hard to get rid of traditional concepts and prejudices, they sometimes are just a ballast to dump so…let the hot-air balloon of our imagination and creation fly.

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“I link therefore I am”: Mark Amerika and Avant-Pop Culture.

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Beniamina

 

[Today's work of electronic literature: Grammatron]

Maybe it is just a need caused by so long time spent in studying the “traditional” literature, but I feel I need a kind of history of Electronic Literature, or at least some time reference which allows me to collocate it a cultural and historic context. It sounds strange because Elecronic Literature is a very recent phenomenon, not older than 30. It is almost an adult, but it feels like a teen-ager. But anyway.

While I was looking for what was going on in the culture and society of those years, I happened to meet the Avant-Pop Movement, that is “a whole range of innovative formal strategies and narrative approaches modeled on more kinetic, dynamic, nonliterary forms of art”. This extract form the movement’s manifesto, included in their one and only anthology ”After tomorrow’s crash” gives an idea of what these neo-avangardist had in mind, that is a revolutionary idea of literature, which according to them should be completely unleashed from the previous artistic tradition and always searching for new means of communication and creation.

Moreover, many of the writers who took part in the movement come from different artistic backgrounds, like painting, music and photography. These “cross-genre  impulses of Avant-Pop” give their writings something more, you feel that they are constrained in the small space of a page. They are in need of a sort of third dimension, you cannot just read them as you would read any other book. While reading I had the feeling of  actually seeing what they were talking about, but some letters on a piece of paper are not enough to render this sensation. But when I saw that “Grammatron” by Mark America, probably my favourite among them, was later re-constructed, re-written and transformed into an Internet and hypertextual version,  I was absloutely delighted.

I’ll try to describe it and in some ways explain it, even if the best thing to do with works like this is spending some time navigating and exploring them. So, the basic structure is the one of what is commonly known as “hypertext”, that is a text with different links in it that the writer is invited to chose among so to create her own narrative path.

 [I must confess I find some difficulties in talking about it in literary terms, which anyway are the only "critique" tools that have been taught to me by far and that I am used to. One of the aims that I'd like this project to achieve is providing some useful terms, which should be ideally unbound from the previous print tradition. The only way to do it is giving it a try, so please "pardon my appearence", as many shopwindows say, and appreciate the efforts to ameliorate this unexplored field of our contemporary culture.] But anyways.

There are no substantial differences between the print and the web version of Grammatron in terms of character and events. What really changes is:

  • first of all, the hypertext version is much longer than the other one, but what we experience are just chunks of text, one following another depending on where and when we click on their links. So basically you do not realize how many “pages” you have been reading, unless you think of a page as a web page.
  • According to me, the hypertext version conveys much better the inner dynamics of the characters. [But they are not "characters", I need a better term...] For instance, Abe Golam – the main charactar [this is the first attempt of a better term, "character" and "avatar"], is a “legendary info-shaman, cracker of the sorcerer-code and creator of Grammatron and Nanoscript”. Grammatron itself is a creature of the Nanoscript code and “uses the language of desire’s own consciousness to disseminate the potential creative power that resides within the vast electrosphere”. How can all these things be just stuck in a printed page?
  • The web version of Grammatron is featured with what Mark Amerika calls “a companion theory guide”. I have found his “Hypertextual Consciousness” particularly stimulating in terms of what we expect and get from reading an hypertext. Under the motto “I link therefore I am” he explores the mainfold aspects and psycholgical implications of dealing with this kind of texts. He investigates the viewpoint both of the reader, or “co-conspirator” and the writer, a creator of “textual space”.

My adivse is to experience it, I am sure it will be really inspiring. And moreover, it is the only way of becoming attentive consumers of the Internet without being trapped in its web.

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Something to start with

Posted on September 20, 2010 by Beniamina

 

 

[Today's work of electronic literature: We feel fine].

A huge part of my work in discovering and exploring electronic literature deals with surfing the Web searching for interesting examples of this new literary phenomenon. Being its definitions and boundaries still blurred, and being creativity and fantasy its fundamental characteristics, you can happen to find manifold diverse examples out there.

For instance, We feel Fine can be considered as a continuously up-to-date enciclopedia of feelings. Every ten minutes it starts scanning a series of blog looking for sentences that open with “I feel” or “I am feeling”. Then the different moods are catalogued according six different “movements”, as its founders call them. I don’t know if it can be actually considered literature, but the question whether blogging is a literary phenomenon or not is still open. Maybe this gives you the chance to think a little bit about it…

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Let’s see what happens

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Beniamina

 ”For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconsistancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal.”

 

(Andrew Sullivan, “Why I blog”, from “The Atlantic”, November 2008)

 

  

  

 Why blogging? Just do your thing, publish your ideas regarding Electronic Literature, reseraches,  your own opinions on some works…but while I was trying to give shape to this website at some point I realized that something was missing. I actually needed a blog. I’ll tell you why.

 

 The first thing that made me change my mind was that if the subject I am dealing with is changeable and unpredictable by itself, then a blog is the right way of rendering this sense of constant mutability. That’s why I will post here all the interesting things and links that show up in my navigations through the Web. It is a way of keeping track of what I am finding while I am finding it, a kind of chronicle on the spot.

 

Secondly, one of my aims is to demonstrate that literature is still alive – as the title of this website says, and I always keep my promises. So what is more alive than a blog, in which (hopefully) posts and comments alternate in a  provocation-question-answer chain? Moreover some people consider blogging itself as a new genre of literature, which is what I am mainly dealing with here.

 

To cut a long story short, I hope that this blog could become a platform for sharing contents and ideas. I will use it as an impressionist sketchbook: when something catches and leashes me, I will immediately jot it down, so not to loose the immediate sensation of marvel that only an extemperaneous and pleasurable discovery can give.

  

Blogging adds a further value to it, though.

 

 Blogging opens up to a new concept of “generosity” as a free exchange of words and thoughts as gifts to someone that not necessarily is next to us. “Sharing” is its name.

 

Blogging exposes you to the risk of being criticized, for someone it is just the “vanity publishing by egomaniacs”, but I believe that the accidental web surfer who reads these things has the right of telling his/her opinion about them.

 

If I am learning something through electronic literature that goes beyond the mere literary aspect of it, is that human knowledge is the result of the mixing and intertwining of multiple voices, and that we have to be always ready to redesign our intended paths. Sometimes we are lucky, sometimes we regret abandoning our old habits and our certanites, but I am deeply convinced that, whatever the final result, what we can experiment and learn through attempts and mistakes is always worthy and can counterbalance (almost) every disillusion.

 

 

“May the Web grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot design”

(Stuart Multhrop, “Victory Garden”, http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/VictoryGarden.html )

 

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Hello world! – non potevo cancellarlo.

Posted on September 10, 2010 by Beniamina

“Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!”

Le prime parole autogenerate. Il “benvenuto” in un non-luogo. Tra edit e delete, ho scelto il primo.

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