This page contains materials
intended to facilitate class discussion
(excerpts from readings, outlines of issues,
links to resources, etc.). The materials
are not necessarily the same as the instructor's
teaching notes and are not designed to represent
a full exposition or argument. This page
is subject to revision as the instructor
finalizes preparation. (Last revised
11/18/03
)
Preliminary Class
Business
Course password for restricted online
materials
Readings for Wednesday: Ed Falco,
Olia Lialina, and "hypertext literature"
(essays by Vannevar Bush, George Landow)
Four-page paper due in lecture in
Class 15 (Mon. Feb. 10)
The role of the
computer in media: "new media"
results not from the mere presence of
the computer in the "production,
distribution, and communication"
of media but from new ways of working
with, organizing, and thinking about media
made possible by the computer.
Principles of New
Media:
Micro- or Machine-level Principle:
(1) digitization and "numerical
representation" (sampling/quantization
[also packetization]).
A poem about identity (who
am I? who am I as a writer?)
The problem of identity is discontinuity:
Biographical circumstances of
poem: 1793
1798
("Five years have past; five
summers, with the length / Of five
long winters!")
The biographical, social, philosophical
problem of discontinuity in Wordsworth's
poetry
The solution to the problem of discontinuous
identity is memory:
Memory is a "picture of the
mind":
And
now, with gleams of half-extinguished
thought,
With many recognitions dim
and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture
of the mind revives
again:
While here I stand, not only
with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with
pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there
is life and food
For future years. (ll.
58-65)
Memory composites
or layers together the discontinuous
moments of time in a single, fused
continuity (in Photoshop-speak,
it "flattens" the "layers"):
Five
years have past; five summers,
with the length
Of five long winters! and
again
I hear
These waters, rolling from
their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.
—Once
again
Do I behold these steep
and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded
scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion;
and connect
The landscape with the quiet
of the sky.
The day is come when I again
repose
Here, under this dark sycamore,
and view
These plots of cottage-ground,
these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with
their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue,
and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses.
Once
again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly
hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild:
these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door;
and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from
among the trees!
With some uncertain notice,
as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the
houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave,
where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
(ll.
1-22)
And
so I dare to hope,
Though
changed, no doubt, from
what I was when first
I came among these hills;
when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains,
by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and
the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more
like a man
Flying from something that
he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he
loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of
my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements
all gone by)
To me was all in all. —I
cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding
cataract
Haunted me like a passion:
the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep
and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their
forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and
a love,
That had no need of a remoter
charm,
By thought supplied, nor
any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.
—That time is past,
And all its aching joys
are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures.
Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur,
other gifts
Have followed; for such
loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For
I have learned
To look on nature, not as
in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but
hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of
humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though
of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And
I have felt
A presence that disturbs
me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a
sense sublime
Of something far more deeply
interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light
of setting suns,
And the round ocean and
the living air,
And the blue sky, and in
the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that
impels
All thinking things, all
objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
(ll.
65-102)
Memory is "natural"
and "organic" (the "One
Life")
William Gibson: "Agrippa"
A poem about identity (who
am I? who am I as a writer?)
The problem of identity is discontinuity:
The 4 discontinuous biographical
scenes of the poem:
Gibson's father's childhood
Gibson's own childhood in
Virginia (his father died when
he was six)
Gibson's young manhood in
Virginia
Gibson's move to Canada to
escape the draft
The solution to the problem of identity
is memory:
Memory is not a "picture
of the mind" but media:
a photo album
I hesitated
before untying the bow
that bound this book together.
A black book:
ALBUMS
CA. AGRIPPA
Order
Extra Leaves
By
Letter and Name
A Kodak album of time-burned
black construction paper
(ll.
1-10)
Memory layers the discontinuous
moments of time—e.g., photos
in sections I and III of the poem:
A flat-roofed
shack
Against a mountain ridge
In the foreground are tumbled
boards and offcuts
He must have smelled the pitch,
In August
The sweet hot reek
Of the electric saw
Biting into decades
Next the spaniel Moko
"Moko 1919"
Poses on small bench or table
Before a backyard tree
His coat is lustrous
The grass needs cutting
Beyond the tree,
In eerie Kodak clarity,
Are the summer backstairs
of Wheeling,
West
Virginia
Someone's left a wooden stepladder
out
(ll.
27-44)
But the layers of memory do not
composite, flatten, or fuse. The
inspiration of the work is not organic
Nature but "The Mechanism"—a
mechanism that is the very principle
of discontinuity:
The
Camera:
The mechanism:
stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard,
bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.
(ll.
98-104)
The Gun:
Now in high-ceiling bedrooms,
unoccupied, unvisited,
in the bottom drawers of
veneered bureaus
in cool chemical darkness
curl commemorative
montages of the country's
World War dead,
just as I myself discovered
one other summer in an attic
trunk,
and beneath that every boy's
best treasure
of tarnished actual ammunition
real little bits of war
but also
the mechanism
itself.
The blued finish of firearms
is a process, controlled,
derived from common
rust, but there
under so rare and uncommon
a patina
that many years untouched
until I took it up
and turning, entranced,
down the unpainted
stair,
to the hallway where I swear
I never heard the first
shot.
The copper-jacketed slug
recovered
from the bathroom's cardboard
cylinder of
Morton's
Salt
was undeformed
save for the faint bright
marks of lands
and
grooves
so hot, stilled energy,
it blistered my hand.
The gun lay on the dusty
carpet.
Returning in utter awe I
took it so carefully up
That the second shot, equally
unintended,
notched
the hardwood bannister and
brought
a
strange bright smell of
ancient sap to life
in
a beam of dusty sunlight.
Absolutely
alone
in
awareness of the mechanism.
Like the first time you
put your mouth
on a
woman.
(ll.
105-144)
Agrippa as a "missing link"
work in the evolution of new media:
As we will see when we read Gibson's
Neuromancer, the true "mechanism"
for him is not old media or guns but the
computer.
An updated "translation" of
the beginning of Section 2:
Original:
The mechanism:
stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits
of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.
Translation:
The mechanism:
injection-molded plastic,
Circuits on chipboard, bits of silicon,
A screen
The mouse clicks
Forever
Linking that to this.
Definition of "Composite"
Lev Manovitch, p. 136:
"Once all the elements are ready,
they are composited together into a single
object; that is, they are fitted together
and adjusted in such a way that their
separate identities become invisible. . . .
The result is a single seamless image,
sound, space, or scene."
1798