GRL ISLND: SCND DRFT

I left off in a weird spot...it's at an awkward place. Don't worry, it's not against mothers! It's against patriarchy. The girls are going to take the switches from their mothers hands and ask the mothers to fall into the girls' embrace and live with them on girl island, and will proceed to make a strong argument for theworld they have created together as opposed to returning to the old world that drove them there. But, see how it's going so far...

GRL ISLND: FRST DRFT

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If You Were Wondering Why Our Tuition Keeps Increasing While the Courses Offered Decrease and the Class Sizes Go Waaay Up...

you might wanna take a look at what is going on in California.

(excerpt)

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Samuels, just explain the situation right now. Why are these student hikes? What’s the justification for the 32 percent increase in student fees?

BOB SAMUELS: Well, President Yudof, the president of the University of California system, says that because of state cut to the UC budget from 20 percent of the state contribution, which is—the state only contributes about—contributes only about 15 percent of the total budget, but because of that cut, they say they have to raise student fees. And our argument has been that this is actually a record year of revenue for the UC system, and the problem is they just don’t want to spend the money on instruction. So what they’re doing instead—

AMY GOODMAN: How could it be a record year?

BOB SAMUELS: They brought in a lot of money from the federal stimulus money. They had a record year in their research grants. They had a record year in medical profits. Most of their money is brought in by selling parking, housing and medical services throughout California. So they had a record year in that revenue. They had a record year in grants. And so, actually, last year they ended up getting more money than before from the state, because they got the federal stimulus money.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, what is the justification then? Explain further where that money goes.

BOB SAMUELS: Well, you know, the university says that it’s poor, that it can’t spend money from its other areas on students, on instructions, and so it has to basically—what it’s doing now is laying off hundreds of faculty members, especially the non-tenured lecturers, and it’s increasing class size.

And money is being funneled into the compensation of the star faculty and the star administrators, because in the UC system there’s over 3,000 people who make over $200,000. And many of them make $400,000, $500,000. A lot of them are mostly administrators and staff, and so the university has—basically has fewer and fewer faculty, more and more students and more and more administrators.

And so, what’s going to happen is it takes students longer to graduate. They can’t get the classes they need. And I teach required writing classes at UCLA, and they just laid off our entire department. And we have required classes, so we don’t know what they’re going to do. And the dean of our division told us the university simply does not have money for undergraduate education.

AMY GOODMAN: Doesn’t have money for undergraduate education. But what about the administration, the money that goes into the non-teaching staffs at the university throughout the system? And we’re talking about three basic tiers, right?

BOB SAMUELS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that.

BOB SAMUELS: Well, in California, we have the University of California, and some of the schools are UCLA, UC Berkeley. We have the CSU system. And then we have the community college—

AMY GOODMAN: And the CSU system is…?

BOB SAMUELS: The California State University system. And then we have the community college system. And the way it’s supposed to work is there’s a master plan, and the top students are supposed to go to the University of California. It’s the top ten percent of California students. And then another large group is supposed to go to the California State Universities. And then everyone else is supposed to go to the community college.

What’s going now is California right now has the second lowest rate of students who go directly from high school to a four-year university. It’s the only—only Mississippi has fewer students. And what we’re afraid is with these fee increases, what they’re talking about doing is raising the fees and basically lowering enrollment and increasing the amount of out-of-state students. So California next year will be—have the lowest rate of students who go directly from high school to college in the entire country.

AMY GOODMAN: And the issue of the non-teaching staffs, the administration?

BOB SAMUELS: That the administration keeps on expanding and growing. They keep on hiring more and more administrators. We’re not exactly sure what they do. And our joke at University of California is, when two administrators walk into a room, three always walk out. So we never know exactly what they do, but there’s just more and more of them.

AMY GOODMAN: So what kind of cuts are they suffering, the administrators?

BOB SAMUELS: The administrators are cutting—are virtually no cuts. In fact, the same meeting, when they decided to raise student fees, they voted on millions of dollars of increased salaries and special bonuses to administrators and to the highest-paid people. And so, there has been several compensation scandals in the UC system. And what they discovered is the UC has secret packages that it gives a lot of its administrators and athletic coaches and some of its star faculty, a small percentage, and that it makes these secret deals, it breaks its own rules, and that money continually floats to the top of the university. So while we think the universities are often these progressive institutions, they often are run like large corporations. And that’s one of our concerns.

One of the stories I want to talk about is just that UC lost over $23 billion in investments in the last two years. And one reason why it lost so much money is that it invested heavily in toxic assets and in real estate. And it followed the Yale model of investing in these high-risk assets, and at first it gained a lot of money. And what’s happening across the country are universities, especially the private universities, they’re losing so much money in their endowments that they’re having to raise, once again, their tuition and also cut classes, cut faculty, and especially the non-tenure track faculty are the most vulnerable. And at the UC system, the non-tenure track faculty teach over 50 percent of the classes, and those are the ones that they’re laying off and that they’re firing. And they’re also basically reducing the salaries of the workers and also increasing their workload. At the same time, they’re refusing to negotiate with the unions.

AMY GOODMAN: What is President Yudof’s strategy?

BOB SAMUELS: I think his main strategy is basically to blame the state for everything, while they try to privatize the university. And a very telling moment came. After the UC’s budget was cut by the state, the UC turned around and lent $200 million to the state. And people said, how can you lend $200 million to the state while you’re giving faculty furloughs and while you’re raising student fees and while you’re cutting classes? And he said, “When we lend money to the state, we make a profit from interest. But when we spend money just on teachers’ salaries, that money just disappears.” So, from his perspective, instruction is a losing proposition, and the university should just try to get out of the business of basically teaching students and hiring faculty.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve talked about a great deal of money being lost.

BOB SAMUELS: Right. Well, that money, the $23 billion, is mostly in the pension fund and its endowment and its short-term investments. And so, that’s really a long-term problem. And the UC still has a $20 billion budget. It had more money brought into the system last year than any year before. It doesn’t have to raise student fees. It doesn’t have to fire faculty. It doesn’t have to cut courses. They’re talking about eliminating minors and majors. They’re talking about moving classes online. They’re doing these drastic things. And what we’re seeing is just basically undergraduate students are subsidizing research, they’re subsidizing administrators, they’re subsidizing things that have nothing to do with undergraduate instruction.

AMY GOODMAN: Bob Samuels, the implications of what’s happening here in California for the rest of the country?

BOB SAMUELS: Well, basically, what we’re seeing, especially at the major prestigious universities, is more and more—only upper middle class, upper class students can go to them. And they’re privatizing these institutions. And the institutions—what happened about 1980 was that states started to cut their funding of higher education, and so universities looked for other ways of making money, and so they concentrated on raising funds and doing research, and especially research funded by corporations and the federal government. And so, basically now at a lot of universities, instruction only represents about ten percent of the budget, and so it’s a minor aspect of the universities.

And most people don’t know that, that universities, in some ways, are just kind of fronts for investment banks and investments, because at the University of California, the regents, who are the main financial overseers of the university, are appointed by the governor for twelve-year terms. And most of the regents now are Republicans, who not only have voted against taxes and have not only tried to defund higher education—and they’re the ones in charge in many ways—but they’re also business people chosen by Republican governors. And those—and they are real estate people, they’re investment bankers. The new head of the—the chair of the UC Regents is the former head of Wachovia, and he actually—they sold subprime student loans, right? And they profit from the student loans. And also, they pushed the UC into investing heavily into mortgage-backed securities and into real estate right when those were tanking.

And so, I really think that the Board of Regents basically is forcing the UC or motivating the UC to make a lot of incredibly bad investments, and when the investments turn bad, then they try to take it out on the students, on the faculty and the workers.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to just end with this USA Today latest study of compensation, revealing that at least twenty-five college head football coaches make $2 million or more this season, slightly more than double the number two years ago.

BOB SAMUELS: The UC Berkeley faculty last week voted a resolution to stop subsidizing the athletic department. Apparently UC Berkeley has been paying, subsidizing out of student fees, $3 million to $4 million a year. What most people don’t know is most athletic departments lose money, and the big departments lose a lot of money. And student fees often go to paying for athletic departments. And also, we found out that student fees go as collateral to—for construction bonds.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to end with Zen Dochterman.

Just a correction: I said that fifty-two students were arrested at Campbell Hall at UCLA. It was actually at UC Davis, at University of California, Davis, when they refused to leave the administration building.

Zen Dochterman, what are the plans now?

ZEN DOCHTERMAN: Well, first of all, I just wanted to reiterate a lot of what Bob Samuels said, is that students are fighting not just these 32 percent fee increases, but they are fighting the links of the university to the larger economic system as a whole. We are fighting the privatization of the university and the effects that has. We’re fighting the re-segregation of the university and the way in which these fee hikes also exclude people of color and working-class people from attending higher education, and that public education is supposed to have a universal—a universal scope. But what we’re seeing is an antagonism between that mission and everything that is going on.

So I think what is important for many of us is to recognize that we are part of a larger international student movement that sprung up in places as far away as Vienna and Heidelberg, and Berkeley also, of course, and London, and that really what we need to be focusing on is not so much the issue of fee hikes and layoffs, which are also important, but really that the universities need to belong to the students and the workers who work there.

And so, I would say that the next sort of step for many of us will be talking to our departments, talking to our unions. And many of us have also been working with people in the unions at the UC, such as AFSCME, the UAW, UPTE, so talking more with the unions, more with the student groups, more with our departments, and even more with our friends, and organizing.

We also have a big day coming up, March 4th, which is a public education system-wide day of protest. There have been many thoughts about what kinds of actions there might be on that day, going everything—

AMY GOODMAN: March 4th?

ZEN DOCHTERMAN: —going to everything from system-wide shutdowns of campuses, also going to tuition—tuition strike. So there are many things being talked about now, but we can definitely say that March 4th will be the next sort of November 18th and 19th in the—not just at the UC, but at the public education—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Zen Dochterman, I want to thank you very much for being with us, UCLA graduate student, on the phone with us. And Bob Samuels, president of the University of California American Federation of Teachers, runs that blog called “Changing Universities.”

A New Interpretation of Disco

Okay, this is where I am going--

The last thing I said in class, about the culture of repetition and 7" extended dance remixes? Well, here is a way that even disco has been simultaneously embraced and contested: TRACY AND THE PLASTICS. Wynne Greenwood, who acted as all three members of T&TP, is a performance artist who considers herself a "lesbo for disco." She created electronic music all by herself, but would then make video acting as two members of an imaginary band and then would interact with the other members of the band on stage, with the pre-recorded and synchronized video of herself playing both characters. Her dance songs have incredibly challenging lyrics and champion feminist and radical queer causes.

Some of my favorites:

"Mass historian: you second-handed me. Holy roller: You've got a lot to see."

"Women! Women of! LOS ANGELES! You can't clean it up until you make a MMmmmmEEEESSSssssssss!!"

There's a lot more where that came from. Also: the Margaret Atwood poem I wrote about in my response to Biggs & Leach. My favorite artists are subversive; they are highly skilled at disturbing the narratives and forms that we are accustomed to relate to most easily. That is what makes their work powerful.

The Ironic Nature of Consumption in the 21st Century...

is that I can much more easily put money directly into the hands of independent artists and small business owners via the internet than I could by going to a local, independently owned business (because most of them are dead.) It is in this manner that we are made to depend on a system that is not sustainable. I came to this conclusion while contemplating for the past month or so where I might go to find blank cassette tapes, because I am serious about becoming an advocate of mix tapes as an indigenous and threatened art form. I mean, is it better to go to Best Buy or to buy them directly from company? Can I buy them directly from the company or do I have to go through Amazon? Could I just go to a thrift store and find someone else's old tapes and tape over them? Sometimes that works and sometimes the first thing ever recorded on it bleeds through. Besides, aren't all those places owned by Walmart now, anyway? To what extent is it even possible for me to make ethical decisions in my daily life? Where did our agency go? Irony is for the birds, I want my real choices back!

What I Know Now/In the Best of All Possible Worlds..../How Will I Use This

How am I looking at writing differently? Hmm. I am thinking of writing in a more conversational sense. If you ask a linguist they would say that written language, if a language is ever written, is always more formal than spoken language. I think the main thing I have learned in this class is how to make written language have the character and emotional articulation of spoken language, as well as how to convey a state of being...

I wasn't sure. I kept my eyes down. Down to the floor. Out the window. I nod, and turn away. Always.

The form of this sentence is intrinsic to the content. Short and/or incomplete sentences function to convey the voice, not just the words and their ascribed meanings. It reads like someone talking. It's visceral.

The fact of moving words in a meaningful way in this class has effected me as well. It has expanded the capacity of words for me. Flat words on a page have elicited some striking emotional responses from me more than once...spoken words combined with images in films have done the same...but animated writing seems to function inside a relationship with the reader. In many cases, you don't just open the book and turn the pages, or hit "play" and sit back until the credits roll. You open the book, and choose the moments in whichever order you design in many cases.

IN THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, if I could stay in this class forever, I would want to keep making longer animations. I really enjoyed making my "short" animation (it's two minutes and thirty seconds long...) and am looking forward very much to my looooong animation project. Maybe I would just work on Girl Island forever in the best of all possible worlds. Girl Island is the best of all possible worlds, that's why it is a dream, I guess.

HOW I WILL USE THIS...I am honestly not sure yet. I think a lot of what I have learned will carry over into my future writings and readings and teachings. Promise.

"Songs have always been
man's anodyne against
tyranny and terror;
the artist is on the side of humanity."
--Yip Harburg

YIP HARBURG: My songs, like “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” caused a great deal of furor during a period in Hollywood when a fellow by the name of Joe McCarthy was reigning supreme. And so, they got something up for people to take care of us, like me, called the blacklist. And I landed on the enemy list.


And in order to overcome the enemy list–– what was the enemy list? Well, it’s, one, that you were a red; another one, that you were a bluenose; and the other one, that you’re on the blacklist. Finally, I thought the rainbow was a wonderful symbol of all these lists. In order to overcome the enemy list and this rainbow that they gave me the idea for, I wrote this little poem:

Lives of great men all remind us
Greatness takes no easy way,
All the heroes of tomorrow
Are the heretics of today.
Socrates and Galileo,
John Brown, Thoreau, Christ and Debs
Heard the night cry “Down with traitors!”
And the dawn shout “Up the rebs!”
Nothing ever seems to bust them—
Gallows, crosses, prison bars;
Tho’ we try to readjust them
There they are among the stars.
Why do great men all remind us
We can write our names on high
and departing leave behind us
Thumb prints in the FBI.

Disturbance & Novelty

I want to write about Simon Biggs’ idea that we seek to disturb our perception of things in order to “destabilize subjective experience” rather than to “author a new theoretical position” or to further demonstrate a preexisting line of thought. I had not thought intently about the word ‘disturb’ until recently when listening to a radio interview with the daughters of William Kunstler who just released a film they made about their father entitled William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe. This got my mind working at the word, and so did Biggs’ use of it in this text.





Something that seems relevant to this disturbance of perception and the subsequent destabilization of subjective experience in thinking about auto-poesis specifically is the idea of readers becoming authors that we have read about and I have written about before. In many forms of collaborative (frequently digitally transmitted) writing, as well as the auto-poesis discussed here in multiple but converging contexts, the reader becomes the author. This is true to the extent that a collaborative, public form such as Wiki relies on readers to write the information which is then viewable to anyone surfing the web that can read the text and edit or re-write it as they see fit. In the context of auto-poesis, the reader becomes the author in a sense because the lack of an actual author who is constructing sentences with some degree of intent, with a larger construction of meaning that each sentence construction arches towards, means that the only meaning being salvaged from the automated text is being inferred by the reader who takes on the authorial responsibility “of the creative bringing into being of the text.” Thus, when a text lacks an independent author, a disassociation is brought about between writing and meaning, and the reader takes on the work of straddling that gap and forging connections, building bridges, constructing meaning.

This strikes me as intrinsically important to the question of how value is ascribed to novelty that the text aims to investigate. The independent creativity of the author in an auto-poetic text is absent, so the text only becomes “authored” by the independent schemata and connections that can be forged by readers that encounter it. Additionally, the “juxtaposition of existing elements and understandings” is important to the reader’s ability to actually engage the text, for the text to be accessible and relatable, and to that extent novelty actually disengages what Biggs refers to as the “internal voice that arises in the reader.” I think most of my favorite writers (Kathy Acker, Jeanette Winterson, Haruki Murakami, Carole Maso, Margaret Atwood) use novelty very effectively and subversively. Atwood: “you fit into me like a hook into an eye/a fish hook/an open eye.” Immediately upon hearing or reading this first line we think of a hook and an eye, on a dress, perhaps, two pieces which fit into one another and only one another; we think this is a romantic poem, this is about a union, but then our immediate reading explodes as the images when linked before romantically are revealed to be two very different and unpleasant things, and what was originally a sensual, romantic simile is now an awful, striking assault, really. That is how it feels when you realize how your own perception has been manipulated. This poem is about pain, about rape, about the disturbing conflation of love and violence that permeates the history of sex. This to me illustrates, however, not necessarily the merits of auto-poesis as much as the power available in the disturbance of perception; the appropriation of existing understandings to, as Acker so evocatively stated, “slash apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.” Yes.

Lines: Fnl Vrsn, Pndng Edit Wrk

check

it.

OUT!

Ordinary People

This post serves as a note to myself...for the future...that I want to write about the film Ordinary People. It's such a rich film. I mean, admittedly, I'm pretty much a baby and it is very easy for most directors to get me blubbering, but the kind of hyper intense emotional reaction I have to this film seems important. Also, the abusive, controlling and emotionally distant parent is the mother, which seems pretty good for 1980. This film is as strikingly evocative for me as reading Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina was; both dare to take on horribly complicated situations and human relationships, and both are able to maintain the humanity of all of the characters...illuminating imperfection, and really getting their hands around the truly complex and dynamic experiences of people. These people do not fuck around.

Also, on the agenda: poem tracing family history through gender and class oppression; alcoholism of the men, ferocity of the women; perhaps beginning with the line "my father's best paying job was cleaning out chemical transport trucks"

I cannot do either of these things right now because I must wake up at 6:30am to take STANDARDIZED TESTS that will allow me to be admitted to the School of Education, pending how will I score on them...

Dear Wisconsin, ALL DECENT EDUCATION POLICY RESEARCH IN EXISTENCE HAS ONLY ILLUMINATED THE FACT THAT STANDARDIZED TESTS ARE RUBBISH. SO, YOU WOULD REQUIRE ME TO TAKE ONE TO BECOME A TEACHER. WAIT, WHAT?! While we're talking, could the taxpayers have back the public money that you gave people in vouchers to pay for private schools? Love, Erin

Correspondence with Derrick Jensen

Dear Erin,

Thank you for your note, and for your kind words.

back and forth:





I was the lady sitting on the floor directly in front of you with my biracial partner, Ralph, who was sitting on a couch behind me at yr talk in Milwaukee this evening.

I remember you both very well.


I didn't get an opportunity to tell you something I thought you should know. You had mentioned that cops hand out yr books to "trouble kids" and that yr books are circulated amongst gang members in prison, so I thought you should know about an interesting way your writing is being used here in Milwaukee. My partner was assaulted by a group of (white) men in May and we

I'm very sorry to hear that.

are doing a restorative justice community conference negotiation as opposed to a traditional criminal trial. As part of the community conference we had last week, we got to construct what we thought would be effective restitution. The restitution we got them to agree upon was that the offenders have to pay all of Ralph's medical costs and lost wages (the damage put him out of work for two months...he doesn't have insurance or any other benefits at his job, and these guys really lucked out because the injuries they inflicted could easily have resulted in a surgery that costs $30,000) but beyond that they have to write a letter to a member of Ralph's family, potentially correspondence with a prisoner who is locked up for the maximum of what they could have received (pending if they can find a prisoner who meets the criteria and is interested in participating), and mandatory reading of The Culture of Make Believe. Hopefully it will help them...it helped Ralph, he read it while he was recovering from his injuries this summer.

I'm deeply moved to hear this. This is one of the greatest compliments you could give me.

Thank you very much.

In solidarity,

Derrick

GIRL ISLAND: A DREAM OF EXPATRIATION

So, I would like to announce that I am scraping my previous final project idea. I have decided that I do not have the emotional/mental/physical energy and space in my life to execute that project at this time.

INSTEAD, I am going to make an animation about why I want to expatriate to a mythical girl island. What I want to explore are the plethora of reasons a member of the "most privileged" nation in the world would choose to leave, as well as the inability to locate a place in the contemporary, physical world that suits my dreams of expatriation. Thus, the longing for girl island, a place that I am pretty sure only exists as a place that I enter into when I connect with other semi-feral girl children (and I mean this to describe their spirits regardless of gender, age, etc) that is not specific to a physical place at all. I want the animation to have the feeling of the happenings in my brain. I think that I will mostly just need honest feedback and positive reinforcement as I embark on this project. I think from carrying out this project I might better understand and navigate my own desires!

I think I will have to revisit Monique Wittig's Les Guérillèras for this project.

"EITHER WE WILL ACCEPT THAT MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE

(or)

WE WILL HAVE TO DE-GROW"

-Philippe Diaz

Responding to the Feedback I Got

Okay, so, as usual, some people think it needs to be slowed down. I am not sure if I will take them up on this suggestion or not. The main reason is that the end of each proverbial "line" is supposed to flow into the next...the last word of each "line" is the first word of the next, and I'm not sure if it would flow correctly if I slow it down. I think a certain level of speed is intrinsic to the meaning, maybe. However, I'm not saying I won't consider lengthening some parts. People seem to like the little pictures that pop up to illustrate what the word are describing, so I might try to incorporate more of them into the rest of it. Sometimes there isn't a picture for a while, and that doesn't mean I neglected to think to put one there, it means there wasn't anything in those lines I trusted my ability to illustrate decently. It was specifically requested that I slow the heartbeat down, which I will experiment with and see if I like it when it is slower.

Maybe you can tell me what you think about these ideas?

Happy Birthday, Anne!

If yr name is Anne Frances Wysocki

then

this one is for you.

Lines: First Draft

ladies and GENTs,

may i

preeZENT

my latest

animation

eVENT?

i hope you find it

most

magnifiCENT.

Habeas Corpus: FNL DRFT

Here she is.

Sources:

Senator Russ Feingold on The Patriot Act Reauthorization

What the Socialists Have to Say

Pittsburgh-Tribune Review

ACLU on the Patriot Act

The Willfully or Unwillfilly Ignorant Don't Ask for Answers; Those Who Question Get Ignored; The Ignored Become the Willfully Ignorant

America--

your stupidity.

I could almost love you again.

-Gary Snyder

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Hi Representative Slezak,

I don't live in your district. In fact, I live in Wisconsin. However, we are neighbors, and I thought it important for you to know that banning abortions does not save the lives of the unborn children women seeking abortions did not plan to have. Statistically, scientifically, and IMPORTANTLY, it has been shown that abortion bans do not do anything to save the fetuses you are clearly so concerned about, but rather result in dead women. I am not sure if you just specifically disdain women, or if you think your own personal beliefs should be permitted to shape and destroy the lives of others, or if you are just looking for a way to dramatically improve the unemployment rate in Michigan by killing women who seek abortions (as they are primarily low-income women) but you need to rescind this proposal. You need to take this off the table of consideration, and then you need to apologize for presenting it. After that, you need to work on issues that are effecting the people you represent every day, such as creating new and sustainable jobs and making sure all of your constituents have adequate health care. In this way, you could demonstrate to the American people that you actually give a damn about people, even after they are born.

Truly,

Erin M. Day
Milwaukee, WI

A Semi-Scathing Critique of Glazier

I want to explore Glazier’s idea that we need to examine "the multiple possibilities of making in this [digital] medium...[emerging] from the study with wires tangled in our hair, pixels in our spirit, happy to find that physical interaction with the intangible that makes it making.” (Glazier, 179)* I see his point that we need to make within the medium, or “get into the guts” of it, and have seen the importance of that myself when I have done a lot of conceptualizing and pre-planning for an animation beforehand only to find it impossible to then construct within Flash. Despite this agreement, I do not agree completely with Glazier on the materiality of digital media or with his view that digital mediums are inherently good. Though the interactivity available in digital mediums clearly makes them material in some ways, I do not think that digital mediums have equal materiality to print text.

My main problem is that we as a culture are not critical enough of technology. We have almost always universally received technological innovations with open arms and our historic (and largely current as well) gaze toward technology has been one of subservience and blind optimism. The relationship between emerging technologies and an ever-growing monolithic capitalist stranglehold on…well…everything…is pretty clear. During the Cold War, Americans were essentially told that upgrading their car each year or replacing their washing machines much more frequently than could ever be necessary was a blow against communism. The people propagating technologies have always been the creators and producers of the technologies. Our lack of critical response has put us in a situation in which most people are convinced they need a laundry list of creature comforts to exist and to be happy, when statistics of mental illness or physical and sexual abuse would certainly point to the fact that we are not. It strikes me as very odd that Glazier includes a paragraph on “the present social condition of the disposable environment [showing] a troubling lack of focus on the material” in which he uses that position to ADVOCATE for digital technologies, describing them as “[givers of] alternative and multiple ways to ‘make’ the world” and raising said technologies to the height of necessity by implicating them as the answer to it being “culturally necessary…to broaden ways of seeing.” Though I agree that digital mediums offer new and important ways of seeing, I completely disagree that this means that the larger sociopoliticocultural vision will be affected in anyway and think his view reeks of the progress narrative. Stinkystinkystinky. Additionally, it is difficult for me to understand how he can suggest digital technology as a solution to “the present social condition of the disposable environment” and it’s “troubling lack of focus on the material” when, according to National Public Radio: “computers and computer monitors in the United States are responsible for the unnecessary production of millions of tons of greenhouse gases every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In U.S. companies alone, more than $1 billion a year is wasted on electricity for computer monitors that are turned on when they shouldn't be." This is of course without taking into consideration the chemicals used in production that are largely relegated to the drinking water of people the computer-users of the developed world are permitted, and actively encouraged, to ignore.

Beyond this major dilemma, I am also just not convinced that digital media has the same level of materiality as a book or a painting. I can’t take notes in the margins of an animated writing. You need to understand, I take books so seriously, and treat them so intimately, that I make a weird, fuzzy distinction between "academic" books and “intimate” books and keep the more academic reads on the book shelf in my office and my favorite, most intimate books on a rotating media shelf in my bedroom where I can easily bring them under the covers with me. No animated writing smells as amazingly loved as the super old, leather bound copy of Sons and Lovers I found at a friend’s moving sale for a quarter. And I don’t want it to…if digital texts started to have smells I would begin to suspect the presence of something highly Orwellian (or perhaps Huxley-an is more like it). I think digital mediums are important and should be explored, but I do not think these technologies are going to save the world and I still think I love books way more than I will ever like digital texts. I love books. I will defend books as an indigenous species, along with the mix tape and the LP. And you may wonder why I never use fonts in my animations...I'm defending cursive handwriting, too!

Edit: Also, I didn't think about this until I read the news today, but up until now, the internet was limited to speakers of languages that utilize latin-based alphabets. That would seem to suggest an definite LIMIT on different "ways of seeing" (if we think about languages as containing perspectives and ideologies) that has existed throughout the entire history of teh Internets, one of the primary digital mediums for experimental literature.


*I only reference the quotes I use from the text here because I am using a version of this article that I found on the internet because for some reason my Adobe Acrobat is not letting me open the files from e-reserve and other things stored in D2L. :(

fnl prjct // I Remember

For my final project I am going to construct a (long-ish) poem in Flash following the "I Remember" form. What I most want to explore through this project is memory itself. I want to try to find different ways within Flash to communicate the haziness or the focus of a memory, the certainty of a chain of events or the doubt about it, and to communicate effectively the relative proximity or distance I am allowing the memory to be to me. I want to do this because I have a lot of weird memories and a lot of photographs that I am obsessed with and a lot of unresolved feelings, and it will give me an opportunity to focus that energy by funneling it into a project, which might have a calming effect on said energy. Also, memory is an important aspect of writing to think about. I want to use the juxtaposition of text and photographs to create a tension between the past and the present: the moment of being in the picture, the present remembrance in the text. Additionally, I want the photos to operate self-reflexively by bringing into question, alongside the text, what I actually remember versus what I have contrived from photgraphs and family stories.

I might need yr help figuring out how to most effectively present text. I am interested in maybe doing the blurry-edges-of-text-to-denote-disorientation thing but maybe I need a new technique since we've seen that a number of times in samples we have analyzed for class. I want to make something epic but I have limited Flash skills; when I look at the animation samples we have analyzed I get nervous about not having the technical skills to best do this. I will let you know, though. I think for this animation I am going to use FONTS. Yep, FONTS. I think the phrase "I remember" is going to repeat over and over. That is about all I know. I think that in carrying out this project, I might get a better layout/understanding with which to pick up work on the memoir I started in high school tentatively titled "Looking Through Light."