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In 2013, someone operating under the name Surveillance Camera Man posted a video filmed on a college campus. The man filming enters a library room, in which two people are sitting at a computer. Immediately they look over and one starts asking questions, though lulls in the exchange are edited
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A novel was the first example I was given, in the course of my schooling, of a large-scale project. Obviously work done in other fields – the efforts of science, the laborious research of historians, and the great achievements in history itself – is complex, but this was not strongly impressed upon
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PreCursor Monthly – June 2021 This is the start of Year II of me doing this monthly newsletter charting lines of continuity between literature old and new, print and electronic. Despite making those broad connections across centuries, however, this entry is focused on a big picture issue I think about a
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PreCursor Monthly – April 2021 The following post must be read, but maybe it will be the last thing you read. I will explain more below, but you might begin by wondering how I will keep up a literary newsletter while rejecting text. I am excited to announce that following a
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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
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PreCursor Monthly – February 2021 We are now beyond the time of Johnny Mnemonic, which was set in January 2021, and it is worth reflecting on the distinction between material limitations and human ones. Johnny is a mnemonic courier, a cyborg who smuggles information in his head. For data too sensitive
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PreCursor Monthly – January 2021 As we enter into 2021, I am left with strong optimism for the future of literature, particularly electronic literature. Over the past week, I did a series of Twitter polls feeling out the expectations of some of my followers, leading me to make the following prediction:
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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
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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
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PreCursor Monthly — August 2020 If you have not been following along with my "Literature and Hyperconnectivity" posts, I recommend reading through them. On July 17, I sent out Week 2: Digital Mirrors, in which I discussed three digital epistolary narratives. This sort of writing – making significant use of