Headpiece Filled With Straw

Theory Theory: A Designer's View*

By Thomas Erickson

Theory weary, theory leery,

why can't I be theory cheery?

I often try out little bits

wheresoever they might fit.

(Affordances are very pliable,

though what they add is quite deniable.)

The sages call this bricolage,

the promiscuous prefer menage...

A savage, I, my mind's pragmatic

I'll keep what's good, discard dogmatic.

Add the reference to my paper,

watch my cited colleagues caper,

I cite you, you cite me,

we've got solidarity.

(GOMS and breakdowns, social network,

use those terms, now don't you shirk!)

Clear concepts clad in fancy clothes,

bid farewell to lucid prose.

The inner circle understands

but we overlook the hinterlands

Dysfunctional we are, it's true,

but as long as we're a happy crew,

if strangers stare and outsiders goggle,

or students struggle, their minds a'boggle

(Dasein, throwness, ontology

ethnomethodology)

A pity 'bout that learning curve

but who's to blame if they lack verve?

A ludic take on structuration,

perhaps this causes consternation?

 

I see four roles that theories play:

They divide the world, come what may,

into nice neat categories,

enabling us to tell our stories.

(Info scent sure is evocative,

and cyborg theory's quite provocative)

Our talk in turn makes common ground,

where allies, skeptics may be found.

Prediction's theory's holy grail,

most that seek it seem to fail.

 

The world is messy, fuzzy, sticky,

theoretically 'tis all quite tricky.

Theories keep it at a distance,

cov'ring up the awkward instance.

(Objects, agents, actor networks,

banish life with all its quirks)

But when edges grate and things don't mesh,

that is when I think my best.

So let not theory serve as blinders,

welcome disruptions as reminders!

 

Oddly now, I'm theory cheery

I find I have a theory theory!

Neither holy grail, nor deep disgrace,

theory's useful in its place,

(Framing, talking, predicting, bonding,

evoking discourse--Others responding)

Like goals and methods, plans and actions,

theory's situated, not pure abstraction.

So make your theory a public way,

where passers by may pause and stay.

* Written upon reading a commentary for a special issue of JCSCW on Theory (Version 5)

Theory Theory, by Thomas Erickson.

Howl

By Allen Ginsberg

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,

who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,

who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls,

incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping towards poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,

Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,

who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,

who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,

who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,

a lost batallion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,

whose intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,

suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railway yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,

who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,

who studied Plotinus Poe St John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the universe instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,

who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,

who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,

who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,

who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,

who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving nothing behind but the shadow of dungarees and the larva and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,

who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successfully unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time—

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgement! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovas! Moloch whose factories dream and choke in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisable suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstacies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

         where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you must feel strange

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you imitate the shade of my mother

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you laugh at this invisible humour

I'm with you in Rockland

         where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I'm with you in Rockland

         where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio

I'm with you in Rockland

         where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of actual pingpong of the abyss

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I'm with you in Rockland

         where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha

I'm with you in Rockland

         where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb

I'm with you in Rockland

         where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I'm with you in Rockland

         where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won't let us sleep

I'm with you in Rockland

         where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself   imaginary walls collapse   O skinny legions run outside   O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here   O victory forget your underwear we're free

I'm with you in Rockland

         in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Link: Allen Ginsberg - Howl.

Link: Howl - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Ode to Pipeline Pigs

With all the talk of problems with the Prudhoe Bay part of the pipeline in Alaska (not The Pipeline, a proper noun in Alaska, meaning 800 some miles of the main pipeline), I was reminded of a poem I wrote back in the 1980s, especially because it has a pipeline pig in it, my favorite part of the poem.

Link: Darkroom Glories: Boomtown Winter.

Boomtown Winter

By Christine Boese

Here in the land of Cessna and moose
and commuters to Anchorage
who drive to work in the dark,
and drive back home in the dark,
it's video heaven, I take home grocery bags
of movies, and hear the news of that woman
they found dissected in the gravel pit
out in Shorewood Acres Subdivision,
or my classmate who shot his parents
in their bed on Christmas Eve,
the eighth grader who raped his teacher,
or the gang of pit bulls up the road.
Here, in this midday night,
the suddenly rich and newly divorced
buy snowmachines and meth,
as howling Chinook Winds melt water
on glare ice, and the never-ending
night terrors in the never-ending
night chase herds of three-wheelers
through ditches lined with loose nails.

Meanwhile one shining sliver of pipe
angles through snowfields and passes.
A round iron pig rumbles down inside.
Sensors gauge the inner walls
for weak spots, deformities, incipient cracks
as it pushes black crude to Valdez.

   

'Twas The Night Before Zeitgeist

By Denise Howell

'Twas the night before Zeitgeist, when all through the fog,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a blawg.
The shingles were hung on the Web with such care,
In hope that Saint BusDev soon would be there.

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While unspeakable visions did dance in their heads.
And Ernie in his Treo, and I in my thong,
Had just settled down with a good Springsteen song.

When out in the Ninth there arose such a clatter,
(And not just 'cause the Supremes think us Mad as a Hatter).
On over to Howard's I clicked (without Flash),
Tore into the case, and turned down the mash.

It took a few moments, though I'm far from deaf,
for the file to load up ('twas a cursed PDF).
When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
A lustrous dissent!  And the word "blawg" so clear!

With a little old author, so lively and hot,
I knew in a moment Kozinski I'd got.
More legal than eagles, his sources they came,
And he chided and scolded and called them by name!

"Through these lengthy proceedings, this judge, if he's that,
based his actions on something right out of a hat.
Not a case, not a statute, not treatise nor tome,
Was cited to justify where he did roam."

As questionable authorities before the wild hurricane fly,
when they meet with sound precedent, up to the sky,
So up to the house top, and on through the smog:
"Not a law review article — not even a blawg!"

And then, in a twinkling, I heard in the land,
the wailing and weeping of Unlearned Hand.
As I drew up my head, and was turning around,
I knew I had run the cause right to the ground.

Oh why, Judge Kozinski?  Your timing does blow!
Just 400, you know, will be all who will go!
A bundle of blawgers would give their eyeteeth,
to hear Larry and Barry and Sergey — (no Keith?).

Our hopes — how you've dashed them!  The world now — how chary!
Of those at the end of your list they'll be wary.
Your nod to our presence, though lovely and fine,
Has put us, no bones, at the end of the line,

Of writers whose words perhaps warrant belief.
Your list does encircle our PageRanks like a wreath.
It has a broad reach, near as broad as the telly,
And leaves little blawgs in a heap sort of smelly.

We were clubby and pumped, a right jolly old meme,
With more juice when we posted than it might have seemed.
But a blink of your eye and a shake of your head,
Soon gave us to know we had much left to dread.

For together with those who think "blawg" is distasteful,
(And those who think words not in Webster's are wasteful),
I'm afraid that the finger is all that we've got,
From Google, re Zeitgeist — invited, we're not.

(Rick or Glenn, if you are, I just don't want to hear it.
There's already too much that's crushing my spirit.)
But I heard them exclaim, as they blawged late at night,
"If you're going to dis us, then link us — all right??"

Link: Corante: Between Lawyers.

Isn't this a terrific resource! The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson

OK, so yes, they are the bastardized versions that are in the public domain right now. Pooh. Lousy punctuation, changed pronouns, "fixed" rhymes. Somehow Thomas Johnson managed to lock the real versions of Emily Dickinson's poems away so the public can't see America's greatest poet who's only been dead more than 100 years.

Gotta love those folks at the University of Virginia American Studies program. There are all kinds of goodies available there in electronic form!

Link: Dickinson, Emily Collected Volumes I and II .

Another Hypertext from AS@UVA

About the electronic version

Collected Poetry, Volumes I and II by Emily Dickinson

By the University of Virginia American Studies Program 2002-2003.

Tagged in HTML October, 2003.

Copy-edited and overall design and construction: Adriana Puckett, October, 2003. This version available from American studies at the University of Virginia. Charlottesville, Va.

Freely available for non-commercial use provided that this header is included in its entirety with any copy distributed

About the print version:

Dickinson, Emily

Poems by Emily Dickinson / [1st and 2d series] edited by two of her friends, Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W. Higginson. Boston : Roberts Brothers, 1893, [c1890]

Poem For Computer Users Over 40

By Anonymous

A computer was something on TV
From a science fiction show of note.
A window was something you hated to clean,
And ram was the father of a goat.
Meg was the name of my girlfriend,
And gig was a job for the nights.
Now they all mean different things,
And that really mega bytes.

An application was for employment,
A program was a TV show,
A cursor used profanity,
A keyboard was a piano.
Memory was something that you lost with age,
A CD was a bank account,
And if you had a 3 1/2 inch floppy
you hoped nobody found out.

Compress was something you did to the garbage
Not something you did to a file,
And if you unzipped anything in public,
You'd be in jail for a while.
Log on was adding wood to the fire,
Hard drive was a long trip on the road
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived,
And a backup happened to your commode.

Cut you did with a pocket knife,
Paste you did with glue,
A web was a spider's home
And a virus was the flu.

I guess I'll stick to my pad and paper,
And the memory in my head.
I hear nobody's been killed in a computer crash,
But when it happens they wish they were dead.

More links for Glide and The Maze Game

OK, so if this sort of thing is new to you, my Amazon review of the print book Glide and The Maze Game in the entry below perhaps got your interest. But the book is only one part of it (and just the first part of the trilogy). But the rest, still under construction, is part of the reason I think the people who decide those MacArthur Genius Fellows ought to be looking at Diana Slattery's work.

Take a look at The Glide Project site. What you will find here (must have Flash/Shockwave installed on your browser) is the interactive part of Glide. Here you can download the first two chapters of the novel, and enter the different working parts of the Glide project, Collabyrinth, a Glide glyph editor, and the Oracle (not omnipresent like 'Oh-T'bee, but it has levels of interpretation that are pretty cool).

Praise for The Maze Game

“This book is like a recurring dream—haunting, prophetic, a wish fulfilled. Diana Slattery’s investigations of the future approach the limits of what can’t be said. She is a true visionary and The Maze Game—infused with love, grace, crazy wisdom and humor—is the work of a life time.”

—Lewis Warsh, Editor, United Artist

“Imagine being a goldfish swimming in your bowl, and suddenly five finger ends appear beneath the surface of your universe. They waggle simultaneously. In that instant, your goldfish brain sparks with the revelation that your world is a world of appearances beneath the surface of a higher order, a projection of some more intelligent dimension or deus ex machina.

There is a class of wonderful fictions that puts us in the goldfish bowl. In this genre, the higher dimension is a cosmic game with formal rules and moves that are beyond the ken of the characters who play them out. Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh’s Prop, Nabokov’s ADA, Italo Calvino, Raymond Roussel, Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table. They are all ambitious, all meticulous, all boundary shattering, all inspired, all epistemologically potent. All implicitly comment on the metaphysical order of things and on the nature of authorship itself. Diana Slattery’s The Maze Game joins the class, and may even catapult to its head.  It is both passionate and constrained and, like all the rest, a wonderfully peculiar work of  genius.”

—David Porush, Author The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fictions and creator of Gameworld, the AI narrative platform.

“The Maze Game is a remarkable achievement, envisioning a society in which elaborate rituals have evolved around a visual language that can gestured but not spoken.  Working at the crossroads of electronic and print literature, Diana Slattery breaks new ground in thinking about the multiple sensory modalities through which experience can be transformed into narrative. A ‘must-read’ for anyone interested in science fiction, electronic literature, and the future of narrative.”

—Katherine Hayles, Author, How We Became Post-Human

Diana Reed Slattery's interactive novel/poem/oracle/experience

I just now got around to putting my review of this wonderful book up on Amazon, and I wanted to reprint it here with a few more links to other aspects of the work in progress besides the print novel for sale.

I am proud to say I was what folks in the fan fiction universes call a "beta-reader" for this book in its earlier manuscript. It blew me away then and now, although Diana has gotten to be a lot more famous since then, and deservedly so.

Anyway, here's my (still somewhat casual) review:

The Maze Game by Diana Reed Slattery

I've struggled for a while, wanting to review this book and trying to see where to begin. That is how astonishing Diana Slattery's vision of this place is, a place where something like AIDS has been cured through the creation of something more horrible, the "disease" of immortality, spread through blood products and bodily fluids. For me, that is the "what if" that makes this novel/interactive experience so tantilizing. It makes me imagine imortality as something where you best be careful or you might "catch" it.

And this curse of immortality creates the phenomena of the Death Dancers and the Maze Game. (allegory coming, duck! Do you think Earth could be an afternoon soap opera for a race of gods or little gray aliens?)

You need to read this book for the hilarious surprise of figuring out who 'Oh-T'bee is. Folks from New York will love the ironic twist.

Oracles and AI, but this is not cyberpunk in the strict sense of the genre. The Maze Game pushes past that and imagines a cosmology, like Ursula LeGuin in the Hain series, a cosmology spun out by a concept. This ties in to some of Diana Slattery's other work looking at alphabets and the cultures that come out of them, considering a culture based on uncertainty and doubt, interpretation, layers of meaning. We learn to think about lilies and this thing called "Glide Mind."

It's like haiku crossed with I Ching crossed with Tarot, and delivered through an omnipresent artificial intelligence agent in glyphs. Diana invented a language of glyphs just so she could craft poems in it and imagine a culture that lives inside those poems.

And as a student of the Tarot, I found my own layers in this book, layers relating indirectly to the 4 types of Death Dancers and the 4 suits in the Tarot, corresponding also to Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. These things become highly differentiated styles of the dance.

And those old, old Immortals, shades hiding their impossibly old eyes, they watch, enviously.

Chris