Lenore Weiss's Blog

When I’m in a Walt Whitman state of mind I want to hug every new mother I see wheeling a sleeping infant in a stroller, a boy on a skateboard whose body jumps past every pothole in the pavement, seniors who walk around the lake in baseball caps; there’s a man in a wheelchair shouting curses at anyone who’ll listen, but no one does, another man who balances on a bicycle filled with recycled cans, young girls on roller skates hi-fiving their friends, kids with charms attached to backpacks like bushy yellow tails, a red bottle brush washes the sky, a Bird of Paradise bows its split head open, there are ravens in the city flying past all the light sleepers and all the all-nighters with the same cry in one mutable moment, as broken mirrors piled beneath cars on either side of the sidewalk reflect the places time takes us through a littering of lives, and then I know. A woman in a green dress walks past me, her heart a retablo beating on view. As shocking as it is to watch it contract and release in the open air, she covers the muscle with one hand and flies away.

The post A Walt Whitman State of Mind first appeared on Fiction and Poetry.

The begonia survived the winter wind
Smashing its pot on the porch
Bits falling down the stairs like a slinky
Heading toward the bottom
Picked up by the root ball and
Introduced to a new home
Beneath the Australian fern
And the wandering palm
Blooming in the courtyard
Pink between glossy leaves
Much like the way I’ve accommodated
My history to this place, replanting
My body in a new bed, each morning waking
To a soft mist and a pair of orange
Orioles sipping nectar from a headdress of flowers.
I met you two hours after you were born
Wrapped in a tortilla’s worth of blankets,
An infant with bloodlines from three continents
Who rests in my arms registering
First wonderment at every leaf and flower.
I count all ten of your toes
A soft intelligence in your bright eyes
Stirring the world.

The post New Beginnings: for Mara first appeared on Fiction and Poetry.

Although I had two older sisters, I grew up being lonely. We were five years apart and I was the youngest. My sisters called me the baby, and while that was a non-negotiable fact, I was smart and recognized any time my older sister lied to my parents, and knew how my middle sister let boys squeeze her boobs, and cast evil looks my way from across the room as she giggled on the telephone. She sounded so incredibly dumb, and I told her so, which always ended with a series of shrieks. “Mommy, tell her to get out of here!” But I could go nowhere except to a vacant lot outside our house where I did spend considerable time removed from my sisters’ endless posing and making weird faces in the mirror. “Are you kissing yourself or your boyfriend?” My older sister turned rapidly away from the mirror and told me to shut up. “You’re such a baby.”

Crammed into a single bedroom with one closet, our lack of space contributed to our general discomfort. We lived on the third floor of an apartment which was built sometime after World War II as veterans traded their dog tags for wedding rings and families needed a place to call home. While my sisters and I shared the one bedroom, my parents slept on a roll-away couch in the living room. In the morning, we took turns pounding on the bathroom door. “Hurry up. I have to use it!”

My mother, a woman with a sweet disposition and a rake of curly hair, considered herself a natural beauty. As such, she had no use for cosmetics or fingernail polish or perfume, although her Silent Night powder that she used after every shower did have an unmistakable scent. She was the family’s designated negotiator, and my father deferred to her in all matters “Jeanne, you do it.” But as capable as my mother was, raising three girls over an expanse of fifteen years had worn her out, and she would just as soon, not do it. After all, I was her “change of life” baby, born at a time when her generation had finished bearing children. She’d bend down to my five-year-old self, brush my ponytail and softly suggested, “Why don’t you go outside and play.” Which I was always happy to do, released from Saturday morning chores, dusting furniture and whatever else my sisters wanted to palm off on me “You’re such a baby.”

The post Sister Love (to be continued) first appeared on Fiction and Poetry.

Working as a writer in the computer industry suited me fine. First, I contracted at engineering companies. I moved on to other positions. My role required me to interview software engineers, marketing and business analysts, and to ask questions. Many questions. At the end of each development cycle, there was a new or updated technical manual followed by release notes, use cases, product specification sheets and sometimes even PowerPoint presentations to highlight features.

While these tomes took a significant commitment of time and money, their value were as completed items on a manager’s spreadsheet. “Yeah, we produced that thing.” The reality was that people wanted computers to be easy, intuitive was the word, and so was borne the need for interface design.

I joined a professional organization, Society for Technical Communication, dedicated to people like myself who shuttled between Marketing and IT departments. I learned from my peers. The industry was heading away from the printed page to the online world and I wanted to go there with it.

After my children were grown, I commuted “to the valley,” contracting for Apple Computer. Here was a global company where teams used videoconferencing to develop business requirements. Countless software engineers and program managers lived in the United States for short periods of time, or hop-skipped around the country to fulfill contracts. A mélange of food preferences, language, and culture were synthesized in the name of technology. Team was the operative word. Sort of like hyperlinked people.

At times, I wished I could substitute my creative writing with another more well-paid compulsion. Lawyer? Software engineer? Realtor? I tried on different roles, but they didn’t compute. Instead, I hoped to find peers with similar obsessions about the impact of technology on language.

Language has been bombarded by increased consonant usage on cell phones to save the effort of typing with diminutive keyboards. Acronyms: OMG, LOL, BRB. Hyperlinks, icons, blogs, email, structured programming languages, the constant downpour of information raining on our heads from the Internet. The global world economy. There’s material here.

So how do we respond to these machines, devices, and networks that are increasingly shaping our lives and the way we communicate?

I’m not talking about cell phones and social networking. Or even e-books. I’m talking about the way we use language, our hyperlinked minds or what Sarah Gray calls the “nomad mind.” Multitasking on parallel planes.

“Look at the structure of the Internet, where everything is connected, instead of being hierarchical…The nomad mind is one that moves through different realities and spaces, and feels comfortable in all of them. This is what the contemporary world is all about.”

A while ago,  I visited the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco and saw Evan Bissell’s “The Knotted Line,” a media art project and an educational tool “for the digital generation.” The project began as a dialogue between incarcerated fathers and youth with incarcerated parents, a collaborative discussion inside the nomad mind that spurred creation of the project. Click and expand.

It’s not difficult to find discussions about collaborative writing models.

An article in Fast Company magazine by Baratunde Thurston, founder of a comedy and technology company, notes how several new apps allow clipping, linking, sharing and remixing text previously “trapped within bound volumes.” Thurston is excited by the possibilities of networked ideas. But in some way, writers have been doing this for a long time. Journalists work in teams to pull together research from disparate sources to produce the evening news. Authors with big budgets like Elmore Leonard hire teams to help research his next book. Poets work from prompts to come up with myriad responses to the same word or situation. So many artistic productions depend upon people “behind the scenes,” editors, comedy writers, script writers, and yes, technical writers. We’ve been collaborating for a long time.

My new “go-to” place to read about technology and culture is appropriately named, Technoculture, a peer reviewed scholarly annual for technology studies published from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In Volume 2 (2012), Pamela Ingleton of McMaster University has a fascinating article that examines “Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less,” a Penguin novelty book composed by college students Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, and released in December 2009. The book condenses more than eighty literary works into a series of tweets.

In her discussion, Ingleton acknowledges the dependence of the digital with the print media. After all, Twitterature exists in a print format, a kind of Cliff’s Notes for the information age. Without the book, there are no royalties. Ingleton says:

“The Internet and social media are changing the ways we write and read, as well as the ways we think and talk about writing and reading. Which is not to say that the space between something like the print tradition and digital media is an easy one to solve…or dissolve.”

But what about the actual way we handle language?

There always have been different “schools’ of poetry, Surrealists, Futurists, Modernists, PostModernists, Language poets. Where are the Technologists? It seems to me that rap lyrics come closest to acknowledging what is happening. Read rap artist Jay-Z in Decoded. He uses a combination of art and multimedia to “tell the story of a culture, an art form, a moment in history.”

Sometimes a poet like Harryette Mullen in Sleeping with the Dictionary collaborates with Roget’s Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. While Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, was compiled with the assistance of a African-American poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. Mullen incorporates word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect. Mullen’s work is also play.

Many years ago, I met poet Walter Lowenfels. What I remember about Walter was his vast generosity and commitment to the word. Walter published my first poem that ended with the line, “this bioluminescence still swimming in the dark.” I was excited by the relationship between science and language. So was Walter. From “Every Poem Is A Love Poem” included in The Portable Walter edited by Robert Gover, International Publishers, 1968:

“I am trying to break through this language to get to
fireboxes
Cooper-Bessemer compressors
magnetic films
without the copperbelt lining that keeps my hope
from exploding out of this typewriter,
desk, window, through the pines, down the
Little Egg Harbor River, across the
Continental Shelf…”

Walter did not have access to computer technology. But he was trying “to break through this language.”

Later I met William Dickey, who was my faculty advisor at San Francisco State University. Bill was enthralled with the possibilities of HyperCard, an application program and programming tool for the Apple MacIntosh released around 1987 that predated the unveiling of the World Wide Web several years later. One of Bill’s last projects before his death in 1994, was a series of HyperCard poems, “Poem Descending a Staircase.” His work is mentioned in “Hypermedia and Literary Studies” edited by Paul Delany and George P. Landow from MIT Press. Bill was fascinated by the fluidity of this new medium. While I am unable to reproduce his experiment here, the following is a quote from “Life Moving More Rapidly Than Hands Can Manage,” from Brief Lives, (The Heyeck Press, 1986).

“…Nevertheless, always, the frames will move
one frame faster than you can visualize.
On your back, in the experimental cubicle
where problems in mathematics are projected on the ceiling,
when you cannot solve the first problem, when time
is ticking loudly by you, your mouth sweet
with saliva gathering, lie.

The machines will know you lied. They will say to one another
on their instantaneous tapes: “He lied.”
If they are feeling generous, they will only note
that fact. Then they will let you advance to the next problem.”

Bill loved technology. His poetry also reflects a discomfort with authority and an artificial intelligence that may come back to mock us á la The Matrix, a movie with Keanu Reaves that debuted in 1999.

Nina Serrano has a different take on technology. Writer and storyteller and co-founder of the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, Nina is a radio producer at Pacifica Radio Station (94.1 FM) in Berkeley, California and is currently producing an e-book, “Heart’s Journey” that is available on Amazon. Here is an excerpt from “Poems From a Sleepless Night:”

“…My Dear we will be posted at our computers
catching the hem of the skirt
of every passing muse
in the dust of time
in this longest moonshine
brewing an elixir of memory and metaphor
Our fingers will capture it
letter by space bar
Verses sent off by electrical force we don’t understand
Our words bumping into others’ words flying
through cyber space
will create a universe of poetry in cyber clouds
of ever expanding immensity
of ever expanding immensity
becoming finite only in the print-out of pages.”

Nina’s poetry is exuberant with the infinite possibility of an electrical force “we don’t understand,” an elixir that wraps together memory and metaphor.

And here’s my contribution, a poem entitled “WFH” from my manuscript Genghis Code:

“Working from home and raising children, my brain and hands connect across a keyboard. Everything else recedes into the background: a ring tone, a tea kettle, a leaf blower outside my window. Focus on the problem. Not the error.

Somewhere I hear a boy eating a kernel of popcorn on a first-floor landing.

A young girl walks by with an iPod strapped to her upper arm and a Raiders patch on her jeans.

I like how my hands and my brain need each other.

In Israel, the color of a yarmulke is a code
about where you stand along that country’s
divided political line.

On the pond at Leona Canyon,
male and female mallards
survey cattails.”

Technology is a tool that can be used to foster communication or not, depending upon who is doing the programming. Maybe it will be a group of younger writers growing up with technology to explore the intersection of technology and language. Or maybe by that time, technology will be so transparent that something else generates creative ideas. In any case, I am excited to further this dialogue and to continue to make notes in the margin.

End Notes

Gray, Sarah.”Israeli-born artist’s ‘nomad mind’ mixes archeology, myth.” Jweekly 17 August 2012.

Bissell, Evan. Home page.

Thurston, Baratunde, “The Future of Reading,” Fast Company, February 2013

Ingleton, Pamela, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Twitterature? Reading and Theorizing ‘Print’ Technologies in the Age of Social Media,” Technoculture,
Volume 2 (2012)

Jay-Z, Decoded, Spielgel & Grau (a division of Random House), New York, 2010

Mullen, Harryette, Sleeping with the Dictionary.
University of California Press, 2002

The post Notes Made in Melted Margarine first appeared on Fiction and Poetry.

Working as a writer in the computer industry suited me fine. First, I contracted at engineering companies. I moved on to other positions. My role required me to interview software engineers, marketing and business analysts, and to ask questions. Many questions. At the end of each development cycle, there was a new or updated technical manual followed by release notes, use cases, product specification sheets and sometimes even PowerPoint presentations to highlight features.

While these tomes took a significant commitment of time and money, their value were as completed items on a manager’s spreadsheet. “Yeah, we produced that thing.” The reality was that people wanted computers to be easy, intuitive was the word, and so was borne the need for interface design.

I joined a professional organization, Society for Technical Communication, dedicated to people like myself who shuttled between Marketing and IT departments. I learned from my peers. The industry was heading away from the printed page to the online world and I wanted to go there with it.

After my children were grown, I commuted “to the valley,” contracting for Apple Computer. Here was a global company where teams used videoconferencing to develop business requirements. Countless software engineers and program managers lived in the United States for short periods of time, or hop-skipped around the country to fulfill contracts. A mélange of food preferences, language, and culture were synthesized in the name of technology. Team was the operative word. Sort of like hyperlinked people.

At times, I wished I could substitute my creative writing with another more well-paid compulsion. Lawyer? Software engineer? Realtor? I tried on different roles, but they didn’t compute. Instead, I hoped to find peers with similar obsessions about the impact of technology on language.

Language has been bombarded by increased consonant usage on cell phones to save the effort of typing with diminutive keyboards. Acronyms: OMG, LOL, BRB. Hyperlinks, icons, blogs, email, structured programming languages, the constant downpour of information raining on our heads from the Internet. The global world economy. There’s material here.

So how do we respond to these machines, devices, and networks that are increasingly shaping our lives and the way we communicate?

I’m not talking about cell phones and social networking. Or even e-books. I’m talking about the way we use language, our hyperlinked minds or what Sarah Gray calls the “nomad mind.” Multitasking on parallel planes.

“Look at the structure of the Internet, where everything is connected, instead of being hierarchical…The nomad mind is one that moves through different realities and spaces, and feels comfortable in all of them. This is what the contemporary world is all about.”

A while ago,  I visited the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco and saw Evan Bissell’s “The Knotted Line,” a media art project and an educational tool “for the digital generation.” The project began as a dialogue between incarcerated fathers and youth with incarcerated parents, a collaborative discussion inside the nomad mind that spurred creation of the project. Click and expand.

It’s not difficult to find discussions about collaborative writing models.

An article in Fast Company magazine by Baratunde Thurston, founder of a comedy and technology company, notes how several new apps allow clipping, linking, sharing and remixing text previously “trapped within bound volumes.” Thurston is excited by the possibilities of networked ideas. But in some way, writers have been doing this for a long time. Journalists work in teams to pull together research from disparate sources to produce the evening news. Authors with big budgets like Elmore Leonard hire teams to help research his next book. Poets work from prompts to come up with myriad responses to the same word or situation. So many artistic productions depend upon people “behind the scenes,” editors, comedy writers, script writers, and yes, technical writers. We’ve been collaborating for a long time.

My new “go-to” place to read about technology and culture is appropriately named, Technoculture, a peer reviewed scholarly annual for technology studies published from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In Volume 2 (2012), Pamela Ingleton of McMaster University has a fascinating article that examines “Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less,” a Penguin novelty book composed by college students Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, and released in December 2009. The book condenses more than eighty literary works into a series of tweets.

In her discussion, Ingleton acknowledges the dependence of the digital with the print media. After all, Twitterature exists in a print format, a kind of Cliff’s Notes for the information age. Without the book, there are no royalties. Ingleton says:

“The Internet and social media are changing the ways we write and read, as well as the ways we think and talk about writing and reading. Which is not to say that the space between something like the print tradition and digital media is an easy one to solve…or dissolve.”

But what about the actual way we handle language?

There always have been different “schools’ of poetry, Surrealists, Futurists, Modernists, PostModernists, Language poets. Where are the Technologists? It seems to me that rap lyrics come closest to acknowledging what is happening. Read rap artist Jay-Z in Decoded. He uses a combination of art and multimedia to “tell the story of a culture, an art form, a moment in history.”

Sometimes a poet like Harryette Mullen in Sleeping with the Dictionary collaborates with Roget’s Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. While Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, was compiled with the assistance of a African-American poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. Mullen incorporates word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect. Mullen’s work is also play.

Many years ago, I met poet Walter Lowenfels. What I remember about Walter was his vast generosity and commitment to the word. Walter published my first poem that ended with the line, “this bioluminescence still swimming in the dark.” I was excited by the relationship between science and language. So was Walter. From “Every Poem Is A Love Poem” included in The Portable Walter edited by Robert Gover, International Publishers, 1968:

“I am trying to break through this language to get to
fireboxes
Cooper-Bessemer compressors
magnetic films
without the copperbelt lining that keeps my hope
from exploding out of this typewriter,
desk, window, through the pines, down the
Little Egg Harbor River, across the
Continental Shelf…”

Walter did not have access to computer technology. But he was trying “to break through this language.”

Later I met William Dickey, who was my faculty advisor at San Francisco State University. Bill was enthralled with the possibilities of HyperCard, an application program and programming tool for the Apple MacIntosh released around 1987 that predated the unveiling of the World Wide Web several years later. One of Bill’s last projects before his death in 1994, was a series of HyperCard poems, “Poem Descending a Staircase.” His work is mentioned in “Hypermedia and Literary Studies” edited by Paul Delany and George P. Landow from MIT Press. Bill was fascinated by the fluidity of this new medium. While I am unable to reproduce his experiment here, the following is a quote from “Life Moving More Rapidly Than Hands Can Manage,” from Brief Lives, (The Heyeck Press, 1986).

“…Nevertheless, always, the frames will move
one frame faster than you can visualize.
On your back, in the experimental cubicle
where problems in mathematics are projected on the ceiling,
when you cannot solve the first problem, when time
is ticking loudly by you, your mouth sweet
with saliva gathering, lie.

The machines will know you lied. They will say to one another
on their instantaneous tapes: “He lied.”
If they are feeling generous, they will only note
that fact. Then they will let you advance to the next problem.”

Bill loved technology. His poetry also reflects a discomfort with authority and an artificial intelligence that may come back to mock us á la The Matrix, a movie with Keanu Reaves that debuted in 1999.

Nina Serrano has a different take on technology. Writer and storyteller and co-founder of the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, Nina is a radio producer at Pacifica Radio Station (94.1 FM) in Berkeley, California and is currently producing an e-book, “Heart’s Journey” that is available on Amazon. Here is an excerpt from “Poems From a Sleepless Night:”

“…My Dear we will be posted at our computers
catching the hem of the skirt
of every passing muse
in the dust of time
in this longest moonshine
brewing an elixir of memory and metaphor
Our fingers will capture it
letter by space bar
Verses sent off by electrical force we don’t understand
Our words bumping into others’ words flying
through cyber space
will create a universe of poetry in cyber clouds
of ever expanding immensity
of ever expanding immensity
becoming finite only in the print-out of pages.”

Nina’s poetry is exuberant with the infinite possibility of an electrical force “we don’t understand,” an elixir that wraps together memory and metaphor.

And here’s my contribution, a poem entitled “WFH” from my manuscript Genghis Code:

“Working from home and raising children, my brain and hands connect across a keyboard. Everything else recedes into the background: a ring tone, a tea kettle, a leaf blower outside my window. Focus on the problem. Not the error.

Somewhere I hear a boy eating a kernel of popcorn on a first-floor landing.

A young girl walks by with an iPod strapped to her upper arm and a Raiders patch on her jeans.

I like how my hands and my brain need each other.

In Israel, the color of a yarmulke is a code
about where you stand along that country’s
divided political line.

On the pond at Leona Canyon,
male and female mallards
survey cattails.”

Technology is a tool that can be used to foster communication or not, depending upon who is doing the programming. Maybe it will be a group of younger writers growing up with technology to explore the intersection of technology and language. Or maybe by that time, technology will be so transparent that something else generates creative ideas. In any case, I am excited to further this dialogue and to continue to make notes in the margin.

End Notes

Gray, Sarah.”Israeli-born artist’s ‘nomad mind’ mixes archeology, myth.” Jweekly 17 August 2012.

Bissell, Evan. Home page.

Thurston, Baratunde, “The Future of Reading,” Fast Company, February 2013

Ingleton, Pamela, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Twitterature? Reading and Theorizing ‘Print’ Technologies in the Age of Social Media,” Technoculture,
Volume 2 (2012)

Jay-Z, Decoded, Spielgel & Grau (a division of Random House), New York, 2010

Mullen, Harryette, Sleeping with the Dictionary.
University of California Press, 2002

The post Notes Talken in Melted Margarine first appeared on Fiction and Poetry.

Working as a writer in the computer industry suited me fine. First, I contracted at engineering companies. I moved on to other positions. My role required me to interview software engineers, marketing and business analysts, and to ask questions. Many questions. At the end of each development cycle, there was a new or updated technical manual followed by release notes, use cases, product specification sheets and sometimes even PowerPoint presentations to highlight features.

While these tomes took a significant commitment of time and money, their value were as completed items on a manager’s spreadsheet. “Yeah, we produced that thing.” The reality was that people wanted computers to be easy, intuitive was the word, and so was borne the need for interface design.

I joined a professional organization, Society for Technical Communication, dedicated to people like myself who shuttled between Marketing and IT departments. I learned from my peers. The industry was heading away from the printed page to the online world and I wanted to go there with it.

After my children were grown, I commuted “to the valley,” contracting for Apple Computer. Here was a global company where teams used videoconferencing to develop business requirements. Countless software engineers and program managers lived in the United States for short periods of time, or hop-skipped around the country to fulfill contracts. A mélange of food preferences, language, and culture were synthesized in the name of technology. Team was the operative word. Sort of like hyperlinked people.

At times, I wished I could substitute my creative writing with another more well-paid compulsion. Lawyer? Software engineer? Realtor? I tried on different roles, but they didn’t compute. Instead, I hoped to find peers with similar obsessions about the impact of technology on language.

Language has been bombarded by increased consonant usage on cell phones to save the effort of typing with diminutive keyboards. Acronyms: OMG, LOL, BRB. Hyperlinks, icons, blogs, email, structured programming languages, the constant downpour of information raining on our heads from the Internet. The global world economy. There’s material here.

So how do we respond to these machines, devices, and networks that are increasingly shaping our lives and the way we communicate?

I’m not talking about cell phones and social networking. Or even e-books. I’m talking about the way we use language, our hyperlinked minds or what Sarah Gray calls the “nomad mind.” Multitasking on parallel planes.

“Look at the structure of the Internet, where everything is connected, instead of being hierarchical…The nomad mind is one that moves through different realities and spaces, and feels comfortable in all of them. This is what the contemporary world is all about.”

A while ago,  I visited the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco and saw Evan Bissell’s “The Knotted Line,” a media art project and an educational tool “for the digital generation.” The project began as a dialogue between incarcerated fathers and youth with incarcerated parents, a collaborative discussion inside the nomad mind that spurred creation of the project. Click and expand.

It’s not difficult to find discussions about collaborative writing models.

An article in Fast Company magazine by Baratunde Thurston, founder of a comedy and technology company, notes how several new apps allow clipping, linking, sharing and remixing text previously “trapped within bound volumes.” Thurston is excited by the possibilities of networked ideas. But in some way, writers have been doing this for a long time. Journalists work in teams to pull together research from disparate sources to produce the evening news. Authors with big budgets like Elmore Leonard hire teams to help research his next book. Poets work from prompts to come up with myriad responses to the same word or situation. So many artistic productions depend upon people “behind the scenes,” editors, comedy writers, script writers, and yes, technical writers. We’ve been collaborating for a long time.

My new “go-to” place to read about technology and culture is appropriately named, Technoculture, a peer reviewed scholarly annual for technology studies published from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In Volume 2 (2012), Pamela Ingleton of McMaster University has a fascinating article that examines “Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less,” a Penguin novelty book composed by college students Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, and released in December 2009. The book condenses more than eighty literary works into a series of tweets.

In her discussion, Ingleton acknowledges the dependence of the digital with the print media. After all, Twitterature exists in a print format, a kind of Cliff’s Notes for the information age. Without the book, there are no royalties. Ingleton says:

“The Internet and social media are changing the ways we write and read, as well as the ways we think and talk about writing and reading. Which is not to say that the space between something like the print tradition and digital media is an easy one to solve…or dissolve.”

But what about the actual way we handle language?

There always have been different “schools’ of poetry, Surrealists, Futurists, Modernists, PostModernists, Language poets. Where are the Technologists? It seems to me that rap lyrics come closest to acknowledging what is happening. Read rap artist Jay-Z in Decoded. He uses a combination of art and multimedia to “tell the story of a culture, an art form, a moment in history.”

Sometimes a poet like Harryette Mullen in Sleeping with the Dictionary collaborates with Roget’s Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. While Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, was compiled with the assistance of a African-American poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. Mullen incorporates word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect. Mullen’s work is also play.

Many years ago, I met poet Walter Lowenfels. What I remember about Walter was his vast generosity and commitment to the word. Walter published my first poem that ended with the line, “this bioluminescence still swimming in the dark.” I was excited by the relationship between science and language. So was Walter. From “Every Poem Is A Love Poem” included in The Portable Walter edited by Robert Gover, International Publishers, 1968:

“I am trying to break through this language to get to
fireboxes
Cooper-Bessemer compressors
magnetic films
without the copperbelt lining that keeps my hope
from exploding out of this typewriter,
desk, window, through the pines, down the
Little Egg Harbor River, across the
Continental Shelf…”

Walter did not have access to computer technology. But he was trying “to break through this language.”

Later I met William Dickey, who was my faculty advisor at San Francisco State University. Bill was enthralled with the possibilities of HyperCard, an application program and programming tool for the Apple MacIntosh released around 1987 that predated the unveiling of the World Wide Web several years later. One of Bill’s last projects before his death in 1994, was a series of HyperCard poems, “Poem Descending a Staircase.” His work is mentioned in “Hypermedia and Literary Studies” edited by Paul Delany and George P. Landow from MIT Press. Bill was fascinated by the fluidity of this new medium. While I am unable to reproduce his experiment here, the following is a quote from “Life Moving More Rapidly Than Hands Can Manage,” from Brief Lives, (The Heyeck Press, 1986).

“…Nevertheless, always, the frames will move
one frame faster than you can visualize.
On your back, in the experimental cubicle
where problems in mathematics are projected on the ceiling,
when you cannot solve the first problem, when time
is ticking loudly by you, your mouth sweet
with saliva gathering, lie.

The machines will know you lied. They will say to one another
on their instantaneous tapes: “He lied.”
If they are feeling generous, they will only note
that fact. Then they will let you advance to the next problem.”

Bill loved technology. His poetry also reflects a discomfort with authority and an artificial intelligence that may come back to mock us á la The Matrix, a movie with Keanu Reaves that debuted in 1999.

Nina Serrano has a different take on technology. Writer and storyteller and co-founder of the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, Nina is a radio producer at Pacifica Radio Station (94.1 FM) in Berkeley, California and is currently producing an e-book, “Heart’s Journey” that is available on Amazon. Here is an excerpt from “Poems From a Sleepless Night:”

“…My Dear we will be posted at our computers
catching the hem of the skirt
of every passing muse
in the dust of time
in this longest moonshine
brewing an elixir of memory and metaphor
Our fingers will capture it
letter by space bar
Verses sent off by electrical force we don’t understand
Our words bumping into others’ words flying
through cyber space
will create a universe of poetry in cyber clouds
of ever expanding immensity
of ever expanding immensity
becoming finite only in the print-out of pages.”

Nina’s poetry is exuberant with the infinite possibility of an electrical force “we don’t understand,” an elixir that wraps together memory and metaphor.

And here’s my contribution, a poem entitled “WFH” from my manuscript Genghis Code:

“Working from home and raising children, my brain and hands connect across a keyboard. Everything else recedes into the background: a ring tone, a tea kettle, a leaf blower outside my window. Focus on the problem. Not the error.

Somewhere I hear a boy eating a kernel of popcorn on a first-floor landing.

A young girl walks by with an iPod strapped to her upper arm and a Raiders patch on her jeans.

I like how my hands and my brain need each other.

In Israel, the color of a yarmulke is a code
about where you stand along that country’s
divided political line.

On the pond at Leona Canyon,
male and female mallards
survey cattails.”

Technology is a tool that can be used to foster communication or not, depending upon who is doing the programming. Maybe it will be a group of younger writers growing up with technology to explore the intersection of technology and language. Or maybe by that time, technology will be so transparent that something else generates creative ideas. In any case, I am excited to further this dialogue and to continue to make notes in the margin.

End Notes

Gray, Sarah.”Israeli-born artist’s ‘nomad mind’ mixes archeology, myth.” Jweekly 17 August 2012.

Bissell, Evan. Home page.

Thurston, Baratunde, “The Future of Reading,” Fast Company, February 2013

Ingleton, Pamela, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Twitterature? Reading and Theorizing ‘Print’ Technologies in the Age of Social Media,” Technoculture,
Volume 2 (2012)

Jay-Z, Decoded, Spielgel & Grau (a division of Random House), New York, 2010

Mullen, Harryette, Sleeping with the Dictionary.
University of California Press, 2002

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I did not go looking for Mable Pyne. She found me. Knowing I enjoyed books, my partner’s daughter gifted me with The Little Geography of the United States. As far as I know, there’s no biography of Mable’s life, nor does Wikipedia have a listing.

But I did find a meager note posted by the University of Southern Mississippi. I learned Mable was born on January 15, 1903 in Mount Vernon, New York, a suburb north of the Bronx and about eighteen miles from midtown Manhattan. She died in 1969.

I unearthed more information. When We Were Little, a memoir illustrated by Mable and written by three generations of her family, Mable writes about growing up in a railroad flat not far from Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother was determined that all her three children “learn to do everything.” Her father, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, taught his children how to shoot using the ends of sharpened wooden kitchen matches as bullets. Maple regularly borrowed books from the Children’s Room in the Pratt Institute where she later studied art.

Houghton Mifflin Company published the Little Geography in 1941. Mable wrote and illustrated the book for children using her own wonderful iconography. Her maps reveal the entire economy of the United States, a scattering of cows, corn, cotton, oil rigs, milk and cheese, and minerals across every state, taking you on a cross-country trip through rivers and mountains, deserts and western plains, including canals, volcanoes and islands.

What’s special, however, is the quality of her illustrations, a few inches high, with approximately eight to ten per page. They capture the “isness” of whatever she’s drawing, possibly pen and ink sketches using color for highlights: Forty-niners pushing a donkey loaded with a pickaxe and supplies up a steep incline, or the idea of a bear followed by blurry cubs. Her sketch lines capture the moment. The illustrations are charming, but more than that. Mable is a storyteller as well as an artist.

In describing the agriculture of Virginia, she starts with the headline PEANUTS.

Of course children like them elephants LOVE them, and squirrels beg for them. But COWS think they are fine eating too. So Virginia grows MILLIONS of peanuts. 

Although her books appeared long before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1962, one senses that Mable was a strong feminist who featured girls and women in all her illustrations playing an active role at both work and husbandry, climbing mountains and picking apples, engaged in all aspects of life.

There’s also The Story of Religion, a book published in 1954, also by Houghton Mifflin Company. It tackles the daunting task of explaining the world’s religions in fifty-four beautifully illustrated pages—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This is no small task, but Pyne does just that providing information that pays homage to the builders of temples and churches and the artisans who adorned the interiors of religious meeting places. She offers, “Perhaps there is no future life, think some: all that one does on earth is what counts. Others are sure the soul returns to the Creator.”

Through her own silvered mirror, Mable Pyne reflected the better part of our world.  During International Women’s History Month, I honor her achievements as a talented educator who promoted understanding and tolerance, something we need more than ever.

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I will be at Clio’s March 26, 7-9pm with Lee Rossi and Paul Corman Roberts. Each of us will share from published work, offering glimpses of where we started, where we are now, and what still feels unfinished. Do come! Here’s the link and more information.

The post Influence, Reinvention and Work that Endures: A Discussion With Three Bay Area Writers first appeared on Fiction and Poetry.

Mable Pyne, the name sounds like a character from a book written by Carson McCullers, southerly with a lonely heart, she doesn’t give too much away and stands upright like a walnut armoire in a second bedroom that doesn’t get much use, but without mirrors there’s no reflection on the actual name of the woman; no funny business, she’s there to get the job done, a real Rosie the Riveter who understands she’s as good as anyone and out to prove it. See that geography book? Mable wrote and illustrated it for children, using her own iconography that lets you see as soon as you turn a page, the entire economy of the United States, a scattering of cows, corn, cotton, oil rigs, milk and cheese, and minerals across every state, takes you on a cross-country trip through rivers and mountains, deserts and western plains, including canals, volcanoes and islands. She lets us know about the people who came a long distance “to find a better place for themselves and their children…working to make their new country still better.” From Mexico, Italy, Ireland, and China. I know more about Mable and her books than I do about my own mother.

The post Introducing the One and Only: Mable Pyne first appeared on Fiction and Poetry.

Deer bite off the heads of my coreopsis, yellow sunbursts of blossoms I was hoping to see every morning outside my window, but now only sad stumps are left leaning against the pavement. Every day, I go outside to encourage the plant, hoping it might grow back, sprout a few new leaves. The way olive trees are being cut, burned and poisoned, and the olive, which is more than a fruit, a symbol of resistance, buckets picked and pressed with a wooden beam, sometimes with a stone to produce golden flowing oil. Every tree which is not being harvested, is lost to the occupation. Deuteronomy 20:19-20 prohibits cutting down fruit-bearing trees during a war as they provide life-sustaining food. Isn’t this an ongoing war? Olive trees growing in the West Bank are the first to go, surrounded by settlements built high on ridges that strangle villages, and even when armed renegades desist, they return with more venom. Concentration camps and the multitude of prisons throughout the United States produce men and women who understand how physical space can be controlled, minds never. Villagers living in Burin say their olive oil is spicier because it is laced with tear gas. 

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