Thursday, November 30, 2006
When the poet disappears
Machine poetry's real threat is that it potentially supplants conventional poets--unlike in the past when regardless of what poetry was trying to become, there were always authors behind it with aesthetic philosophies and intentional writing practices. Will and stance can be discussed, praised, or ridiculed. Poets can be revered or dismissed, even engaged in conversation and dialog. In the past the critic and the poet have always had Williams' "common language to unravel." But not so with the computer, or more precisely, software, which is incapable of responding to Williams admonition to "Invent!" Even Wimsatt and Beardsley, while dismissing the poet's intention as at all relevant, postulate that "a poem does not come into existence by accident"--that there is a "designing intellect" behind it. Up until now no one has really believed that the author is dead. But now the machine jeopardizes the implicit assumption behind every critical thought--that there is a real author with a real intention somewhere in the room. Absent the author, the critic risks losing everything, or worse, looking foolish.
In trying to engage literary scholars in discussions about machine poetry, I have been most surprised with how uncomfortable it makes so many of them. On one occasion I discussed my plan for submitting machine poems to literary journals (as a way of testing their quality) with a major postmodernist scholar and editor of a first-tier journal dedicated to postmodernist thinking. His response was that that was not a valid test, because it's impossible to gauge the quality of an author's work on one or two poems--yet his journal accepts, all the time, work judged on a single submission. A scholar of seventeenth century English literature, in response to my question about how he would feel about a successful poetry machine, simply (and honestly) said, "I wouldn't like it." I discussed with another poet and scholar of contemporary poetry my goal of getting machine poetry to the point where it was indistinguishable from human poetry. His confidence response: I could tell the difference.
Over time I came to understand that these people were wary of being hoaxed. The clear fear is of being fooled--of the embarrassment of reading a machine poem and finding that it takes one's breath away. If all those years of preparation and study hasn't prepared a critic to detect a counterfeit poem, then of what value was it all? And of what value is she? There is a misperception at work in all of this. Machine poetry is not counterfeit--it is as real as any poem any human poet might compose and as deserving of appreciation.
Computational poetry attracts unwanted computational guests
I've turned word verification on for comments. We're starting to get spam comments, which is not a matter of increased popularity (we have about 5 regular readers)--it just shows the bots finally got around to us. Oh well....
We've only had a half-dozen or so comments in our entire history, so I don't expect this to inconvenience anyone much, but I apologize anyway.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
On the death of a beautiful woman
More testing:
She is beautiful.
She is beautiful.
She is beautiful.
She is beautiful.
She is beautiful.
The beautiful cleaning lady dies.
She is beautiful.
But the beautiful cleaning lady affords.
The ugly nativity writes.
The ugly man earns.
The ugly nativity attracts.
She is ugly.
She is ugly.
She is ugly.
She is ugly.
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
First steps forward
I've written a test module that takes all of the syntactic descriptions in a given grammar and writes a line utilizing each. Pretty boring, huh? Think again. Here's a sample.
the simple stranger
the ravelling
wedlock or loneliness
to transport is to review
to annul
With the right cover letter, I could get this published.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Another asset in jeopardy
Over on Free Space Comix, Brian Stefans has announced his print-on-demand book, It's not Time. What's interesting about this (aside from the fact that just about anything Brian does is interesting) is his statement of motivation, that he's been "enjoying print design much more than web work lately."
Back to his roots I guess, even though he has done some outstanding e-lit, most notably Kludge. I've posted on Kludge before: affectatiyuns can be dangertus. It's a great piece (Kludge, not my post) not just for the concept, but for the writing that supports it.
But what's a guy to do when he's a better writer than technician? As much as I would like to see more e-lit from Brian, print-lit is what he's best at--and where he should expend his efforts.
And so e-lit suffers another setback. Will e-lit be like the collaborative discussion sites that have turned into mere bulletin boards? Once so full of promise--now a promise broken. Seems the electron only lightly bonds to the author--as it does to the scholar.
Lose the writers and we lose the lit part. I fear that when all that's left is the e part, we'll just be second-rate magicians working the same old and tired parlor tricks.
Oh well....
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
For want of a '++' or When will I ever learn
Last night etc3 wrote its first piece from a grammar with two syntactic structures. Prior to that it had written pieces using different structures, but only from grammars with one of them. The code was there to do two--it just hadn't been exercised (or so I thought). I spent much of yesterday writing a GUI to manage grammar content, so I wouldn't have to keep keying it in via SQL commands. Got that to work and used it to link up two structures with a single grammar. (I'd previously tested each independently.) This was the first important test and of course, the program crashed right out of the box.
The call stack showed a problem in the constructor of one of the TAG nodes (a nominal-pronoun node). I was looking for a "composition preferences" object that doesn't get linked to a tree until the complete grammar loads. I should have known better: Never do work in a constructor. (During testing of that node, I'd hard-coded a preference object where it could see it, but after the test, moved it to where it should be, as an attribute of a "composition plan" object. Ok, that's easy to fix, right? Just extract a method that used that object and call it from places where the node wants some direction on how it should realize itself.
Still crashed.
This time the problem appeared to be in the grammar factory, which uses a node factory to build up its TAG trees. From the stack trace it looked like the grammar needed to know about the preferences object and the preferences object about the grammar. This was not good. Bidirectional associations almost always means a seriously flawed design. Oh boy.
An hour of stepping the code: There it was. The code that loads the trees first gets the names of all of the trees for a given grammar, then gets the Xml for each tree (since a tree is just nested nodes, Xml was the logical choice), which it stores in an array allocated the length of the number of names. The problem was that in spinning the array of names, I wasn't incrementing the index into the array of Xml definitions, so the second just overwrote the first. The second was null and when the grammar tried to load it, got very confused.
This kind of thing happens all the time and this post isn't just an old and grey programmer spinning yarns. What interests me about this phenomenon is how seriously a minor flaw xml[i], instead of xml[i++] can complete derail a large software development project. If this were such a project, there would be one team writing the Xml interface, another the grammar, another the rules of composition and so on. Some investigation shows that the problem does not appear to be isolated to a particular component, but is a function of two or more component interactions. So we have meetings to figure out what each other is doing, review the UML that supports the programming, assign testers to devise more test cases to verify that there is indeed a general problem not specific to a given grammar, and on and on and on.
Brooks noted that most programmers think they can build systems more quickly than large teams. But what they do better is write better programs. Systems are a whole 'nother thing. But sometimes, when I catch a problem such as the one I wrestled with last night, I wonder if maybe the programmer is on to something.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Speed is expensive. How fast do you want to go?
Etc3 is composing complete poems (none that I'm prepared to share just yet--the grammars have to expand a bit before I do that--about a month, I'd say).
But SHAZAMMM! Etc3 composes 8-line, 2-stanza poems, of complete and grammatically perfect sentences in about 6 seconds (fastest so far was 3 seconds). Etc2 by comparison would take 8-12 minutes to generate the same amount of output. That's a 2-order-of-magnitude improvement in performance. Oh, are we ever proud of that. But of course we were proud of Etc2 as well, since its grandfather took about 30 minutes to compose a single sentence.
We could not have achieved this much improvement by "fixing" Etc2. It took a complete rewrite: New design philosophy, new language models, new grammar, new database, new everything. Very expensive, inviting the question How fast do you want to go? We'll see.
What interests me most about this is that I am not an incompetent developer. I know how to fine-tune a database, program for performance, design a class hierarchy that conforms to the basic principles of OOP (and when OOP is not the right way). What I don't know (but am starting to glimpse) is what the primary abstractions in an ALG system are.
It always comes down to understanding the application domain. Give me a mediocre programmer who really understands the workings of the business for which he or she is coding over the technical star who thinks that a couple of meetings with end users is all that's needed--that the real value-added is in the syntax and elegant composition.
Just as with natural language, knowing what you are writing about is actually pretty important to the success of a text. And to the success of a computer program.
Friday, November 17, 2006
TAG, you're it
A nice little benefit of using a tree aligning grammar (TAG) in an ALG system is that you don't have to code separate semantic and surface realizers. Since each node in a given tree knows what it is and is whatever it is in a way that is only loosely coupled with other nodes, it pretty much has all the information it needs to assign itself a semiotic value and a surface form all in one operation. There's the little wrinkle of agreement (verbs to subjects, referring expressions, and the like) but that can be handled in the TAG structure as well. I assign such nodes IDs and IDs of their "partners," then link them up with a small bridge class that lives in a collection in the tree itself (outside the nodes). A node already knows if it wants to agree with something else and so just asks of the tree if it has a partner and if it does, asks the partner for information. The partner passes back an array of Objects that the requester spins through looking for pertinent data. If it finds it, it sets its surface realization context to it (them)--if not, it just falls over into its defaults. Wicked fast, really easy to code and very, very OOP: No node other than the root is ever aware of its place in the tree--it just does what it's told. Kind of like what folks have been trying to get me to do since I was 16--without any luck at all.
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Cost of the first poem
Steve Kimbrough does a lot of different kinds of work in textual analysis. In papers and conversations about his work in Formal Language for Business Communication, he often refers to the "cost of the first transaction." In any system that performs distributed (or for that matter local) transactions, that system has to be built first. When the first transaction is performed, its cost is not just the transaction cost associated with that individual activity, but all of the costs incurred in designing and building the system. So if it cost $1,000,000 to build the system, that first transaction has cost you $1,000,000+. The price goes down fairly quickly. Upon executing the second transaction, the per-transaction cost is $500,000+. But you never know for sure if the system is really going to work until you get to that first transaction.
ALG systems are like that. I'm approaching the point in etc3 where it will compose its first complete poem. There have been some fragments from unit tests, but nothing that exercises this new system as I intend for it to. I've been working since May, just on the infrastructure and formatting of the source texts. Every time I begin work on a new component, I have to write several support modules. For example, I broke down and used pronunciations in some stemming and inflecting modules. That meant creating a table of pronunciations and then loading it from a pronouncing dictionary and then writing a table maintenance utility to add words from the source texts that weren't in there. Whew....
The cost of finding out if this monster can compose a decent poem is high: Seven months of database stuff, document planners, poetic forms classes, TAG trees, TAG nodes, word classes, randomizers, enums, utilities, etc., etc., etc., with nary a poetic moment. Getting this right takes time, practice, and lots of patience. Either that or a grizzled old coder driven just to the edge who doesn't quite get it that to most folks he makes no sense at all.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Un-criticism - the best of Bruce Andrews
Literary critics have learned their vocabulary lessons well, as is obvious in their responses to what is truly new in writing, which is what we really want to know about. A handy example: Kenneth Goldsmith. Goldsmith proclaimed in November of 2000, "I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity" ("Uncreativity as a Creative Practice"). He was in the midst of Day, his latest project, in which he was transcribing the September 9 edition of the New York Times, "word by word, letter by letter." His goal? To be "…as uncreative in the process as possible." Day is only one of his several uncreative texts, among them: Fidget (the written record of all of his movements on June 16, 1997) , Soliloquy (the written record of everything he said during the week of April 15, 1996), and The Weather (a transcription of radio weather forecasts broadcast between the winter solstices of 2002 and 2003).
What constitutes an appropriate critical response to such work? Can Arnold's dictum that real criticism tries "…to know the best that is known and thought in the world" and "…to lead him [man] towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things" in any way obtain? Is a reasoned critical response even possible?
The editors of Open Letter think so. They dedicated an entire issue to discussions of Goldsmith's work that "analyze the conceptual question from a variety of angles: close readings of single texts; comparative studies; and creative responses." ( The reader may feel free to pause at this point to release the pressure of imminent laughter. My intent in this post is not to ridicule or belittle any critical position; but if it were, quoting this sentence without comment would pretty much do the job.) A review of some of these discussions can be instructive in how the community of literary critics actually responds to disruptive literary practices. Some excerpts:
From Marjorie Perloff's "Goldsmith's The Weather": Within this frame, the struggle to survive, as defined by the daily weather within which, rich or poor, young or old, citizens of the New York area function, is dramatized in all its boring detail: rare is the week that there isn't an unexpected shower, a crust of frozen snow, a swollen river, or some other impending disaster. Listen to the weather forecast and you cannot avoid the beginnings, middles, and ends of Aristotelian narrative….
These are all very smart people, whose work I deeply respect. But their tedious arguments are phrased in the vocabulary of the last period of literary innovation, post-Structuralism. Faced with Goldsmith's success as an artist, they respond in the safe language of what it is they know. Drucker, a significant presence in the realm of experimental literature and a foremost expert in the artist's book as both creator and critic, doesn't even discuss Goldsmith in her essay. The excerpt above is from an end note. Her essay is a meditation on the concept of conceptual art itself (something she is especially good at), not a critique of Goldsmith.
Christine Wertheim in "Unboring and the new Dream of Stone or if literature does politics as literature, what kind of gender politics does the current literature of the boring enact?" explicitly uses her opportunity to establish a feminist position on the kind of work Goldsmith does-essentially that it is not new. "The point here is not to criticize Goldsmith's work, but simply to argue that, just as we cannot have a classical form of art in a democratic era, so also we don't yet have one free of gender anxiety, however neutral it may appear on the page" (132). And concludes: "a literature of the 'boring with all the boring taken out' is linked to a symbolic order that places men as itinerant voyeurs, coldly copying the ephemera of a meaning- and creativity-sucking figure they really can't confront, for they always abject it into the feminine form" (138). Like Drucker, Wertheim is comfortable with what she knows and is good at, in her case the gender polemic. So that's what her paper is about. Face to face with what she herself lacks the vocabulary to confront, she reverts to the status quo.
Lacking new tools with which to pry open the enigma of Kenneth Goldsmith, these writers use the ones already in their toolbox. Born and refined in the debate of the last forty years, these responses are more illustrative of their writers' critical and political theories than valid criticisms of the work under discussion. Of enormous value in discovering the best that could be known and thought about the avant of the last generation, they disappoint now. None of them gets it. Almost none.
From Craig Dworkin's "Zero Kerning": I want to suggest in these paragraphs, is the concept of the interval. To read Goldsmith's oeuvre, at a certain remove, reveals a consistent concern with spacing-with the collapse of distances into equal measures, and the differences and repetitions subsequently legible within regimes of periodic regulation.
From Molly Schwartzburg's "Encyclopedic Novelties": "Day [like Soliloquy] also resembles Ulysses. It is a book whose 'action' takes place on a single day-not Bloomsday of course, but a day in a great city, framed through the transcription experiences of Kenneth Goldsmith, protagonist. But the parallel with Ulysses is less complete, since it doesn't contain a masturbation scene as Fidget does.
From Johanna Drucker's "Un-Visual and Conceptual": The term "un-visual" rhymes deliberately with Kenneth Goldsmith's term "un-creative." His work forms the subtext of this paper, as will be evident within a Perecian scheme.
These are all very smart people, whose work I deeply respect. But their arguments are phrased in the vocabulary of the last period of literary innovation, post-Structuralism. Faced with Goldsmith's success as an artist, they respond in the safe language of what it is they know. Drucker, a significant presence in the realm of experimental literature and a foremost expert in the artist's book as both creator and critic, doesn't even discuss Goldsmith in her essay. The excerpt above is from an end note. Her essay is a meditation on the concept of conceptual art itself (something she is especially good at), not a critique of Goldsmith.
Christine Wertheim in "Unboring and the new Dream of Stone or if literature does politics as literature, what kind of gender politics does the current literature of the boring enact?" explicitly uses her opportunity to establish a feminist position on the kind of work Goldsmith does--essentially that it is not new. "The point here is not to criticize Goldsmith's work, but simply to argue that, just as we cannot have a classical form of art in a democratic era, so also we don't yet have one free of gender anxiety, however neutral it may appear on the page." And concludes: "a literature of the 'boring with all the boring taken out' is linked to a symbolic order that places men as itinerant voyeurs, coldly copying the ephemera of a meaning- and creativity-sucking figure they really can't confront, for they always abject it into the feminine form." Like Drucker, Wertheim is comfortable with what she knows and is good at, in her case the gender polemic. So that's what her paper is about. Face to face with what she herself lacks the vocabulary to confront, she reverts to the status quo.
Lacking new tools with which to pry open the enigma of Kenneth Goldsmith, these writers use the ones already in their toolbox. Born and refined in the debate of the last forty years, these responses are more illustrative of their writers' critical and political theories than valid criticisms of the work under discussion. Of enormous value in discovering the best that could be known and thought about the avant of the last generation, they disappoint now. None of them gets it. Almost none.
Bruce Andrews's "from Coldest" is a ten-page list of a column of words, each absent its initial letter and alphabetized by the new initial, initially second, letter. The piece is interesting in and of itself . It's impossible to read the list without filling in the gaps those missing first letters make. Just try:
luster-fuck
luuuured
ly-by-night
mack-back
mashproof
mpala
mpteen
nafu
This is not a refusal to respond, but a response aimed at a kind of criticism appropriate for un-creative writing. Wherever these words came from and whatever their original sequencing (as a linear text or as an alphabetized list), they are no longer that, just as Goldsmith's Day is not the New York Times and The Weather is not a weather report broadcast. Andrews gets it right: The only reaction appropriate to un-creative writing is un-criticism. And with absolute bull's eye accuracy he helps the student of un-creative writing come to grips with exactly what is "best" about it. What Andrews "gets" is that radical literary innovation demands a corresponding radical change in the way readers and critics engage with it. Approaching Day with readings that attempt to assess its value in terms of meaning and narration makes no more sense that judging William Carlos Williams on how well his poems attach to the tradition of conventional forms.
Monday, November 13, 2006
A milestone
Erica recently wrote her 1000th online poem. A couple from the last week "Joyful" and "Of she." She certainly does speak her mind.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Courage is as courage does
During his talk Friday evening at Slought, Barrett Watten, referred to (and showed) the Bruce Andrews Fox News clip. Watten seemed to be saying that Andrews is to be lauded for resisting Red baiting (or academic baiting) by deflecting O'Reilly's questions. And that "resistance" like this is a good thing. And somewhere in the talk Allen Ginsburg was referenced as another example of a brave soldier in the army of righteousness. (I made up the soldier part, but you get the idea.)
On my...
When Ginsburg said "Amercia, go fuck yourself with your atom bomb" and "I smoke marijuana every chance I get," he was taking a real chance--of imprisonment or personal harm. Real resistance implies personal risk. What's Andrews, with all of the civil protections tenure affords risking? Not much, I think.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
And the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew they were naked
In print writing, the text is eminently there. Whether clear or ambiguous, literary or profane, original or derivative, explicative or self-conscious, the text is perfectly and completely accessible. The reader and other artists are free (within legal constraints) to do with it as they see fit. They can adopt its stylistic conventions. (Shortly after Giacomo da Lentini wrote the first Italian sonnet, someone else advantaged themselves of the form. It skipped across the English Channel, eventually making its way to America to reach its expressive pinnacle in John Peale Bishop.) They can quote it. They can allude to it. They can parody it. They can extract new essentials from it and parlay those into new, entirely different texts. They can usurp its accidents, welding them to their own forms and message. They can ignore it.
The point is that in legacy writing, the text is always there, which is often not so with e-writing. Of the 60 pieces included in the Electronic Literature Organization’s recent Electronic Literature Collection: Volume I, only a very few include source code, and several of those are Java Script files, client-side scripts that must be available to the browser. This is the proprietary-code mindset that seeks to increase developer value via secrecy, in effect a declaration that I know how to write a program that will do this, but you don’t. Showing you my code, means that you will. Since my worth is wrapped up in the ingenuity and cunning cleverness of my code—giving you access to it would diminish my value relative to yours—something I dare not allow. All of which is a vain attempt to hold on to what software makes impossible: The presence of the original.
Jim Andrews gets it. In his ELC artist statement regarding his contribution Nio, he says, “I decided to release the Nio source code for various reasons. It furthers the art of interactive audio more to release it than not to release it, and if people use the code, it increases my value as a programmer and artist, as long as I am credited in your project publicly, which I request of you, and as long as your project works really well and people like it. So please make your project really good.”
Indeed.
