Difference between revisions of "Nonsensical gibberish"

Revision as of 20:21, 8 October 2017

Beautiful example of "nonsensical gibberish" from this week's reading [courtesy of Craig Douglas Dworkin's The Ubuweb: Anthology of Conceptual Writing]:

"Accordingly, the conceptual writing collected here is not so much writing in which the idea is more important than anything else as a writing in which the idea cannot be separated from the writing itself: in which the instance of writing is inextricably intertwined with the idea of Writing: the material practice of écriture."

So maybe it's my brain, but did Mr. Dworkin actually say something in this sentence? I think he is trying to say there is an unbreakable link between writing and the idea put forth by the writing, particularly in his chosen examples of conceptual writing. Um, duh? Unless I have completely misunderstood him, which is entirely possible. Likely, even.

Regardless, he seems to be making distinctions between notions of materiality and concept in literary forms, Form over function? This distinction is quite clear to him and not to me, but I would be delighted to point him towards something certain to blow his mind wide open: MIT digital media professor Nick Monfort's (written with Stephanie Strickland) poetry generator "Sea and Spar Between" - [1]" Removing the human conceptualizing element altogether, this computer poetry generator randomly pulls language from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the poetry of Emily Dickinson to create entirely new blended stanzas -- 225 trillion of them. Apparently this is supposed to roughly equal the number of fish in the sea, and each stanza is numbered with longitude and latitude coordinates. So meta. Another fascinating feature? The stanzas don't stay still very long, but shift around on the page, presumably like the fish they resemble. So very, very meta. --Awheelo