"In times of peace,
life went on in 17th century Ireland.
Before, in between,
after the wars.
Then, it should be remembered,
sometimes there was dancing
in the fields."
The role of displacement and disrupted tradition in the work of contemporary Irish authors
is paralleled in From Ireland with Letters,
an Irish American epic in progress, written with a polychoral manuscript
authoring system. (Judy Malloy: "fiddlers-passage")
|
Judy Malloy: Writer's Notebook for Parts IV and V of
From Ireland With Letters
the research, the writing, the creation of the
fiddlers_passage authoring system,
and various things that happened along the way.
July 4, 2012 - April 12, 2013
Introduction
This iteration of my series of online notebooks for
From Ireland with Letters
began on July 4, 2012. On that day, working on what would become
fiddler's passage, I listened to
an interview with Irish fiddler Liz Carroll on the National Endowment for the Arts web site.
Then I listened to Mary Custy, to Eileen Ivers, and to Sharon Shannon playing the accordion with
Steve Earle singing "The Galway Girl". With this music, the writing and the rhythms of Fiddler's Passage
were introduced.
Ten days later on July 14, 2012, an informal entry in this notebook documents the week
when I began to compose the text of fiddler's passage in measured as opposed
to unmeasured notation. "The timing is still in flux," I wrote. "I was curious if a closely followed constraint based on music timing
could be used in fiddler's passage. So I looked at changing the 4/4 time of the reel into an equivalent.
At this point I confess to being somewhat stymied by this. 4/4 time won't work for moving lexia
chunks by seconds. The closest I can come, given the need for text readability, is 32 seconds per bar,
and then working with units of 8 -- ie 8 seconds, 16, seconds, 24 seconds or 32 seconds.
(Did James Joyce do something like this the "Sirens" chapter of Ulysses? Need to revisit this.)"
The paths that led to this fortuitous constraint in my polyphonic digital writing
will be documented at some point in a paper or a book chapter, but for a short review.
I consulted my
previous writer's notebook and reread this passage written on May 27, 2012.
"At home, thrown back in time to the era when the energy of creating polyphonic music
resulted in seminal systems of notation. I perused the books with which I had returned from Friday's
one-parking-space holiday expedition:
Willi Apel, The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900-1600, 4th edition, Cambridge, MA:
The Medieval Academy of America, 1949 and Carl Parrish, Notation of Medieval Music,
NY: Norton, 1957
The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900-1600 fell open to page 316
in the chapter on Franconian Notation. On that page, an enchanting facsimile from the circa 13th century
Montpellier Manuscript is displayed:
"huic ut" in which the magi bring mystical gifts..."
The significance of this compelling example of Franconian notation is beyond the scope of the introduction
to a writer's notebook, but it should be noted that just as Franconian notation was a turning
point in music
notation, it was a turning point in my work.
A poet may at times work in quiet; it is the nature of the creation of poetry. Nevertheless, a poet's
wider creative environment in also important. When I was at Xerox PARC the idea that
making art was a reflection of the artist's environment was a part of the philosophy of the
innovative program that brought a digital poet to PARC's fabled Computer Science Laboratory. (CSL)
Listening to the talks of researchers, reading their papers, and exploring their work were expected.
And eventually that environment seeped into in the work I created at CSL.
Contingently, the experience of live early music at the University of California
Department of Music -- and in particular the incomparable choral and ensemble directing, the
poetic yet scholarly writing, and the virtuoso playing of the harpsichord of musician/musicologist Davitt Moroney --
continues to inform the polychoral aspects of my work. In this notebook, for example,
in the October 3, 2012 entry:
"...yet as in poetry, the allusions contribute to the experience
At intervals last week when I was working on this, I would stop working and explore
Davitt Moroney's program for his harpsichord concert at the Cal Performances Fall celebration
on September 30.
In the hands of a master, the writing of a music program that leads to many stories
is in itself an art form. Of course, when that program is played, it is the music itself that is most
important, yet as in poetry, the allusions contribute to the experience. So Davitt Moroney's program:
Henry Purcell, Suite in D major: Prelude, Almand, Hornpipe
Johann Sebastian Bach, Fantasia and Fugue in A minor
Louis Marchand, from Suite in D minor: Prelude, Two Courantes, Chaconne
Johann Sebastian Bach, from The Art of Fugue: Contrapunctus 8
François Couperin, from the Eighteenth Ordre Prelude, Le Tic-Toc-Choc ou Les Maillotins
led me on many trails on which, among other data items, there were:
celebrated harpsichordists including Gustave Leonhardt, Kenneth Gilbert, and Moroney himself;
French harpsichords painted with scenes of meadows, trees, and flowers,
or in elegant black, gold and red;
album covers with clocks, fountains, and men in Puritan attire;
a pièce croissée that will probably find its way onto the menu
of Uncle Roger's music box;
and something I should have explored long ago: the scores of the works in
The Art of Fugue."
In the main, this online writer's notebook, follows the writing, the research and the implementation
of measured notation in
fiddler's passage,
and in
Junction of Several trails.
But along the way there were walks in the country, social media, exhibitions, celebrations,
conversations with colleagues, and the incredible creative energy of the electronic literature community!
There was the midsummer inclusion of From Ireland with Letters in FILE 2012,
the Electronic Language International Festival, where it was seen/read on a large plasma
display screen in Sao Paolo Brazil,from July 16 to August 19, along with
Nick Montfort's Concrete Perl and Alan Bigalow's Pangram, among many other works.
There were the travels of my classic Eastgate hyperfiction
its name was Penelope --
from Avenues of Access, New "Born Digital" Literature,
at MLA 2013, the 128th Modern Language Association Convention, Boston, MA, January 2013;
to Electronic Literature and Its Emerging Forms at LoC, Washington, DC,
April 2-5, 2013, both curated by distinguished electronic literature curators:
Dene Grigar and Kathi Inman Berens.
The print notebook for Junction of Several Trails
There were printable scores for
fiddler's passage and
Junction of Several Trails. There
are print notebooks that look like artists books.
There was the publication of Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport,
(Terri Cohn, ed., Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2012) which includes Anna Couey and Judy Malloy,
"A Conversation with Sonya Rapoport (on the Interactive Conference on Arts Wire)".
Our Conversation is important both in its informal look at my friend Sonya's role as a catalyst
in computer-mediated interactive art and in the historical use of online interviews in early social networking situations
And the music continued with notebook entries, such as this one written on
October 26, 2012:
"In Music in Ireland, Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, (NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
the story begins with a welcome invitation. 'Listen, Stan and Dora. There will be music, dancing,
and singing tonight...Here's how you get there,' Following this invitation and directions,
the authors, Dorothea E. Hast and Stanley Scott, journey to a pub on the Western Irish coast.
Here players of fiddles, flute, tin whistle, bagpipes, concertina, and accordion
'begin their set with a gentle, lilting jig, 'The Mist Covered Mountain,' composed by Junior Crehan...'
'Every few minutes, the musicians switch to a new tune, moving seamlessly from one melody to the next.'
And in the interludes, there is dancing; there is conversation; there is beer.
'As can be seen here,' Hast and Scott note to conclude their opening 'Invitation to a Session,'...
the community surrounding the music -- including people, place, and even physical locale --
is a vital component in the overall musical experience.'"
My online writer's notebook for fiddler's passage and Junction of Several Trauils, which
began on July 4, 2012 and ended on April 12, 2013 begins below. As I have done with all my
online writer's notebooks, although they were initally written in blog form
with the last entry first, for the final form I have rearranged them to begin at the beginning
so that the story unfolds from beginning to end in a sequential manner.
July 4, 2012
A new writer's notebook begins on the Fourth of July!
From Ireland with Letters will initially be presented in three separate books of
three parts each, each with its own opening title page. I say "initially" because
the whole is a polyphonic electronic manuscript that -- like a work of music -- will
eventually present all parts together. Poetic, separate yet related, the parts will flow
into each to create a contemporary Irish lay.
The first book, which includes the Prologue, Begin with the Arrival, and
passage, has been completed. It premiered in my retrospective at the 2012 Electronic
Literature Organization Conference and mid-summer will be on display at the
2012 Electronic Language International Festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Setting the stage for Junction of Several Trails, the second book will begin with
a musician's passage. In the rhythms of Irish music,
the musician's passage will focus on Power/Powers family history both in Ireland and America,
reveal details of Máire's personal life, and because she will have received Liam's email invitation
to meet him in a cafe, there will be continuity and anticipation. I now have the interface and opening words
for Junction of Several Trails working pretty well and will continue working on this, while
at the same time I begin the musician's passage.
Long ago, I studied classical violin for quite a few years; a while ago when I lived in Berkeley,
I spent some recreational time learning to play the fiddle. So when I was writing
Begin with the Arrival, it was easy to imagine the music. And, woven into the work,
Irish music will be an integral part of the musician's passage
which focuses on Máire -- returned from a session with her band, practicing alone at home.
2012 Fourth of July Holiday research: listening to Irish fiddle music,
remembering the rhythms in my mind.
First I listened to
an interview with Irish fiddler
Liz Carroll on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) web site. Carroll talks about
her Irish American roots in Chicago, about playing in Ireland, demonstrates her techniques, ends
the NEA set with a fine playing of "The Irish Washerwoman".
Liz Carroll puts her own stamp of individually on her music, the interviewer observes,
but at the same time it remains traditional.
Although she does not play like Liz Carroll, that is how I imagine that
Máire Powers plays the Irish fiddle.
And then I listened to Mary Custy, to Eileen Ivers, and to Sharon Shannon playing the accordion with Steve Earle singing
"The Galway Girl".
The starting of a new writer's notebook is a time of new beginnings while at the same time the
history is archived. The truth of the statistics is that the
archived notebooks actually still live and sometimes are more visited than the new
notebook. They are also archived in my papers at Duke. Nevertheless, often a writer does
not want to feel a separation between the past and the present, and I usually put off the
starting of a new notebook until the old one is loading so slowly that it has to be done.
The major parts of my thinking about my work are now in online writer's notebooks.
The form of these notebooks -- as I have developed it for my work -- is somewhat different
from that of a blog in that the focus is on the writing of a work and not on my personal life.
But once in a while I make a small note about other things I am doing. Yesterday, for instance,
I went for a hike
along a very beautiful waterway. It was a sunny California early summer day. As I have done for more than
15 years since my leg was broken in 13 places,
I hiked on crutches. Sometimes colleagues meet me and are surprised by the crutches,
so I like to mention this interface every now and then.
Last week on KDFC radio, I heard Itzhak Perlman play the Bach Violin Concerto No. 2 in E major with the
San Francisco Symphony. I imagined him walking onto the stage on crutches, taking his seat.
When Perlman sits down to play,
he lays his silver crutches on either side of his seat.
When he begins to play, you forget about the crutches.
July 7, 2012
As a template to create fiddler's passage, I am using the score-chart I made for Liam's
passage. So, in fiddler's passage, the passage
frameset will be replayed. In order to reflect Máire's mercurial personality
and the pace of traditional Irish fiddle music, both the colors and the tempo will be different;
however, the size and placement of the lexia spaces will be the same.
It should be noted that in Begin with the Arrival, Máire plays the fiddle at a somewhat slower
and more individual pace than she ordinarily plays with her band, Focluth Wood, But as fiddler's
passage begins, the tempo picks up. She is blowing off steam after her performance; she
is exploring new material for Focluth Wood. Inspired by photographs of Hiram Powers,
she is playing legendary Irish fiddler Sean McGuire's The Mason's Apron Reel.
Since email from Liam, she has been researching Hiram Powers, whose name she had encountered
but never explored in her research.
Photographs of Hiram Powers in the online Archives of American Art
-- where he is often depicted in a white sculptor's apron -- reminded her of The Mason's Apron Reel,
which she heard Sean McGuire play in Boston when she was a child. She also knows how
Mason's Apron is played by The Dubliners and John Sheehan and by The Chieftains; she particularly
likes the the way Martin Hayes plays it. As fiddler's passage opens, Máire Powers
is playing Mason's Apron in different ways, listening to the sound of the music, imagining how it
might be performed by Focluth Wood.
Initially fiddle music continuo, which will be placed in the third lexia space, will move fairly quickly.
Contingently, the first lexia space will contain genealogica information about the
Powers family, in Ireland, in America, and the central lexia space will focus on Maire's thoughts as she
plays -- her recent breakup with Donal, the band's guitar player; her forthcoming meeting with
Liam; and the travels of the band. Thus fiddler's passage will disclose Máire's
life in the same way that passage discloses Liam's life.
As Fiddler's passage closes, a slowing of tempo will
move the reader into Junction of Several Trails, which begins on the serious note of
slavery and remembrance of slavery.
July 14, 2012
Changes in a writer's work from notebook entry to notebook entry can, of course,
be expected. So, there have been changes since the last notebook entry,
and fiddler's passage now opens with a quote from "Easy and Slow":
"I lifted her petticoat
easy and slow
And I tied up me sleeve
for to buckle her shoe."
There is some question as to who wrote or wrote down this song. One story is that
Dublin playwright Seán O'Casey first quoted a few lines, and then Irish writer
Dominic Behan wrote it all out with the help of an anonymous woman.
"Easy and Slow" is a slow song, but the pace of fiddler's passage picks up quickly,
as Máire Powers runs through Steve Earle's "The Galway Girl" and then quickens the tempo
with the playing of "The Mason's Apron Reel", which she first heard in Boston,
played by Belfast fiddler Sean McGuire. There will be a final reel or jig, probably something
introduced by a woman, perhaps Liz Carroll, Mary Custy, or Eileen Ivers.
The frameset for the polyphonic lexia spaces (nodes would also be appropriate terminology in this work)
is now slightly different from that of passage, with predominance
given to the left-hand lexia space where the stories of Donnchad mac Briain and the Italian princess
and Walter Power and the Puritan woman, Trial Shepherd, unfold, while in the central and right
hand lexias, Máire Powers plays the Irish fiddle at home and recollects how her former boyfriend,
the guitarist for Focluth Wood, left her for another woman;
how she met Liam O'Brien in the pub after her performance, how he told her the story of Hiram Powers.
A print-out of an email from Liam, inviting her to meet him for coffee or beer,
now sits on her coffee table, while she plays the practice set of Irish fiddle tunes.
To summarize, this week's progress:
The themes which wind in and out of fiddler's passage are:
1. "I took a stroll down the old long walk
of the Day-I ahI oh..."
Donnchad mac Briain's pilgrimage to Italy and his 11th century dalliance
with an Italian princess, that might or might not have happened and might or might not
have had something to do with the origins of the Powers Family.
The 17th century historian Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh says it happened.
His contemporary, Geoffrey Keating, says Donchadd was too old to father children.
Keating is also credited with a poem on a contingent subject.
"O Woman Full of Wiles", a few lines of which I have quoted in fiddler's passage.
2. "The Mason's Apron Reel"
An 11th century adventure with an Italian Princess is a fine beginning to expatriate Hiram Power's
studio in Italy and his Florence-situated making of statues of mythical and influential women.
As the narrative segues into the story of Hiram Powers, Máire Powers metaphorically plays
"The Mason's Apron Reel" -- first as she heard Sean McGuire play it, then as she heard East Clare fiddler
Martin Hayes play it.
3. "Forget Donal."
Paralleling Liam's breakup with Cordelia, (recorded in passage)
Máire's breakup with Donal, opens the central
lexia of Fiddler's passage:
"Irish men with curly black hair and blue eyes
were too darned attractive.
Forget Donal.
Máire Powers threw her jacket on the chair,
opened the fiddle case;
picked up the fiddle;
played a few bars of a seductive song."
4. The story of Walter Power and Trial Shepherd
This story was not introduced in the first book of From Ireland with Letters
because I felt it would change the focus. The 15 lashes that Walter Power received in Cambridge
for pre-marital fornication with Trial Shepherd -- documented in Middlesex Country Court where my Father
was once Assistant District Attorney -- is a riveting beginning to a new story. Yes, it is a true story.
Máire' will begins to tell it in fiddlers passage.
And there is a fine twist to the story. Whatever happened between Walter and Trial,
her family supported them, and they helped Walter and Trial purchase the land to make their own home.
So, Trial Shepherd's Massachusetts Puritan family gave Irish slave Walter Power
back the land that was taken from his family by Cromwell's Puritan soldiers.
With Trial, he fathered a family, and one of their descendants made a work
that became symbolic in the fight against slavery.
5. An invitation from Liam O'Brien
Now on the fiddler's coffee table is the print-out
of an email message from Liam O'Brien:
"Will you meet me for coffee or beer?"
(And I ask you now
what's a girl to do
if his hair was brown
and his eyes were blue)
As of this week, I have the color scheme and node structure pretty well set up, and the writing is
going nicely.
The timing is still in flux. I was curious if a closely followed constraint based on music timing could
be used in fiddler's passage. So I looked at changing the 4/4 time of the reel into an equivalent.
At this point I confess to being somewhat stymied by this. 4/4 time won't work for moving lexia
chunks by seconds. The closest I can come, given the need for text readability, is 32 seconds per bar,
and then working with units of 8 -- ie 8 seconds, 16, seconds, 24 seconds or 32 seconds.
(Did James Joyce do something like this the "Sirens" chapter of Ulysses? Need to revisit this.)
Basically, in From Ireland with Letters, I think my methods of simulating rhythm with color changes,
the way words move across the array, and a partial use of timing that echoes the original tune
may work better, but am not sure and will experiment with this. There are almost always constraints
in electronic literature, but --in a work where the narrative is historical -- writing directly to
a timing constraint can confine the meaning, so in the matter of timing,
in this work I incline towards a partial constraint.
"I took a stroll on the old long walk
Of a day -I-ay-I-ay"
I think I will be ready to post a draft of fiddler's passage in a few weeks.
July 20, 2012
A
first draft of fiddler's passage is working,
but as is usually the case, much tweaking will be needed to make it work to my satisfaction.
By creating the work in units of bars of 32 beats, it was much easier to score. When reading
the writing of the early music theory composers who shaped musical notation, I have wondered
if early musicians felt constrained by the standardization of notation.
I confess that in transitioning to a more standardized authoring system
for polyphonic electronic literature, I do feel somewhat constrained. However, to a certain extent
much electronic literature is created with constraints. And my sense is that it is important to be able
to score polyphonic electronic literature. In addition to creating a more workable authoring system,
scoring works of electronic literature may be important in preserving works for the future.
With the score, the numbered lexias, and information such as the frameset and the background and text colors,
Fiddlers Passage could be recreated on any platform in the future.
draft score of the first four bars of Fiddler's Passage.
Contingently, I have been working on recreating the BASIC version of
Uncle Roger. At this point, I have the original programs for
all three files working on DosBox.
Surprised that for the most part, this work is actually
better in the original BASIC than it is in the web version. Perhaps it is a harpsichord
vs piano issue, ie Uncle Roger plays best on a platform and authoring system for which it
was originally written.
This is not always the case with electronic literature.
For instance, the Eastgate iPad its name was Penelope
is the best iteration of this work!
July 27, 2012
Moving from a draft to build_1,
fiddlers passage now features a new title page,
notes about the work, and an incipient score. The work is
a transition, a "passage" that -- read with Liam's
passage in From Ireland with Letters --
introduces the reader to two characters who will meet in Junction of Several Trails.
The whole is a polyphonic electronic manuscript that, like a work of music, will
eventually present all parts together. Poetic, separate yet related, the parts will flow
into each to create a contemporary Irish lay.
The title page currently features a 19th century engraving (by George Victor Du Noyer)
of the ruins of the Rock of Cashel
in County Tipperary where Brian Boru was crowned High King. This may be an interim title page image,
but it is a good beginning. According to legend, Brian Boru was a patron of Irish poetry and music.
The seat of his patronage of Celtic art, literature, and music was Cashel.
In the paper scores I created for other parts of From Ireland with Letters,
words from the lexias are included along with the html filename, and colors are better indicated.
Created with pencil on watercolor paper, the paper scores are aesthetically pleasing. But the
starker computer-mediated
fiddlers_passage score created for fiddler's passage is easier to update, easier to read,
and more useful. It will be expanded to include more information.
It is now time to leave the editing and tweaking of fiddler's passage and return
in a few weeks with a fresh eye, so to speak. Meanwhile, on my list is to look at the scoring and
instrumentation of early music.
Both for continued work on creating more standardized authoring
systems for polyphonic literature and because I am writing a book chapter on the returning
of Uncle Roger to BASIC, I am interested in how composers of early music scored their works and
possibly rescored their works for changes in instruments -- ie from harpsichord to piano,
from recorder to flute -- and contingently how early music was rescored in
later eras and now is being returned to the original by musicians and musicologists.
Uncle Roger was created in these ways: BBS, (1986-1987)
interactive UNIX shell scripts, (1987-1988) Apple Basic, (1986-1988) IBM PC BASIC (1988-1991)
HTML (1995-2012) and back to BASIC. (2012)
The early programmed versions were somewhat similar, although the BASIC version
was a little more versatile than the UNIX Shell script version. The HTML version on the World Wide Web
was essentially a rescoring. (a piano version perhaps) And now back to BASIC.
The issues are of interest. A question is: if we provide scores for our work how will
they be rescored for different systems in the future?
Contingently this week, looking at the development of an artist's work, I spent some time
with Terri Cohn, ed,
Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport, Berkeley, CA: Heyday, July 2012,
which includes Anna Couey and Judy Malloy, "A Conversation with Sonya Rapoport
(on the Interactive Conference on Arts Wire)".
The book is particularly notable for the way in which Terri, Sonya, and Heyday worked to display -- with
extraordinary clarity and depth -- many fine images of Rapoport's beautiful, conceptual work. .
As if it were a catalog for an exhibition, (indeed its genesis was Rapoport's retrospectives at Kala and Mills College)
the book begins with over 25 plates, many of which are in color.
With an excellent introduction by Terri Cohn, essays and interviews by Richard Candida Smith;
Anna Couey and Judy Malloy; Ernestine Daubner; Walter H. Moos, Susan M Miller, & Sarah R. Moos;
Hava Rapoport; Meredith Tremble; Anuradha Vikram; and John Zarobell; and an Afterword by
Roger Malina, Pairing of Polarities explores Rapoport's work in terms of influences,
continuum, information, detail, innovation, and interaction -- against a background of Jewish family
and art community.
Having known Sonya for 32 years, I know that the role of home and family in her art and life,
which is emphasized in the book, was very important in the development of her work.
At the same time, Sonya was always interested in new work and in fellow artists
and was very much a part of the vibrant Bay area art conceptual,
performance, installation, and new media art scene. Often we would meet or show new work
at 80 Langton St, SITE, Capp Street, SFAI, at art spaces, such
as David Mott and Terry Ellis' WINDOW, or the exhibitions that Helen Holt and
Tom Patrick and others curated on the Berkeley campus in the 1980's. Afterwards we would often talk
on the telephone, deconstructing the work, sharing ideas and opinions.
Looking at my notes for the informal talk for the Mills College book launch for
Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport, a few things
about our artist's friendship stand out:
I first met Sonya Rapoport at 80 Langton St when I went to the opening
of her Objects on my Dresser installation. I was particularly interested in her work
because the way she clarified extensive amounts of information was something
I was also working on, although in a different way. We both used drawing and text,
continuous feed computer paper, and Xerox images, and we both used artists books
and large amounts of interesting information in installation situations.
Later our paths diverged somewhat as I focused on computer-mediated literature.
But over the 32 years in which I have known Sonya, we have talked many times and
shared approaches to art making.
The way our different but tangential work converged and diverged but had certain
sometimes intangible things in common is illustrated by Objective Connections,
the work we created together for the Generations Exhibition at the Richmond Art Center
that is also on exhibition here at Mills. The creation of this work in
which Sonya set forth a visual image from her work, and I responded with text from my work
was surprisingly seamless. I don't recall a single exchange in which it was difficult to do this.
Thus, it was a pleasure to create the "Conversation with Sonya Rapoport" that
Anna Couey and I contributed to Pairing of Polarities.
About Sonya Rapoport's role as a catalyst in computer-mediated work:
As computer-mediated work took root in the Bay Area in the mid 1980's and beyond,
Sonya's work was what I would call "in the air". I mean by this that ideas that
she had been working with for many years seeped into new media artmaking. Rapoport
was one of the pioneers of this way of working and even just the idea of using a computer
in installation situations was important.
About our informal interview:
Historically, in my case, the idea of interviews with artists in online
communities was influenced by Crown Point Press' print series of interviews with artists.
As a young artist, what I liked about these interviews was the feeling of being in the studio,
the informal views of the artists' lives. And I have remembered this approach since the first online
interview I did:
"Keeping the Art Faith" an interview with Carl Loeffler on Artcom Electronic Network on the Well
in 1987.
So, the Conversation with Sonya Rapoport is important both in its informal
look at Sonya's computer-mediated art and in the historical use of online interviews
in early social networking situations.
Pairing of Polarities is a fine book and I very much appreciate Terri Cohn's excellent work in
putting together this important look at the life and art of Sonya Rapoport!
August 5, 2012
A few days ago, I spent a pleasant early afternoon at the library, looking at images of Ireland
-- castles, antiquities, the Irish countryside, and Irish life -- in old books, such as
Constance Louisa Adams, Castles of Ireland; some fortress histories and legends
(London: E. Stock, 1904. illustrated by Rev. Canon Lucius O'Brien)
It is important that the book as an interface continues, I thought as I sat on the library floor
and enjoyed surprises of 19th century illustrations and unfolding maps, set into dense pages of
beautiful print.
Waiting to be explored with an infinite variety of navigation possibilities,
computer-mediated works have a depth that lies beneath the surface.
They can mimic human thought processes; they can create enchanting experiences of
reading. Words and images appear, as if by magic. Text moves like music.
I can speed it up or slow it down if I so desire.
But the print book -- a narrative or poetry conveying object that is both ancient
and contemporary -- brings a different and continuing pleasure.
The experience of holding a book in your hands is evocative. The hand turning of pages is
participatory. And the print book has been a lasting interface.
This is, I suppose, a plea that -- as more and more books are digitized -- we remember that
a digital version of Castles of Ireland; some fortress histories and legends
might be quite wonderful. Castles might fade in on the screen. Searchable words might
float beside them. But it would not be the same experience as holding in my hands the printed book,
turning the pages, wondering how many readers have, since it was published in 1904,
held this same book. Both digital and print narrative are important in our culture.
I was looking for a different image for the title page of The Mason's Apron, Book II
of From Ireland with Letters. I didn't find exactly what I wanted. But it was a very
enjoyable afternoon.
Some of the books I have looked
at for this purpose are by 19th century British-based travelers, Mr. and Mrs. S.C. Hall's
beautifully illustrated Ireland: its Scenery, Character, &c, for instance.
(Samuel C. Hall and Anna Maria Hall, Ireland: its scenery, character &,
London: How and Parsons, 1841)
Since it was a week of the Olympics in London, I tried not to be to put off by 19th century British tourist
statements in other books, such as "The harbour of Cork is one of the most extensive and commodious in
the United Kingdom, being capable of affording shelter to the entire British navy."
on p. 165 of the 1863 4th edition of Black's Pictureesque Tourist of Ireland,
Illustrated With A Map Of Ireland And Several Plans And Views.
August 10, 2012
while in the splashing notes
of the not yet named jig,
Irish streams and rivers
flowed down to the sea,
like the waters
of the fountains
in Rome
where Donnchad mac Briain
courted a princess so long ago.
In the rapid, clear music,
it was hard to know
where the sorrow ended
and the joy began.
And she knew how perfectly
she was playing
her own song.
After a pleasant hike along a stream, a small picnic, and watercolor sketching -- to clear my mind
with the sound of the water and with the flow of paint on watercolor paper -- I returned home to
take another look at
fiddler's passage. Looking at the work with fresh eyes, so to speak,
I was pleased. I made a few tweaks in the text and considered the speed. Particularly
in the continuo lexias, the "wildly flowing notes" run faster than any other work I have done,
but if you have ever listened to Irish fiddle music, you know why.
I am thinking about creating a slower version as an option for those who want it,
but in the meantime, I added a "replay fiddler's passage" to each page.
There is more tweaking to do but fiddler's passage does what I wanted it to do,
and I am happy with it, although I would like a different image for the cover of Mason's Apron.
Still looking....
Meanwhile, the time has come to return to Junction of Several Trails.
I had already written some text and created a draft structure for Junction, when I decided that
rather than put Máire's passage in between her conversations with Liam, fiddler's passage
would work better in tandem with Liam's
passage to introduce their conversations. And so, I set aside
Junction of Several Trails and wrote fiddler's passage first. Thus, once more
evading research on Irish slavery, I listened to fiddle music.
Around this time of year last year, after circling the issue with continuing diversions,
I finally settled into deep research for Cromwell's invasion of Ireland.
I was helped by Father Murphy, who followed this terrible trail in the 19th century
and documented it so carefully -- in Rev. Denis Murphy, S.J.,
Cromwell in Ireland, a History of Cromwell's Irish Campaign. Dublin,
M.H. Gill & Son, New Edition, 1897. When I finished a close reading of Denis Murphy's book, I wrote
Begin with the Arrival.
But as far as I know, there is no historic Gaelic Revival documentation of Irish slavery on the level of
Cromwell in Ireland, a History of Cromwell's Irish Campaign. There are sources, but
it is a different trail to follow without Father Murphy. I will have to chart my own course.
Also this week I finished the documentation for the recreation of the
BASIC Uncle Roger, (1986-1988) and it -- along with a link to a .zip of the entire work -- is available
at
http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/uncleroger/uncle_readme.html
If the pace at which the tech environment changes and the need to keep
up with it seems difficult today, it was much more difficult when Uncle Roger was written.
I remember how quickly on Arts Wire we had to move/redesign our entire system from a command line BBS to a
World Wide Web-based GUI interface. I put a version of
Uncle Roger on the web in 1995. It had to be done. The general public was no longer using
command-line based systems. But in the past few years there has been renewed interest in running
early works of electronic literature on the platforms for which they were written
and/or on emulators such as DOSBox.
It was a pleasure to be able to return Uncle Roger to its original state myself,
and it is a pleasure to know that there are readers who are interested in seeing how
the Apple II BASIC version of Uncle Roger, file 1: "A Party at Woodside" looked
when it was exhibited at Images du Futur in Montreal in 1987 and
how the complete Uncle Roger looked when it was exhibited in the seminal
Art Com Software traveling exhibition that began at
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, NYC in 1988.
As I noted in the conclusion to the new documentation:
"I have been surprised in recreating Uncle Roger by how much better the original
versions of "A Party in Woodside" and "Terminals" are than the Web version.
Perhaps this is a similar issue to harpsichord works that were recreated on the piano.
Initially when this was done, it was often seen as an improvement.
But as the early music movement reclaimed the harpsichord, it has become
clear that works composed for the harpsichord usually sound much better on the harpsichord."
August 17, 2012
In the interlude between the beginning of Junction of Several Trails and the
pulling together of my book chapter on the BASIC version of Uncle Roger,
I have returned to thinking about the parallels between the creation of artist books
and the creation of electronic literature. I am planning to write
an essay for Authoring Software, something like the essay I did on
The Electronic Manuscript
but with a focus on the artists book as a sculptural approach to interface.
I began by looking at an excellent catalog for the exhibition Art in Small Packages:
Miniature Artist Books from America sent to me by a family friend in the State Department.
It documents an exhibition organized by the U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan and
curated by Suzanne Reese Horvitz and Roger Roesch for the 4th International
Biennial of Contemporary Art, December 11-17, 2009.
A few examples of interest:
- Lydia Hunn: Many Things Are Moved by Shovels
This book -- illustrated also on the
artist's website -- is bound to look like a small shovel.
From the shovel/binding two parallel accordion fold pages emerge, each containing words.
I am not sure how the pages intersect with each other.
But the creative use of parallel word structures is of interest.
- Catherine LeCleire's Women of War
In search of more images of this work, I was led to
her website where I found
A Day in a Life of a Palestinian. (closed copper/silkscreen 2" x 5" 2006)
It appears to be a long strip of text/visual text which is rolled and unrolled like a small scroll and
can be unfolded.
There are quite a few other books of interest in the Art in Small Packages:
Miniature Artist Books from America catalog, and I will return
to this source.
Meanwhile, thinking about how artists books can have time-based elements,
I remembered
Doug Beube's work and recalled that he was interested in
time-based artists books. (He curated a The Book in Time exhibition at
SUNY Purchase in which one of my works was included)
On his website -- because of the connection with Italo Calvino, I particularly like
Invisible Cities, and looking at the book as something to explore in the way that
electronic literature is explorative, his
Pocket Book is also of particular interest.
Then, going back in time,
- Since I had last looked,
the work of Alison Knowles is better documented online.
Knowles made some early works using random processes, (See Alison Knowles and James Tenney,
A House of Dust) and her work is of great interest for writers of electronic literature.
Examples include the book installation
Big Book and the interactive book,
Bean Rolls. (designed by George Maciunas)
- There is now an extensive website devoted to
lettrisme and Isidore Isou, who wrote a series of
hypergraphic novels and Le Grand Désordre,
a narrative that the reader must reassemble.
A writers notebook is a good place to get started on a project and to make a few notes to return to at
a later time. It will be a pleasure to return to artists books.
August 26, 2012
Yesterday, following the trail of what happened between Walter Power and Trial Shepard,
I went in search of two books: Albert Christopher Addison, The Romantic Story of the
Puritan Fathers and Their Founding of New Boston and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Boston, L.C. Page & Company, 1912 and George Francis Dow,
Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Boston:
The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1935.
They were heavy books. Since I could not carry both books across the campus,
I decided that Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony would be the most useful.
Then, sitting on the Library floor, I perused The Romantic Story of the Puritan Fathers,
admiring the 1912 look of the book, the graphic border that surrounded the text on every page,
and the image of the ships that carried Puritans to America on the cover. The experience of the
book as text-bearing object was romantic. (you can find it digitized but there is much of the
experience that you will miss) But not unexpectedly the experience of 17th century New England
was otherwise. Captain Kemble, for instance, had to sit in the stocks for two hours because
when reuniting with his wife after three years of absence, he kissed her on the Sabbath in public.
As the summer comes to a close, and
the work of Junction of Several Trails begins,
I am remembering late summer events as yet unrecorded in this notebook.
A few weeks ago, on August 12, 2012, I went to a party in Berkeley for the
25th Anniversary of HyperCard,
where Bill Atkinson gave an fine talk on how HyperCard came into being, and many members
of the audience came forward with stories. There were people from General Magic
and from the HyperMedia Group. SSL guru Christopher Allen demonstrated a new authoring system app,
Infinite Canvas, which I will follow with interest, and a teacher pointed out that
there is now no one replacement for HyperCard, a user friendly authoring system that worked
well in any classroom situation.
I very much enjoyed this occasion of wine and pizza, technoculture stories,
and old days camaraderie, and personally remembered creating an early
HyperCard work in the Sausalito offices of The Whole Earth Review, where
in 1988 because I did not have a Mac, in the spirit of Uncle Roger, (running at that time
on Art Com Electronic Network on The Well) I was invited to use a Mac, HyperCard, and
an early Apple scanner and was amazed at how wonderfully my card catalog artists book Home
took shape on HyperCard with words, images, and sound. I also remembered that Apple lent me a
Mac when I was reviewing early electronic literature and digital art, and I wrote an extensive article
on early HyperCard Works. (Judy Malloy, "Some Artware for Macintosh Computers" MicroTimes,
May 31: 298-303, 1993)
Throughout the summer the energy of ELO 2012 was carried from Morgantown, West Virginia
onto the Internet and was a catalyst for continuing Twitter discussion with many colleagues,
including Kathi Berens, J. R Carpenter, Lorie Emerson, Leonardo Flores, Dene Grigar, Anastasia Salter,
Mark Marino and many others. Online, I also followed Mark Bernstein and Stacey Mason at Hypertest2012 and
Mark Sample and Anastasia Salter at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit. And then
there was a wonderful discussion with Kathi Berens about social media, software tools she is using in the
class she is developing, the genesis of Uncle Roger, and her ideas for her own new work.
Contingently, with help from the online electronic literature community. I began to restore a
ten-year old website, the
Women in New Media site associated with my MIT Press book
Women, Art and Technology.
The Process has been a fine example of how Twitter can not only enhance but also create interest in
scholarly projects.
Summer walks, picnics and sketching adventures were reflected in the works in the exhibition
The Nature of Collecting: The Early 20th Century Fine Art Collection of Roger Epperson
at the Saint Mary's College Museum of Art through September 16, 2012. Epperson,
was an East Bay Regional Parks Ranger, who created an extraordinary collection
of over 300 art works of California landscape artists, including, among many others, Jessie Arms Botke,
Maurice Braun, Bertha Lum, Xavier Martinez, Mary DeNeale Morgan, Chiura Obata, Carl Sammons,
and Hiroshi Yoshida. The exhibition is important not only for the work itself
but also for the idea of supporting artists by creating significant personal collections of art.
For me in reviewing the late summer, there was the pioneer hacker artist's thrill of seeing
all of
Uncle Roger actually running in BASIC and the contemporary electronic literature
writer's pleasures of the creation of fiddlers passage and the launching of my fiddlers passage
authoring system -- with the score for fiddler's passage and yesterday with
the new
score for the beginning of Junction of Several Trails.
Today I look forward to a walk in the country and reading
Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
September 2, 2012
After a long search, I finally found an appropriate image for the cover of From Ireland with Letters
Book II,
The Mason's Apron. It is a dancing couple, a detail taken from an unattributed composite
sketch of the Connemara hill country, County Galway, Connacht found in Samuel C. Hall and
Anna Maria Hall, Ireland: its scenery, character &, v. 3 p.468
London: Jeremiah How, 1843.
Many other interesting images were found in Ireland: its scenery, character &;
a few that I did not use are reprinted above.
Although they are generally sympathetic British tourists with Anglo-Irish backgrounds
-- Samual Carter Hall was born in Waterford and his wife Anna Maria Fielding Hall was born in Dublin
-- Anna Maria was a supporter of the temperance movement, and the Halls were at times
vehemently critical of Irish mores and manners. Nevertheless, their multi-volume
Ireland: its scenery, character &, is of interest for the many local legends they relate;
for the storied details of the landscape of pre-famine Ireland; and especially because they used the
work of many Irish artists throughout their books. Among the Irish artists who illustrated
Ireland: its scenery, character &, are Cork Artist John Connell;
Thomas Crofton Croker, who wrote the lyrics to the Joycean-referenced
"Oh Twine Me a Bower"; Henry MacManus, a 19th century Dublin School of Art headmaster;
Belfast painter Andrew Nicholl; and Cork artist William Willes who studied and worked in England but
returned to Cork to as the first master of the School of Design in Cork.
Note that in the illustrations above, The Roundtower is by British artist G.F. Sargent, and
the Powerscourt waterfall is by British landscape painter Thomas Creswick.
Midweek, on a woodland walk, I thought about the continuing work on
the score for fiddler's passage
and in particular about how more precise notation (the specifications of the sonnet form, polyphonic
electronic literature written to a score) introduced fortunate constraints and how the history of
music notation is of interest in this respect.
I sat beside a stream, had a small picnic, indulged in locative sketching, and then went home
with the memory of intertwined music and words.
September 10, 2012
In Berkeley, on Tuesday Night, September 4, 2012, I attended an extraordinary event:
Alan Turing: A Centenary Celebration.
The evening was introduced by Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Director Robert L. Bryant.
Oxford mathematician and Gay Liberation activist Andrew Hodges, author of
Alan Turing: the enigma,
gave a fine talk to a full hall. Setting Turing's creative work in algorithms, code breaking,
and artificial intelligence in the context of Turing's life, Hodges brought one of the most important
figures in the history of computer science alive, reminding the audience of the difficulties of gay
lives in the World War II and post-war era, while at the same time celebrating Turing's career and the remarkable
contemporary influence of his work.
Turing is my hero, legendary Stanford computer scientist and author of The Art of Computer
Programming, Donald Knuth, told the audience in a panel that followed Hodge's speech. Knuth also
reminded the audience that there were not many University computer science departments in
Turing's era, and he noted that collaborative efforts by people in the field were important in changing this
situation.
All of the Turing Centenary panelists were themselves Computer Science luminaries.
The panel was chaired by UC Berkeley computer scientist Richard Karp, who won the Turing award for his
work on the theory of algorithms. In addition to Knuth, other panelists were Martin Davis, NYU,
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences; Peter Norvig, Google Director of Research; Dana Scott,
Carnegie Mellon University; and Luca Trevisan, Stanford University. Many of the panelists have done
formative work in algorithms, and Dana Scott worked with Strachey on the semantics of programming languages.
Some events cannot be adequately summarized. But for those of us who create with the machines, algorithms, and languages developed/foreseen by Turing and by the computer scientists
who celebrated his work, Tuesday, September 4 in Berkeley was an important and memorable evening.
Questions of scoring electronic literature were on my mind last week as I finished build 3
of
the score for fiddlers passage and at the same time began a HTML5/CSS version.
As regards, scoring electronic literature, I confess that intitially, I had more questions than
I had answers.
The difficulties are not too different from the problems that confront early music scholars;
for example, see Davitt Moroney's program notes for
The Polychoral Splendors of Renaissance Florence
(Cal Performances) in which he describes how he
recreated the circa 1545 anonymous Spanish canon Unum Cole Deum, working from unusual
notation. ("Spanish number tablature")
In some instances, an Authoring System may be well enough documented so that a scholar of the future
could reconstruct works created in that system. BASIC, for instance, is well documented, and in the case
of Uncle Roger, I don't think it is necessary to create a score; the four programs that
comprise this work are the score. Even without access to my
BASIC recreation of the work,
a scholar who visits my archives at Duke University should be able to set Uncle Roger
running by looking at the original programs and lexias.
Javascript is widely used, and if a script was discovered 100 years later -- Nick Montfort's
Taroko Gorge, for instance -- a scholar of the future could probably
set it running pretty easily, or convert it to run on a contemporary computer.
Although Montfort and Stephanie Strickland's Sea and Spar Between is more extensively commented,
as an experiment, I took a look at Nick's elegant code for Taroko Gorge,
a generative poem/script -- the reuse of which has become an electronic literature tradition.
No additional score would be needed to restore Taroko Gorge, I decided.
Additionally, a scholar might soon find that he or she was inspired to recreate another work based on this code.
Indeed, I spent several happy hours altering the code a little to create
Scholars Contemplate the Irish Beer. (Thanks, Nick!)
But in the case of the polychoral literature which I have been writing and coding, until recently,
my documentation was hand-drawn score charts that are quite large and --
due to pen and ink and pencil vagaries -- difficult to reproduce online. Furthermore, there are
some complexities in this work that are not common in generative poetry, such as the
3-stave measure; the use of lexias (someone once said that I was a paragraph poet as opposed to
the language poetry school) and the varying speeds of lexia duration within the measure. Thus the question
had to be asked: what would a scholar find that would enable the reconstruction of these works?
In the long run, I conclude, I need to write a program that encompasses all the aspects of the
notation. However, long ago when I worked on library database programming on an IBM 1160, I was trained to
begin with systems analysis and then write the program. I still think that this is a good method.
September 16, 2012
As Junction of Several Trails opens, Máire Powers and Liam O'Brien are sitting
at an outside table with a view to the woods. On the table, there is a white tablecloth,
a basket of freshly baked bread, a plate of country cheese. They have ordered a local microbrew.
The conversation is filmic in that
only some details are revealed, yet the work conveys a whole experience;
it is musical in that it is scored and framed by continuo text. The
From Ireland with Letters time signature is now 40 sec/8 sec,
with each measure being 40 seconds and the unit of measurement 8 seconds. This allows for certain
parts of the conversation remaining on the screen a little longer than the 32 sec/8sec time signature
of
fiddler's passage. (Note that I prefer not to go under 8 seconds for the unit of
measurement because there can be server glitches with short duration text production.)
The conversation begins with a discussion of family memories, passed from generation to generation
and the question: Did Hiram Powers know of the family's Irish slave origins? In the process,
details of their own families emerge. They talk about what led each of them to their convergent narratives:
Walter Power, Hiram Powers. The conversation then segues into who Walter Power was.
In preparation
for this discussion, this week I have begun to review the branches of the Power families in Ireland
in the 17th century.
At this transitional time, I took a long anticipated September trip to the Sierras, where I packed
my backpack with a picnic and sketchbook and at about 7,000 feet hiked above a blue green alpine lake.
I descended to a quiet private place to eat lunch and paint; the sun was shining on the lake;
a hawk perched on a tree beside me. For several hours, I sat quietly, looking at the trees and the
mountains across the clear water, making a series small paintings and drawings for artists books.
This writer's record of last week closes with a Memorial Concert for baroque soprano
Judith Nelson, an event with which --
on the evening of Monday September 10 -- the week began.
It was a fine musicians' celebration for a fellow musician, with soloists and ensembles who performed
in Nelson's honor including, among other colleagues and friends, British soprano Emma Kirkby,
The American Bach Soloists and friends, under the direction of Jeffrey Thomas; musicians of
the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra; Anna Carol Dudley, Jennifer Ellis Kampani and Susan Rode Morris,
who sang a lovely Monteverdi madrigal; Susan Hedges singing Gershwin's "Summertime";
and an effecting performance of Bach's Cantata "Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit", played and
sung for the most part by Bay Area musicians, with Jonathan Dimmock as organist.
Judith Nelson's husband, U.C. Berkeley emeritus professor of English,
Alan H. Nelson translated "Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit" for the program notes, and following
the closing chorus, he took the stage to introduce the highlight of the Memorial Concert. And
from Christopher Hogwood's iconic production of Handel's Messiah, Judith Nelson's own
beautiful voice and strong virtual presence became a central part of the evening
via a DVD projection of her Westminster Abbey solo: "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth".
I was not very familiar with Bach's "Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit" and during the concert heard
it as at times transitionally difficult. But later at home, I was interested to discover
-- when studying this work and listening to several performances -- that my experience of the work
was not surprising since there are unexpected changes of tempo in this early (1707) Bach cantata.
They are illustrated in a
detailed chart, available on the website of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem.
Since it was an issue I had been addressing in scoring fiddler's passage, I note the usefulness
of this chart in interpreting the score. Indeed, not yet documented questions I have been asking myself this
week concerned using several different but parallel ways of scoring for electronic literature.
Bach composed "Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit" in a phrase by phrase mix of tempos and keys.
The
origin of each phrase in this remix is set forth on the Bach
Cantatas Website. To my ear, Bach also added contrasting interpretations to the words
by backgrounding certain phrases with unexpected instrumental passages.
The lyricist for "Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit" is not known, yet in the
textual construction of this work, there is something of Bach's music -- a kind of contemporary
juxtaposition that requires the reader to adjust his or her expectation of how
words/music might conventionally flow.
September 25, 2012
Last week was a week of restoring early work, as I took the time to finish the second edition of
A Party at Silver Beach, which I had begun working on
prior to its exhibition in my ELO2012 Retrospective.
These days I am less inclined to change the look and feel of earlier work. So I have kept the
early 21st century World Wide Web look of A Party in Silver Beach. But much of the text
has been rewritten with the idea that since what I am creating overall is the experience of being
at a celebration, every narrative element does not need to be completely realized.
The complete story is seldom revealed in such situations.
"And somewhere in the distance,
the sound of Papageno's glockenspiel
was emanating from Uncle Roger's music box.
The most important element I added in the second edition of A Party at Silver Beach
was the magic realism device of Uncle Roger's music box, which plays at times when
lovers reunite. While I was working on this I listened to/watched James Levine's
Metropolitan Opera Magic Flute, with Kathleen Battle as Pamina and David Hockney
as set and costume designer.
Looking at issues of recreating a work on its original platform -- for the final part of my book
chapter on the recreation of the BASIC recreation of Uncle Roger --
I went home from a library trip last week with Nikolaus Harnoncourt's
Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech. (Portland, OR, Amadeus Press, 1988,
translated by Mary O'Neill from the 1982 original Austrian edition, Musik als Klangrede)
Although admittedly I was tempted to do so by his words --
"In general, the sound of the Baroque orchestra is much softer, but sharper, more aggressive
and more colorful than that of the modern orchestra..." (p. 117 )-- I am not making (in the face of
Harnoncourt's own disdain for those who think computer circuitry more important than a symphony, p. ii)
-- the unthinkable comparison of Uncle Roger with a Baroque Orchestra.
Nevertheless, Harnoncourt, who recently directed The Magic Flute at the 2012
Salzburg Festival, writes with clear, challenging insight and cogent example, and when
I was finished his chapter on "The Baroque Orchestra, (pp. 111-117) I had a better understanding of
why electronic literature works of the command line era exist in a different place than works
of the GUI era and why this is an important consideration. (Forgive me
Saints of early music, we who write electronic literature
have not the history to understand how to navigate our problems of "translation".)
As regards continuing struggles with notating electronic literature, Harnoncourt's chapter on
"Problems of Notation" (pp. 28-38) looks at (among other things) the difficulties of
playing/performing pre-1800 scores. Given that I am working on the notation for the conversations
in Junction of Several Trials, I was particularly interested in how the 17th century
Italian/French composer Jean-Baptiste de Lully tried to notate the speech of French actors
and in the process arrived at unusual time signatures "...completely inconceivable in the music notation
of that period...".( p.37) The texts, Harnoncourt observes, "...acquire a wonderfully scanning rhythm."
His chapter on "Tempo" (pp. 50-58) is also relevant. "The question of tempo only became problematic
with the origin of polyphony," he notes. "Now tempo and sometimes even rhythm had to agree, at least
in certain passages. Since this was not possible using the old neumatic system of notation,
a completely new notation, designed to indicate tempo and to some extent, rhythm had to be invented."
(p.51)
October 3, 2012
For several weeks, I had been circling around Junction of Several Trails,
doing some writing, looking at the score, but I was having difficulty getting into that
mode where the writing is central to existence, and the work becomes a part of existence.
When this mode does not happen, there is usually something wrong, and it has to be dealt with.
I had made a good beginning on the conversation between Máire and Liam.
But there were some problems.
Firstly, changing the time signature from 32 sec/8 sec to 40 sec/8sec wasn't working very well.
I think this is because I had already begun to score with 32sec/8 sec and also because
when I tried to work with it, 40 sec./8 sec seemed clunky. I have not yet completely addressed this issue,
but one thing to explore is how Jean-Baptiste Lully wrote and notated recitative in
the tragédies lyriques.
Secondly, the words I had written in the opening staves of continuo were not working. I had begun with two
paintings -- Thomas Cole's "View of Florence, and his "View of the Arno, near Florence", both painted
at the time when Hiram Powers arrived in Florence. Liam's art historian descriptions of
these paintings are important, but they should come in later. Junction would open more dynamically if the
entry of Liam and Máire was framed on each side with words about music. So, I began again.
On Liam's side, in counterpoint to the central discussion of family memories of Walter Power's arrival in
America, I alluded to Liam's own family history by bringing him onstage with the Irish American waltzes
that were playing when his grandfather met his grandmother at a Boston Dance Hall in the 1950's.
(You could meet someone whose family came from County Cork at the time of the potato famine and
so did your family, but you never knew this until you were dancing and talking at the Hall.)
"Neither one remembered
which band was playing
or the name of the waltz
that they first danced to,
but they said
over and over again
(as if the memory was a song)
that the sound of the accordion
was the sound of the dance hall,
and there was nothing like
that music on that evening.
'I think it was Tom Senier
playing the accordion';
'no, it was Joe Derraine.'
'It was a local tune,
a waltz with no words'"
'no, there were words,
they were about a woman
whom you met in Tralee
or Aranmore or a place
you had never been
but you were really
in Boston or Cambridge
or Dorchester,
and there was nothing like
that music on that evening."
...yet as in poetry, the allusions contribute to the experience
At intervals last week when I was working on this, I would stop working and explore
Davitt Moroney's program for his harpsichord concert at the Cal Performances Fall celebration
on September 30.
In the hands of a master, the writing of a music program that leads to many stories
is in itself an art form. Of course, when that program is played, it is the music itself that is most
important, yet as in poetry, the allusions contribute to the experience. So Davitt Moroney's program:
Henry Purcell, Suite in D major: Prelude, Almand, Hornpipe
Johann Sebastian Bach, Fantasia and Fugue in A minor
Louis Marchand, from Suite in D minor: Prelude, Two Courantes, Chaconne
Johann Sebastian Bach, from The Art of Fugue: Contrapunctus 8
François Couperin, from the Eighteenth Ordre Prelude, Le Tic-Toc-Choc ou Les Maillotins
led me on many trails on which, among other data items, there were:
celebrated harpsichordists including Gustave Leonhardt, Kenneth Gilbert, and Moroney himself;
French harpsichords painted with scenes of meadows, trees, and flowers,
or in elegant black, gold and red;
album covers with clocks, fountains, and men in Puritan attire;
a pièce croissée that will probably find its way onto the menu
of Uncle Roger's music box;
and something I should have explored long ago: the scores of the works in
Art of the Fugue.
In the process of beginning to look at those scores...
In the process of beginning to look at those scores, I understood better how
Bach's themes work with the variations -- which was helpful not only in writing
Junction of Several Trails, a work where conversation themes work together with memory variations,
but also in looking at my problems with scoring for this work.
Following where Davitt's program led, in my mind,
I now saw the four-stave structure of Junction
(where the conversation is framed on both sides by the variations) in Bachian terms,
as if it were a mirror image of Bach's Contrapunctus 9 from Art of the Fugue.
Soon, I would go to hear Davitt Moroney play at the Cal Performances Fall Free for All,
and on that memorable afternoon of French and German harpsichord music, I would also
hear the Kronos Quartet perform string quartet new music from
Mexico, Syria, and many other places, including work by Serbian composer Aleksandra Vrebalov
and by New York composers John Zorn and Bryce Dessner.
Meanwhile, there were many other things
I was doing/working on: the Twitter tools page for
Authoring Software; trail hikes, each one adding a new sketch to a series 3 1/2 x 2 inch drawings
for artists books, plans with JR Carpenter for a collaborative work that will juxtapose mail art
with computer communication; my book chapter on the recreation of the BASIC Uncle Roger;
a restored web page for my MIT Press book on Women in New Media; and centrally, the continuing writing
and scoring of Junction of Several Trails.
...the way Purcell's beautiful Prelude and Almand led into an unexpected Hornpipe
On Sunday, September 30, 2012, at noon, in the Berkeley Music Department courtyard, I listened to the
singing of the UC Men's Octet and (under the trees) the singing of Perfect Fifth.
It was a fine hour that began with a cappella barbershop and Cal football
songs and segued to a cappella Renaissance and early Baroque choral music.
Then, I went to hear the long anticipated program that UC Berkeley Professor of Music
and Internationally renowned harpsichordist Davitt Moroney played for this
Cal Performances fall celebration,
At one o'clock, in Hertz Hall, as if he were Bach,
coming into a room, sitting down and beginning to play -- and there is no one else who can play the way he can, which of course he knows --
Dr. Moroney played every note of his program with perfect touch.
I particularly liked the way Purcell's beautiful Prelude and Almand led into an unexpected Hornpipe;
the river flowing majesty of Bach's Fantasia, followed, like an emanating stream tributary,
by the perfectly constructed Fugue in A minor; the clouds of cascading notes in Marchand's Chaconne,
the clarity of Contrapunctus 8,
and the imagined movement of Davitt Moroney's hands in the concluding Couperin.
He received a standing ovation, and there was no question that he deserved it.
Afterwards, I sat for an hour or so in a cafe, where I ate
memorable French pastry, drank good coffee and -- writing in my notebook -- explored
the plotting of Junction of Several Trails.
Then I joined the crowds of people
heading into Zellerbach to hear the Kronos Quartet.
The Kronos Quartet is David Harrington and John Sherba, (violins), Hank Dutt, (viola)
and Jeffrey Zeigler. (cello)
Playing to a large, enthusiastic crowd they rocked the hall with new music that began with
Mexican composer Severiano Briseño's rousing "El Sinaloense" and also included -- in addition to the music mentioned earlier
-- Syrian composer Omar Souleyman's "La Sidounak Sayyada" and music by Vietnamese musician Kim Sinh
and by Cantor Alter Yechiel Karniol.
...the long anticipated music was unforgettable
While drinking coffee and eating French pastry, I had been thinking that Máire Powers
would arrive at the cafe from a Focluth Wood rehearsal. What Focluth Wood was rehearsing before Máire
meets Liam would, of course, not be the music that Kronos played on stage on Sunday.
Nevertheless, there is about Focluth Wood's music a certain Irish wildness which echoes
the music of folk cultures that Kronos so finely transforms into contemporary new music.
Indeed, the idea of such transformation is inherent in the music that Máire plays in
Begin with the Arrival and Fiddler's Passage.
There was also -- with the echoes of Irish fiddle music in the fast moving notes and
the musician's virtuoso skill -- something of a contingent influence in the work by Couperin with which
Davitt Moroney finished his program on Sunday.
And as the program concluded, he delayed the
entrance of this final work in such a way that when he began to play, the long anticipated
music was unforgettable.
October 21, 2012
A draft of
the first four bars of the Sinfonia for Junction of Several Trails has been composed and is available online.
So far, the
new notation for this work is working well.
Although I have used conversation in three-stave works, (notably
Wasting Time, 1991-1992,
which I am currently restoring in the original BASIC) such early narrative data structures are
digital text in which word compositions are slowly built on the screen. They are conceptual
(with something of the Language and Photography school in aesthetic) and are different from how
conversation will be portrayed in Part V of the polychoral Irish American epic From Ireland with Letters.
Polychoral dialogue was also explored in recent works, such as
when the foreground and the background merged, but I am not yet sure of how to compose the dialogue in
Junction.
So, following a trail that began with Nikolaus Harnoncourt's
Baroque Music Today: Music as Speech, I went home from the library a few weeks ago with
Jean-Baptiste de Lully and his Tragédie Lyriques. (Joyce Newman, UMI Research Press, 1979)
Of interest was how Lully experimented in the creation of recitative:
p. 101: "In sequences of conversational speeches, there are certain elements which tend to bind
the dialogue together. Poetically, rhyming patterns overlap from section to section and speech
to speech while musically, cadences are accomplished before the end of one speech so that the
second speaker begins to sing without a harmonic change. The
speakers follow each other very rapidly and, indeed, in some instances they interrupt
each other."
p. 103: Other techniques used by Lully (who often worked with lyricist Philippe Quinault)
include variation in the speaking speed of conversationalists, with in some instances one speaker
speaking twice as fast as the other.
The exploration of Lully's 17th Century recitative was not necessarily for the purpose of imitating it.
However -- in addition to the fact that I had not thought precisely in terms of using speed of
speech in this manner -- another purpose of looking at how musicians compose recitative is to
understand the variety of approaches.
Interlude: On Saturday night in Berkeley I heard the Holloway Gower Mortensen Trio play
"Back to the Future", a program
of 17th Century German and Italian Music.
Led by renowned Baroque violinist
John Holloway, playing with fellow musicians Lars Ulrik Mortensen (harpsichord) and Jane Gower, (dulcian)
it was an evening of seldom heard "Stil Moderno" instrumental music, including two enchanting
sonatas by Dario Castello for violin, dulcian and harpsichord;
Philipp Friedrich Böddecker's lively dulcian-led "Sonata Sopra La Monica";
and harpsichord toccatas by Johann Jakob Froberger and Michelangelo Rossi.
The highlight of the evening was the Passacaglia from the Mystery Sonatas.
The Passacaglia for solo violin was written by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, one
of the finest violinists of the 17th century. On Saturday night in Berkeley, this challenging,
riveting, wildly beautiful serenade was played in a virtuoso performance by the incomparable John Holloway.
A seminal work for solo violin, in which the bass is played by the violin itself,
the Biber Passacaglia exists in the original hand-written manuscript of the Mystery Sonatas
(held by the Bavarian State Library in Munich) -- where each of the sonatas is illuminated by an icon image
from the Rosary mysteries, and the concluding Passacaglia is illuminated
by the image of a guardian angel.
The works on the program -- which also included Philipp Friedrich Buchner, Johann Rosenmüller,
Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Bartolomé de Selma y Salaverde, Giovanni Battista Fontana,
and Marco Uccellini -- were interesting, technically challenging, sonorous, unexpected, and adventurous --
with occasional echoes of festival or street performance (where music moves outside of
expected venues: Joshua Bell playing Bach's "Chaconne" incognito at the Matro Station in Washington DC;
John Holloway bringing ancient music to life, as if he were a 17th century violinist transported to Berkeley;
Lars Ulrik Mortensen finely recreating a Rossi toccata; Jane Gower playing
the dulcian sound of hundreds of years ago)
"Back to the Future": And somehow I remembered Leslie
Ross' innovative bassoon
"other instruments". Indeed, listening to the experimental early music that
the Holloway Gower Mortensen Trio played on Saturday night,
I was also reminded of the continuing influence of Fluxus artists
on contemporary art, music, and literature.
For instance -- from the point of view of the field of electronic literature --
in the Fluxus objects collected by Jean Brown and now housed in the Getty,
one could look at:
Vito Acconci's "when it was set down there (and)....;
Eric Andersen's "Become a member of Eric Anderson's random audience I: frequency C";
Joseph Beuys' "Enterprise";
George Maciunas' "Confetti invitations";
Takako Saito's "Sound Chess";
Carolee Schneemann's "ABC: we print anything in the cards";
and one of my own early image catalogs,
to name just a few works in this extraordinary collection.
My work, which Jean Brown purchased for her collection in the early 1980's, was created using a box
originally intended for microelectronic chips. Into the slots that originally held the chips,
I put photographs and text. (and some of the original chips remained in the box.)
Also on Saturday, I returned to the writing of Junction of Several Trails. After 6 hours or so,
it was not working exactly the way I wanted. The segment of continuo which concerns Thomas Cole's
paintings of Florence -- "View of Florence from San Miniato",
Oil on canvas, 1837 -- is effective, but it should probably be a part of the Sinfornia and not
(as currently) frame the conversation.
In Begin with the Arrival, (part II of From Ireland
with Letters) there are 4 staves but the continuo is intermittent; in Junction, it
is continuous. This kind of Four-part polychoral writing is challenging.....
October 12, 2012
Writing and interface design continue on Junction of Several Trails,
and it is beginning to take shape. The 4-stave text, with which it opens now, functions in somewhat the
same way as a sinfonia that introduces a Bach cantata.
Thus Junction, which is part V of
From Ireland with Letters, now begins with a text sinfonia, where
the music is in the writing.
Last week, with Irish American waltzes at Boston Dance Halls,
I wrote Liam's continuo. Beginning this week, I wrote the first draft of Máire's
continuo. It plays in counterpoint on the other side.
She came to the cafe from a rehearsal.
"And when I'm drinking,
I'm always thinking
How to gain my love's company"
I never should have told them
I was meeting Liam O'Brien,
Máire thought to herself.
And it would be Cormac's turn
to call the songs.
"upon his knee a pretty wench
and on the table a jug of punch".
The band played on,
as if they were at road trip festival,
the audience sitting on blankets,
drinking draft beer
as the sun went down.
But no one said a word
about where she was going
after the rehearsal.
"And what's it to any man whether or no,
whether I'm easy or whether I'm true,
as I lifted her petticoat easy and slow".
Leading with the sweetly wailing sound
of his accordion.
Cormac kept calling the songs.
"I'd go home to my parents
confess what I've done"
until Frannie,
who was married to Cormac,
started playing the fiddle
out of turn,
"A gypsy rover came over the hill",
and Máire joined her.
"A gypsy rover came over the hill,
Down through the valley so shady
He whistled and he sang till the green woods
rang And he won the heart of the lady."
So, somewhere between line 6-14 (above) in counterpoint, I, the writer, bring Máire Powers to the
Farmhouse Cafe where:
"At the hour when they were meeting
the woods were darkly beautiful.
There were lanterns in the courtyard
of the cafe where they were meeting,
but they were not yet turned on.
"Down through the valley so shady"
Meanwhile, Liam's continuo is playing on the right hand side. Soon, he will also arrive.
October 26, 2012
Supportive collaborative social media environments foster a creative bonding among individuals, and
on social media platforms -- particularly for writers and artists working in new fields --
there is an energy that reflects and catalyzes the artmaking process.
Beginning in 1986, on Art Com Electronic Network
(ACEN) on The Well, social media conferencing
-- and
an associated online publication menu
that 26 years later is still innovative -- were instrumental in my work in California and in
the work of other writers, including Jim Rosenberg in Pennsylvania and Fortner Anderson in Montreal.
These days, we take this for granted, but at that time the network capability to bring artists
from all over the World together on the same platform was radical and astounding.
Since then, networked discussion, artmaking, and information sharing have been a part of my life --
from the seminal Telluride community Infozone; to creating MUD-based social media narrative
at Xerox PARC; to
Arts Wire's work bringing diverse cultural communities online; to the USC-based
Critical Code Studies Working Group; to the amazing way in which -- using only 140 characters --
information is exchanged between writers of electronic literature and digital humanities scholars
on my Twitter stream.
With this in mind, I posted my Authoring Software story on the upcoming
Remediating the Social Conference at Edinburgh, (which will include
an interactive e-cast) and then on October 25, I went to the Berkeley Center for New Media to
hear digital media theorist Wendy Chun talk about the research for her in progress book,
"Imagined Networks".
Under the heading of "Mapping the Unmappable", Chun, a Professor of Modern Culture
and Media at Brown University, spoke of the science of networks explored by a network of scientists --
collectively solving problems that cannot be solved by one individual.
Additionally, focusing in particular on popular network culture,
she highlighted issues including:
- online friendship
- the public/private dichotomy of networked information
- and the role of the "theoros" and social media in the validation of
lives and events.
At times in her talk, the popular network that Wendy Chun explored was not the network
-- where the role of art and culture in the creation of community is a continuing pleasure -- which I see.
Nevertheless, (even though sometimes electronic literature is
experimental and targeted to an audience of colleagues) for poets who write on the Internet,
writing on the Internet is still Homeric in that whenever/whatever we write on the World Wide Web,
we are working in the public square.
In Music in Ireland, Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture,
(NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) the story begins with a welcome invitation. "Listen, Stan and Dora. There
will be music, dancing, and singing tonight...Here's how you get there," Following this invitation
and directions, the authors, Dorothea E. Hast and Stanley Scott, journey to a pub on the
Western Irish coast. Here players of fiddles, flute, tin whistle, bagpipes, concertina, and
accordion "begin their set with a gentle, lilting jig, 'The Mist Covered Mountain,' composed by Junior Crehan..."
"Every few minutes, the musicians switch to a new tune, moving seamlessly from one melody to the next."
And in the interludes, there is dancing; there is conversation; there is beer. "As can be seen here,"
Hast and Scott note to conclude their opening "Invitation to a Session,"
"...the community surrounding the music -- including
people, place, and even physical locale -- is a vital component in the overall musical experience."
Indeed, a poet writing
an Irish American epic on the World Wide Web might remember that in some
social media platforms (The Well, Arts Wire, for instance) the presence of the networked community
and interactive audience is/was and continues to be important in the way that audience and community are
important in Irish and Irish American culture.
On Wednesday October 24, at the U.C. Berkeley Department of Music, Carla Moore (violin)
and Davitt Moroney (harpsichord) played a Noon Concert Series program that featured two Bach sonatas for
violin and harpsichord and Muffat's Passacaglia in G minor.
From the opening riffs in the Allegro of the Sonata in G major, (BWV 1019) to the final Allegro
of the Sonata in B minor, (BWV 1014) Bach's fascinating Sonatas for violin and harpsichord
were beautifully played by violinist and a Concert Master of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra,
Carla Moore, and harpsichordist and musicologist, UC Berkeley Professor Davitt Moroney,
whose recent concerts include an acclaimed performance at the Hall of Musical Instruments
of the National Museum of American History in Washington DC.
Between BWV 1019 and BWV 1014, as if in friendly challenge to John Holloway's
Passacaglia from Biber's Mystery Sonatas, (played on Saturday night in Berkeley)
the incomparable Davitt Moroney took Muffat's Passacaglia and with complex variations, an
unusual bass, and subtly implied dialogue woven into solo harpsichord polyphony, he
creatively transformed it into into a multi-faceted surprisingly contemporary work.
He played this Passacaglia with such coherent vision that it was difficult to separate
the composition from the performance, and perhaps because of how he suffused this work with
a poetic discourse that wordlessly approached narrative, it was an extraordinary harpsichord passage.
It should be noted that John Holloway and Davitt Moroney have together made a classic recording
of Biber's Mystery Sonatas. Holloway and Moroney have also recorded the Bach violin and
harpsichord Sonatas.
On Wednesday, listening to Carla Moore and Davitt Moroney play these same Sonatas, I was entranced
with how Bach carefully crafted each Sonata movement in such a way that it not only stood by itself
but also could be combined with other movements to create a whole. And -- particularly because each
movement was such a perfect whole unto itself -- how the allegro/adagio movements were contrasted
(and how else this might be done) was of interest.
In BWV 1019, it is Allegro, Largo, Allegro, Adagio,
Allegro.
In BWV 1014, it is Adagio, Allegro, Andante, Allegro.
At home, I continued to work on Junction of Several Trails, creating the template for the score
and then working within it. With this method, I cannot just write the words and then intuitively
put together four staves. Instead the preordained time measurement forces
a more constraint-based writing. If this seems difficult, (and in fact at this point it is)
the hours and hours of playing/rewriting; replaying/rewriting the work until the
correlations between each stave are working are greatly reduced. It is much easier to
correlate the four staves of the work when working with a scored template.
This, I suppose,
(as noted before, Harnoncourt p. 51) is why music was more exactly notated when
polyphony was introduced.
November 4, 2012
While in the Edinburgh, Scotland, many of my electronic literature colleagues met
at the ELMCIP Conference
Remediating the Social -- and on my Twitter stream and the Bambuser e-cast,
I followed the panels, the new works, and the new ELMCIP
Anthology of European Electronic Literature --
at home I worked day and night on the complete score and
the writing of the "Sinfonia" that introduces Junction of
Several Trails, until finally late on Saturday night,
the score and
the draft
were at the place that they could be made public. There is of course more work to be done to make the score
comprehensible, and, as always, much editing to be done on the writing. But it is working!
The continuo in the second half of the Sinfonia is dense, almost Bachian.
There once was, it should be noted, an Irish tenor, who sang early music.
His name was James Joyce.
The information intensive word structure of
From Ireland with Letters also reflects information age text display, and, in places, it
proceeds so rapidly, that it must be replayed in order to comprehend the whole. However,
it should be remembered that this is the case with certain works of polyphonic music. Indeed,
in earlier centuries, increasing complexity
was probably initially difficult for audiences accustomed to Gregorian chant. As
is the case with the reading of online text by contemporary Internet audiences, an understanding
of polyphonic music was gradually acquired.
In celebration of the first online posting of the Sinfonia, I went hiking in the hills.
I have been making a series of small (3 1/2" by 2" drawings) of the forests, trees, ferns, and laurel on
trails in the East Bay and Marin, and now have about 35 small pen and ink sketches that will be made into
a series of landscape artist books. I look forward to working with my hands and to the interface
decisions and explorations involved in making artists books. The interplay between this work and the creation
of electronic literature has always been a part of my work.
At home, I made a traditional fresh tomato and basil Italian pasta sauce, remembering the Society of Six:
how Seldon Gile went hiking and painting in the Oakland hills with his friends and when they
returned to his cabin, they talked about their work while Gile made informal dinners. Pasta and red wine.
Contingently, the uses of narrative in contemporary electronic literature and the immense amount of research
required to write historical fiction were (last week) subjects of a lively, interesting digital writers'
conversation with Canadian British writer Kate Pullinger, who recently spoke at Books in Browsers 2012
in San Francisco.
In the opening Sinfonia to Junction of Several Trails, the continuo ornamentation
of a simpler central text subtly conveys a background to the central themes.
In the central measures, accompanying Liam's theme, it describes a painting of Florence
done by Hudson River painter Thomas Cole in the same year that Hiram Powers and
his family moved to Florence:
Thomas Cole,
View of Florence from San Miniato,
oil on canvas, 1837
"And in the evening, in 19th century Florence, artists gathered at the Caffe Doney,
where their conversation was not unlike those of artists of any era."
Liam's continuo text also looks at between-the-wars life in 17th century Ireland
and how the traditions of Ireland, such as "The Table Laden" were carried on in his potato
famine immigrant.
Family memories of slavery, how slave memories were passed from generation to generation,
and the question of whether or not Hiram Powers -- a frequent visitor at the
home of Harriet Beecher Stowe before he left America -- knew of the slave origins of his family
will return in the conversation between Liam O'Brien and Máire Powers that I will write next.
Accompanying Máire's theme in the opening Sinfonia to Junction,
is the family tree that begins with Walter Power and Trial Shepherd.
"Like a fiddle tune
that continually returns
to the opening notes,
her family tree
was echoing in her mind."
The way the Irish names are gradually submerged in New England names becomes apparent as this "tune"
proceeds:
Lemuel Powers,
Ezekiel Powers,
Abijah Powers,
and Elias Powers who married Emeline White, a descendent of Elder John White.
(on whose Cambridge cow-yard a Harvard University library
is allegedly built)
In Máire's family the Irish names return when
her father marries the granddaughter of a Gaelic revival scholar, who took his family into exile to
America after the Easter Rising.
Note that in real life, my family in America, started with the exact same
family tree that is disclosed in the Sinfonia to Junction of Several Trails,
but Walter Power symbolically returned in name with my grandfather Walter Powers --
who set me on the trail that resulted in From Ireland with Letters. The name continued
in my family with my father's brother, Walter Powers II and his son
Walter Powers.
November 14, 2012
As is my usual practice, I am letting the Junction of Several Trails
Sinfonia rest for a week or so before beginning
the process of editing the text and finishing the score.
Meanwhile, work on restoring my 1991-1992 narrative data structure, Wasting Time, has resumed.
Wasting Time begins as a simple duet and turns into a more complex trio.
Although it is not nearly as elegant algorithmically or as densely narrative as the works that
preceded it, notably Uncle Roger and its name was Penelope, it is of interest both
as a pre-web example of early, easy to navigate, digital narrative poetry written for a
literary magazine and in my own work as a short precursor to polychoral literature.
I confess that at the time I was interested in how Gilbert & Sullivan put together words in
duets and trios.
Although it is tempting to do so, other than editing words in the narrative portions,
I'm not making changes in the program. But in 2012, I have rewritten the REM statements in this way:
10 REM WASTING TIME
15 REM copyright 1991 Judy Malloy
16 REM This BASIC program provides an interesting
17 REM look at producing text with three different methods,
18 REM including READ DATA statements, such as those used in lines 4050-4310;
19 REM file reading, such as the opening statement that calls the file "clicks",
20 REM and inclusion of the text within the program itself
21 REM which begins in line 340.
22 REM At the time when it was written, few people would have looked
23 REM at the program, so it also asks the question:
24 REM if the reader does not see it,
26 REM what is the impact on a work of literature
27 REM of such an experimental and at times unorthodox program?
28 REM And does the program itself echo the narrative situation in Wasting Time?
My approach to restoring early work is that as a writer it is ok to edit my words,
but my program and the way it worked 20 years ago is historic. So, except for the opening
REM statements which do not effect how the program runs, the program is essentially the same as it was in
1991. Also, some of the purely narrative text in the program has been edited, and several
screens of the opening of the duet are omitted.
The program and text are working. I may have over-edited the text. While I consider this,
I'm working on the documentation. To introduce the documentation, I have lightly edited the artist's note that
accompanied the Wasting Time disk when the work was published in a special edition of
Perforations in 1992 -- After the Book: Writing Literature/Writing
Technology (Perforations 1:3, Summer 1992. After the Book was edited by Richard Gess. It
was published in a cardboard box that contained disks of electronic literature including Stuart Moulthrop's
Dreamtime and my Wasting Time and copies of papers (they were separate and not bound)
by Michael Joyce, Carolyn Guyer, Jane Douglas, Jim Rosenberg and others.
The 2012 text of my 1992 artist's note in Perforations -- Judy Malloy, "Wasting Time: A Narrative Data Structure" --
which now introduces the documentation for the restored work, reads as follows:
"Intelligent, responsive electronic 'bookware' (either packaged like software or running on book-sized
machines) is invigorating established literary forms -- blurring the boundaries between literature,
visual art, and theater.
Words that are stored on bookware can be retrieved in natural, consequential ways -- as memories are retrieved by human minds.
In addition, as they 'run' on the fluid, glowing computer screen, animated words can convey the slow unfolding of time and/or multiple points of view.
My 'narrabases' Uncle Roger and its name was Penelope, use the computer's ability
to store and manipulate nonsequential narrative information. My 'narrastructure' Wasting Time uses
the visual attributes of the computer monitor in combination with the computer's ability
to organize information and display it in an animated manner that clarifies that information.
The Setting
Something about the basement I was living in (in Albany, California in the winter of 1990-1991) reminded
me of the house where I lived in the Rocky Mountain foothills in the late sixties. Perhaps it was
the penetrating cold and the long red underwear I used to combat it. Perhaps it was the twanging
of warm water against the metal sides of the shower. Or, it might have been the contrast between
the sinister darkness in the corners of the kitchen after the sun went down and the bright sun
in the morning on the owner's well-tended garden -- a contrast that echoed the difference
between the black woods outside the window at night in that Colorado house and the white
snowcapped mountains seen from its kitchen windows on sunny mornings.
Wasting Time, a work of fictional digital poetry, is set in this house, still located
I imagine, above Boulder at 7,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains -- about a mile up a dirt road.
In January when the story takes place, after a snowstorm, Ellen and Dick, the fictional new owners,
have to park their car by the side of the main road (as we did) and to reach the house,
walk up a snow covered dirt road
in the dark.
The Characters
Ellen and Dick are a married couple on their early thirties. Ellen is an assistant food designer
for a company that makes frozen meals for institutions. Dick, a plant physiologist, is a
research-oriented university professor. The third character, Dan, was Dick's roommate
in his freshman year at college.
The Structure
Wasting Time, a short narrastructure about 3 characters, is told from separate but parallel points
of view using 3 columns of text in a series of 25 computer monitor screens. Each screen is built up
slowly, and the speed at which the words appear is partially controlled by the reader.
When I began work on Wasting Time, I had just finished producing a collaboratively
written narrastructure Thirty Minutes in the Late Afternoon. In this work, written on
Art Com Electronic Network on the WELL in 1990, 3 characters were developed simultaneously by
15 writers, using the WELL's topic system. (a pioneering social media system) The group-written
thoughts and actions of the 3 characters were then displayed in 3 parallel columns of text.
The reader saw their separate thoughts and actions simultaneously in filmic "real time".
Wasting Time also occurs in filmic "real time" that is represented by 3 parallel columns of text.
But in the central part of the work, it utilizes a more complex text delivery system.
The Story
When Wasting Time begins running, words that set the scene appear on the screen,
accompanied by a light tapping noise; (The steady falling of the snow outside, perhaps,
or the typewriter on which I wrote when I lived in Colorado before the days of word processing)
In the beginning, Ellen and Dick's separate thoughts appear side by side. After
Dan arrives unexpectedly, the screen structure changes. Ellen, Dan, and Dick sit down on the couch in
front of the fire. First, their spoken words appear on the screen (in capital letters) at
the speed of spoken conversation. Then slowly, the screen is filled with their thoughts
(in upper and lower case letters.) The reader controls the "thought flow" by pressing when
he or she wants to see more.
Wasting Time examines the exterior and interior ways in which individuals relate to each other.
The gradual emergence of text on the fluid computer screen allows the viewer to assimilate complex
word patterns."
And, when the story ran on the original platform, the bright, glowing words on a
black screen emphasized the contrasts in the story.
November 24, 2012
Thanksgiving was celebrated early this year with a family visit and a trip to Marin to
hike along a streamside trail. I stopped to have a small picnic, listen to the sound of the water,
and do some drawing in my notebook of calling-card sized pen and ink sketches.
Later at home, I was happily surprised to see that the image I had been searching for to
illuminate the
score for the Sinfonia to Junction of Several Trails was already in my drawing
notebooks. Additionally, as of Thanksgiving day, the entire "lyrics" were added to the score,
an
opening page was created for the Sinfonia,
and
I began to write the conversation between Máire and Liam. At present my plan is to continue
with the four stave structure, so that the Sinfonia flows into the conversation. However in
this part of Junction of Several Trails, the continuo of Irish poetry and song will
occur intermittently, while in the central two staves, Máire and Liam will converse.
Also this week I returned to reading Dorothea E. Hast and Stanley Scott, Music in Ireland,
Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture. (NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
In books about Irish music, themes about the role of music in Irish culture occur and reoccur
in the way that themes occur and reoccur in Irish music itself. These themes are expressed in print
as differently by different writers as they are in the music by different musicians.
I am enjoying the stories of how Irish music is learned In Music in Ireland, Experiencing Music,
Expressing Culture. They begin in Chapter 1, "Invitation to a Session", with
West Clare fiddle player Junior Crehan, who for decades played the fiddle in Gleeson's Pub on the
Western Irish coast. Junior's mother played the concertina, and he also learned from West Clare fiddler,
Thady Casey. But his father wished him to be a farmer, so with his pajamas hidden in the barn,
he would sneak out to play at night. Returning home early in the morning, he would put the pajamas on
and enter the house as if he had been out early feeding the chickens.
One night, (or so goes the story that he told folk musicologist Tom Munnelly)
Junior was walking beside an ancient ringfort -- on the kind of moonlight night where
the clouds would at times obscure the moon -- when he saw a small ball of light moving
back and forth "...and as I was walking didn't I see two goal posts and a little man standing in between
the goal posts? and the ball was coming! 'Stop the ball,' says he."
So Junior stopped the ball
and stayed for a while to watch the game. When he left, the goalkeeper gave him a
small piece of metal to put behind the bridge of his fiddle "as a charm to win a wife".
Junior relates that he played so well that "While the music was on the people were in a kind
of daze. They never heard anything like it in this world. And a lot of them say they will hardly
ever hear anything like it."
And that is how he won the hand in marriage of the woman he loved.
(source: Tom Munnelly, "Junior Crehan of Bonavilla," Béaloideas p. 66-161, 1998,
quoted by Hast and Scott on pp 12-13)
"Passing on the Tradition", Chapter 3 of Music in Ireland,
Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, focuses how the traditions of Irish music are passed from
from generation to generation in ways that include the osmosis of the central place of music in
Irish life. In the words of East Clare concertina player Mary MacNamara:
"My father would take us, when we got to the stage we could go out and play, he would go to different
houses...maybe twice a week and we'd sit down and we'd listen to these musicians.
And listen to the stories they had to tell, listen to them playing. We'd have the tea and the corncake
and all the rest, and then we'd play a few tunes with them, might dance a set.
And that's really how we got our music. It was kind of given to us by the older people
more than having actually sat down and consciously learned it..." (p.44)
In the field of the electronic literature, our history is relatively new and yet --
as digital writing, becomes a part of contemporary culture -- more and more it is
being celebrated with exhibitions and gatherings and readings. And I am happy to note that this month my classic Eastgate
its name was Penelope is running at Nouspace Gallery in the exhibition
Digital Stories of the 1990s: A Look at Works
from the Storyspace School, with works by Michael Joyce, Judy Malloy, Stuart Moulthrop, Shelley Jackson,
Richard Holeton and more displayed on vintage Macs from Dene Grigar's collection.
Nouspace Gallery & Media Lounge is directed by Grigar and John Barber, Faculty in
The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver.
Contingently, this week on
Authoring Software, I featured
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, a wiki-written book by ten authors who participated in
the 2010 Computer Code Studies Working Group:
Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas,
Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter.
Written in BASIC for the Commodore 64, the 1980's program of the title --
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 -- uses characters (205 \ and 206 / )
from the Commodore-specific character set, PETSCII in order to generate an
array of maze-like pattern. The ten writers who created this significant book, worked
together to explore the program in terms of it techno-cultural history,
including the history of the BASIC language, the Commodore 64, and the histories and uses of mazes.
walking beside an ancient ringfort -- on the kind of moonlight night where
the clouds would at times obscure the moon
While I was writing this article, I tried running the program on DOSBox. Since PETSCII and ACSII
characters sets are different, the output of
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 was not unexpectedly quite different.
On a DOS emulator, I produced this surprising result -- in which the maze metamorphosed into
a score.
Note that while in PETSCII, 205 and 206 are the \ / characters that create mazes, in ASCII,
205 and 206 are box drawing characters. A DOS maze could probably be created using the ASCII codes
for \ /. However, in ASCII, they are not next to each other in numerical order, so the workaround might
force a longer program. Note also that to run 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); on DOSBox,
I eliminated the .5 that works on the Commodore.
November 30, 2012
My mother, Barbara Lillard Powers, November 30, 1916 - October 10, 2001, Editor
of the Winchester Star, Editor of the Somerville Journal, Managing Editor
of the Somerville Journal, the Cambridge Chronicle, and the Watertown Press.
Rain and writing and research. The story that Máire Powers tells Liam O'Brien
about how her great grandfather escaped after the Easter Rising set me on the trail of American
Fenian support for the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The rebellion was supported by Clan na Gael.
(at the time of The Rising, the name for the Fenian Brotherhood) From Boston, Máire's great
grandfather's brother was among the men who transported guns to the IRB. After The Rising -- when
the British arrested over 3,000 Irish men and women and brutally executed the leaders by firing squad --
his ship sailed silently back to America carrying Máire's great grandfather.
And in the crates, that had formerly held guns, was a treasure of books from the Gaelic Revival.
A
hundred years later, these books would inspire a contemporary lay by a woman, whose first ancestor in
America was an Irish slave.
This week's research (for the continuo to the Cantata of
Junction of Several Trails) centered on songs from The Easter Rising.
I began with these words from "The Foggy Dew"
by Parish Priest Charles O'Neill:
"But the Angelus' bells o'er the Liffey swells
Rang out in the foggy dew."
The entire opening of this song -- finely sung by Sinead O'Connor
with the Chieftains -- is:
"As down the glen one Easter morn
To a city fair rode I,
Their armed lines of marching men
In squadrons passed me by.
No pipe did hum, no battle drum
Did sound its loud tattoo
But the Angelus' bells o'er the Liffey swells
Rang out in the foggy dew."
The names of the rebels are in songs such as
Peadar Kearney's ballad: "The Row in the Town", sung by The Wolfe Tones:
"God rest gallant Pearse and his comrades who died,
Tom Clarke, MacDonagh, MacDermott, McBride,
And here's to Jim Connolly he gave one hurrah,
And he faced the machine guns for Erin go Bragh."
The names of the rebels are in "The Boys from County Cork", set forth on
the website of the Merry Ploughboys,
where the entire ballad is available:
"Meet the boys from Kerry, take the boys from Clare
From Dublin Wicklow Donegal and the boys from old Kildare
Some came from a land across the sea, from Boston and New York
But the boys who beat the Black and Tans Were the boys from County Cork
In Ireland's rebel county our heros fought and died
Tom Barry and his gallant crew filled Irish hearts with pride
From Skibereen to Bandon, to Bantry by the sea
Our brave young Michael Collins fought for Ireland's liberty
Well Cork came us McSweeney, A martyr for to die
And Wicklow gave us Dwyer in those days now long gone by
And Dublin gave us Padraic Pearse, McBride and Cathal Brugha.
And America gave us De Valera to lead auld Ireland through."
excerpt from "Boys of the county Cork", Trad. Arr. Merry Ploughboys;
also sung by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem
All of the seven signers of the 1916 Proclamation, whose brutal executions
inspired the Irish War for Independence were:
Galway born Éamonn Ceannt, the first signer of the Proclamation of Independence.
Thomas James Clarke, who had spent 15 years of penal servitude for his role
in a bombing campaign in London.
Commandant-General of the Dublin forces, Edinburgh-born James Connolly. He was so badly
wounded that he could not stand. Connolly was sitting in a chair when he was gunned
down by the firing squad.
Seán MacDiarmada: from Leitrim, manager of the newspaper Irish Freedom.
He had polio and walked with a cane.
Tipperary-born Thomas MacDonagh was a teacher, scholar, writer, playwright,
and commander of the Second Battalion of Volunteers.
Dublin-born Patrick Pearse, Editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, the newspaper of the Gaelic League.
He also founded two schools for the Irish language education of Irish children. (with Thomas MacDonagh)
Pearse was the author of the Proclamation of Independence and Commander in Chief of the Irish forces.
Dublin-born Joseph Mary Plunkett, editor of the Irish Review, was also involved in the founding of
the Irish National Theatre. He was Director of Military Operations.
More information is available in
The Executed Leaders of the 1916 Rising (Department of the Taoiseach)
Thinking about the role of the Easter Rising in Ireland's freedom,
thinking of the symbolic treasure of books from the Gaelic Revival, I returned to
one of my own favorite books: H.V. Morton's In Search of Ireland (London: Methuen, 1949. First edition: 1930)
Morton, an English journalist, set off for Ireland only 8 years after the Treaty of 1922.
On the deck of a boat on his way to Ireland, he wrote:
"I was going not to the land of clowns and 'bulls', which amused the ruling class of two centuries,
but to a small country that has stood to its guns through a consistent War of Independence
that dragged its weary, blood-stained way through nine centuries -- the longest struggle
in the history of the world. Before me on the sky-line was the Irish Free State."
Returning to Music in Ireland,
Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, in the conclusion Hast and Scott look at the influences
of contemporary culture on Irish music. They quote Belfast poet
Ciaran Carson in this way:
"Each time the song is sung, our notions of it change, and we are
changed by it. The words are old. They have been worn into shape
by many ears and mouths and have been contemplated often. But
every time is new because the time is new, and there is no time
like now." (Ciaran Carson, Last Night's Fun, NY: North Point Pres, 1996. p, 116;
quoted in Hast and Scott p. 135)
December 2, 2012
It is the beginning of the Christmas season and time to bring in greenery, light the Advent candles,
and (not yet done) bake Christmas cookies and Irish bread.
And on December 2, I raised a glass of Powers Irish whiskey for Lord John Power and his wife
Lady Giles FitzGerald, who died on December 2, 1649 when Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army
attacked and demolished the Power family castles outside of Waterford.
Their story has been told before in the pages of my writer's
notebooks and is written in
Begin with the Arrival, part IV.
December 3, 2012
Rain, writing, research and music. I drove in the pouring rain to Berkeley on Saturday night
to hear the University Baroque Ensemble. Later, at home, I looked at this week's writing
and was confronted with the impossibility of creating one notebook entry that combined December 2 1649
in Ireland, the 1916 Easter Rising, and Baroque music in Berkeley. There was only one thing to do:
back dating. I decided to give the University Baroque Ensemble today's date, December 3, and to
give Máire's scholar-rebel great grandfather the date of my mother's birthday, November 30.
It seemed appropriate since my Mother was a Boston area Journalist. I note also that 1916, the year
that my mother was born, was the year of the Easter Rising, and at the time in America, November 30 was
always the day of Thanksgiving.
And so, I begin with Saturday night, December 1 in Berkeley. It was an interesting and unusual program,
alternating vocal works with cello consorts, violin consorts, a keyboard duet, and the full
ensemble in a series of pavans, galliards, motets, concertos, and airs -- and closing
with a Buxtehude Cantata: "Alles, was ihr tut, mit Werden oder mit Werken".
Because this year the University Baroque Ensemble has an unusual number of cellos, (Abraham Aragundi,
Nina Pak, Bryanna Reed, Alexandra Roedder plus cello and violine: Joshua Daranciang and Emily Judd)
the program included several works for a consort of cellos and violine. French
organist Michel Corrette's enchanting "Le Phénix" Concerto in G major" -- with its multi-cello
bowing visuals and sonically fascinating score -- was so interesting (how often does one see so many cello's playing
in ensemble on the stage?) and so well played that the audience could not resist clapping in between the
three movements. (Allego, Adagio, Allegro)
The voices were Alana Mailes, (soprano) Elsa Bishop, (alto) Casey Glick, (tenor) and Hayden Godfrey.
(bass) They were joined in the Buxtehude Cantata by the University of California vocal ensemble
Perfect Fifth. Of particular note in the program were Mailes and lutist Marco Paliza-Carre,
performing French composer Joachim Thibault de Courville's Air "Si je languis"; the full UBE
vocal ensemble performing John Farmer's erotically charged "Faire Phyllis I saw sitting all
alone"; and Mailes, accompanied by harpsichordist and UBE director Davitt Moroney,
in a fine motet by the 18th century French woman composer Anne Madeleine Guédon de Presles.
Opening with a Largo e staccato, in which alternating staccato and melody led to an Allegro
and thence to a lively closing Vivace, Telemann's Concerto in G major was played by violinists
Hannah Glass, Jennifer Kwon, David Lin, Anita Satish, Conor Stanton, and Edith Yuan.
As in "Le Phénix", the ways in which the different sounds were passed between the
musicians were both interesting and well played. Contingently, when the keyboard players
(Philip Chan, organ and Kay Yoon, harpsichord) performed C.P.E Bach's Duetto II,
(Poco Adagio) the sound of the organ and the sound of the harpischord moved effectively
back and forth from separate positions on the stage.
In conclusion, joined by Perfect Fifth, (Director: Mark Sumner) the University Baroque Ensemble
performed Buxtehude's "Alles, was ihr Tut". Before the performance I had listened to
several Buxtehude cantatas and was amazed that these finely composed and affecting works have
until recently been so little performed. Buxtehude's artfully structured Cantata -- "Whatever you do" --
began with an instrumental (Adagio, Presto) followed by a chorus. As if framing the opening chorus
in gold leaf, the instrumental Adagio, Presto repeated, creating a Sinfonia-surrounded opening
that was then followed (in this order) by chorus, tenor, soprano, chorus, chorus.
It was a splendid and beautifully performed finale to an evening of music surprises.
As if I was in New Hampshire driving home on a December night, there was thick fog on the hills
on my journey home. I drove slowly, thinking about the music -- and the way that UBE
Director Davitt Moroney works with students to bring an always innovative and well
performed series of concerts to the University of California at Berkeley.
December 9, 2012
Remembering the many different trails and paths I walked on to create the small drawings that I am using
in this year's books, as the Christmas season begins, I am working on making artists books for Christmas
presents -- enjoying the cutting and folding of beautiful Arches paper and the way
the memories of the trails persist in the drawings. Probably I should photograph these books, but
I have never done this with Christmas present artworks. They are, in a sense, removed from the artworld.
This weeks reading is A Traditional Music Journey 1600-2000, from Erris to Mullaghban
by Máire Nic Domhnaill Gairbhí. (Máire Mc Donnell Garvey, published by Nure,
Manorhamilton, Co Leitrim, Ireland: Drumlin Publications in 2000)
Earlier in this year's writer's notebook, I wrote:
"In books about Irish music, themes about the role of music in
Irish culture occur and reoccur in the way that themes occur and reoccur in Irish music itself.
These themes are expressed in print as differently by different writers as they are in the music by
different musicians.
Yes. And in A Traditional Music Journey, we begin again with a céilidh.
The author, an Irish Fiddler and born in Connacht, now living in Dublin, begins the story in this way:
"I grew up in Tobracken, Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon and my love for Irish music goes back to 1932 when
Aunt Molly and cousins came home from Providence Rhode Island...That night in the ancestral home is
still clear in my memory." (p. 1) After describing preparing the lamps, the "excitement in the kitchen",
the rolling in of a barrel of double X porter, the arrival of the musicians, the playing, the dancing,"
she writes that:
"There was a feeling of joy and safety in Kilmovee that night that made it never ending...We children
were allowed to stay up late and had to be coaxed to bed with the bribe of a Clarke's tin whistle under
our pillows. We fell asleep to the haunting sounds of traditional music, which has left me with a love of
it, something impossible to explain." (p. 2)
Often when one is writing a work of fiction, after a certain amount of time, the characters
begin to take on a life of their own. This has begun to happen with From Ireland from Letters,
to the point that I feel it is necessary to remind not only the readers but also myself that
although the lives of Walter Power and Hiram Powers are real, Máire Powers' great grandfather
-- who from Ireland after the Easter Rising, brought to Boston the books she used to create
Begin with the Arrival -- is fictional.
I swear (beginning to sound like West Clare fiddle player
Junior Crehan telling his story of what happened on a moonlight night) that
after much thought, (mine/his) I wrote that Máire's great grandfather escaped with his
Fenian American brother -- packing crates that had carried guns to the rebels with books
from the Gaelic Revival -- that after I wrote this, this fictional part of the
story felt real. And, as if he was my very own great grandfather, which as far as know he was not,
I could easily imagine the silent midnight unloading of those books on the piers of Boston Harbor.
I am indebted to the Library of the University of California for many of the Gaelic Revival books
that I used to create Begin with the Arrival. But somewhere, I can almost
feel it, are the books that arrived in Boston Harbor in 1916, the year that my mother was born.
December 16, 2012
ornamented on December 20
Returning from a December walk along a woodland stream in Marin -- in fog
and intermittent rain on a trail where the redwoods grow into the sky, and at this time of year,
there are waterfalls along the trail -- I continued to follow Irish fiddler Máire Nic Domhnaill
Gairbhí's A Traditional Music Journey 1600-2000, from Erris to Mullaghban,
enjoying both the way she integrates the history of Irish music with her own experience and the many songs
I did not know which she shares with the reader, such as Turlough Carolan's "Kean O'Hara", (p. 65) which begins
with these words:
"Were I blessed in sweet Aran or Carlingford shade
Where ships swiftly sailing with claret and mead"
In the tradition of Irish music itself, ornamenting and quoting
early classics, such as Charlotte Milligan Fox's Annals of the Irish Harpers, (NY: Dutton, 1912)
and Grattan Flood's A History of Irish Music, (Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1906)
on her journey, Máire Nic Domhnaill Gairbhí intertwines her own life, the lives and work of other
contemporary Irish musicians, and the lives of 17th, 18th, and 19th century Irish musicians and poets.
In the conclusion to another book,
Dorothea E. Hast and Stanley Scott's Music in Ireland, Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture.
(NY, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Irish poet Ciaran Carson is quoted in this way:
"Each time the song is sung, our notions of it change, and we are
changed by it. The words are old. They have been worn into shape
by many ears and mouths and have been contemplated often. But
every time is new because the time is new, and there is no time
like now." (Ciaran Carson, Last Night's Fun, NY: North Point Pres, 1996. p, 116;
quoted in Hast and Scott p. 135)
During the past week, in the course of making an exhibition copy of
From Ireland with Letters,
I reviewed the entire work and was pleased with how it flows. The reading of a work of electronic
literature is an exploratory, diffuse experience. Nevertheless, the writer of an epic work of electronic literature may desire to create
a rigorous underlying structure. From time to time, as new material is added, it is necessary
to reevaluate the structure.
"The story was continually changing with the research;
the weeks of research had been difficult.
She wanted to hear some music."
The
Prologue,
with which I struggled for almost a year, is now very good, and it effectively sets the stage.
"The sound of the fiddle
brought the forests of ancient Ireland
into the imagination of the audience,
for the pub was situated in a part of New Hampshire,
where pine and deciduous forests still crowded onto the hillsides;
the lakes were clear; and they knew by the music what she meant."
The work then flows into Begin with the Arrival, a dark lay of Oliver Cromwell's destruction of
Ireland. In
Begin with the Arrival, the story is sung in a New Hampshire pub on a stormy night.
The musician is Máire Powers, a
descendent of Walter Power, one of the young Irish people Cromwell shipped to America as slaves in the
years of The Transplantation.
"passage:
a short part of a music composition,
a detail of a work of literature or painting,
a journey"
In contrast, Begin with the Arrival is followed by
passage, which transports the
reader to Liam O'Brian's University office and to Florence, Italy where Irish American sculptor
Hiram Powers lived and worked from 1837 until his death in 1873.
Eventually, when the work is
further along, The Prologue, Begin with the Arrival, and passage will
comprise Book I, which will be titled Begin with the Arrival.
The overall title of the work, From Ireland with Letters, will at that time be transferred to
a top page. Book II will have the title of The Mason's Apron.
named for legendary Irish fiddler Sean McGuire's playing of "The Mason's Apron Reel" and for a
19th century photograph of
Hiram Powers in a sculptor's apron.
The
title page for Book II, the Mason's Apron has already been made, but
From Ireland from Letters will not be restructured until Book II is completed.
Book II will be comprised of three parts:
"while in the splashing notes
of the not yet named jig,
Irish streams and rivers
flowed down to the sea,
like the waters
of the fountains
in Rome
where Donnchad mac Briain
courted a princess so long ago."
1. Bringing the reader to a practice set of Irish fiddle music in the home of Máire Powers,
fiddler's passage was completed in the summer of 2012. Beginning with fiddler's passage, the scores
that serve as computer code for From Ireland with Letters
were not created as unmeasured scores notated with pen and ink on watercolor paper but rather as
measured scores, notated online in the writer's authoring system,
fiddlers-passage. Thus while Book I is composed in unmeasured notation, Book II
is composed in measured notation.
"In times of peace,
life went on in 17th century Ireland.
Before, in between,
after the wars.
Then, it should be remembered,
sometimes there was dancing
in the fields."
2. The
"Sinfonia" to part 2, Junction of Several Trails, leads to Máire and
Liam's conversation (or a series of conversations) at the Farmhouse Cafe in New Hampshire. The "Sinfonia" is completed and
partially scored and I am writing the conversation that follows. This conversation will be less
"ornamented" then the "Sinfonia" and will focus the reader on a duet, the words that Máire Powers
and Liam O'Brien
speak to each other.
3. Book II will conclude with a short work, currently planned as an introductory
look at 17th century Puritan life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony at the time when Walter Power arrived.
This part will probably be constructed like The Prologue, only somewhat less formal.
Eventually, From Ireland with Letters will include a third book, Book III.
Interested in the music of Connacht, where many members of the Power family were exiled in the 17th century,
I read "Dance Tunes of the West of Ireland", Chapter 7 of A Traditional Music Journey 1600-2000.
(pp 76-90)
"Dance Tunes of the West of Ireland" begins with the scores of The Connachtmans Rambles
and Farewell to Gurteen:
"The Connachtmans Rambles has been played at my home as far back
as I can remember. Farewell
to Gurteen I picked up from local musicians as Gurteen is only six miles from my home.
It was played for all who had to emigrate and bid farewell to that lovely area,"
Máire Nic Domhnaill Gairbhí writes to explain her choices.
(p. 76)
As if in a set of reels and jigs, her stories of historic and contemporary musicians
-- for instance, Sligo fiddler Martin Wynne, who moved to America in 1948 and was
influential in teaching the Sligo school of fiddle playing in New York --
move rapidly, incorporating dense information and mercurial changes of mood.
And there are many stories
that I did not know, for instance, that the first signer of the
Easter Rising Proclamation of Independence, Éamonn Ceannt, (executed on May 8, 1916)
was an award winning musician and one of the founders of The Pipers Club in Dublin.
The mood changes quickly when a page later we are in the jovial company of famous Sligo fiddler and
storyteller, Fred Finn.
December 30, 2012
In the Irish Christmas Eve tradition, "The Laden Table", after dinner, the kitchen table
is set with a loaf of bread and a pitcher of milk. Beside the food,
a candle is lit in symbolic welcome for the Holy Family and
-- as is the custom of Irish hospitality -- for all visitors and travelers. Last week,
on Christmas Eve, I baked Irish bread for The Laden Table. For the family party the following morning,
I also baked focaccia and Christmas cookies. Early Christmas morning was Christmas music.
And the baking of quiche.
This year, New Year's Eve is the continuing writing of
Junction of Several Trails,
Part V of From Ireland with Letters.
And although I cannot be there, I look forward with
pleasure to the inclusion of the wonderful Eastgate iPad edition of
its name was Penelope in the exhibition
Avenues of Access at MLA2013 in Boston from
January 3-5, 2013. Many thanks to Mark Bernstein and Eastgate and to the curators of
the exhibition: Dene Grigar and Kathi Inman Berens.
"Of these events, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
tell me the story again, beginning where you will."
Judy Malloy, its name was Penelope installed at the Richmond Art Center,
Richmond California, Oct. 3 - Nov. 19, 1989, curated by Zlata Baum.
Called a classic of
the "Golden Age" of hypertext literature by Robert Coover,
its name was Penelope is a work of generative hypertext. It consists of six files of lexias that represent
six parts of the life of a woman photographer. The reader moves between these files at will,
but once within each file, selections from the group of lexias that comprise that file are chosen
at random by the computer. And the narrator's memories appear and reappear on the computer
screen.
Like a photos in a photo album, each lexia represents an image from the narrator's memory,
so that the work is the equivalent of a pack of small paintings or photographs that the computer
continuously shuffles. The reader observes memories come and
go in a natural, yet nonsequential manner, and -- in the process -- experiences a constantly changing order,
like the weaving and reweaving of Penelopeia's web.
Sailing home on the sea of evolving platforms and authoring environments, its name was Penelope exists in a
continuing series of "translations" that include
- my BASIC program, first exhibited in 1989, as shown in the photo above. This version ran
on IBM compatible computers, AT or XT, 128k.
- Eastgate's Storyspace look and feel implementation of
its name was Penelope, published in 1993. (available for both Macintosh and IBM compatible
computers)
- and now the 2013 Apple iPad version, also beautifully implemented by Eastgate and exhibited in Boston
at MLA2013
And mirroring this series of translations, as well as the Homeric inspiration for
its name was Penelope, and the work's generative interface, the words (freely translated)
that begin Homer's Odyssey, now also begin the iPad edition of its name was Penelope:
"Of these events, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
tell me the story again, beginning where you will."
January 7, 2013
"Above my booklet, the lined one
The thrilling birds sing to me.
In the 9th century, an Irish scribe wrote those words in the margins of the
St Gall Priscian manuscript. [1]
As 2012 ended, I took a walk in the Berkeley hills, sat down beside the trail, and stopped to begin a
new series of drawings.
Then, playing Internet continuo, at home, I virtually accompanied my colleagues
in the electronic literature exhibition and the digital humanities sessions at MLA2013
-- writing
coverage for Authoring Software
and keeping pace/improvising with the Twitter stream from the Convention, while beginning on New Year's Eve,
I code-scored the first five measures of the
Cantata to Junction of Several Trails.
Measures 4 and 5 of Junction of Several Trails
Contingently, wondering what were the titles of the forty books that Máire's Gaelic League
scholar great grandfather brought to America in April 1916 when he escaped on a returning Fenian ship,
I began a list of those books.
Some that I have already read are:
W. H. Grattan Flood, A History of Irish Music, Dublin: Browne and Nolan, 1906.
John Healy, The life and writings of St. Patrick, Dublin: Gill & Son, 1905.
Charlotte Milligan Fox, Annals of the Irish Harpers, NY: Dutton, 1912
Rev. Denis Murphy, S.J., Cromwell in Ireland, a History of Cromwell's Irish Campaign. Dublin:
Gill & Son, New Edition, 1897.
John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, London: Longman, 1865.
George Sigerson, Bards of the Gael and Gall, New York: Scribner's, 1907.
Specimens of the Early Native Poetry of Ireland with an introduction and running commentary
by Henry R. Montgomery. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, and Co., Second Edition, 1892.
Some that I have only begun or that I seek are:
Douglas Hyde, A Literary History of Ireland From Earliest Times to the Present Day, 1899
P. W. Joyce, The Wonders of Ireland, 1911.
Standish O'Grady, Early Bardic Literature, Lemma Publishing Corporation, 1879
Standish O'Grady, The History of Ireland, London: Sampson, Low, Searle, Marston, & Rivington, 1878-80.
George Petrie, The Petrie Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland, Dublin: M.H.Gill, 1855
Together, there are 11 titles, only a beginning. But the making of this list and the reading of
the books is a an epic e-poet's grand diversion. (And I will complete and verify the citations soon)
The words that are used as continuo in the beginning of the Junction of Several Trails
Cantata and that now appear in
the first five measures of the score are from the Trad Irish song "The Next Market Day" [2]:
"She sat down beside him, the grass was so green
The day was the fairest that ever was seen."
____________
1. Kathleen Hoagland, 1000 Years of Irish Poetry, Old Greenwich, CT:
Devon-Adair, 1981. p. 25
2. Jerry Silverman, Mel Bay Presents Songs of Ireland, (Pacific, MO: Mel
Bay Publications, 1991. p. 6
January 15, 2013
and a short entry of pleasant intervals written on January 21, 2013
Many hours of work and finally the opening measures of the Junction of Several Trails Cantata
are attached to the Sinfonia. And so,
Junction of Several Trails is almost ready to be placed on the main menu for
From Ireland with Letters. The process of moving between the score and writing was intense
but satisfactory. The annotated score now needs to be translated into the online score and attached
in some way to the
score for the opening Sinfonia. And of course the Cantata is not yet finished.
At times of intense writing and score-coding, the time spent on writing in this notebook is diminished.
But last week, there was time to relive the closing measures of the Cantata -- sitting on the floor
of the Cal library and one by one looking at the many books in shelf after shelf of volumes on
the Gaelic Revival and the Easter Rising.
It was something I had to do, as if in libraries around
the world, the story is still being told.
Because of its extensive coverage of the Gaelic League, I went home with Timothy G. McMahon,
Grand Opportunity: The Gaelic Revival and Irish Society, 1893-1910, Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2008
And last week was also a fine week of family birthday parties.
January 21, 2013
This week was a fine walk in Marin, sunlight in the dark forest, a wide stream, a waterfall beside the trail,
a small picnic, and another good beginning to my 2013 artist book drawing series. This week was also
writing, score-coding, documenting the sources of
lyrics I used in Junction of Several Trails,
and a lively and interesting discussion with sound and interactive performance artist
Michelle Lewis-King about her project on how women approach coding.
January 23, 2013
In preparation for the next part of
Junction of Several Trails -- which will begin
with the story of how Máire Powers knew of the family history of slavery and then segue into
a discussion of The Greek Slave -- I am rereading "The Greek Slave" in the core reference
Richard Wunder, Hiram Powers, Vermont Sculptor. 1805-1873, Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 1991, (pp. 207-274) and at the same time in other sources, I am returning to 1847, the year the Hiram Powers
crated The Greek Slave in Florence and shipped her to America.
Frederick Douglass' influential
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,
An American Slave
was first published in 1845, a few years before The Greek Slave
arrived in America in 1847. Other early slave narratives written by African Americans included
Adventures of Charles Ball,
A Black Man, 1836;
A Narrative of Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery, 1837;
and
Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave, 1847.
All of these books were widely read at the time, and all are now available on the website
Documenting the American South (DocSouth),
sponsored by the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
It was in the climate of these and many other widely read slave narratives that in 1847
Hiram Powers shipped The Greek Slave to America. The sculpture arrived on the docks of New York
in August 1847. During the initial 447 days it was on view it was seen by more than 100,000 people.
(Wunder (p. 242)
Among the first places where The Greek Slave was exhibited in America in the years before the
Civil War
were (in this order) New York City, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, Louisville, and New Orleans.
The statue then returned North, where among other places it was shown in Albany, NY,
Providence, RI, Burlington, VT, Rochester, NY, and St Louis. (Note that the story is slightly more complex
because Powers made several versions of the sculpture, and several versions were exhibited
in America in the late 1840's and early 1850's. The histories and current locations of the
different versions will be detailed soon in this notebook.)
On January 16, 1851, the Abolitionist newspaper The National Era wrote the following words
in a review of The Greek Slave:
"I was fashioned by a hand whose every motion was the offspring of love
for man in all his relations, with a sublime conception of the beautiful and the true,
and it is therefore that he has sent me around the world to preach by this loveliness and
nakedness, and by this cruel chain, joy to the forsaken, comfort to the destitute,
and liberty to the captive. I was carved from Parian, rather than from Ebony,
that I might more effectually appeal to perverted justice and partial sympathy;
but I am the representation of the captive and the forsaken everywhere,
and whatever sympathy I may secure for my enslaved sisters in Turkey, are due to my sisters
of another hue in the land throughout which I am making my pilgrimage.
Whatever claim of justice I may secure for me, and those like me, are due to those equally
oppressed in your very midst. Think you that it was cruel to rob me of liberty,
purity, and happiness? Though my skin were black as night, my soul would have the same aspirations,
and need the same sympathies, my intellect would have the same laws and need the same development.
Cease your sympathy for a slave in Constantinople, and go show kindness
and justice to those over whom you have power."
"Powers's Greek Slave in St. Louis", (The National Era, January 16, 1851
In
From Ireland with letters,
I have returned again and again to Powers' dream of the woman in white whom he could not reach
across the river, metaphorically interpreting this dream -- which he cited as an inspiration
for The Greek Slave -- as a vision of the wrenching of enslaved captives from their
families, in Powers' case, the young people stolen from Irish families and sent into slavery
at the time of the Transplantation.
The scene in Ireland in the 1650's is described in
To Hell or Barbados, (Dingle, Co. Kerry, Ireland: Brandon Books, 2000)
by the journalist and antislavery advocate Sean O'Callaghan, who died on the eve of the book's publication.
In his words:
"The work of rounding up people for transportation was carried out very thoroughly by government
agents throughout the country. These 'man-catchers', as they were called, were mounted and armed,
with long whips to herd the unfortunate people into the holding-pens outside the cities and towns
....Here they were branded with the initials of the ship that would take them to Barbados or Virginia.
They were attached together with ropes around their necks and the long march to the seaports in
the south of Ireland began." (p. 78)
In his statement for the American exhibitions, Hiram Powers, the artist, whose Irish forefather had come
to America in 1654 in the hold of the slave ship The Goodfellow, described his sculpture The Greek Slave
in this way:
"..Her father and mother, and perhaps all her kindred, have been destroyed by her foes,
and she alone preserved as a treasure too valuable to be thrown away. She is now among barbarian
strangers, under the pressure of a full recollection of the
calamitous events which have brought her to her present state..."
January 28, 2013
There are details about the Hiram Powers' The Greek Slave that now need to be explored. Indeed,
it is almost Liam's turn to talk. His narrative cannot be written without disclosing more about
the The Greek Slave -- and two other sculptures by Hiram Powers:
America and Benjamin Franklin.
At the time when he meets Máire Powers at the Farmhouse Cafe, Liam O'Brien has been working on
deep background for Hiram Powers' studio in 19th century Florence, Italy. Using 16th Century Florentine
arts writer Francesco Bocchi as a guide, he has explored the treasures of the City. (recorded in
passage) Reviewing his own research on the Hudson River School,
he has looked at paintings such as the View of Florence from San Miniato al Monte that
Thomas Cole painted in 1837, the year that Hiram Powers and his family arrived in Florence.
And, as related in the
Prologue, he has explored
the work of the 19th century Italian artists at the time of the Risorgimento.
It is to this last trail that I now return, setting the stage
for the beginning of The Greek Slave in Hiram's studio in 1841.
A writer may sometimes spend several months on reading for what might seem to the causal observer to be
only a few lines of poetry, yet writers sometimes need to do this background reading. It is one way to
put oneself in the space of characters and their environment. In the creation of an epic work like
From Ireland with Letters, a writer also needs to review his or her own writing of
the story so far.
And so, I am using this notebook to explore a few trails in my own writing, beginning
with keyed excerpts from the Prologue:
"Her feet were bare,
and she wore a Garibaldi medal."
"As if he was at the junction of several trails that would eventually converge,
the many research trails Liam had started at once
did not particularly concern him. He looked out the window, thinking that when he had finished reading
he would go for a hike.
On his desk, Albert Boime's book on Italian artists and the Risorgimento
was open to Pietro Magni's evocative sculpture of a girl reading.
In the year of the Reunification of Italy, Magni's Girl Reading
and Powers' America, a female figure, trampling on the chains of slavery,
were both included in the First Italian National Exposition, the Esposizione Nazionale,
that opened in September 1861
in Florence, where Powers had lived and worked since 1837."
"...since 1862, when it arrived from Florence
in the midst of the Civil War."
"For the U.S. Capitol building in a time of War, as if Franklin is
a woodworker's carved saint in a Cathedral niche -- his solid presence,
the crisp and detailed way in which his clothing is sculpted --
Powers created an image of Ben Franklin with iconography suggesting the
protection of the lightening rod he had invented."
"The intangible similarity,
was more than the woodcarving feel to the works.
In different ways,
two 19th century sculptors, who lived in Italy,
had depicted the idea of the working artist."
"In Duprè's sculpture, Giotto is not wearing the usual neoclassical toga; instead, as if he was on a
journey, Giotto wears a patterned Florentine tunic and over it a hooded clock. His stockings are
wrinkled; his legs stocky; his feet planted firmly on the ground. In his right hand, he holds what
looks like the plans for the Campanile. His left hand is on his belt; his expression challenging.
The work had the look of a woodcarving, which was not surprising since Duprè was the son of a
woodcarver."
"He made a note to find a copy of Duprè's autobiography,
Pensieri Sull'arte e Ricordi Autobiografici.
An English edition had been published in Scotland in the 1880s..."
And sometimes one has to retrace one's own steps. There was something I needed to read to more clearly
understand the making of sculpture in 19th century Florence:
Giovanni Duprè,
Thoughts on art and autobiographical memoirs of
Giovanni Duprè; tr. from the Italian by E. M. Peruzzi.
Edinburgh,London: Blackwood, 1884.
Thus, as intended, the hypertextual Prologue sets the stage not only for the reader but also for the writer
-- allowing access to the story at many points, disclosing the relationship between the stories that
form the core of the work, and continually opening new narrative paths.
February 1, 2013
Interlude: "...tell me the story again, beginning where you will."
Begin then, with the music. On Wednesday, at the University of California Department of Music,
I heard virtuoso harpsichordist Davitt Moroney play a program that was dramatic in its
transposed narrative and so beautifully played that it was as if I were in Dresden in the autumn of 1717,
where a contest between Johann Sebastian Bach and French harpsichordist and organist Louis Marchand
took place on the harpsichord, but Marchand did not stay for the organ contest.
It is a much told story
that has as many variations as the French theme on which Bach defeated Marchand on the harpsichord.
But -- as set forth in the well-researched version in Moroney's own book, Bach: an Extraordinary Life,
(London: Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, 2000 pp. 33-35) --
it was a originally conceived as a two part competition in which Bach, who much admired Marchand's
playing and compositions, nevertheless clearly bested Marchand in the harpsichord contest,
and Marchand quietly left town before the organ contest could take place.
In Berkeley, on Wednesday, January 30, Davitt Moroney reversed this story by sending Bach first with an
unlikely work:
the Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro in E-flat major, BMW 998, probably written
for an unusual instrument, the lautenwerck or lute-harpsichord. (Bach owned two) Then he gave Marchand
the finale with his famous Suite in D minor (Recorded by Moroney himself on Plectra:
Le Clavecin Français:
Louis Marchand, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault)
In between, there were bells: the enchanting Les Cloches by Nicolas LeBègue.
With this repertoire, Marchand was the obvious choice for winner.
His Suite in D minor is complexly constructed, intricate, chiaroscuric, and Davitt's interactive choice to end
it on the slowly building, cascading Chaconne (for this concert he omitted the closing Gavotte Rondeau
and Menuet) gave Marchand an important finale statement. It was flawlessly played; the sound was clear,
brilliant, beautiful.
But Bach said something memorable in Prelude, Fugue, and Allegro in E-flat major.
Perhaps it is the way in which his own recollected pleasures seemed to occur and reoccur in the music,
perhaps it was the way he translated the always expressive basso of the lower lute strings
into harpsichord music, perhaps it was the evocative way that Davitt recreated this work. This is
not something you can hear on any of the online versions. (by other performers)
You had to be in that concert hall at that time.
The real winner was, of course, Davitt Moroney.
February 8, 2013
The
statue of Giotto by Giovanni Duprè -- which Liam O'Brien compares to Hiram Powers' statue of
Ben Franklin, now in a niche in the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol -- still stands in a niche in the
Uffizi Loggia. It was commissioned by the Grand Duchess of Tuscany Maria
Antonietta as part of a project to honor illustrious Tuscans.
Duprè selected Giotto.
The year it was commissioned was probably 1844, according to my reading of Duprè's autobiography,
which I checked out of the library last week. (Thoughts on Art and Autobiographical Memoirs of
Giovanni Duprè; tr. from the Italian by E. M. Peruzzi. Edinburgh, London: Blackwood, 1884. p. 131)
This book, that for my narrative is setting the stage for the life of a 19th century sculptor in Italy,
is now bound in buckram, (a difficult decision which I well remember from
such library decisions) yet the vestiges of its original beauty remain in the finely painted
fore-edge pattern.
Like Hiram Powers, Giovanni Duprè was not schooled beyond a few early years of the equivalent
of elementary school. Like Hiram, he had some formal art training, but for the most part,
he learned his trade as an apprentice. Like Powers who read every book and magazine in the Cincinnati
Hotel reading room where he began working at age 15, Duprè loved books, and as a young man at home he kept a
little library of books that he bought "in streets from book-stalls set against old walls". (p.16)
Before he moved to Florence, Hiram married a young woman whose Irish immigrant mother ran a Cincinnati
boardinghouse. In Florence, Giovanni married Marina, a laundress, whom he
first saw walking by his workbench. He kept looking for her but she did not appear until miraculously,
in his words, "The second festa of Easter I was at Mass in the Church of the Santi Apostoli near by.
Suddenly lifting my eyes, I saw facing me the dear young girl on her knees. Her face was in shadow,
as it was bent down, and the church was rather dark, but the features and general expression were chaste
and rather sweet. I stayed there enchanted." (p. 40)
There follows a detailed and honest narrative of his courtship of Marina which -- in its accounts of
chaperoned meetings interspersed with parental interference, a street brawl, a day in prison just when he
about to propose to Marina, and what he drew on the prison walls -- is beyond the scope of this notebook.
Giovanni is outspoken, individual, prone to adventures. On a visit to Rome, on Christmas Eve, he gets
lost on the way to Midnight Mass at St Peters. He has not eaten; the shops and restaurants are all closed;
he wanders hungry for hours and hours until on Christmas Day, he meets a friend, the engraver Travalloni,
who knows a hidden place. The doors are opened to a room of tables and cheerful people eating,
where he and his friend are served bread, soup, a cutlet, cheese, fruit, and wine.
"That day Travalloni appeared to me to be a man of genius," Giovanni observes.
(p. 138)
A few pages later, working on
his statue of Giotto, he writes that
"In making my Giotto, I followed my inspiration by drawing upon nature for that type of rude good-nature
which constituted the outward character of my statue..."
The work in progress is criticized by some of
his literary friends. Nevertheless, he notes that
"I adhered to the sound principle of imitating nature. The Giotto was finished without a
moment's indecision..."(p. 141-142)
Meanwhile, in his letters, (many of which I read on microfilm on interlibrary loan from the
Archives of American Art several years ago) Hiram Powers describes his journey into the
Seravezza marble quarries, located in the Apuan Alps at an altitude of about 6,000 feet.
He does not send his studio assistants but makes the rough journey himself. It is,
he writes in a letter on August 2, 1844 an "immense cavern" with walls of statuary marble,
a natural cavern that extends hundreds of feet into a mountain, and the wind currents are so strong
that he has to hold onto his hat.
And -- in the year that Giovanni received the commission from the Grand Duchess to begin his Giotto --
in a letter to her mother on December 18, 1844, Hiram's wife Elizabeth writes that Hiram is packing
The Greek Slave for its first journey. She says that the sculpture has been
finished for about three weeks and that crowds of people have been to Hiram's studio to see the work,
including the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess.
February 16, 2013
In this week of as yet unannounced wonderful surprises, I have been making 2"x2" grided drawings
on Berkeley trails and working on papers and assorted small academic treasures to send
to my archives at Duke.
There was a fine interlude at Martina }{ Johnston gallery in Berkeley,
where Sonya Rapoport's participative gathering of data for her new work brought together old friends
in the interactive creation of text, image, and theory for her forthcoming exhibition at
the Fresno Art Museum. And I also continued to read Giovanni Duprè's autobiography, worked on a syllabus on social
media poetics, looked to the future, reviewed the notation for From Ireland with Letters, and
read a seminal paper on unmeasured preludes.
Reviewing
From with Letters, I have been pleased with how this
epic work of polychoral literature has taken shape. In the review process, I consolidated
the score for the Sinfonia and Cantata for
Junction of Several Trails and also looked at the composition of From with Letters as a
whole -- with several thoughts and questions in mind:
The Music of 17th Century Massachusetts
It is not unlikely that there will be a change of pace in the notation of From Ireland with Letters:
part VI. (which will follow Junction of Several Trails) In this respect, the music of 17th century
Massachusetts is of interest. I would expect Puritan music in the colonies to be solemn, church-suitable, and
that may indeed be the case. But in the source I currently have,
George Francis Dow, Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Boston: The Society
for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1935) the chapter on "Trades and Manufactures"
represents "musician" with this information:
"Thomas Androus, 'the scholar musician, was there with his music,' at John Androus house in Ipswich,
in the summer of 1656, at a merriment" (Dow, p 136-137. source: Essex Co. Court Records, April 1657)
There was then, in Ipswich, about 3 years after Irish slave Walter Power arrived in Essex County, a
"merriment". According to Dow, there were also corn husking parties, barn raisings. spinning parties, quilting parties,
and in the winter, there were singing schools in the district schoolhouses. (p. 119)
The Music of 19th Century Florence
As Liam continues to explore the lives of 19th century artists in Florence, Italy,
the music that Hiram Powers might have heard in 19th century Italy is also of interest in the shaping
of narrative notation.
To begin, in the summer of 1846, Hiram's wife writes to her Irish-born Mother that with a gift from
a patron, her husband has purchased a "splendid" piano for the children, who are very fond of music.
Meanwhile, in his autobiography, Powers' contemporary in Florence, Giovanni Duprè recounts the story
of the genesis of his friendship with Giuseppe Verdi. The year is probably March 1847, when
Verdi's Macbeth premiered at the Teatro della Pergola.
Representing himself as one of his own assistants, Duprè visits Verdi and personally hands
the composer an invitation to visit his studio. Then, when Verdi says he had
already intended to do so, Giovanni replies:
"If you, Signor Maestro, desire to make the acquaintance as soon as possible of that young sculptor, you
can have that satisfaction at once, for I am he."
"All the time he remained in Florence
we saw each other every day," the story continues, as Giovanni describes how he was invited to the
rehearsals of Macbeth and how in the mornings Verdi often came to his studio for art
and art talk. (pp. 166-168)
17th and 18th Century French Unmeasured Preludes
An important issue in the complete notation of From Ireland with Letters is: do I -- in the interest
of symmetry -- return to unmeasured notation to close the work as a whole? Or, now that fiddler's
passage and Junction of Several Trails have been created in measured notation, is measured
notation there for the duration?
With these questions in mind, I spent a pleasant hour in the Music Library reading Davitt Moroney's
1976 paper "The Performance of Unmeasured Harpsichord Preludes" (Early Music 4:2, April 1976 p 143-151)
In general, the purpose of composing unmeasured preludes was conceptually different from the purpose
of creating unmeasured polychoral electronic literature. Yet, in the compositional freedom which they
give to the composer and the interpretive freedom they give to the performer, there is something of the
aleatory nature of electronic literature in French unmeasured preludes.
Indeed, musician/musicologist Davitt Moroney's suggestions to the performer of unmeasured preludes
could as well apply to the reader of hypertextual literature:
"Good prelude playing requires the invigoration of imaginative freedom, but the player must be liberally
inclined to impose on the music that measurement and shape
which his imagination dictates." (p. 143) [1]
And in his fascinating and beautifully written account of the unmeasured preludes
created by Couperin, Nicolas Lebègue, and Jean-Henri d'Anglebert, among others,
there was an answer to a question confronting me: What are the issues in combining unmeasured and
measured sections in one work?
It was, it seems, an issue addressed in the 17th century in works such Couperin's tripartite
toccata-styled preludes. "These works, Davitt Moroney explains, "are in three sections, of which the outer two are rhythmically
free while the central one is strictly contrapuntal..." (P. 145)
___________________________________
1. Contingently, as Davitt has pointed out in conversation, also of great interest
to the electronic literature community, is 20th century French composer Pierre Boulez' aleatory
Third Piano Sonata, which premiered in 1957.
This is a trail which I will follow later.
February 23, 2013
It was a week of short walks,
library adventures,
continued work on the score of Junction of Several Trails,
looking at this writer's notebook in terms of its authoring mission and
its role in the creation of From Ireland with Letters as a whole,
and documenting the six marble versions
of The Greek Slave.
Sometimes a writer becomes entranced with a subplot, as I did with the 40 books of the Gaelic
Revival that Máire Powers' Great Grandfather brought to Boston in 1916. This can be quite wonderful,
an interesting trail that the writer continues to follow, but, accompanied with drama and heightened
interest, a return to the main plot must eventually occur. In this case, it was Giovanni Duprè's
autobiography which returned me with bravado and compelling personal narrative to 19th Century Florence,
where (in Liam's main plot continuo) Hiram Powers is working on The Greek Slave.
This week, it was clear that it was time to return to documenting the fates of the six life size
marble versions of The Greek Slave. Indeed, with their resonance of the Irish slaves sent
to America in 1654, the real histories of versions of The Greek Slaves -- including both the
versions sent to England and the versions that Hiram Powers, the descendant of an Irish Slave,
sent to America in the years before the Civil War -- are of interest.
If the total number of versions seems surprising for a work that is generally considered as one work,
remember that Powers' only source of income was selling his sculpture, and at the same time
The Greek Slave had an important meaning that, as an abolitionist, Powers would want
to be seen by a wider public. A way of dealing with this was to create several versions of The
Greek Slave in which the figure was the same, but the details were varied. In this way Powers
could sell a version to a patron where it might only be seen on the patron's property,
such as the 1848 Whitley Court Greek Slave. He could also send The Greek Slave
on tour to America, where in the years between 1847 and 1851, it was seen by over 100,000 people
and, in a time of the importance of African American slave narratives, became an additional symbol
of the abolitionist movement.
In the light of the connection between the slavery history of his own family, (although it is not
certain that he knew this) and the African American slavery which he strongly opposed, the fact
that there was more than one slave, as well as the narratives of the purchasers of these works and
the places where they were exhibited need to be documented within the narrative of From Ireland
with Letters.
According to Wunder (Richard Wunder, Hiram Powers, Vermont Sculptor. 1805-1873,
Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991) from 1841-1843, Hiram Powers made at least three clay
and/or plaster life size models prior to beginning to create The Greek Slave in marble.
One is presumed destroyed, and two are in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in
Washington DC.
The six marble Greek Slaves will form a part of Liam's continuo as Junction of Several Trails
continues. In order of completion, the full-size marble versions that Hiram Powers created of The Greek Slave,
beginning in 1844, are:
1. The original Marble Statue: The
Raby Castle Greek Slave, 1844-1845
The first marble Greek Slave was purchased by a British artillery Captain, John Grant.
Grant ordered it after viewing one of the models in Powers' studio in December of 1843.
The work was completed from 1844 - January 1845, and it was shipped to Grant in London in February 1845.
Grant exhibited it in London that same year, where it was seen by Queen Victoria and over 40,000 people.
(Wunder v.1 p. 216) In 1851, it was exhibited in The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry
of all Nations in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London.
The first Greek Slave is currently in the possession of Raby Castle, Darlington, Country Durham, England,
where it has been since 1859. Wunder notes that "The statue still rests on its original wooden revolving
pedestal, designed by Powers, covered in the same green velvet." (v. 2 p. 161)
2.
The Corcoran Gallery of Art Greek Slave, 1846
Originally ordered by Lord William Ward, this is the version that Hiram Powers shipped to New York on the
Hudson in 1847 in the care of
Goodhue and Company, where it began its tour of America in New York City.
In New Orleans,
it was claimed by James Robb, who had also ordered a version
of The Greek Slave. William Wilson Corcoran purchased it in 1851, and in 1869 he deeded it to the Corcoran Gallery of Art.
(Washington, DC)
3.
The Newark Museum Greek Slave, 1847
Although ordered by Sir Charles Henry Coote, this version was not purchased. Instead,
in 1848, it was sent to America on the North Carolina, where it continued the tour
in place of the version that Robb had purchased in New Orleans. Eventually,
it was purchased by Franklin J. Murphy in Newark NJ, and in 1926, his son, Franklin J. Murphy, Jr.
gave it to the Newark Museum.
4. The
Whitley Court Greek Slave, 1848
This replica was made for William Ward, 11th Baron Ward,
later first Earl of Dudley, Whitley Court, Worchester, England.
It was destroyed by a fire at Whitley Court in 1937.
5.
The Yale University Art Gallery Greek Slave,
Originally purchased by Prince Anatole Demidoff, Villa San Donato, Florence,
this version was purchased by Yale University for the Yale University Art Gallery.
6.
Brooklyn Museum Greek Slave
This version was made without an order in 1866 and purchased by Edward Wallace Stoughton, NY in 1869.
It was eventually inherited by Charles Fiske Bound, Jr., who gave it
to the Brooklyn Museum in 1955.
There were also three or more 2/3 size versions, one of which is in the collection of the
Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Note that there are some inconsistencies in the provenances
of some the versions of The Greek Slave, so, in this writer's notebook,
I will continue to attempt to verify and expand the
information about each version.
A part of the genesis of the From Ireland with Letters series of online writer's notebooks began when I looked at the
print writers notebooks that I sent to
my papers at Duke and compared these print notebooks --
for Uncle Roger and its name was Penelope for instance --
to the record of my writing that was being recorded in transitory computer files that were seldom
compiled together. It was apparent that something was being lost.
There is, for instance, no comparable documentation
for the creation of L0ve0ne or The Roar of Destiny, both created at the interesting
time of the beginning
of writing hypertext narrative on the World Wide Web.
In the process of creating writer's notebooks for From Ireland with Letters,
I have found that, yes, a fair amount of time is consumed by the process of creating
notebook entries. However, because the details of the narrative have been accrued and sorted,
that time is rewarded when I am writing the work itself.
And I need only clear my mind and begin to write.
March 2, 2013
In weeks in which the main focus is on writing and on working on authoring software notation,
what there is to say is being said in the work itself. And I am very happy with how the work is progressing.
This week, on the left side of the screen, Máire's continuo returns to the text of the Prologue, where
the contrast between Walter Power's former life in Ireland and his cold January arrival
in America as an Irish slave are, like a refrain, again set forth.
The central nodes
-- in which Máire Powers tells Liam O'Brien that her father knew of the family's slave origins,
and Liam responds that he thinks that Hiram Powers may also have known --
stand by themselves for several measures.
And then, on the right hand side of the screen, in Liam's continuo
the story of how Hiram Powers' Greek Slave arrives in America in 1847 is slowly revealed.
This morning, six new measures were completed
in the score.
Now, I am
translating the notation into the lexias files that will continue the work itself.
March 9, 2013
ornamentation: March 17, 2012
"The early
literature of Ireland is so
bound up with the early history, and the history so bound up and
associated with tribal names, memorial sites, patronymics, and
topographical nomenclature,
that it presents a kind of heterogeneous whole,
that which is recognised history running into
and resting upon suspected or often even evident myth, while
tribal patronymics and national
genealogies abut upon both,
and the whole is propped and supported by legions of place-
names still there to testify, as it were, to the truth of all"
Douglas Hyde,
A Literary History of Ireland
From Earliest Times to the Present Day,
1899
The continuing Cantata to Junction of Several Trails has been written, and using
the revised score as a guide, I have created the approximately 40 files that run this section.
There are questions about the need for either a pause between the first two sections and/or a view
of the surroundings in Cafe, which might serve the same purpose. I am considering this.
Meanwhile, working with the histories of Walter Power and of Hiram Powers' Greek Slave,
I am reminded that to a certain extent -- for instance the sung/spoke true narrative in
Begin with the Arrival; the genealogies of the Powers family, the words from a court case
brought by Irish slaves, the titles of African American slave narratives, and the descriptions of
19th century paintings that serve as continuo in Junction of Several Trails --
From Ireland With Letters references the work of the
ancient Irish bards.
The distinction between bard and filidh (or fili or file, as in the three files that describe
the lords of Silicon Valley in Uncle Roger) is
beyond this late night notebook entry. But it should be remembered that the bards, who
were attached to Irish royal courts, were learned in history and law, as well as in music and poetry,
and their works included genealogies and detailed accounts of the events of the times, as well as
elements of magic realism.
In Annals of the Irish Harpers, there is a story that illustrates the importance of such magical bardic
detail.
It concerns how in the Sliabb Echtge mountain range a 10th century harper saved his own
life by calling the ghost of his former master, the poet Flann MacLonan, who
in a tour de force performance "...recited a poem of one hundred and thirty-two lines, commencing:
'Delightful, delightful lofty Echtge'
and followed by the history of the mountains, the warriors and tribes, who had made it their
hunting ground
including the famous Finn MacCumhaill and his band. Giving the names
of peaks, lakes, rivers, fords, woods, he concluded with a eulogy of the Dalcassians of Clare."
______________________
(Charlotte Milligan Fox, Annals of the Irish Harpers, NY: Dutton, 1912. pp. 85-86.
Her source is Eugene O'Curry's Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish.)
Contingently, while exploring social media from an historical perspective -- beginning with
Heidi Grundmann's Art Telecommunication. (Vancouver: Western Front; Vienna: BLIX, 1984) --
this week I have been looking at World Wide Web electronic literature and writing in terms of
public literature, remembering that in a talk that I gave at the 1993 Computers, Freedom &
Privacy Conference, I said to the audience:
"To tell UNCLE ROGER, I used the WELL's topic form as a stage - a central spot in the marketplace.
I was intrigued by the performance aspect of telling a story in the Homeric tradition in a
modern electronic community of people with many and varied interests with the common denominator of
online communication."
CFP93 was a memorable gathering, where there was much enthusiasm and where the cultural Internet
was an important area of discussion. I recall listening to Randy Ross (Ponca Tribe of Nebraska and Otoe Missouria)
speak about telecommunications, and American Indian art. And in the context
of traveling bards, I still have a Russian coin, given to me at CFP93 by Bruce Sterling.
March 14, 2013
W
ednesday was an interlude of music and the making of drawings for artists books.
It was a spring day in the Northern California countryside and in the city of Berkeley,
where, at the Department of Music, every work that I heard the University Baroque Ensemble play
was interesting and beautifully performed.
A concerto grosso in D major, Op. 2, no 2 by Lucca-born composer Giovanni Lorenzo Gregori,
was a fine beginning to a noon hour concert of concerto grossi
and Renaissance song.
And the way Gregori's seminal work foreshadowed later concertare,
and the way the violins interacted with the other stringed instruments
in perfectly flowing Baroque ensemble playing
were highlighted when
-- after telling the audience that the group had practiced the work in different tempos --
Baroque Ensemble director Davitt Moroney asked for a repeat,
and the ensemble responded with a tour de force top-speed performance of the final Allegro.
The program also included the interactive solos and lilting forward motion
in the Adagio and Allegro from the (attributed to) Handel
Concerto a quattro in D Minor, as well as Vivaldi's Concerto in A Minor, op. 3, no.
8 Con due Violini obligati from l'Estro Armonico -- notable on this March day
for sweet-sounding violin solos and responses and for the lovely spring-brook sound of
the entire ensemble. The string solos were excellently played by David Lin, Connor Stanton,
violin (Handel, Vivaldi) and Bryanna Reed, cello.(Handel)
The centerpiece of the concert was Dowland's deeply poetic "Come heavy sleep",
with Casey Glick singing a beautiful tenor and Marco Paliza-Carre -- who also played Dowland's lute solo
"My Lady Hunsdons Allmande" -- skillfully accompanying on the lute.
The complete University Baroque Ensemble is:
Voice: Casey Glick;
Violins: David Lin, Conor Stanton, Jennifer Kwon,
Liyang Li, Anita Satish, Tapua Sakuta, Tiffany Lay, and Iris Wang;
Viola: Jake Scheps;
Cellos: Bryanna Reed, Alexandra C. Roedder, Abraham Aragundi, Nina Pak, and Emily Judd;
violine: Joshua Daranciang;
Keyboards: Philip Chan, (organ) Jeremiah Trujillo, (harpsichord) and Tevye Friedlander; (spinet)
Lute: Marco Paliza-Carre, Daniel Larson.
The coaches who work with UBE student musicians are Carla Moore,
(violin) Elisabeth Reed, (cello) John Dornenburg, (violone) Louise Carslake. (flute)
and David Taylor. (lute)
The University Baroque Ensemble is directed by
Davitt Moroney.
A
fterwards, I sat by myself in a meadow, drawing, remembering the music, and considering how a
grided work of many different 2"x2" drawings slowly changes with the creation of
every new image.
March 16 & 17, 2013
ornamented: March 25, 2013
"...and my fiddle strings are new
and I've learned a tune or two
So I'm well prepared to ramble, I must go
....And when we return again
May our foes have turned to friends
And may peace and joy be with you until then."
-- Tommy Makem, The Rambles of Spring
The score for Junction of Several Trails, which is part V of
From Ireland with Letters
is now about 5 1/2 feet long. I have taped the six pages together,
and they are draped across my drawing table. The whole would look quite beautiful if displayed on the
wall.
I looked at this electronic poet's score and remembered that spinning and probably also weaving were
traditional
in Waterford, from whence my family came to America in
the 17th century. Indeed, in The description of Ireland and the State thereof as it is at this present in Anno 1598,
Edmund Hogan, observes that at the end of the 16th century
the people of Waterford were "Cheerful in their entertainment of strangers, hearty one
to another". The woman were famous for spinning, and they spun "the choicest rug in Ireland".
(Dublin: M.H. Gill, 1878 p. 159)
Today, while my slowly woven score is on my sketch table, I am baking
Irish bread for a family St Patrick's day celebration. And -- because yesterday
I went to the library and returned with
two books of poetry by Irish women writers --
I am reading the voices of contemporary Irish women.
"Tell me a story about Ireland
I said as a child
to anyone in earshot: about what had been
left behind by a modern world.
But not by memory." - Eavan Boland, "Dublin, 1959"
The Irish poetry chapbooks I carried home on Friday are Eavan Boland's The Lost Land
(NY: Norton, 1998) -- with its evocatively woven texts of country, history, colonization, land,
and family -- and Moya Cannon's Carrying the Songs, (Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2007)
with its soft-strong words of winter birds, of Irish history and of countryside, and its
"Between the Jigs and Reels" finale. ("...The high parts of the road and the underworlds/
which only music and love can brave...")
"It was always those with little else to carry
who carried the songs
to Babylon,
to the Mississippi-
some of these last possessed less than nothing
did not own their own bodies
yet, three centuries later,
deep rhythms from Africa,
stowed in their hearts, their bones,
carry the world's songs."
-- Moya Cannon, "Carrying the Song"
Today, in honor of Patrick -- former slave and the first man known to speak out in print against
slavery -- the next continuing measures of
Junction of Several Trails are now woven into the work as a whole.
I will continue this process and celebrate the progress on St Patrick's day. Today.
It has taken at least a month to make this small part of From Ireland with Letters work,
but it is almost there -- there enough to join the céilidh.
its name was Penelope goes to Washington, DC, April 3-5, where
it will be featured in the exhibition,
Electronic Literature and Its Emerging Forms
at the Library of Congress.
Curated by Dene Grigar and Kathi Inman Berens, the exhibition will include work by
Ingrid Ankerson & Megan Sapnar, Michael Joyce, Robert Kendall,
Judy Malloy,
Mark Marino, Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop, Emily Short, Stephanie Strickland,
and more, including
The Deena Larsen Collection and a
keynote, panel, and readings.
"Of these events, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
tell me the story again,
beginning where you will."
March 25,26, 2013
Last week began with hosting a family party and ended with an intense
series of days of writing and scoring in which, as often happens in the creation of electronic literature,
the two became blurred -- as if they were one and the same.
Last week was also:
a California spring day interlude of walking, picniking, and continued pen and ink drawing in my series of 2"x2"
grided squares;
the sorting of papers for archives, storage, and packing;
and the continuing review of scholar/practitioner books in preparation for the seminar in
Social Media: History, Poetics and Practice,
which I will teaching at Princeton University this coming fall.
On my reading tables and shelves -- like a generative poem of social information information --
the titles begin to unfurl:
Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace, Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness,
Edward A. Shanken, ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. pp. 232-246
Roy Ascott and Carl Eugene Loeffler, guest eds, Connectivity: Art and Interactive
Telecommunications, Leonardo 24:2, 1991.
Beth Coleman, Hello Avatar, Rise of the Networked Generation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Heidi Grundmann, ed, Art Telecommunication, Vancouver: Western Front; Vienna: BLIX, 1984
Katie King, Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2012
Alondra Nelson, Thuy Linh N. Tu with Alicia Headlam Hines, eds., TechniColorRace, Technology, and Everyday Life, NY: NYU Press, 2001.
Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008. There is a second edition in press, which is due to be published later this year.
Howard Rheingold, Net Smart, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2012
And: (on the way to my mailbox)
Lisa Nakamura,
Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet, Routledge, 2002
It is only a beginning.
As the research for Junction of Several Trails comes to a close, it is time to concentrate
on the finishing of the writing and scoring. Thus, this notebook will also come to
a close in mid-April.
I will begin a new writer's notebook
at the time when I begin the research for the narrative of what happened between
Walter Power and Trial Shepherd. (probably in the fall of this year)
For this part of
From Ireland with Letters, much research
will need to be done on
life in the Colonies in 17th century America.
The birthplace of Hiram Powers in Woodstock, Vermont
I will also be visiting some of the core places in the story.
March 30, 2013
"Imagine parenthetical pages, mobile notebooks, constellations of formants! In short, imagination
will have no difficulty if technique does its share. Moreover, a composer enjoys setting out towards
a certain horizon and arriving in completely unknown countries, whose existence he scarcely suspected
at the beginning."
Pierre Boulez, "Sonate, Que me Veux-tu", Perspectives of New Music
1:2, Spring 1963. p. 44
On March 26, I sat at a large table in the UC Berkeley Library. It was the week of Spring Break,
and I had chosen this quiet time to look at the score of Pierre Boulez's
Troisième sonate pour piano, Formant 3: "Constellation -- Miroir".
(London, Universal Edition, 1963)
The score is printed on nine separate large leaves of fine paper
that are housed, like an artists book, in an unfolding string-tied manila container.
Each page is maybe about 3' x 2'.
I did not precisely measure the pages, but part of the
impact of this score is its size and the art object feel to the whole.
Confronted by an array of hypertextual arrow-indicated links to red and green sections of the score,
my first thought was that a pianist being asked to sight read this score might be in the
same difficult situation as a reader being asked to read aloud from a classic work of hyperfiction
which he or she has never explored.
Next -- perhaps it was an experience which all writers of
electronic literature should be subjected to -- there was a disconcerting feeling of not knowing how
to interpret the symbols, akin perhaps to
the experience of being presented with a stark
>
prompt in an Interactive Fiction, when you do not
know the conventions of the genre.
But after perusing the entire composition, its hypertextual structure began to become a part of the
understanding of this beautiful score, and I was enchanted by Boulez' multiple paths and
innovative artist's notation.
Boulez's Troisième sonate pour piano, was begun in the 1950's and first performed at
Darmstadt in 1957. In 1963, he published a statement on this work in Perspectives of New Music.
(1:2, Spring 1963. pp.32-44) The title of his statement -- "Sonate, Que me Veux-tu"
("Sontata, What do you want of me?") was probably taken from a question attributed to
Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle on the occasion of hearing purely instrumental music.
In this week leading up to a major exhibition of electronic literature in the
Nation's capitol -- which includes the pioneering work of Michael Joyce, Judy Malloy, Stuart Moulthrop, and Deena
Larsen,
among many others -- it is a question that could be paraphrased to apply to the confronting of
any innovative genre:
"Hyperfiction, what do you want of me?"
"Generative poetry, what do you want of me?"
_____________________
It is of interest that in "Sonate, Que me Veux-tu", Boulez's stated inspiration
is literature -- in particular the work of James Joyce and Stéphane Mallarmé.
It should, however, be noted that Boulez was very familiar with the work of composer and musician
John Cage. Indeed,
The Boulez-Cage Correspondence, edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (English translation:
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993) is a fascinating read for a writer of
electronic literature, who is interested in chance, experimental notation, and artist's lives.
Additionally, Karlheinz Stockhausen was working in
"open composition", and also Boulez seems to be exploring composition in a very Art of Fugue manner.
But perhaps my writer's notebook
is not the place for its writer to delve into what artists absorb from their environment,
as opposed to what they read and record in notebooks and statements.
Regardless of stated and unstated influences, what is most important is that
Pierre Boulez created a radical and innovative work when he composed and notated
Troisième sonate pour piano, Formant 3: "Constellation -- Miroir". Furthermore,
his citing of literary
influences continues centuries of influential exchanges between poets and musicians in the development of
literature and music.
Here then, are a few sentences from Pierre Boulez's Perspectives of New Music statement about
his Third Piano Sonata:
"What we must do from now on, following the examples of Joyce and Mallarmé, is to stop
regarding the work as a single trajectory, traced between a point of departure and a point of arrival."
p. 33
"The modern notion of the labyrinth in works of art is certainly one of the most important leaps
accomplished by Western thought -- one from which there is no return." p.34
"Similarly, the work must provide a certain number of possible routes, thanks to these very precise
devices, with chance playing a shunting role at the last moment."
p.35
"In the arrangement that I have adopted, one is free to choose any one of the four forms, simply by
reading these fragments according to their left-hand or right-hand version, independently of each other,
it being understood that in the same response there must be for every A structure a B structure of
the same nature"
p. 38
"The wealth of possibilities contained in the encounter of these formants is even now apparent.
Imagine parenthetical pages, mobile notebooks, constellations of formants! In short, imagination
will have no difficulty if technique does its share. Moreover, a composer enjoys setting out towards
a certain horizon and arriving in completely unknown countries, whose existence he scarcely suspected
at the beginning." p. 44
So far, with some surprise, I have listened online to
Troisième sonate pour piano, Formant 3: "Constellation -- Miroir" as
performed by Steffen Schleiermacher and by Idil Biret. The surprise -- which should have been expected
by a writer of electronic literature, who occasionally creates one-of-a-kind readings from her own works --
is that the listener might not be always aware of the complexities of
navigating the score or of the impact of the incredible beauty of the score on the music itself.
The player has already made the choices; the score is unseen. Nevertheless, there exists the (difficult)
possibility that the player can, in the playing, convey the experience with his or her interpretation.
I am grateful to musician and musicologist Davitt Moroney for sending me on this extraordinary path.
April 6, 2013
Junction of Several Trails is finally finished!
As the work concludes, the conversation between Máire Powers and Liam O'Brien at the Farmhouse Cafe
is still in progress. But when From Ireland with Letters continues
with the separate narratives and recollections of the two main characters, (in Parts VI and VII)
the denouement of their conversation will be repeatedly recalled.
At times in the creation of art and literature everything goes smoothly. The artist/writer
conceives of, plans, and creates a work in a clear path of process and creative fulfillment.
The writing and scoring of Junction of Several Trails was *not* one of these times.
Yet, I have found that sometimes the works that come together with the most difficulty, the works
that require a continual working and reworking, eventually these works -- existing side by side with the smoothly
flowing pieces of the whole -- clearly convey the many hours of struggle
that it took to create them.
This week, in reviewing the process through the pages of this writer's notebook, what
seems most important is not the many explored and abandoned plans of how to make Junction of Several
Trails cohere, but the history, the poetry, and the music which were read and listened to during the creation of
this work.
The music began with the quixotic search for the lost Irish sonata
(Grattan Flood, A History of Irish Music, pp 19-20) that has informed the composition of
From Ireland with Letters from its onset. It continued
with the music of 17th century
Irish harpers, with historic and contemporary Irish fiddlers, and with an intermingling of Irish poetry, Irish song, and baroque composition
structures (the Bach Cantata, for instance) that is not without precedent in Irish writing. (the writing of Irish tenor James Joyce, for instance)
The characters in Junction of Several Trails are set in an electronic tapestry, where left and right side continuo marginalia of Irish history,
Powers family genealogy, 19th art history, slave narratives, and the travels of The Greek Slave, are equally, if not more important, than
their conversation. This does not mean that their conversation is not important but rather that because the continuo nodes surround the main
characters, they are core to the way that, with slowly moving polyphonic text,
the narrative is revealed.
Intertwining Irish history and generations of
Irish American family recollections in a work of
polyphonic literature based on the rhythms of ancient Irish poetry, the imagined lost Irish Sonata,
the madrigal, streams and fountains, and Irish song,
From Ireland with Letters
could be considered a playable text, a work of polychoral narrative poetry,
and/or a generative hypertext. However, it is
also an epic electronic manuscript told in the public space of the World Wide Web.
In this work of public literature, the narrative echoes the role of displacement
and disrupted tradition that is evident in the poetry of contemporary Irish writers.
Contingently, the act of telling an Irish American epic in the public space of the Internet is redolent
of the ancient Irish lay, the music of the traveling Irish harpers, of the tradition of the ceilidh,
and of my own late 20th century digital literature.
As electronic literature critic Leonardo Flores writes in his
review of From Ireland with Letters:
"the time may have arrived for a hypertext epic."
April 12, 2013
In this, the last entry of the online writer's notebook for Parts IV and V of
From Ireland with Letters, looking to the future, I am planning the as yet
untitled Part VI, in which Liam O'Brien will continue to explore the lives of
Italian and American sculptors in 19th century Italy; review the travels of the many versions
of The Greek Slave; and remember his conversation with Máire Powers at the Farmhouse Cafe.
Much of the research for part VI has already been done. Now, I am considering the rhythm,
how the work will flow, what music
will inform the authoring score. To begin with, there is opera in Florence. It was a part of the culture to attend
opera in 19th century Italy. Even if Hiram Powers did not often go to the Teatro della Pergola,
he would surely have heard his neighbors and friends Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
talk about Italian music.
And I like the idea of following the intimate, Irish heritage-laden conversation in the courtyard
of the Farmhouse Cafe with 19th century Italian opera in the dramatic period of il Risorgimento,
the era when Powers created The Greek Slave.
As currently planned, the "score" for Part VI of From Ireland with Letters
will begin with bravura. In some places,
the tempo will be faster than the tempo of Junction of Several Trails.
The music will correlate more precisely
with the words.
Thus, as Hiram Powers, Giovanni Duprè, and
the Macchiaioli stride on stage, Liam has been researching the music of 19th century Italy.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, he wants to take control of the story which Máire
has been telling.
So far,
the most interesting and useful source for researching how Part VI will work
is Danielè Pistone,
Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera from Rossini to Puccini, a book
(Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1995; translated by E. Thomas Glasow)
which is composed in three parts:
The Librettos, The Music; Performance.
But online documentation of this book will have to wait
until my writer's notebook resumes, most likely when I am at Princeton in the Fall.
The print notebook for Junction of Several Trails
Meanwhile, there are print notebooks that no one but the poet reads, and I am reminded of how
important this online writer's notebook has been not only in providing a place
to document the research that informed Parts IV and V of
From Ireland with Letters but also in documenting how the
authoring score was created and then used to create a work of electronic literature.
Interlude
On April 7 in Berkeley, I heard the awesome Davitt Moroney play Bach's The Art of Fugue in a tour de
force musicologist/musician's "close reading" performance. Moving seamlessly between
speech and harpsichord music, he explored Bach's over 200 uses of the theme that pervades
this unfinished work -- creating an innovative scholarly journey through the
composer's art.
Davitt Moroney's path through The Art of Fugue began in his program notes
and continued on stage with informally spoken words and the playing of the harpsichord.
Bach's compositional devices, the performer observed, included:
- Melodic Inversion, "the idea of turning a theme or melodic fragment upside down";
- Counterfugues, that use both the original and inverted versions of the theme;
- Stretto, in which "the main melody is heard playing against itself in another voice, so
that you can hear the theme twice at the same time, but with one part starting just after the other.";
- Double Counterpoint, "...two-part counterpoint, always based on two ideas being tossed back and
forth between the hands."; (of the harpsichordist)
- Triple Counterpart. "Usually Bach combines the layers rapidly by immediately adding
a second theme in counterpoint, and then a third, so that after about
six measures three different elements are already in play together."
____________________
The quotes are from his program notes for:
The Art of Fugue, Davitt Moroney, harpsichord,
Cal Performances, Hertz Hall,
University of California, Berkeley, April 7, 2013.
But it was the harpsichord music itself -- informal, beautiful, played as if we, students, family members,
colleagues, were sitting beside Bach in his own home -- that created a feeling of Bach recalling
his own life,
remembering with variations of his theme:
his childhood in a family of musicians,
his life long exploration of composition,
the moments of tragedy, moments of anger, the moments of happiness,
until his death, which by family legend occurred while working on the
end of the 14th fugue, the fugue in which Bach spelled out his name in music,
the fugue that ends so abruptly.
At this point, the place where Bach's written score ends, Moroney dramatically stopped playing
and then -- following a brief silence -- completed the fugue himself.
It was an experience of the carrying on of music that brought the audience to their feet in a standing
ovation.
________________
Davitt Moroney's completion of Contrapunctus 14
is available on his harmonia mundi recording of The Art of Fugue
(1985 and later editions)
Looking to the Future of Learning and Teaching Electronic Literature
In the field of electronic literature, we are still developing the vocabulary and the pedagocial practice.
We are, or soon will be, teaching born digital students, who have their own experiences to share.
We need to demonstrate not only the creation of the content of the work but also the way that interface
and authoring systems work with the content to create a whole.
In this respect, I look forward to participating
in the pre-festival Pedagogic Colloquium at the 2013 E-Poetry Festival
at Kingston University in London this June. The Pedagogic Colloquium will be produced by poet
and Kingston University Professor,
Maria Mencia, with presentations by:
- Leonardo Flores on teaching with ongoing scholarly blogging;
- Judy Malloy (virtually) on teaching Electronic Literature Authoring Systems;
- Maria Mencia on "Theory as analysis and methodology in
practice-based creative media";
- Talan Memmott on "Practice-based critical and cultural studies;
- and Kate Pullinger on "pedagogy in the field of where creative writing meets technology",
plus Serge Bouchardon, University of Technology of Compiegne, France; Jeneen Naji, National
University of Ireland Maynooth, Maya Zalbidea Paniagua, Universidad La Salle, Madrid, and much more.
And as this electronic literature poet's notebook closes, I also remember the role of social media
in the creation of electronic literature that began for me in 1986 with
Art Com Electronic Network
on the WELL, continued on
Arts Wire, and in the past few years has been renewed on
Critical Code Studies and with the wonderful
digital humanities community on Twitter.
Judy Malloy
|
Composed like a piece of music, From Ireland with Letters
interweaves the stories of Walter Power -- who came to America as an
Irish slave on The Goodfellow in 1654, stolen from his family
by Cromwell's soldiers and sold in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
when he was 14 years old -- and his descendant, 19th century
Irish American sculptor Hiram Powers, who grew up on a Vermont
farm and moved to Florence, Italy, where his work played
a symbolic role in the fight against African American slavery in America.
Index
July 4, 2012
A new writer's notebook;
begins on the Fourth of July!
listening to Irish fiddle music;
reflections on online
writer's notebooks;
when Itzhak Perlman
begins to play
July 7, 2012
a template for
fiddler's passage;
The Mason's Apron Reel;
fiddle music continuo
July 14, 2012
"easy and slow";
The themes which
wind in and out of
fiddler's passage;
a constraint based
on music timing
July 20, 2012
the standardization
of notation;
the BASIC version of
Uncle Roger
July 27, 2012
build_1 of
fiddlers passage;
starker computer-mediated
fiddlers_passage score
the ways in which
Uncle Roger
was created
August 5, 2012
early afternoon
at the library,
looking at
images of Ireland
the pleasures of
printbooks
August 10, 2012
a pleasant hike
along a stream,
a small picnic, and
watercolor sketching;
tweaking fiddler's passage,
"replay fiddler's passage";
documentation for the
recreation of the
BASIC Uncle Roger
August 17, 2012
artists books interlude:
miniature artist books;
Doug Beube's
Invisible Cities
Alison Knowles
lettrisme
and Isidore Isou
August 26, 2012
The Romantic Story
of the Puritan Fathers
and Their Founding of
New Boston and the
Massachusetts Bay Colony
Every Day Life
in the
Massachusetts Bay Colony;
the Electronic Language
International Festival;
a party in Berkeley for
the 25th Anniversary
of HyperCard;
the energy of ELO 2012
carried from
Morgantown, West Virginia
onto the Internet
and beyond:
The Nature of Collecting
September 2, 2012
an appropriate image
for the cover of
From Ireland with Letters Book II:
rejected images;
Samual Carter Hall and
Anna Maria Fielding Hall
the Irish artists who
illustrated Ireland:
its scenery, character &
beside a stream
September 10, 2012
Alan Turing:
A Centenary Celebration;
build 3 of the score
for fiddlers passage;
working from unusual notation:
Unum Cole Deum;
Nick Montfort's Taroko Gorge
Scholars Contemplate
the Irish Beer
systems analysis
September 16, 2012
The setting for
Junction of Several Trails;
The time signature
a September trip to the Sierras
Memorial Concert for
baroque soprano Judith Nelson
changes in tempo in Bach's
"Gottes Zeit is die allerbeste Zeit"
September 25, 2012
restoring A Party
at Silver Beach;
Uncle Roger's music box;
Nikolaus Harnoncourt:
Baroque Music Today:
Music as Speech
Although admittedly I was
tempted to do so by his words;
Forgive me Saints of early music;
how Lully notated
the speech of French actors;
"The question of tempo only
became problematic
with the origin of polyphony"
October 3, 2012
beginning again on
Junction of Several Trails;
the sound of the accordion
was the sound of the dance hall,
and there was nothing like
that music on that evening;
Davitt Moroney's program
for his Cal Performances
harpsichord concert
how Bach's themes work with
the variations in
Art of the Fugue
the way Purcell's beautiful Prelude
and Almand led into an
unexpected Hornpipe;
the long anticipated
music was unforgettable;
memorable French pastry;
The Kronos Quartet concludes
the afternoon
October 12, 2012
Máire's continuo;
"A gypsy rover
came over the hill,
Down through the valley
so shady..."
October 21, 2012
the first four bars
of the Sinfonia for
Junction of
Several Trails;
Jean-Baptiste de Lully;
"Back to the Future"
Holloway Gower Mortensen Trio
"Stil Moderno";
Biber's Passacaglia
Fluxus objects
October 26, 2012
collaborative social
media environments;
Remediating the Social;
Wendy Chun in Berkeley;
"Invitation to a Session";
Moore and Moroney:
Bach sonatas for
violin and harpsichord;
Moroney: Muffat's Passacaglia;
the template for
the Sinfonia score
November 4, 2012
While in the Edinburgh,
elit colleagues met
at the ELMCIP Conference,
I completed the score and
the writing of the "Sinfonia"
that introduces
Junction of Several Trails;
a lively, interesting
digital writers' conversation;
"a fiddle tune
that continually returns
to the opening notes"
November 14, 2012
restoring Wasting
Time resumes;
rewritting REM statements;
"Wasting Time: A Narrative
Data Structure"
November 24, 2012
Thanksgiving celebrated
early; the image I had
been searching for
to illuminate the
Sonfonia score;
"Invitation to a Session";
West Clare fiddle player
Junior Crehan;
"Passing on the Tradition";
"...And that's really how
we got our music;
its name was Penelope
at Nouspace Gallery;
10 PRINT
running "10 PRINT" on DOSBox,
the maze metamorphosed
into a score;
Ciaran Carson: "Each time
the song is sung
November 30, 2012
the trail of Fenian
support for the IRB;
a treasure of books
from the Gaelic Revival;
"The Foggy Dew",
"The Row in the Town",
"The Boys from County Cork";
the 7 signers of the
1916 Proclamation;
H.V. Morton: "Before me
on the sky-line was
the Irish Free State."
December 2, 2012
a glass of Powers Irish whiskey
for Lord John Power
and his wife
Lady Giles FitzGerald
December 3, 2012
Rain, writing, research
and music; The UBE:
a series of pavans,
galliards, motets,
concertos, and airs
and closing with
a Buxtehude Cantata
December 9, 2012
artists books for Christmas;
A Traditional Music Journey
by Máire Nic Domhnaill Gairbhí
on the piers of
Boston Harbor.
December 16, 20 2012
a walk along a woodland stream;
...Where ships swiftly sailing
with claret and mead";
reviewing From Ireland
with Letters;
Dance Tunes
of the West of Ireland"
"The Connachtmans Rambles";
"Farewell to Gurteen"
December 30, 2012
"The Laden Table"
writing the Cantata;
Penelope at MLA2013
in Boston;
"Of these events, Muse,
daughter of Zeus,
tell me the story again,
beginning where you will"
January 7, 2013
"Above my booklet,
the lined one
The thrilling birds
sing to me.;
playing Internet continuo;
code-scoring the Cantata
on New Year's Eve
11 books from
the Gaelic Revival;
"She sat down beside him,
the grass was so green
The day was the fairest
that ever was seen."
January 15,21, 2013
moving between
the score and writing;
shelves of books
on the Gaelic Revival
and the Easter Rising;
Grand Opportunity:
a fine week of
family birthday parties
January 23, 2013
the year the Hiram Powers
crated The Greek Slave
in Florence and shipped her to America;
Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass,
An American Slave;
Narrative of William Wells Brown,
a Fugitive Slave;
and many other
widely read slave narratives;
the first places where
The Greek Slave
was exhibited in America
in the years before the Civil War:
The National Era's review
a vision of the wrenching of enslaved captives
from their families:
the scene in Ireland in the 1650's
as described in
To Hell or Barbados;
Powers' statement
for the American exhibitions
January 28, 2013
And sometimes one has to
retrace one's own steps;
Giovanni Duprè
Thoughts on art and
autobiographical memoirs of
Giovanni Duprè
February 1, 2013
virtuoso harpsichordist
Davitt Moroney:
a program dramatic
in its transposed narrative
and so beautifully played
that it was as if I were in Dresden
in the autumn of 1717
February 8, 2013
Giovanni Duprè's
autobiography;
his statue of Giotto
commissioned in 1844;
his courtship of Marina;
a visit to Rome on Christmas Eve;
"The Giotto was finished without
a moment's indecision..."
Hiram Powers' journey
into the Seravezza marble quarries;
In 1844, crowds of people
have been to Hiram's studio
to see The Greek Slave.
February 16, 2013
small academic treasures
Sonya Rapoport at
Martina }{ Johnston gallery
Every Day Life in the
Massachusetts Bay Colony,
The Music of 17th Century Massachusetts;
The Music of 19th Century Florence,
a "splendid" piano for the children
of Hiram Powers,
Giovanni Duprè meets
Giuseppe Verdi;
Davitt Moroney: "The Performance
of Unmeasured Harpsichord Preludes"
an answer to the question
What are the issues
in combining unmeasured and
measured sections in one work?
February 23, 2013
library adventures;
continued work on the score Junction of Several Trails;
documenting the six marble versions
of The Greek Slave.
March 2, 2013
six new measures;
translating the notation
into the lexias files
March 9, 2013
A Literary History of Ireland;
bard and filidh
how in the Sliabb Echtge mountain
range a 10th century harper saved his own
life by calling the ghost
of his former master;
exploring social media
from an historical perspective;
CFP93
March 14, 2013
an interlude of music
and the making of drawings
for artists books:
the University Baroque Ensemble;
in a meadow, drawing,
remembering the music
March 16 & 17, 2013
"...and my fiddle strings
are new/and I've learned
a tune or two;
a 5 1/2 feet long score;
the people of Waterford were
"Cheerful in their entertainment
of strangers"...
The woman were famous
for spinning;
baking Irish bread for
a family St Patrick's day party;
the voices of contemporary Irish women;
Eavan Boland, "Dublin, 1959":
Moya Cannon, "Carrying the Song";
elit in Washington DC;
"Of these events, Muse,
daughter of Zeus,
tell me the story again,
beginning where you will."
March 25,26, 2013
a California spring day
interlude of walking,
picniking, and drawing;
and like a generative poem
of social information information
the titles begin to unfurl
March 30, 2013
"Imagine parenthetical
pages, mobile notebooks,
constellations of formants!
Pierre Boulez:Troisième sonate
pour piano, Formant 3:
"Constellation -- Miroir"
"Sonate, Que me Veux-tu"
April 6, 2013
Junction of Several Trails
is finally finished!
reviewing the process
through the pages
of this writer's notebook,
The music began with the
quixotic search for
the lost Irish sonata
Intertwining Irish history
and generations of
Irish American family recollections
in a work of polyphonic literature
"the time may have arrived
for a hypertext epic."
April 12, 2013
the last entry of the
online writer's notebook
for Parts IV and V of
From Ireland with Letters;
planning Part VI;
The music will correlate
more precisely with the words;
Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera
from Rossini to Puccini
The print notebook for
Junction of Several Trails;
the awesome Davitt Moroney
plays Bach's The Art of Fugue
in a tour de force
musicologist/musician's
"close reading" performance,
an experience of
the carrying on of music;
Looking to the Future
of Learning and Teaching
Electronic Literature,
the pre-festival
Pedagogic Colloquium
at the 2013 E-Poetry Festival;
the role of social media
in the creation of electronic literature
that began for me in 1986.
Judy Malloy
Notes on for the Creation of From Ireland with Letters: Begin with the Arrival
and passage
Notes on for the Creation of the Prologue
to From Ireland with Letters
About Judy Malloy
In the twenty-five years since she first wrote
Uncle Roger on Art Com Electronic Network,
Judy Malloy has created an innovative body of new
media narrative poetry that in hypertextual
structures explores the lives of artists.
Beginning in the 1970's with a series of handmade
visual books that sought to create a nonsequential
reading experience, her work has been exhibited/published in
over one hundred curated exhibitions, invited
readings and panels, and editions.
She strives for a poetic clarity, so that each lexia
-- an idea developed in the handmade books --
transcends the computer screen and can either
stand by itself or be combined in the reading or
array to create a larger narrative.
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