Scott Rettberg

Anyone who likes cute animals, culinary pursuits, and gratuitous profanity will love the shit out of Fucking Delicious.

Cybraphon is a project from Edinburgh-based artist collective FOUND (Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby and Tommy Perman). Inspired by early 19th century mechanical bands such as the nickelodeon, Cybraphon is an interactive version of a mechanical band in a box. Consisting of a series of robotic instruments housed in a large display case, Cybraphon behaves like a real band. Image conscious and emotional, the band’s performance is affected by online community opinion as it searches the web for reviews and comments about itself 24 hours a day.

Cybraphon Demo Song from Cybraphon on Vimeo.

Just a quick post here to say I think Beck gets the Web in ways that a lot of contemporary recording artists don’t. While a lot of bands give you discographies and tour dates and bios and the like, maybe a few sample tracks, I’m impressed with the Web strategy Beck is embracing on his site. As far as I can tell, he is not directly promoting his albums, his tour dates, or his merchandising on is site at all. Instead, he is using the Web site as an occasion to make and distribute cool stuff with his friends. His new site has features including Record Club, a project to informally re-record a classic album in a day with other musicians, and release a new track on the site every week. Irrelevant Topics will feature Beck informally interviewing other musicians at length about whatever comes to mind, released in serial installments. The first part of the first interview, with Tom Waits, is a fantastic discussion with one of America’s best songwriters. Planned Obsolescence is a weekly DJ set mixed by Beck’s crew. In an age when anybody can put on a pirate hat and download any album without paying a dime, this type of creative approach to using the web as a experimental platform for music and its environments is exactly the type of thing that might make me want to support an artist by buying his CD or MP3 or concert ticket or T-shirt. Beck’s crew is using Web 2.0ish tools and social media like facebook and vimeo to reach their fan base and share their funky new readymades.

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico “Venus In Furs” from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Today I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, which has a much nicer backend interface and some smart improvements (though I can’t seem to get the media uploader to work). In the process I also found out my previous theme had somehow been spam-hacked, which explains the new look-in-progress. But the major technological upgrade of the day was my subscription to MLB.TV. We have a DV cable to put the stream through to the TV. At anything over 400K, the image stream is too jerky on my connection, but at 400K, it is a lot like like watching baseball used to be when I was a kid and broadcast television involved rabbit ear manipulation. Still, you can’t beat being able to watch the Cubs live from Norway. Great game, the Cubs beat the Phillies 6-5 in the 10th inning. Well worth $20 a month.

Hey this is the coolest thing that happened to me today. I’ve got a short piece on the recent Audiatur poetry festival coming out in the next issue of the Scandinavian literary magazine Vagant. They translated the piece from English into proper Norsk for me (I could have given them a third-grader Norsk version — “Jeg liker audiatur, audiatur var veldig bra, etc.) which was nice of them. But the cool thing today was that they emailed asking if I could send them a sample of my handwriting within the next hour or so to use as their logo for this issue. My students always complain about my handwriting, crack jokes about how I ought to be a medical doctor with the level of scrawl I work with. So what the heck, why not? I wrote “Vagant” a few times on a piece of paper, took a picture, and emailed it back. Two hours later they sent me a cover layout with my scrawl where a proper logo should be. That’s cool.

The internet works in mysterious and sometimes wonderful ways. Yesterday I got an email from Reneta Bozhankova of the faculty of Slavic Studies at Sofia University Bulgaria on behalf of a journal called Literaturata (The Literature), asking if they could translate my essay “All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation” into Bulgarian. I had to get out a map to remind me where Bulgaria actually is, but I’m pleased as punch that somebody wants to take the effort to translate some of my writing, particularly into a language I have no hope of understanding. A revised version of that essay will also be coming out next year in New Narratives: Theory and Practice, Thomas Browan and Ruth Page, eds. published by University of Nebraska Press, but I’m glad that the Bulgarians will be able to read it in their native tongue first. Now if we could only find some Romanians willing to translate The Unknown . . .

Apparently, yes, but you can also do so on any other day of the year, given the right egg. It has more to do with the number and arrangement of bumps on the egg than the time of year. It also helps to shake the egg with enough force to break the yolk, lowering its force of gravity. I got to wondering about this last night when we went to go see an excellent folk music show including music from West Norway and from the Shetlands last night, performed by “Columbi Egg” whose name is derived from the story of the Egg of Columbus. Regardless, happy vernal equinox. I plan to celebrate by shaving my seasonal beard and starting a paper on appropriation in electronic literature.

If you advertise on the internet and make use of an ad that moves from its original position to cover up what I am reading and demand my attention, I will not buy your product EVER. If I am already buying your product, I will boycott it thereafter.

This trend of advertising that zips all around the browser window until you click on it is driving me nuts. It’s an intolerable form of textual pollution.

bears, originally uploaded by david.o.

The Chicago Bears are in the Super Bowl for the first time since 1985. Though I’ve been less wrapped up in this championship season than the last one (it’s hard to get American football in Norway), we got our cable TV upgraded just in time, so I’ll be watching it live midnight Sunday night. Monday’s likely to be a rough one. Bear down! Now I’ve gotta go buy some sausages, chicken wings, and beer, for my own little Super Bowl party.

Today will be the 75th consecutive day that it has rained in Bergen. This breaks the record even here, in the rainiest city in Europe. In the above short video I have documented two rare weather events in Bergen. On December 11th, 2006, I saw blue sky as geese frolicked in the park. Yesterday, it snowed in the afternoon, after the morning rainfall. Though I didn’t capture the lovely dusting of snow on the pines up the mountainside, I did capture the snow itself falling as black birds circled over Lille Lungegårdsvannet in the center of town.

According to the New York Times, “A six-game chess match between Vladimir Kramnik of Russia, the world champion, and Deep Fritz, a souped-up version of commercially available chess software made by Chessbase, ended today in victory for the computer, which won the final game and clinched the match, 4 games to 2.”

This is just sad. Isn’t it time that humans just give up chess playing altogether, and begin trying to take back poetry before the machines take that from us too?

From November 3rd to 4th, a group of brave academics gathered in Bergen, Norway for the Worlds of Warcraft seminar, a project that will result in a critical anthology of writing about the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, to be published by MIT Press in 2008. After two days of closely reading and discussing essays on topics ranging from representations of feminism, postcolonialism, and capitalist economies in World of Worldcraft, to character naming conventions, spatial representation, narrative conventions, deviant strategies, and roleplaying in the game, these scholars gathered for a group activity at a shooting range, where they were taught to fire shotguns at clay pigeons by a retired special forces combat sniper. Using the video camera in my N73 cellphone, I tried to document the event in the above short video.

you procreate outsit nick you raffle
you boycott you irrigate
explore I befound you layer control
accelerate chuck
mindmeld
you photocopy
you green thought
you green shade you cram
you cram
you you intern
you cigar
you twitch
you liquidate
twitch
strangling the wind
I reproduce
I declaim you scribble
rephrase
disdain
mary had to make a phone call
but she left the dogs
I can show a little behind the scenes
of what we did last night
what did I just plug into
(moaning)
head
set?
or
computers only go down
so
as you might expect the first step
can you see it
you’ve seen it three layers
video
we turned off the lights
I calibrate
one side of my face
the same intrigue
take the resolution
down
sort of a simmmmmmum
resolution
a readin looks for a text file
a particular name
listening to the voice
running
sound environment
machine
middle layer
anna simple
simple as you might
expect
external
revision process
launch, choose, layer
I guess
that’s not right
you know why
well
let’s turn
this off
I can point this
I can run
my hand in front of this
people start sort of
playing pushing
editing the system
quick behind
the scenes
written in feed
nobody gets anything but mead
easier to add in other machines
my site works that way
holds and grabs that
composing poems
technique and algorithms
it posterizes
it is
not really
doing color
light and dark
particularly light
section shows
the lightest text
read through
we worked it down
to three
the darkest could be nothing
a blind screen
a chair
a microphone
a camera
hey try this
the time it
actually takes
it may take you
a while
death is nothing
compared to this
the distribution
xeroxing
this isn’t something
you compose
you can’t distribute this
how many people
would argue
that people read
the reading of
the reading
logos in space
I had to scrape the
screen
the christmas
of the original
the binary
resistant
the margins
generating
our interests
the neologisms happen
in the middle
we see the torment
a side (issue)
you create a language
dormant explore huge ambient effective
focusing
the disembodied
voices reading
the arm twists
the knees angled
processing
the smell of dessert
apple pastry
naturally speaking
innovation
most people never make
a shale of heroes
never worn
shit ASCII statue is a good science
fiction
the number of folks is dwindling
I and I
crawled up to you
is there a video game
controller in the house
bring me tron
ream
appropriations weren’t just
boring
awful lot
the shading inbetween
Xrated
500pagewordpoem
give me you
our EL
blue one
let me
plug you in
acceleration, tron is in tron
machine
not loading
not loading
sorry there’s a big X
plug in lady
em er el slash dee how dot com blue
thing
it takes
a couple
seconds fuck
writing
I can’t really see
the screen
there’s something enfolding
an installation a purple thing
this
is good
two players playing
a new text book
recombining
into vogue
we have
new text
get the entry high
enough
playing reading piece of
literature
footlong physics letters
hanging
about thirty recombined
all about issues of
transparency surveillance
how we see squishing bladdery
morning
gravity processing components
softee prose nice stuff contributions
fruits of people
green man physical communication
devices netblessing
googling the eyes
click click prototyping
much nicer qualm model
I fucked this multiplayer shrapnel
you’ve made it
subversion
get new text
measley
how do you shower gurglings
onto shadowversions
that don’t exist
gaussian blurge
this is the beginning of the beginning
for me
bizarre lighting underground lockbox
bending the apples
is nearly impossible
they snapped
laborious placing
not the most fun
abstract sound offensive
large structure with every single node
you get the same effect
from walking around it
the user uses program programmatically
a little bit more every time a little bit more
give me just a little more
time
there is a kind of twitching
around the mouse
skipping frames
the soldiers try desperately
single words flip by
you can read the words

Dead Man with Cell Phone, Broken Heart

We ran across this grave in the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna. I have no idea who is buried there, or of the circumstances of his life or death, but I find the form of representation endlessly intruiging.

Here’s a great slice on the history of pizza, including some amusing bits on the spread of pizza during the the 1950s in the USA. One issue: although the article attributes to Chicago’s Pizzeria Uno, in 1943, the first “truly American” pizza none of the pizzerias listed on the article’s top 10 list are in Chicago. No Lou Malnati’s? I question the author’s veracity.

Nick and I did some serious work on a draft of a forthcoming concrete writing project late last night.

Song for a Spoon

o i ddnt mn go

Requiem for a Fork

      o o o twist
    o o
  o o o o o exist
o o o
o o o o o o cease
o o o
  o o o o o below
    o o
      o o o sadly

On the Surface of a Knife

May you slice more than
you jab and may your edge always
be sharper than the flesh you meet
as you descend into memories

Collander Holes

     o i o u i u
  o i u o i u o i
 u o i u o i o i u
o i u i i i i u o i
 u o i u o i u o i
  u o i u o i u o
   i u o i u o i

Corkscrew Soliloquy

    someone
       one's um
          won some
 um, sm  un-sum
     summon

Tea Infuser Canto

Wet
Parts
Diff
Use
Dry
Stews
Tea
Me

Spork Song

Foodig
Meating
Yumastication

Garlic Crusher

You die now
souls souls souls
souls souls souls
Uncontested

Spatula

flip flip flip flip
pilf pilf pilf pilf
turn turn turn turn
nrut nrut nrut nrut
form form form form
mrof mrof mrof mrof
sear sear sear sear
raes raes raes raes

Ice Cream Scoop Reflexive

hey
are you
serving others
or yourself alone
as you dip into
this mass
now

Blender

Before you turn me on:

1) Find today’s newspaper.
2) Read a headline with a contradictory emotion.
3) Read an obituary in the mode of Sports.
4) Read local news with a French accent.
5) Read sports in the mode of Obituary.
6) Spit on the ground and wipe it up.
7) Renounce your citizenship.
Disagree with the drink.
9) Call last call.
10) Blend.

Coffee-Maker Prose Poem

There is time. This is the time. Just rest. Well. Fill the filter. That is what
it is there for. You must have coffee. Assuming. This is the nature. Careful planning. Morning. Assuming. You have rinsed the pot. Preparations. A basket. Ground beans. Preparations. A day. An afternoon. And end to an evening. Coffee.

A Turkey Baster

I assure you that this baster has been
used for nothing but its proscribed
purpose, the basting of a dead bird’s
fat upon itself. Many people have bad
and false impressions about this baster.
These myths are completely untrue. It
has not been used for anything unsavory.

Words for Coffee Cups

Editor
Scrivener
Bastard
Malcontent
Plagarist
Secret
Longing
For Words
Onomatopoeia
Wounded
Confessional
Fraud
Lack

Words for Saucers

Assholes
Sychophants
Saints
Luminaries
Breast-fed
Lonelyhearts
Players
Groupies
Chimeras
Undiscovered
Porn stars
Wallflowers

On the Outside of a Cereal Bowl

Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time Regular Time

On the Outside of a Cereal Bowl

You can only begin to imagine. You can only begin to imagine. You can only begin to imagine. You can only begin to imagine. You can only begin to imagine. You can only begin to imagine. You can only begin to imagine. You can only begin

On the Outside of a Cereal Bowl

I do so not hate your work. I do so not hate your work. I do so not hate your work. I do so not hate your work. I do so not hate your work. I do so not hate your work. I do so not hate your work. I do so not hate your work. I do so not

On the Outside of a Cereal Bowl

This hurts me more than it hurts you. This hurts me more than it hurts you. This hurts me more than it hurts you. This hurts me more than it hurts you. This hurts me more than it hurts you. This hurts me more than it hurts you. This hurt

Reamer

Fruit yields. Twisting. Turgid anecdotes
giving it up. Threatening more than the sharpened
ones of metal. Into it. Represplendent.

Egg Timer

The life of the party. Casual.
Almost as much of a dandy
as Warhol. Whatever. The eggs
can be timed, crystal digital
appearance there. Tick whenever.

Cookie Tray

Oh fuck oh fuck fuck glistening heat
once more more clatterling throwaway
more. Can you can can can fuck once oh.

Outside of a Frying Pan

I leave here as my last will and testament the terms of the disposal of my estate, to my best beloved my second best

Meat Thermometer

too much information

Paring Knife

Lovers should carve together.

Matchbook Cover

She left me
I left him
He left me
I left him
Joan of Arc

Phrases for Cutting Board

Vegetables have no souls
I’ll show you
Decentered
Precision
Not too small
Chunky
We weep
Fowl
A proper burial
Honor, Strength, Decency
Herbs rule

Paper Towel Roll

How bout a
yeah what about it
you wanna
one of the
sure how you gonna
go ahead sure
yeah there you go

Pitcher

jug jug jug
jug jug jug jug
jug jug
jug jug jug
jug jug jug
jug

Masher

potato
apt too
poo tat
op o tao
tatoo p

Poacher

Et tu?

Just for kicks, I attempted to summarize/narrate the 2006 State of the Union Address over iChat with Nick Monfort while I watched it on television, as he was writing some kind of interactive fiction program instead of taking in the important annual national narrative.

the violent are trying to take the earth
but we love our planet and we will keep it
trying
you listening to W?
) nope
) I’m trying to do serious IF work here
fishious attackers battlefield own shores no honor in retreat
9:20 PM
the UNITED STATES WILL NOT RETREAT FROM THE WORLD
Hell Yeah!
we saved liberty in Europe, and faced down an evil umpire
Read more…

My iBook died rather tragically of a logic board failure a week ago Sunday, while I was in the midst of grading papers and right before I was leaving for the SLSA. After recasting my presentation more or less from scratch and paying (unnecessarily as it turns out) to have my data backed up, tonight I drove through the ink black night to Fedex in what appears to be fully functional condition, with a new logic board. Nice to have the axe back.