The New Value of Text. There is an increasingly pervasive notion that other forms of media are additive to literature, that they somehow improve it. Because, you know, books are just telling stories, right? We are witnessing a profound assault on book publishing and literature, on the text itself—not from ebooks, which publishers are slowly, painfully coming around to after a long resistance, or the internet, which is after all entirely made of text—but from applications, “enhanced” books and reductive notions of literary experience. As I’ve written about before, in the context of advertising, publishers’ reactions to new technologies betray a profound lack of confidence in the text itself. We are being distracted by shiny things.
Text lasts. It’s not platform-dependant, you don’t just get it from one source, read it in one place, understand it in one way. It is not dependent on technology: it is what we make technology out of. Yet we are terrified that in the digital age, people are constantly distracted. Chapter5. Film: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare Retold, 2005)
THE METAMORPHOSIS OF FRANZ KAFKA - FILM ADAPTATION. Two years after finishing film studies, Carlos Atanes, great fan of Franz Kafka, directed this adaptation very freely. He made the risky decision to don't limit himself too much to the text. He took advantage from what producion achieved (as a magnificent location with a library with more than 60,000 volumes). He added some winks to other Kafka's works (and Borges', and Piranesi's...) and above all, he dressed the story with a lot of allusions and references to the author's private and familar life, especially to his father, Hermann Kafka, whom Franz always had complicated relationship. This identification between fictitious family (the Samsas) and true family (the Kafkas) also inspired a change into the time context: the story is placed at Central Europe subjugated by national socialism, grotesque regime that Franz Kafka didn't know, but it was what, some years after his death, annihilated his family.
Fifteen years later ... The Book, Page 1 | The Jefferson Bible, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Exquisite corpse | harpojaeger.com. Exhibit Corpse. He thought he kept The heart of his lover on his left side. Burning and transforming Flowers and butterflies Sink to the surface Bubbles are not heavy But life, today, RIGHT NOW, is! Special I am special I like myself I am unique I am exotic I do things unusual How are you exotic? Why are you exotic? Man that’s really good. But then, there is, in the smallest steps, a way out! And eventually, enough self-love can build up, enough self-love can accumulate that we once again can open back up onto the world: I am special, I am unique, I am exotic, I do things unusual…How are YOU exotic? Once we have reencountered ourselves as worthy of love, once we have healed from the alienations and hurts of our past, we can begin looking back out on the world and allowing new lives, new experiences, new responses to enter into our spheres.
How cool is that! Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment » Exquisite Corpse. Burroughs-cutup. In writing this chapter I have used what I call "the fold in" method that is I place a page of one text folded down the middle on a page of another text (my own or someone else's)--The composite text is read across half from one text and half from the other-- The resulting material is edited, re-arranged, and deleted as in any other form of composition--This chapter contains fold ins with the work of Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Paul Bowles, James Joyce, Michael Portman, Peter Weber, Fabrizio Mondadori, Jacques Stern, Evgeny Yevtushenko, some newspaper articles and of course my own work-- At a surrealist rally in the 1920's Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theatre. Andre Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut ups on the Freudian couch.
In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. TDMCC Meta Mashup. Intermission: Ice Cube Lays Down Architectural Wisdom - Design. Lessig_FOI. Mashup: A Fair Use Defense. Mashup, a style of music that combines samples from various songs, would appear to many to be the epitome of copyright infringement. In fact, a 2005 court case, Bridgeport v. Dimension, deemed the unauthorized use of even one second of a sample to be copyright infringement. Since mashup blends several samples over the course of any one song, it must certainly be copyright infringement. Right? Not so fast. Judges do make mistakes, and no court decision is set in stone, so it is worth considering whether a legitimate legal defense could be made on behalf of the mashup artist. In establishing such a hypothetical defense, let’s turn to the fair use doctrine, which permits the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials under certain circumstances.
Fair use is a legal doctrine meant to protect works deemed valuable for society, often shielding works involving first amendment expression, such as parodies. I will now show one reason why mashup could be considered fair use. The Lyceum. The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book. The following is a transcript of the Hearst New Media lecture I gave last night at Columbia University, subtitled "Two Paths For The Future of Text. " Thanks to everyone who came out, and to the Journalism school for the invitation. I want to start with a page out of history—the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, taken from one of his notebooks on religion. The words on this page belongs to a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe and America, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book.
In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. Steven Johnson and the modern day commonplace book | TriQuarterly Online Mobile. Steven Johnson, author of The Ghost Map, has posted the transcript of a fascinating lecture about the practice of "commonplacing" and the implications of new reading technology on sharing and remixing digital text.
During the Enlightenment, scholars and thinkers usually kept a "commonplace book," or research scrapbook where they transcribed interesting passages of things they read, augmented with their own notes. You can see the obvious parallels to modern media. These commonplace books were the original blogs, tracing the development of minds like Jefferson, Milton, Bacon, and Locke. Of course, they didn't have the benefit of copy-and-paste, so everything was written and rewritten by hand.
The internet, e-books, and digital text combined with programs like Evernote, Yojimbo, and your favorite blogging platform allow us to assemble public, shareable commonplace books that would curl their powdered wigs. Commonplace books.