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PreCursor Monthly – December 2020 Having earned a Ph.D. in English and taught poetry courses, there is no question raised so frequently as some variation of: * Can literature exist on Instagram? * Is Instagram poetry real literature? * What do you think of Rupi Kaur? This has never once been asked of
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PreCursor Monthly — November 2020 Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go or what you will do – Marianne Moore, from "Baseball and Writing" We are mere ideas, hatched whole and hapless, here to enact old rituals
Literature Past
The sea is everything that is the case. > underrated how "everything is water," despite being the first philosophical idea, has not gotten any less wacky since — Evan (tweed) (@beingandslime) July 9, 2020 [https://twitter.com/beingandslime/status/1281076498707951617?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw] This tweet refers to the
Electronic Literature
Below, I give a quick introduction to how you can create your own generative literary work, even if you have no technical knowledge. I start with some worthwhile context, but feel free to skip down to "Writing a Generative Poem" if you just want to get started writing.
Literature Yet to Come
Don DeLillo's novella The Silence came out on October 20. It was advertised in its publisher blurb as being centered around a catastrophic event from which "the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed." What follows is a far-reaching reading of the text, carrying
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PreCursor Monthly — October 2020 The deep learning language model GPT-3 launched back in June. GPT-3 stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3," but in seeing some people get highly invested into interactions with it, I thought it is also a bit of a Galatea, or a Galatea pt. 3,
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PreCursor Monthly — September 2020 This past Friday, I wrapped up my Literature & Hyperconnectivity series. This was designed, however, as a foundational overview. I will be returning to related ideas and texts in posts and videos and so on over time, and hope to also organize more live discussion events
Literature Yet to Come
We end with a look to the past, both in shifting back from 2019 novels to a 2013 one and in looking at what is a bit of a historical novel already: Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/306761/bleeding-edge-by-thomas-pynchon/] . Over the past ten weeks,
Literature Yet to Come
We last discussed Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers, a digital-age tale of the 40 years in the desert awaiting the Promised Land. Next, for our final week, we turn back to Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge. The latter tells of a moment of collapse, through which Cohen&
Literature Yet to Come
This week, we are focusing on Joshua Cohen's 2015 novel Book of Numbers [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/240498/book-of-numbers-by-joshua-cohen/] . If you read Week 1: Introduction [https://www.precursorpoets.com/hyperconnectivity-week1/], you may recall Cohen's comments from his 2013 review of Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding
Literature Yet to Come
Last week [https://www.precursorpoets.com/hyperconnectivity-week6/], I discussed within generative poetry two examples of nature writing which move away from an individual human perspective, providing instead some form of machine voice or engagement with weather data. Elsewhere, some writing strives to be deeply and outwardly personal. The introduction to
Literature Yet to Come
Last week [https://www.precursorpoets.com/hyperconnectivity-week5/], we looked at three collections of poetry. Each was the product of a single poet, with a series of short works organized around a central concept. In traditional conceptions of poetry, these are original expressive writings of these poets. The length of the