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Free Culture and Our Public Needs

Stanford law professor and first-tier cyberlaw theorist Lawrence Lessig has probably thought more about the relationship between copyright, the Internet, and technology than any other intellectual. In 1998 Lessig represented Web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Unfortunately, he lost the case. The reasons for the defeat are delineated in Lessig’s latest book Free Culture, a synthesis of recent popular thought on copyright. The central claim of Free Culture is that in the past decisions could have been made that would have both stunted (or […]

Riga Under Western Eyes

If you’re under the impression that Americans are wealthy, check out the capital city of Latvia. This essay was written for the launch of electronic text + textiles, a residency based in Riga, Latvia. The author gratefully adknowledges David Mace for supplying auto statistics, Linda Krumina for fashion tips, and Toms Rosenbaums for population statistics. A Latvian now working and studying in Argentina, Toms became a point on the data he researched. On a Sabbatical in the Spring of 2003, I was going by train along the North Sea coast and then by bus through the Baltics – from Hamburg […]

Notes from the Middleground: On Ben Marcus, Jonathan Franzen, and the Contemporary Fiction Combine

I. Rising action If Ben Marcus’ well-meaning defense of experimental/innovative/slipsteam/anti-didactic/non-simple/counter-discursive/et al. writing becomes the end-point for our post-millennial discussion of the William Gaddis’, the William Burroughs’, the Kathy Acker’s, not to mention the Kass Fleisher’s, the Lance Olsen’s, the Steve Tomasula’s, and the more than 100 other writers, artists and purveyors of pro-language, pro-innovation who participated in the second &NOW conference at Lake Forest College in early April 2006,The conference is reviewed by participant-observer Ted Pelton, publisher of Starcherone Books. then the terms of this debate may have inadvertently become as effective as a good ol’ red state/blue state hootenanny. […]
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Long Talking Bad Conditions Illinois Blues: A Report on &Now, A Festival of Innovative Writing and Art

I been to Chicago and I been to Detroit But I never had a good time till I got up in Illinois – Skip James, “Illinois Blues” Chicago Self-Portrait You are watching me, runny nose and throbbing headache, wheel an 80-lb. suitcase (for which United Airlines charged me a $25 overweight fee on the flight from Buffalo – still cheaper and more trustworthy than shipping) down Halsted Avenue in Chicago on a brisk sunny April Tuesday morning. The suitcase is freighted with books, and the books freighted with just about every spare moment I’ve had from my college teaching job […]
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The Eternal Hourglass of Existence

Knowing no more about the book than its title, Nietzsche’s Kisses, this work of fiction triggered in me an association to a line that must have been in my unconsciousness for years, a remainder of a lasting, difficult relationship with the dead man who wrote it: “Der beste Autor wird der sein, welcher sich schämt, Schriftsteller zu werden.” The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer. Professional writer, that is, and writer of fiction – the loose translation above misses the finer meanings of Schriftsteller, especially as they are opposed to the less technical […]

Critical Code Studies

“Hello World” is one of the first programs that computer scientists write in a programming language. The program, usually only a few lines of code, causes the computer to output a greeting, as if it were speaking. The Lisp (List Processing language) version of such a program, for example, looks like this: (DEFUN HELLO-WORLD () (PRINT (LIST ‘HELLO ‘WORLD))) DEFUN defines the function HELLO-WORLD (with no set arguments). The computer as a result will speak its greeting to the world in our natural language. What could be a more appropriate language for this activity than Lisp, a family of algebraic […]

The Way We Live Now, What is to be Done?

The sites referenced by McGann appear under the ebr ‘enfolded thread,’ which was established at the time this essay was published. This paper was presented at the University of Chicago on Friday, 23 April 2004. Late in the 19th century, Matthew Arnold looked to France as a model for a salutary “Influence of Academies” on culture in general. Twenty-five years ago Arnold’s academic inheritors appeared to be living the realization of his hope. But then came the crash. Humanities scholarship and education has been a holy mess for some time. Looking at the way we live now in the academy, […]

Seeing the novel in the 21st Century

Steve Tomasula’s latest book, The Book of Portraiture, published by FC2, continues his project, begun with VAS and IN & OZ, to reshape the novel to accommodate technology, artistic, social, and sexual history. The Book of Portraiture is a cunning reply to the historicity that demands a response. Using the formal innovations of postmodernism with a naturalistic treatment of historical conditions, Tomasula has composed a nearly comprehensive text that shows us the stakes of making art in the 21st Century. The novel is composed of five chapters that are as much thesis as plot, from the first, which narrates the […]

Geek Love Is All You Need

Steven Shaviro reviews Shelley Jackson’s Half Life, the first print-based novel by a pioneering hypertextualist. Shelley Jackson’s Half Life is a dazzling and amazing book – the first print novel by the author of the hypertext fictions Patchwork Girl and My Body, the short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, and the short story “Skin,” which is being tattooed one word at a time on the skin of volunteers. Half Life is ostensibly, or overtly, about a pair of conjoined twins, Nora and Blanche Olney, who have separate heads but share a single torso and set of limbs. “Twofers,” as […]

Plagiarism, Creativity, and the Communal Politics of Renewal

Collage and cutup are ways of interrupting the continuity of the controlling discourse – mosaic is a way of renewing discourse. Mosaic: new tiles, old fragments, odd scraps remix. Out of remnants new design. Continuous not discontinuous (Sukenick, “In My Own Recognizance”) I “The best way to consider originality,” Edward Said provocatively argues in The World, the Text, and the Critic is “to look not for first instances of a phenomenon, but rather to see duplication, parallelism, symmetry, parody, repetition, echoes of it… The writer thinks less of writing originally, and more of rewriting.” And he goes on to conclude: […]
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