People are afraid of this city. You know. This is where thugs live, they say. Nothing but crime and ignorance here, crack heads and junkies. Online, in the commentary below articles about the burgeoning violence, people are writing in the local newspaper about bombing this city and plowing it under.

True dat. It’s becoming a ghost town—we’ve lost a significant portion of the population. Buildings are moldering, crumbling to the earth.

I’ve heard the theory that the government wants it empty; that they’re doing something here, and they want it kept on the down-low.

That’s paranoid, conspiracy-theory talk. Only nuts believe that.

Yeah, well, there might be some truth to it. What about that card you found on the tracks?

Well, there is that. I found it on the railroad tracks one afternoon, taking a walk, taking a break from work.

I know.

It was just laying there. I looked it up online when I got home—it was a card that allows NASA personnel to carry firearms. Why would someone working for NASA need a gun?

Homeland security?

Whose homeland?

I’ve noticed, though, that you don’t seem particularly frightened.

I am. I’m scared all the time. I’m just not afraid of the city.

The amazing thing is, jail’s closed, reduced police force, but somehow everything just grinds on as normal.

Do you think it will become a ghost-town? A real ghost-town?

Don’t you feel like it’s haunted?

Ha ha.

What is a ghost?

A memory, maybe. A memory without body, unhinged.

What happened to you when you stopped in front of the abandoned warehouse that night?

I was walking home from the video store—I was doing retail at the time, the work-at-home gig had fallen flat for a while, and I needed cash. The only thing I liked about that job was the long walk home after midnight. I love this city at night, especially now, half-abandoned, littered with decaying buildings, burned and gutted corpses of houses. Over the course of the year I worked there I developed several different routes back home, and would vary which one I followed night by night. One of these routes took me along just about the entire length of Broadway—from the corner at North Ridge Road all the way to the Charles Berry Bridge.

The warehouse squats atop the Nardini underpass, blind, gaping, a dark and obsolete idol forgotten in a useless cul-de-sac, surrendering to time and weather. She’s all rust and red brick, busted windows and shadows locked into misused and half-digested rooms. Bums and kids leaves offerings at her scabbed feet, burst bottles splayed out like cutting flowers. Over the underpass the train tracks creak into the banks of the Black River, leaping in the form of a rickety trestle over the river proper.

You were afraid the first time you crossed the river on that trestle.

So were you. You definitely didn’t like the fact that you could see the water through the grill of the platform.

It’s reference, you’ll notice, that creates vertigo.

I’d never really gotten close to the warehouse before, but of course, it being derelict, it pushed its way into my thoughts every time I passed. Almost as if it were so hollow itself, it had to hammer its way into passing people to hold on to its own sense of objecthood. It had blared at me when I passed it before, until I started rubbernecking every time I walked that way, scanning its windows, even pausing the song on my media player, trying to catch some sort of movement, some kind of sound. There were times I thought I caught glimpses of lights on somewhere in its rotted bowels; a few of these times I tarried, pacing until I could determine that the light was just the streetlights from Broadway, catching on something within. A few of these times I couldn’t make up my mind about it, and wondered, if there was a lit room somewhere within that disastrous hulk, what legitimate purpose could it have. Was there a slum lord in Lorain debauched enough to rent out rooms in that hell of a warehouse? Or was it just squatting junkies?

Finally, one night I determined I would do it. Smoked a fat joint as I left the video store, hotboxing it in the empty parking lot behind Sheffield Centre. I didn’t turn my media player on all the way there. The cannabis embossed everything I saw with a translucent sheen of significance.

So it was the good stuff?

Oh, it was the bomb. Great shit.

Approaching

Blight follows the tracks all through the city, burning the blocks surrounding them until the houses are blackened, creaking, empty. At this end of Broadway storefronts, ripped open by the slow blast of decay, try to board themselves up against the fear, but the fear splinters wood, the fear seeps into beams and splits them from the inside, the fear hollows out everything left behind after the money’s gone, dirtying it. Wild dogs nest in the emptiness.

The warehouse, sitting above the tracks, right where the tracks meet the river, seems to oversee all of this degeneration. Scales of ragged glass still cling to windows here and there, like broken teeth framing a silent inky scream. Boards have been nailed to the windows nearest the pavement, and a sheet of plywood interrupts the front door. It’s one of the higher structures in Lorain; I have to lean backward to see the peeling sign painted on its southern side, a diamond shape proclaiming it the site of wholesalers, said wholesalers long gone. Red bricks climbing into a pink and black sky.

Pink, black, purple, some gold, probably some green.

The colors the steel mill dribbles across the sky. We see them every night. Even when we’re away, when we’re hundreds of miles away, the mill colors our dreams: pink, black, purple, some gold, probably some green.

I stood in front of the boarded-up front door, flicking my media player to record mode. I wanted the sounds, some shred of the atmosphere, some evidence, just in case something extraordinary took place.

So you went there with an expectation of something extraordinary?

We’d been talking about it for weeks, Mary and the kids and I. It’s inescapable. It’s a fathomless smudge even in the day.

But don’t you know how that fucks up any veracity? One, you were high. That’s bad enough, but then you’re already expecting something. Whatever happened could have been made up.

Yeah.

There was no traffic.

Sigh

I stand in front of the boarded-up door. Sigh. A row of windows, these not boarded, stretch across the length of the lot, coming up only to my knee. A basement, I guess. It’s very dark in there. My mind populates the unseen basement with motion, I think; I can see round pillars, chipped islands raised by the yellow moan of the streetlights. I press record. My blood stops. I can’t move anymore. I want to look in the basement. I know I shouldn’t look in the basement. Red brick punctuated by black metal. Sigh. Basement darkness aches. Full of brushing. I can hear pink clouds rubbing over the sky, sighing. I’m bending. I stare into the basement, straining to pick out movement, but the dark stays smooth. I want to run my hand over it. I want to slip through the metal bars and glide in. I no longer have shape or skin. I am only want. The blackness reaches out and grazes my eyes. I know this isn’t happening. I know this is just the drugs, just the brain, coaxing fear out of a dreaded place. This is just cement, brick, metal, broken glass. I need to break it.

I throw the bottled water I’ve been sipping off of the whole walk here into the basement. It thwacks fatly on the pavement, completely submerged from sight. Then there’s the terrible pause, silence sharp as talons, relentless like an owl atop a mouse. Sigh. Suddenly my mouth is very dry.

Broadway, the railroad tracks, hush. If I don’t come home tonight, will they notice?

Somewhere above me, the windows in the warehouse begin to whisper. On the threshold of what I can hear, soft, aspirated voices sigh their way through blasted glass and metal bars.

We are what you see in the edges of your sight when you’re out walking at night. We’re the flash of movement just beyond comprehension, the voice just below listening. We’re the sweetness you sense when you’re high but not high enough, the plateau in poison you know you couldn’t live through . On bridges we’re the fleeting compulsion to hurl yourself. With knives and glass we’re the vivisecting temptation. Come live with us. We can fill your brain to the brim with a sugar beyond thought. We can glaze your nights with a mist spun from orgasm. We’re under everything you do. We can fill your head with a snow so silent and gorgeous you’ll forget your skin. Come lie with us beyond your flesh. Come fly with us beyond your body; leave the mornings behind, the ache, the parch of aging badly in a dead city. Come to us and know us. We live in the secret beyond what it means to be awake. We live in the deliberate liberation. You fear us but you want us. You want to blot yourself out in tides so dissonant and contagious you’ll mingle with the dirt, the mold, the long slow shudder to nothingness that suffuses these blind and hollow carcasses of buildings you admire from the safety of your living. We are what you strain to bury yourself in, the beyond in your dreams. Come here, little boy, and taste the long cold fuck of the grave.

I stand for a moment, listening, swaying. Cannabis bubbles through my skin, lighting up my nerves until I glow from inside like a Christmas tree underwater. I want to step closer to the warehouse. I want to reach between the dark metal bars of the basement and grasp the slender arm beckoning me from that secret within the bricks and glass.

But I know. The beautiful whisper, the white emaciated arm reaching out for me from that deserted basement; it’s all evil. Evil. To follow it is to die.

So I turn, slowly, dazed with fear and longing. And I walk back home in a darkness newly glittering with recognition.

The Evidence

How carefully did you review the recording?

What do you want to hear? There’s nothing in that wav file that matches up with what I experienced. The sound of footsteps, my breath, flick of a lighter initiating a cigarette.

The water bottle?

You can hear it. It falls, echoing, flat. No trace of the voices. Just the wind, my breathing, a few cars sighing through the underpass.

So there’s no evidence any of this happened in the way you just told it?

None whatsoever.

]]> http://www.lewislacook.org/2009/12/rust-and-red-brick/feed/ http://www.lewislacook.org/2009/07/previewwormwood-a-novel/ http://www.lewislacook.org/2009/07/previewwormwood-a-novel/#comments Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:40:42 +0000 admin http://www.lewislacook.org/?p=19 I know, I know: the novel’s dead, right? First the decay of narrative itself, the plunge in faith in any sort of grand structure or unifying point-of-view. Yeah. The novel’s as dead as the Commodore 64.

Wormwood - a novel by Lewis LaCook

Anyone familiar with my work in networked literature knows I have an ongoing fascination with poetry generators–applications that write poems based on datasets and randomizing algorithms. The motivations behind this obsession are very simple, if problematic on the theory tip: a good poetry generator allows the “author” to relinquish control; other than providing a dataset and some compositional templates, the generative poet does not compose the generative poem. The poem is instead composed by a combination of the underlying code and the reader’s initializing of the application.

I have more than a thimbleful of thoughts as to why this is a worthwhile paradigm for new media poetry, and why I often feel new media poets who don’t at least dabble in the margins of this paradigm might be missing some of the point of a networked literature, but those will be saved for a future post. Instead, I’d like to introduce you to a PHP framework that I’ve been using to create the piece, and offer some thoughts on how working in this way requires a different conception of poem composition.

CakePHP is rapid application development framework for creating web apps with PHP, and, though I’m very much a n00b as far as its use goes, so far it seems the best choice for building complex applications quickly and with as little code as possible. CakePHP leverages the Model-View-Controller design pattern to modularize the various components of a software project. This means that the application is coceptualized as having 3 layers: a model, which represents a data source; a controller, which encompasses the logic involved in working with the data from the data source; and a view, which is comprised of all the presentational or visual display functionality. MVC applications separate these layers into seperate files, thus promoting reusability and easy refactoring.

The benefits of using MVC are obvious; you can very quickly set up the bones of your app, and very easily extend and revise it. CakePHP provides a framework for doing this by favoring “convention over configuration”; by applying conventions to file names, database table names, and other assets, CakePHP provides a structure that makes simply creating and writng methods for certain classes build a rich structure for your web application.

I started writing Black River Ghosts with CakePHP initially just to get my head around how to use the framework. I already had the beginnings of a dataset; a file of distinct lines of text i’d started for the project. It became obvious very quickly that I could better make use of CakePHP and the poetry if I broke the lines down into records keyed by grammar. I tagged the poetry with parts of speech: nouns, verbs, prepositions. And then I started adding to the dataset, building a table of lines of poetry that represented (very subjectively) parts of speech to me.

As I worked, I became aware of how composing poetry like this, directly into a database, with the thought that each line, each unit, would go toward composing a sentence, is a fundamentally different way of composing poems linearly, as the popular conception of poetry has taught us. The form imposes some limitations; if you’re relying on “states of consciousness,” you must rely on them in targeted bursts, and you must keep in mind that what you’re writing will be combined and recombined with all of the other elements in the set.

The resultant text, though, definitely has a rush to it. Because I’m working with phrases instead of bare words, the sentences flood with a certain lyricism I’m enjoying. As algorithmically-generated text, these early tests of my code are yielding results I like.

• Your running details waking in the margins of voices long faded during the burning swallow the shadows of unkempt houses the scented epinephrine
• Stigmata oxidizing those lines you forgot after he slept an outline of her into the bed says you have come to suck life from me her corpse

Early on I was a huge fan of the Eclipse development environment. Eclipse, it seemed, sought to be the swiss army knife of dev tools; though it was primarily intended for Java, it’s plugin architecture allowed it to be extended to develop in any language a plugin was provided for. This allowed me to use one application to write in multiple languages and idioms, which was just fine by me. Since the majority of my work is LAMP-related (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl), I found that Eclipse coupled with the PHPEclipse plugin was perfectly suited to the way I write code.

But the PHPEclipse plugin had issues, as I was soon to find out. The version of Eclipse in the Debian and Ubuntu repositories is old, and the PHPEclipse plugin has some issues working on these platforms. This was fine when I used WindowsXP as my primary Desktop OS, but when I started using Linux on the desktop this stopped me in my tracks. And while there are some fine environments out there for the Linux platform, I missed the ease and familiarity of my Eclipse interface.

Luckily, Aptana stepped in to fill the gap. Aptana can be downloaded as either a standalone application or an Eclipse plugin, and was built on the Eclipse platform. And Aptana is geared toward web development, offering a rich set of tools for working with HTML, CSS and Javascript. It’s very AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) aware; in fact, when creating a default web project in Aptana, you’re given the option of downloading and making part of your project many of the most popular and innovative Javascript libraries, such as JQuery and Prototype. And it fits my workflow snugly; not only do I have all of the functionality and extensibility of Eclipse at my disposal, but Aptana has it’s own set of plugins to aid in the development of PHP and Adobe AIR applications, and also features a very rich interface and code snippet library (featuring, thankfully, a whole range of snippets for editing .htaccess files).

Aptana, installed as an Eclipse plugin, works on both Windows and Ubuntu-another selling point for me. I run a dual boot system, and any opportunity to use the same software on both sides of my box is welcome.

Edward Picot brings up some interesting points in his latest essay Play on Meaning? Computer Games as Art up on both furtherfield.org and the Hyperliterature Exchange.  I’m most struck by this passage:

The insistence on interactivity as an important element of hyperliterature - and on computerised role-playing games as a paradigm of interactive art - has always begged a number of questions, however. First of all, champions of “traditional” literature are inclined to argue that new media theorists are starting from an incorrect model of the relationship between author and reader. Readers do not receive text “passively” - they interpret it, and many modern(ist) texts, far from spoon-feeding their readers with predigested messages, are deliberately written in fragmented, ambiguous or enigmatic ways so as to oblige the audience to make interpretations. If this is granted, then the claim that interactive fiction is “liberating” its readers by re-defining their relationship with its authors begins to look simplistic.

I would certainly agree that anyone arguing that text is received passively is starting from an incorrect model–at least as far as more postmodern or post-avant texts go. But I have issues with the idea that this is one of the strong arguments toward an interactive literature.

In my mind, interactivity and generativity are tightly bound. A New Media artwork in which I can simply move sprites around is boring, even if these sprites do contribute somehow in “winning” something (and I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of “winning” an artwork). I’ve always been more interested in getting the reader/user to participate in the generation of the work itself.  This can happen beyond the interactivity of the piece–any New Media artwork that uses an external datastore is particpatory, if only in capturing the zeitgeist of a particular tag on a particular website. You may not be able to alter the datastore from the piece itself, but the datastore itself is changing constantly.

I have a much more materialistic view of the artwork. Yes, with a traditional book, interpretation will change the way the text is received. The text in the book, however, does not change; it will materially always be the same. A New Media Poem should subvert this–there’s no hope of closure with new media poetry, because the very material of a good new media poem is dynamic.

Picot recognizes this here when, in a discussion on the work of Rod Humble, he states, “To a child, the phrase “Let’s play!” means something different from ‘Let’s play a game!’ The second phrase means ‘Let’s play a game with predefined rules’, whereas the first means ‘Let’s have fun’, and may involve rules or may not.” One of the reason’s I’ve never really explored a game aesthetic seriously in my work is because of this very fact–the very concept of “game” requires the constraint of rules. Rules are stable, and with rules one is given a sense of closure. All games can either be won or lost–which implies that the idea of closure itself is inherent in the game form itself.

New Media theoretician Lev Manovich wrote a famous essay that I think is all-too-overlooked in discussions of New Media art and literature. Database as a Symbolic Form explores the marked differences between narrative art and a database art. Manovich discusses this very point that nags Picot:

…Computer games, for instance, are experienced by their players as narratives. In a game, the player is given a well-defined task - winning the match, being first in a race, reaching the last level, or reaching the highest score. It is this task which makes the player experience the game as a narrative. Everything which happens to her in a game, all the characters and objects she encounters either take her closer to achieving the goal or further away from it. Thus, in contrast to the CD-ROM and Web databases, which always appear arbitrary since the user knows that additional material could have been added without in any way modifying the logic of the database, in a game, from a user’s point of view, all the elements are motivated ( i.e., their presence is justified).
Often the narrative shell of a game (”you are the specially trained commando who has just landed on a Lunar base; your task is to make your way to the headquarters occupied by the mutant base personnel…”) masks a simple algorithm well-familiar to the player: kill all the enemies on the current level, while collecting all treasures it contains; go to the next level and so on until you reach the last level. Other games have different algorithms. Here is an algorithm of the legendary “Tetris”: when a new block appears, rotate it in such a way so it will complete the top layer of blocks on the bottom of the screen making this layer disappear. The similarity between the actions expected from the player and computer algorithms is too uncanny to be dismissed. While computer games do not follow database logic, they appear to be ruled by another logic - that of an algorithm. They demand that a player executes an algorithm in order to win.

Here is the crux of why I dislike New Media art that explores the game meme. It’s a narrative art, and much of it’s narrative technique, while not linear, smacks of the novel. In fact, I can see where one could write a New Media novel as a game–but poetry is not a novel, is not fiction, and doesn’t require narrative. The exploration of a poem resists closure and teleology at its core–no matter what form it’s in. The New Media Poem is a wild, aimless child.

There are four kinds of word discrimination, all of which are to be avoided because they are alike unreal. First there are the words indicating individual marks which rise from discriminating forms and signs as being real in themselves and, then, becoming attached to them. There are memory-words which rise from the unreal surroundings which come before the mind when it recalls some previous experience. Then there are words growing out of attachment to the erroneous distinctions and speculations of the mental processes. And finally, there are words growing out of inherited prejudices as seeds of habit-energy have accumulated since beginningless time, or which had their origin in some long forgotten clinging to false-imagination and erroneous speculations.

Then there are words where there are no corresponding objects, as for instance, the hare’s horns, a barren woman’s child, etc.–there are no such things but we have the words, just the same. Words are an artificial creation; there are Buddha-lands where there are no words. In some Buddha-lands ideas are indicated by looking steadily, in others by gestures, in still others by a frown, by a movement of the eyes, by laughing, by yawning, by the clearing of the throat, or by trembling. For instance, in the Buddha-land of the Tathagata Samantabhadra, Bodhisattvas, by a dhyana transcending words and ideas, attain the recognition of all things as un-born and they, also, experience various most excellent Samadhis that transcend words. Even in this world such specialised beings as ants and bees carry on their activities very well without recourse to words. No, Mahamati, the validity of things is independent of the validity of words.

Moreover, there are other things that belong to words, namely, the syllable-body of words, the name-body of words, and the sentence-body of words. By. syllable-body is meant that by which words and sentences are set up or indicated: there is a reason for some syllables, some are mnemonic, and some are chosen arbitrarily. By name-body is meant the object depending upon which a name-word obtains its significance, or in other words, name-body is the “substance” of a name-word. By sentence-body is meant the completion of the meaning by expressing the word more fully in a sentence. The name for this sentence-body is suggested by the footprints left in the road by elephants, horses, people, deer, cattle, goats, etc. But neither words nor sentences can exactly express meanings, for words are only sweet sounds that are arbitrarily chosen to represent things, they are not the things themselves, which in turn are only manifestations of mind. Discrimination of meaning is based upon the false-imagination that these sweet sounds which we call words and which are dependent upon whatever subjects they are supposed to stand for, and which subjects are supposed to be self-existent, all of which is based on error. Disciples should be on their guard against the seductions of words and sentences and their illusive meanings, for by them the ignorant and the dull-witted become entangled and helpless as an elephant floundering about in the deep mud.

Since Samhain is yet again upon us, I decided I would finish up this track that I’ve been toiling away at for the past month. Haunted with spooky sounds and a near/neo disco groove, Grayson Hall rises up from the murky depths of the old house at Collinwood to boogie her way back into New Media Poetry. Yes, I know: another Dark Shadows themed bit of audio. But Grayson Hall seems intrinsic to the camp that was this gothic ’60s soap opera, and she deserves to get down with her bad self. Of course, I just couldn’t resist.

Barnabas’ Affliction

Excellent, somewhat trippy video art from Donna Kuhn!

Of course, I don’t believe that my work is devoid of discriminatory criteria. These art objects come out of living in a Postmodern era–a huge, raucous pastiche of an age, in which no single ideology is dominant, thus allowing the poet to slip in and out of modes of expression like salmon struggling upstream. The postmodern poet often suffers from a compulsion to irony, and who can blame her: she lives in a world of kaeidoscopic shifts, where reference breaks down in the rush of styles, dictions, and ideologies.

Now, anyone TRULY familiar with my work can also see that through it all runs a pungent strain of the Romantic. This can seem at odds with much Postmodern art; after all, doesn’t that intrinsic irony imply a certain detachment? Can love really exist among all these shattered billboards?

I believe that this is the question I’m trying to answer.

To that end I’ve chosen to use the immensely popular WordPress blogging software as my platform, as opposed to the previous incarnation of this site, which used Joomla. While Joomla is quite a robust and flexible system, I found that it had a lot of features I didn’t neccessarily need or want for this website.

This New Media Poetry website will focus exclusively on, well, New Media Poetry–my own work, of course (and those of you who wandered into this site looking for my new work won’t be disappointed–as the site gels I’ll be getting posts up about the old work soon enough), but also some reviews of other new media poems on the web, some thoughts on the technologies involved in creating these works, and anything else I want to throw in. This site aims to not only showcase my own work, but to serve as a periodic exploration of what new media poetry exists on the web, it’s direction, polarities, and practitioners.

To that end, enjoy the spiffy new design (handcrafted using the default WordPress theme, some custom markup, and the JQuery JavaScript library) and keep coming back for more news, reviews, and opinion on those poems that don’t quite fit on the page…