Every now and then I have this continuing burst of gratitude: I’m in grad school for poetry. I planned for this for ten years, and I made it this far when many of my early peers — the formalists, the classicist bullies I knew in my teens and early twenties — gave up. A [...]
Okay, so, various geek toys to date:
The Vigenere Cipher — part of this semester’s conference project.
Relativity Calculator — just a silly E=mc2 thing.
Preston’s Law — one of many, many ridiculous language toys I’ve made.
Colorgene — a strange, half-done RGB color breeding system. Just check two colors of your choice and click on “mate” to [...]
1. The end of the American dream.
The “American dream,” whatever the hell it happens to be, necessarily (d)evolved in the last century or so from an immaterial system of acceptable pursuits to a material system of consumption and exchange. At its core is a fundamental tension between Western optimistic belief in individual potential and [...]
In my dream this morning, I found myself entering some sort of amusement park, a reconstructed era type, like a Renaissance Festival or parts of Gettysburg. I was with someone, a woman, but I don’t know who. I remember that something was strange about the gates of the park — they were at [...]
Often you sit down with the page and you say: come forth. The poem looks like 2x + y = z. You need augmented matrices to solve it, lemmas, obfuscated points and axioms. You curl up on the floor, pace, do push-ups, brew coffee, sing to yourself, all the while thinking: [...]