RIP Lem

I’ll write more about E-Fest when work stops slamming me upside the head, and certainly after I take Shiva (for she’s finally told us her name) to be spayed this morning.

Meanwhile, Stanislaw Lem has died. Rest in peace, Writer; thank you for your wor[l]ds.

psst, here’s a secret.

E-mail mckin-at-edrex-dotttt-com. Go ahead, do it.

(E-Fest 06 is being held at the McKinney Conference Room, at the Watson Institute for International Studies.)

Now, if you ever see a sticker somewhere with an email address ending in @edrex.com on it, you’ll know what to do.

E-Fest 06

Hello from E-Fest 2006, being held at Brown right now. It’s lunchtime; the first session of papers has passed, as has the first evening of performances (last night, natch). A few thoughts so far. They aren’t intended to be an exhaustive review of the event, just things that occurred to me so far.

The most immediately striking thing, for me (thanks to reading Dr. B et al., and recent women’s issues debacles in the news*) is that, out of the twenty-two official participants, three are women. Three.

Aside from that, however, the event’s pretty interesting thus far. One of the highlights at last night’s performance was Aya Karpinska’s reading of open.ended. Aya will be the next electronic creative writing fellow in Brown’s Literary Arts MFA program.

Judd Morrissey did a fantastic reading as well, but I can’t find it online; structurally it was similar to his The Jew’s Daughter, which is also a worthwhile read.

Nick Montfort’s presentation particularly interested me from a pedagogical perspective. He has been working on software that, when overlayed onto a pre-existing piece of interactive fiction (in yesterday’s case, the classic Adventure), allows the user to read the game’s text transformed into different narrative styles. Victorian, for example, peppers setting descriptions etc. with “Reader,”; explicit, when you say “go west,” informs you that you have decided to go west; you have relocated yourself westward; you are now in $otherlocation; you see objects around you. That sort of thing. It seems that, applied to [IF in] other languages, this could be a useful tool for language learning!

Then there’s today. Today’s first session was titled “Memory and Real Time.” It was pretty whirlwind, but one thing that Braxton Soderman was talking about caught my attention: the place of criticism, theory and critical thinking within the increasingly real-time digital culture. (I could be misquoting; will correct later if needed, but this was for me the essence of his talk.)

Briefly: text encoding as literary analysis/research is critical thinking “on the run” (which, for Braxton, was: you get an idea and “run with it”). On the other end of that, the software that eventually shows you a larger picture is also “running”. This feels more real-time than paper writing.

Networked publication of that research, as well as online collaboration (VHL, instant messaging), are also much more real-time than publications in journals and then responses published at a much later date.

Not particularly deep, but a useful snippet for theorizing Roland^HT!

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*And speaking of South Dakota’s legislative idiocy, check out the fuck-you message sent by the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe to the white boys in the state senate there. How much ass does this woman kick?! Needless to say, please donate… or don’t, but we’re not having an abortion debate in the comments, mmkay?

SIC PUPPY

Am just now reading ‘Plain Talk About Plain Speech,’ an article in a recent Inside Higher Ed. This, this is what gives me hope that I may survive in academe. Few things turn me off more about my chosen field than unnecessary jargon. Well, one thing maybe: its unnecessary overvaluation.

If I can continue treating academic speech as, you know, every other form of speech (perhaps of a slightly different register) and still contribute to Knowledge Work(tm), that will rule. If not… well, then I won’t last, and the issue will be irrelevant.

But the reason you might want to read the article is that it’s damn funny.

O joyous day! (LIFE, part two)

Welcome, Sylvana Campbell Gruesz, daughter of Colleen and Carl! A big one she is, 9lb 3oz. Born last night by c-section for positioning reasons, mom and baby seem to be doing fine so far. I hope to see them soon, perhaps even today.

Dance the dance with us, baby. We’ve been waiting for you.

(I was thinking of diminuitives to her name last night. Sylvana – Syl – Sylly!)