Sept 1st - Vampire Calculus

Vampire Calculus

Begin program "Vampire Calculus"

{I shall bite your daughters into something else.
I shall bite your sons into something else again...
I am omitted from your vision. I remain
a thought behind the wind,
a voice inside the rain:
whispering to your young folk
as they choose to upgrade
until all human weakness falls away
like the dry beech leaves faced with
a sudden sexy springtime.

I read their warm pink mechanisms
I write them out again
in grey, not of death or age,
but of mathematics: a symbol
for every part of the soul
and the whole wrapped up in the big square brackets
which say: this far, this far is human,
but no further...

at least until they say three times
they're ready to transcend.
I have seen the future and it's all transhuman fucking,
every millisecond
every imaginable way,

( ) businesses
that are also games,
and people
who are also art

but behind it all the simplest, most carnivorous algorithm:
One less of them;
One more of us;
Repeat, while not all upgraded.

} End program "Vampire Calculus"

Compile
Execute

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 22nd - Alice through the mirror-plane

This is, of course, a sonnet -- although I've sneaked an extra rhyme into the penultimate couplet.  The prompt here was for a mirror poem and like every other living human, I love the tone of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland...



(Does Liddell rhyme with fiddle?  Probably not, but there's the competing constraint of the text making some sort of sense...)



Alice through the mirror-plane


A rabbit and an anti-rabbit, go
around the tree and down the wormhole.  Where
can such a transformation lead? — Please show
your working as you think it through.  I share
your nervousness around the silvered glass
and note what care we're taking with the frame.
We pause and whiskered heads are asked to pass
their eyes across each step as we arrange

the kit.  We all wear white gloves on our shift
and antique pocket watches we have found
provide a way to check your drift.  Keep cool!
You're near normal, still grounded in old-school
reality—you'll find we never fiddle
our safety checks: we all recall Miss Liddell.

NaPoWriMo - 2017 - April 18th - Possible taxonomies of the 1957 Yorkshire coast

I went to a writing workshop, some years back now.  One of the exercises was to watch a "British Transport Film" similar if not identical to this:

-and write a poem in response.

It's the "poem" part that may be dubious here.  Sometimes my response to something is more to its style than its content and seeing this I was struck by how much it was unique to the period.  So I started thinking about how people might present the same information in other styles...  and I hit on the idea of an overly abstract and academic study.

So what I am saying is that there may be nobody else in the world except me who gets this...

...but it is a list poem and you could imagine it came from the introduction of some dry-as-bones volume that a tweed clad professor has been labouring over for the best part of a decade..

---

Possible taxonomies of the 1957 Yorkshire coast

• those involving sun hats
• those involving beer
• those involving knobbly knees
• those involving simple foodstuffs : apples, sandwiches, cheese
• as above, but also fish and chips
• those involving model ships or boats
• those involving racquets
• those involving balls
• those involving young ladies
• excluding the most popular of all
• those involving sand
• with buckets and spades
• with towels
• with sandwiches
• those planned a year in advance
• those involving dance with various degrees of skill
• the subset involving omnibuses
• those involving ice cream
• the subset with also small children
• and the subset of those in which a seagull features
• those involving other creatures:
• donkeys
• crabs
• minute fish
• those in which you drink too much, and wish you hadn't
• those featuring special boys or girls
• appearing at just the wrong moment
• or where they don't arrive at all
• as yet to be categorised:
• sea temperature
• sunburn
• chilblains
• lower back pain in the context of luggage
• all the grades of rain

NoPoWriMo - 2017- April 5th - Our correspondent interviews the famously private poet

Our correspondent interviews the famously private poet


Question: You have before said, which is to say
that people quote you expressing the idea
and you've elaborated on other occasions
that this idea, or conception, I should say

has seemed to have a life, a meaning beyond
its origin.  Would you comment on that?  But first...
Question: In your work, as received by the audience
there often seems to be an almost pause

a moment of collection before expression
where as a reader one is forced to look
for alternative interpretation.  How
do you imagine all that we imagine

sitting as we are so... figuratively
remote from you there with the pen...?  Which makes
me recall!  I have to ask, when ideas strike
-- sorry, this is a different question --

as an idea is dawning in your mind,
what do you gasp of it at first?  A shadow
a mere imagining with every part
to be filled in, or is it more Athena

all springing fully formed with rhymes and scansion
already there in place?  But I see we're out
of time and I wanted to ask about your book!
Never mind, I have enjoyed, it's been my privilege.

Essay: Future Technology #1

Future Technology #1

(or The Shape of Things to Come)

Future technology, earlier today

Civilisation, back in the '90s

If, back in the 90s, you played Sid Meier's Civilisation, on a DOS computer, and if you were very good (Rosemary regularly achieved Moon landings before 1730) then it was possible to reach the end of the technology tree...

(Aside, for the uninitiated:  a "technology tree" is a set of available upgrades in a video game.  The player typically has some sort of resources to spend on upgrades and chooses which to develop next.  Upgrades give benefits in the game and unlock the later technologies.  It's just like life.)

However, it is a tenet of geek philosophy that there is no end to the technology tree, and game designers are a sub-species of geek, so beyond the end of the tree lay more technologies:

• Future Technology #1
• Future Technology #2
• And so on...

They served no function, except bonus points...

...but I loved this idea ever since I first saw it.  Future Technology #1 is wonderfully non-specific, whilst saying precisely what it means.

FT#1 could be a pocket hadron collider, smartpants (tm), or an ambiguous phase psycho-encapsulator (which we all could use, if you think about it...)

It could be tomorrow, or a thousand years hence.

And if we achieve FT#1 then there's FT#2 (henceforth to be known as FT#1).

So what is FT#1 for poetry?  I feel strongly that there ought to be something: a killer app for the Sonnet that takes it somewhere it's never been before and makes everybody say:  Well obviously I bought one; I can't understand why nobody thought of it sooner!

Which is not to say that poetry-1.0 (poet stands at front and declaims) or poetry-2.0 (words arranged on page) have had their day.  Far from it, poetry-1.1 (poet on radio/TV/YouTube) is quite popular, and 2.1 (words arranged on internet) has a variety of interesting new angles, but neither of those feels like a real FT, they've basically still just words in sequence, or words arranged in a space.

So every now and then I have a go.  I started with an example of animated poetry, but while that was pretty popular, it's basically a movie and as nicely as self-editing text works for that idea, I am not sure it extends to many other poems...  (see however Kinematic Typograthy.)

It ought to be possible to do more than mere animation, and Jenn Zed (of whom more later) has suggested that videos turn the poetry consumer off.  I hadn't realised it, but I recognise it in myself, and I think it is similar to poetry vs. lyrics  An element of time travel is involved in reading a poem — the eye tracks up and down the page, effectively forwards and back in time — which it can't when listening to a song, as the music proceeds at constant rate.

Something similar applies to videos.  A voice recording of a poem, accompanied by still text, doesn't suffer quite so badly, because the eye can still do a little out-of-order processing but a moving video is really hard to get right, because it is simultaneously distracting the eye, and locking the words into a fixed time-frame.

For lyrics, the fix was to adjust the words, you fit them into the experience already created by the music...

However for poetry-FT#1 I want the reverse.  What happens when we fit the medium as closely as possible to the words?  If the user (reader) needs to control time, then why not let them?

Well I don't know.

I'm still working on it.  It isn't easy.  It's not that poetry's difficult (I think that goes without saying) or that technology is hard to master (although certainly it can be awkward.)  The real problem is, in a world where:

this or this or even this
are easy to achieve...

...what do they mean?  It's more or less a brand new medium, so it doesn't have any established rules.  I'm basically inventing everything from scratch, albeit with wanton theft from books, films, video games and comic books.

Anyway, a new attempt on FT#1 is under way.  I am working with the aforementioned Jenn Zed (who has poetic inclinations and is an accomplished artist...)  This is "mixed media" by which I mean "words and images and Javascript and HTML and CSS and mp3 and anything else that seems to fit..."

It's not huge, but it's slow going...  It will probably take at least another six months, but until then:

Installing FT#1
25%
Please Wait

Person or persons unknown

This is an experimental piece...  I confidently predict you'll either get it or shake your head sadly and walk away.


The inspiration for this was: "This they now do."  Again you'll either recognise the reference or you were born too late, sorry.

---

---

Person or persons unknown


I

The story so far...


II

Fleeing her parent's tiny lives in Bootle—
she meets a confidence man called—
which they steal from a warehouse behind—
they hot-wire a car and flee.

Years later, her humdrum marriage—
by strangely precise anonymous messages—
an embarrassing previous life. She panics and—
small room above a shop in Manchester.

Brooding over her predicament she flounders—
searching everywhere without—
in desperation turns to her former—
a dangerous last-ditch plan.

This they now do.

Chances upon a derelict—
sneaks past the elderly night-watchman—
to at length discover me, who she blames for—
She demands: Tell me now.  What is my life about?


III

Clearing my throat, I explain:

Fleeing Bootle you left middle-class parents—
where you met an adventurer called—
which you acquired from a man in a pub—
you borrowed a car and left town.

Years later, with your husband—
disturbing anonymous messages—
an almost-forgotten previous life. Worried you—
a flat above a shop in Manchester.

Some time later you decide—
but were unable to find—
in desperation you turned to—
who hatched a plan.

This you now did.

You were able to find an abandoned—
avoided the caretaker—
so that you could meet me here—
But tell me in your own words, and maybe I can explain.


IV

Eyes wide, she licks her lips and speaks:

I was reluctant to leave Bootle, I missed my Mum and—
with a fascinating older man called—
which we found in sacks beneath the pier—
we bought a car and moved on.

Years later, I was happily—
wild and disturbing anonymous messages—
my exciting, early life.  I had to investigate and I—
an apartment in central Manchester.

After some thought I resolved—
but careful investigation did not—
until, inspired, I looked-up my old—
I conceived a daring plan.

This we now did.

Painstaking research uncovered a late Victorian—
past the guards and tricked my way into—
to finally confront you.
Now explain!  What is the meaning of my story?


V

She is ready.  There is no choice.
Gesturing her to an armchair,
I compose my thoughts and prepare to recount...


VI

...the story so far.