Alex Reid examines a cross-section of essays in Prefiguring Cyberculture, a work that historicizes the future as neither alarmist nor utopian.
Tim Keane reviews Genet’s republished Prisoner of Love, a ‘mirror-memoir’ in which Genet sees Palestine from the inside in an attempt to see himself from the outside.
This work is inspired by the real-time events triggered by a fatal shooting incident in MIT and a manhunt for suspects allegedly involved in the Boston Marathon bombings as reported through social media, particularly Twitter.
(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
This is a heart-wrenching poem that radically recontextualizes Rengetsu’s Tanka (short poems) by juxtaposing it with sounds and voices from the September 11, 2001 attacks. The poem’s title animation presents the letters in the title descending and coalescing into words that reflect on a suggested surface below, using a background of soft night colors, the moon, and night sounds. Three things subvert the serene initial scene: the night sky contains a jet’s vapor trails, and for a few seconds, a highly transparent image of the burning Twin Towers fades in and out right before the date 09.11.01 appears. This juxtaposition and superposition in time and space of images, sounds, and words is the main strategy for constructing a powerful mix of frames of reference, separated by gulfs of time, place, and human experience. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
'Trujillo' spreekt voor zich en is pas geslaagd wanneer het spontaan tot meerdere lezingen/ herhaaldelijk bekijken aanzet! Het stelt tevens de romantische kunstenaarsopvatting aan de orde (met de roos als leidmotief): een beetje kunstenaar moet groots kunnen afzien. Anders gezegd een beetje schrikbewind legt de kunst geen windeieren: doe er vooral uw maal mee!
"Pax" is a lesser apocalypse that began to unveil itself one stormy spring day near Dallas when someone closed the terminal and the guns came out. It's about flying and falling, truth and desire, nakedness, terror, and the home land. While some may find these themes all too American, they are as Chekhov might have said originally Russian: recall what happened to those cosmonauts who took off from the USSR and landed in the CIS, displaced by a trick of history, discovering (as we all must) that we travel through time as well as space. It's become a common experience these days, this journey to another world, this never coming home. Especially when the guns come out.
As will be apparent, this is not a work of literature in the ordinary sense; neither does it have the formal properties of a game, though it is meant to be be played as well as read. Taxonomic questions--whether this text is hyper, cyber, techno, or oulipo, indeed whether it is "text" at all--I leave to those who care about such matters. Some years ago and in another world, John Cayley pointed out that we play many things besides games--for instance, musical instruments. He went on to wonder if we could create textual instruments, rule-governed systems for producing patterns in which the element of configuration or play is highly prominent. Though it is probably not what Cayley had in mind, the form of "Pax" began as an attempt to realize his suggestion.
(Source: Author's description on About Pax page)
