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Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm
I can get put off by a lot of avant-garde poetry's excess use of strange words. Take Glazier's newly published first collection Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. He's succumbed to the usual academic habit of filling his poems with obscure incomprehensibility, like http, chmod, EMACS ... hang on a second, I know these words. They're not literary jargon, they're software babble, the words I work with. If there isn't a schadenfreude sense of humour behind this chap's use of computer terminology in his poetry, there damn well ought to be. I love the image I get of poetry literati, finding poems stuffed with precision from a different kind of language professional, muttering "what the &hellip?"
Look, don't get me wrong, this collection isn't easy. The poems, mostly prose poems, are impressions, sequences of events, themed associations, riddled with puns (sharper than that), observation and humour. Imagine yourself a tourist, walking down a Mexican / Cuban / Texan / Costa Rican town's main street, staring at the activity, the buildings, the air, everything a slap of newness. Now realise I was snug in an English pub on a cold November night drinking some rather good warm beer, reading "Semilla de Calabaza (Pumpkin Seed)," the central sequence of this collection. I'm guided by Glazier, I'm the gawping tourist, I'm hit by his local knowledge, I'm a stranger but I know this town, I'm the visitor and I've lived here forever.
I'd better give you some samples of his work. It's not so easy, each poem is a long whole; chopping bits out destroys the context, much of the expression. Remember, too, I enjoy new ways of saying old things. Perhaps you'll see this collection's appeal to me from this chunk of the fifth "White-Faced Bromeliards on 20 Hectares (An Iteration)":
Finding a pumpkin seed in your vocabulary. A dead tree becomes
a bromeliad alter. Policia Rural. Brahmin cattle. Los Angeles,
Costa Rica's fresh furrows against smoky ridge. Banana chips on
the bus. Una casada, comida tipica lava gushing glowing twilight
plumes & sputters. Before sunset, bathing in a river heated by
lava's flow.
So why on earth am I reviewing a collection of poetry for /. ? As you've probably already sussed, Glazier's a computer chap. He's professor and Director of The Electronic Poetry Center at New York, Buffalo. He knows our not-Unix / Windows wars; they're here in the poetic armoury. It's like having your own private antagonism codified into opera, suddenly there's an aria about DLLs, or caches, and the damn thing works a treat and it damn well shouldn't. It's still his flow of impressions, but now he's taking tourists around our home town, our systems, our neighbourly rows, our familiar world is slapping them with strangeness, they're asking tourist questions, they're got tourist awe, tourist doubts.
From "One Server, One Tablet, and a Diskless Sun":
And what
kind of bugs? Lorca's mystical crickets?
H.D.'s butterflies? Though I think they
must--if the mind does have an eye--be
cockroaches fat, brightly lit, and mightily
glowing. Flying through the mind shaft to
assault any mental indiscretion. Perhaps a
relative of Burroughs introduced this
term. (Stick that in your machine and
add it up!) What vision of mainframe!
What robust modems! What processor
speed!
Some of my worst bugs have embarrassingly been "cockroaches fat, brightly lit, and mightily glowing." I'd better change the subject. It's probably obvious I believe poetry and programming share something vital. As Glazier says, in "Windows 95" (Ironic? You tell me.):
"In a sense code
resembles classical poetry. The requirements of meter (poetry)
and syntax (code) pose both limitations and challenges for the
good poet / programmer to adhere to and overcome in the
process of writing a great poem / program."
The one weakness of this collection, perhaps, cannot be avoided; Glazier's an electronic poet, a web poet; for all his care, the hyperlinks feel like they're still there, hidden and used; the slide-show web pages are unflowing still on paper. Don't get me wrong; these poems work well, but I just get the feeling, which I cannot properly justify, that they're butterflies killed, pinned and collected, fascinating, very beautiful, but their essence is the flittering movement you can never see in a book. But that's not such a problem; you could always browse The Electronic Poetry Center for Glazier's pages.
I didn't know Glazier's work when I bought this collection. It's published by the print-on-demand Australian/UK publisher Salt. I tend to buy their collections simply because they publish them; they seem to have developed the habit of excellence.
You can also purchase Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit a review for consideration, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I love writing software, and I enjoy reading other people's source
You need to get out more.
...because he needs the kind of help that only a hooker could give!
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
The title of this book is in the form of a Slashback headline. I was confused for a moment.
The local radio station had a super hero named: Anatman
People around here sometimes say: Anat at the end of their sentences, short for and that. Which is the same as: and stuff.
Whatcha do?
I went down to Primani Bros, Ride Aid, anat.
Yinz definately need to learn a new language if you come in our neck of the woods.
Glazier's an electronic poet, a web poet
This sounds like a Geocities homepage to me...
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
*ahem*
huh?
.. This is going to be hard to explain to a cute, blonde Litterature Art student in a bar.
...and the only thing long about him was his bullshit certification and his spaghetti code.
I think I shall never see
A program as lovely as a tree.
In fact, without a program call
I'll never see a tree at all.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
This kind of reminds me of an essay I read many years ago, about UNIX people, literature, and the command-line. Here's a link if you're interested:
r ature.txt
The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
by Thomas Scoville
http://www.insecure.org/stf/scoville_unix_as_lite
I guess the submitter coded too much in his life, because now he is mixing things up.
Coding is about structuring, and poetry too has structures, indeed. This is a shallow comparison. For the whole thing, pardoxically, in poetry, is to give the reader enough freedom to free him(her)self of the structure.
In poetry, structure is a mean, an assurance you take to get free quicker ; in computing, structure is *everything*. Poetry and computing are so different. Computing looks like more architectural works. Definitely coders are not poets ; in that case, they *would* be poets.
Regards,
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
You'll want to be sending that apology to Alfred Joyce Kilmer, not Ogden Nash.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
My brain's hard drive spins on its axis,
anti clock wise.
Penetrating poetry pokes my peripheral vision
like a fully charged capacitor on a hot summer day
My eyes glaze over Glazier's prose
His profound instructions verbose
in machine language, almost
optimized for O(1) execution on a fast Althon
crippled by the superslow multitasking windows OS,
Yet, continue to register their keys,
in my hashtable of memories.
Bah, this poetry stuff isn't hard. I'll give you one.
Programmer's Solitude
by illuminata
Cold, snow
winter breeze blow
at home desk, sorrow.
No love comes to the programmer
no matter how good his code.
Internally crumbling
about to implode.
Couples happy
streets alive.
Not the programmer
dead inside.
The right hand is warm
but dangerous.
For that hand prevents love.
But in return, gives instant gratification.
Why not?
Never very attractive
no female attention
only apprehension.
On a lonely winter's day
do not approach the programmer.
You know where that hand has been.
And the programmer never works all day.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
So your evaluation is "only you can evaluate it?" My enjoyment of the book will be proportional to my enjoyment of the book! Thanks!
The three-item format of the title reminds me strongly of the format used by Haruki Murakami in "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" - every other chapter, the chapter's title would have a three-phrase structure - some examples would be "Elevator, Silence, Overweight," and "Appetite, Disappointment, Leningrad."
--- Bwah?
While I do like poetry and such, I'm getting a uncomfortably Vogon vibe from this guy's stuff. For the unwashed heathens among us, the following is taken from Douglas Adams' _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_:
Oh freddled gruntbuggly
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon,
See if I don't!
Honestly, if you, in the spirit of semirandom recombination that seems to characterize a good deal of Glazier's work, take the nonsense words and add in random techno-jargon, you'd get a very Glazier-y and equally unsatisfying verse. Jargon-wielding for what appears to be its own sake doesn't make for nerd-digestible poetry. So yes, while I applaud the experimental nature of some of his stuff, I don't much like it.
I think your code vs. poetry point is valid, but it doesn't come from some inherent difference in coding, it comes from the marketplace. Most coding is funded. Commercial interests aren't paying for high art. They are paying for pedestrian pragmatism. Easy to understand and maintain, not layered with simile and metaphor. Poets are free to go unread and not understood. Coders won't last long with similar outcomes. When I look at some of those code obfuscation contests, I see more of the branch of coding that produces the pure art of poetry.
Can someone please explain to me where this comparison between code and poetry began? It makes absolutely no sense to me. I've never understood the notion that code is art. Creative, sure... but art?
irb(main):001:0>
Finding a pumpkin seed in your vocabulary. A dead tree becomes a bromeliad alter. Policia Rural. Brahmin cattle. Los Angeles, Costa Rica's fresh furrows against smoky ridge. Banana chips on the bus. Una casada, comida tipica lava gushing glowing twilight plumes & sputters. Before sunset, bathing in a river heated by lava's flow. Ahhh, home!! Can't wait to have some casado and banana chips..
The perfect sig is a lot like silence, only louder
I love writing software, and I enjoy reading other people's source
You must work for SCO.
Poetry is to code as prose is to hippopotamus.
...at least it's not a fucking dupe.
I'll stick to Lorca.
"Careful! Be careful! Be careful!
The men who still have marks of the claw and thunderstorm,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention
of the bridge,"
-Federico Garcia Lorca. Excerpt from the City That Does Not Sleep as translated by Robert Bly.
In that beautiful excerpt, he's obviously talking about people who use h4x0r 5p34k (men) and the typical AOL user (boy).
Yea, but would you want your local nuclear power plant running off some old japanese nantucket haiku jingle? Yea, I didn't think so.
If you make that kind of comparison, can we patent poem ideas?
this is fun that you are speaking of poetry as represented by the sonnet, because the sonnet was used at a very precise time in history (mainly during the 16th century, with the European Baroques), and then criticizing my post because it is historicized.
I guess that we really didn't understand each other. I'm not saying structure doesn't matter in a poem, but at the contrary, this is useful to get rid of it. Have you ever try to read some kind of experimental poetry, sublime in the words, but lacking even the minimal structure ? This is unreadable. Because we humans need a little structure.
And you will have noticed that poetry progressively relinquished the structure that was before necessary to make humans read it without getting too confused.
I maintain my point, poetry is about freeing you, getting your mind outside the mental structure on which your daily life is based. Speaking of sonnet, I advise you to notice by reading it how much Du Bellay or Agrippa d'Aubigne sonnets will free your mind if you stop focusing on the very structure. Enjoy !
Regards,
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
<>!*''#
^@`$$-
*!'$_
%*<>#4
&)../
{~|**SYSTEM HALTED
waka waka bang splat tick tick hash
carat at back-tick dollar dollar dash
splat bang tick dollar underscore
percent splat waka waka number four
ampersand right-paren dot dot slash
curly bracket tilde pipe splat splat crash
Taken from the 1337/poetry section of william wu's site
Jesus saves... the rest of you take 5d20 damage.
While I'm not familiar with 'Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm', I have read much of Glazier's work. His writing can be difficult to parse, but to see/hear Loss read from his own work is quite inspiring.
Often the text he performs will be projected on a screen behind him. In 'Bromeliads' or 'Vis Etudes' for example, where the text modulates mid-sentence, or where there is no established syntax for sequencing each node, the activity of reading becomes obvious - even a little exciting.
It's great to see Glazier get a little attention. If you enjoy the writing even a little bit, try to catch him at a reading.
What's the point of a form of communication that has no well defined meaning? If people can debate for years over the meaning of your writing, you're not communicating very effectively. If you have something to say, just say it and don't make me hunt for hidden meanings.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If you mean that both are an incoherent mess of severely misguided gibberish, then yes, code IS like poetry.
Some of my worst bugs have embarrassingly been "cockroaches fat, brightly lit, and mightily glowing." I'd better change the subject.
Man I could sure go for a fat glowing roach right now.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Words, related by concepts hidden
Only author knows their meaning:
A shiny toaster, cherry tree,
IBM 360, PIC, my little sister's doll house.
Perhaps too stupid, me.
But perhaps words beyond comprehension,
certainly beyond communication.
main(once, was)
{
a = unix_owner;
who(pulled, a, PR_BONER) {
they->staked_out[some_claims && called(ppl_names)];
}
but_everyone_knew(darl, was, a, stoner);
}
My metamoderation cancels your moderation
The author did not get the memo that states everyone must use one language (Java) on one OS (Linux) and use one set of clearly defined designs (patterns). Oh yeah, and it must only come in Black.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
No. What he said was
Else
E lse
If Like_this_genre=TRUE
Then
Like_this_book:=TRUE
Like_this_book:=FALSE
Not
If Like_this_book=TRUE
Then
Like_this_book:=TRUE
End
"The stuff" is used as a colloquialism in place of "the genre." It was not used to mean "this book."
!do{gentle->night(good)}
Wait, that was Dylan Thomas. Nevermind.
This guy's description of reading code is just a litte too fruity. Bet he wanders around coin-op laundries sniffing other people's underwear.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
there are lot's of writers/coders interested in merging literature with programming languages. Stuff that usually goes way more extreme then this. or to quote a star of the genre who goes by the name of lo_y:
= ID
= [Yes]ID==2 ,0-DIR=C:\
"[Tr-s]
Hut=0-Ignamb=So\OGSTARY\832T
R-0-r-io
_RSH.wap=Y
[S]ID=10dB=f
Nve Scie=i
E=0,100=,
[01]InfoI=n
MPOn=e
5=Bl=se
Ud.t+P=el=
Item4=BO=St-
M.cesIt=Rig
==Pla
D=te"
have a look at this lill' overview of this genre with links to more...
http://socialfiction.org/als_daneng.html
Can't parse.
What language is that?
If interpreted, please provide name of interpretor excetuable on the first line preceded by a `#'.
Thank you.
Mod this AC down as flamebait please.
Charles Bukowski
from You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense, 1986, p 103
16-Bit Intel 8088 Chip
with an Apple Macintosh
you can't run Radio Shack programs
in its disc drive.
nor can a Commodore 64
drive read a file
you have created on an
IBM Personal Computer.
both Kaypro and Osborne computers use
the CP/M operating system
but can't read each other's
handwriting
for they format (write
on) discs in different
ways.
the Tandy 2000 runs MS-DOS but
can't use most programs produced for
the IBM Personal Computer
unless certain
bits and bytes are
altered
but the wind still blows over
Savannah
and in the Spring
the turkey buzzard struts and
flounces before his
hens.
==
Richard Brautigan
from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, 1968
At the California Institute of Technology
I don't care how God-damn smart
these guys are: I'm bored.
It's been raining like hell all day long
and there's nothing to do.
Written January 24, 1967
while poet-in-residence at
the California Institute of
Technology.
==
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
(...stand by for the code nazis...)
AT&ROFLMAO
jdifool,
The poster remarked the similarity of poetry to code, particularly that both are formalisms. New forms of poetry are akin to new languages, new works in old forms are like new ideas in familiar contexts.
The distinctions rely on differing relationships to syntactic rigor. What you unfortunately term *extensible* is really a matter of greater freedom: the only interpreter a poem will face is the reader; your code must pass muster with an interpreter whose concern for syntactic and structural detail is unsurpassed. For example, a modernist poet, Marianne Moore, I believe, has adopted a personal convention of declaring simile with the *::* syntax of PERL, long before the first bit was ever flipped. But this idiom does not have the same value, indeed, typically does not occur at all in the work of other poets. It is a personal signifier, rather than a syntactic contract.
It is possible to write a compiler or interpreter to handle any degree of syntactic or structural freedom, but its practical use would be nil. It might make an interesting art project, nevertheless, not unlike the free play of formal requirements Appolinaire exhibits in his picture/poems.
That said, the parallels are real and offer valuable insight, as Glazier's work has demonstrated for some years. But more interesting, perhaps than technical referentiality or verse rigidly structured like code, is the intersection of code and poetry in programs which are haiku generators and the like. In this case, the code embodies some of the requirements of the art form in unique ways. Features are highlighted and made manifest in code which are otherwise merely suggested in the collected body of work in that form.
illegitimii non ingravare
Sorry, thought the USians had come to their senses and had found the superior oil for salads. However I see they still wallow in their ignorance. 'tis a shame....
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
I don't much care for Glazier either, for similar complaints. But DAdams is ripping a familiar form in English, the parody of poetic forms using neologisms, invented words.
Lewis Carroll:
Jabberwocky
' Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jub-jub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch.
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxsome foe he sought -
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack.
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
'And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms my beamish boy
Oh frabjous day! Calooh! Calley!
He chortled in his joy
' Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe.
illegitimii non ingravare
Well, I don't enjoy it. But, I'm still better at it than you.
Hey could you write me a beautiful poem about quicksort in c++ and get it to me before 5:00 pm tomorrow?
I get the same pleasure from reading poetry, but more so. Seeing a poem written in an old familiar form, say a sonnet, is like meeting someone else's code (continued on p94)
This belongs in Pseuds' Corner.
I've studied poetry, written some, and taken it seriously of my own free will, despite that as an English major at UCI I'm required to do so in order to finish my degree.
... must also be correct. And this is where the main difference lies, oddly. In great poetry there is a limited number of interpretations. Great poems may mean any number of a set of things, but they won't, and shouldn't, mean anything. And the meaning in poetry is "encoded", if you will, within the constraints of meter, rhythm, structure, rhyme (if any), vocabulary, subject, ideas, allusions, sound, and intended audience, to name some of the principal things.
I make a living as a coder, though, and I've noticed many similarities between code and poetry, especially between code and the poetry of the so-called "language" poets whose poetry depends on visual appreciation of the physical layout of the words on the page in order to be understood.
There are some significant differences, however, between poetry and code that, to my mind, limit the comparison.
One, in order for code to be interesting, it must be correct, that is, solve the problem it was meant to solve. If it's not correct then it's just a collection of symbols and keywords and, while a language poet might be interested in such a collection for the purposes of expression, it's not going to have much value as code.
Poetry, on the other hand
So, between code having to be correct for its purposes in order to be interesting, and poetry having to be "correct" within its constraints, there's going to be a seriously limited subset of "code poems", if any at all, that legitimately cross over into both domains.
As I was reading the examples, I was in serious doubt that this poetry had much use to the "geek crowd" outside of using a few words like "Emacs" and "modem". So what. Even the reviewer says that this isn't "easy" poetry. Okay. So it's not easy. But is it any good?
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
With apologies to the late Douglas Adams, AKA,
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz:
Oh freddled codebuggly
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabble/BASHits on a lurgid BSD.
GroopID I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously compile me with thunkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will ^H^H^H^H thee in the gobberwarts with my numbercruncheon,
See if I don't!
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Ants
Saddam
Had'em
Sweet!
roses = red;
violets = blue;
i = horny;
hope("you're too");
8-P
With computing you can't do what I just did with words (so crappy, whatever) in my last sentence.
I disagree and I'll explain why. With computing, you can do anything you please. You start with an idea. You decide on the grammar you're going to use to express it. It could be loosely-typed and sloppy. It could be very strict. It may not yet exist; you are free to create the tools and rules you need out of thin air, if that gets your end result across best. Then you express it according to the rules -you- laid out, not the rules of someone else's syntax and grammar (unless you decided to submit to that).
If you broke the rules of syntax of some coding language that you submitted yourself to, well, that was your choice to use the language in the first place. As a coder, you are not limited by artificially-imposed semicolons or datatypes or anything, unless you want to be.
Programming is a unique craft/art/profession in that we can easily create one-off tools and rules out of thin air and then use those tools and rules to express our end product.
The only "rule" a poet follows (I hope we can agree here) is the alphabet/symbols of the target audience. Beyond that, it's free-form. If he doesn't get the point across (blank stares from audience, it's the poet's problem). Likewise, the only "rule" a coder need follow is the opcodes of the target platform. Beyond that, it's free-form. If he doesn't get the point across (crash, hang, bug, it's the coder's problem).
The Pittsburghese 'anat' probably rhymes with 'a rat', and 'man' is pronounced as, well, man.
The Sanskrit 'anatman', rightfully written as 'anAtman~' or 'anaatman~' under the Rice Transliteration Scheme, has a stress for the 'a' before the 't', and no stress for the 'a' after 'm'. 'T' itself is pronounced as in 'thimble'.
The two have very different pronounciations. Most bilingual speakers would probably consider them to be two completely dissimilar words that co-incidentally could be written the same Roman spelling. Personally, I'd spell it as 'anaatman' to emphasise the stress on 'a' I was talking about earlier.
More than mere navel gazing.
poetry is about freeing you, getting your mind outside the mental structure on which your daily life is based.
Coding frees me from structures by allowing me to create any structure I can imagine. Some structures take more work than others, but it's all thought-stuff and then invisible, weightless bits of information. Likewise, poetry still imposes an alphabet on most poets, and if you deviate from that structure/medium, you're going to have about as much luck as a coder who uses undocumented opcodes.
Apologies to Brooks, but the programmer works close to the pure thought stuff that poets strive for also. This isn't something that can be said of most craftsmen or certainly not professions. Programmers create castles in the air, from the air.
Daily life places me in structures. You can say the code still requires a structure of opcodes arranged in ways that don't crash but then poetry, of course, then requires a structure of either written symbols (almost always letters of the alphabet arranged as words, spaces, and punctuation in the language of your target) or verbal transmission (almost always a phonetics, rythm, and inflection from the language of your target).
Use invalid opcodes or get too sloppy: it hangs or crashes. Use invalid alphabets or vocabulary for your target: it hangs or crashes.
... those bastards.
More reviews of this book are at this site.