Fall is way on its way and I have [as always] been falling behind on sharing good news. Here’s a few lovely things that happened this semester:
I published a new poem “Made to Disappear” in the German-Austrian magazine Perspektive, part of a special issue on the digital avant-garde curated by Sylvia Egger. This is a short poem that repurposes the data gathered by one of my earlier interactive survey poems [Room #2, in particular, which was first published in The New River last Spring]. It’s a poem also largely about death, silence and disappearance–all fun stuff, obviously. I am ever so grateful to the Poetry and the Senses Fellowship from the Arts Research Center at Berkeley, because without them and the amazing and humbling poets there, I would have never been able to imagine this larger “corporate poetry” project, which is giving me so much.
So much, indeed! “corporate poetry” was also exhibited online in full at the “Texts of Discomfort” juried exhibition, part of ICIDS 2020. Below is a cheesy video of me explaining what the project is all about, so if you don’t have time to visit the exhibit, you can also just watch this [but really, visit the show, it’s just a click away and it features some cool artists]:
Enough with the artist stuff already–professor hat on now: I also found out this semester that my article “Memory Traces: Printed Electronic Literature as a Site of Remembrance,” finally came out in Comparative Literature Studies. 57.1 (2020): 69-94. Not sure exactly when in the year this came out since I found it serendipitously when googling for something else, but I am equally delighted! [Even more so, good surprises are always so fun].
This is an essay where I look at two novels that I really like, Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts (2007) and Robert Juan-Cantavella’s Otro (2001). I read them as examples of printed electronic literature, where the use of the codex book as inscription mechanism emphasizes a previous state of digital composition. Appearing in different parts of the globe and in different languages—United Kingdom/English and Spain/Spanish correspondingly [hey, just like me!]—I explain how both novels take full advantage of the computer and the Web’s contexts and capabilities in order to express the existing tension between both mechanisms of production and their treatment of memory. Their engagement with technology and the remaining digital traces that are present in their print pages are thus read as manifestations of a deeper historical mark, a [slightly ghostly] trace that engages history and the possibility of talking about a past that permeates through our present inscription mechanisms—that is, digital texts. What I essentially end up proposing in this essay is that these traces are to be read not just as media traces, but also as the trace of a history that cuts through the medium of inscription. I propose that we read new digital techniques for writing as unveiling a literary ruin, and that we think of them as building upon the decomposition of the novelistic form and its legendary ways of telling and recording memory and history [I know this sounds a little grandiose, but you know how I get sometimes]. You can find the complete essay here [or email me for a copy].
Aaaaaaaaand, finally, this semester I have been co-teaching with my bestie Élika Ortega a grad class on Digital Literary Arts that, although it started as an investigation into the material relation between “digital”, “literary” and “arts,” thinking these as intertwined and relational networks in the world, it might have ended up as an ode to posthumanism–about which I am only slightly surprised, and hugely delighted. I will be writing a post soon just on that [I hope], and I think Élika and I will be sharing our students’ artwork as well soon-ish, because what they have been making has been breathtaking and mind-blowing.
Many socially distanced hugs to all. And many thanks for reading.
