Literature Yet to Come
At the start of this month, I sent out "Anti-Text Revolution." April Fools' is a fun opportunity to play with expectations. Of course I support literacy, and ultimately make the case there for the need to support an exceptionally high level of reading comprehension – and yet, O!
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PreCursor Monthly – March 2021 Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak A lasting inspiration, sanctified By reason and by truth; what we have loved Others will love, and we may teach them how: Instruct them how the mind of man becomes A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
Literature Yet to Come
Over the summer, I did a retrospective on some contemporary literature. In 10 posts over 10 weeks, I explored a sample of 2010s literature. The subject was "Literature and Hyperconnectivity" [https://www.precursorpoets.com/literature-and-hyperconnectivity/] and what I was tracing primarily was 1. How and why many writers
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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
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
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
Literature Yet to Come
Poetry has reacted to the digital age in many ways. Next week, we will be looking at some generative poetry, one approach to crafting a fundamentally computer-based poem. Even for crafting something for print, there are practices such as Flarf, mining search results to produce outrageous texts. Alternatively, Mez Breeze
Literature Yet to Come
Heroic Twitter In 1981, William Gibson published a short story in which a man (the titular "Johnny Mnemonic") stores and transports data in his head. With the help of a cybernetically-enhanced woman and a cyborg dolphin, he takes on the Yakuza and starts to retrieve his own lost