alienated.net

The redoubtable Trevor Haldenby mentioned the existence of this document to me at TEDx Waterloo the other day, and it was too good not to track down.

Created by city council in 1916, it's a list of suggested names for Berlin, Ontario, during the period before it changed its name to Kitchener. Originally settled by a largely German immigrant population, Kitchener was known as the Town of Berlin from 1854-1912 and the City of Berlin from 1912-1916. As WWI approached and anti-German sentiment rose, other Canadians began to express growing doubts about whether or not the people of the very Germanic-sounding Berlin, Ontario were doing everything they could to support the Canadian war effort ... hence the name change.

Looking at the list now, I wish I lived in Mechano, Hydropolis or Industria. I may well have to begin the process of transforming Kitchener into one of them at a speed that keeps my activities slightly below the conscious level of its citizens.

(from the John A. Lang fonds of Library and Archives Canada).

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four 53, August 1966. Sometimes poetry HATES SPEECH.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four 50, May 1966. Poetry ... reminds you that Joe Simon and Jack Kirby invented the romance comic.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four 33, December 1964. Poetry likes its levels like it likes them.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Fantastic Four 24, March 1964. Poetry is a giant angry baby with a terminal skin condition that looks when it says it sounds and sounds when it says it looks.

Many years ago, I translated bpNichol's first poem, "Translating Apollinaire," into Klingon. Evidently, it made something of an impression, because ever since then, people have bombarded me with links to All Things Klingon. As my uncles used to say, once they find your ass, they never stop kicking it.

(Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)

Brian Davis just posted a great piece on status update in the Globe Books section online:

Status update: 'Emily Brontë and her Playstation are overly friendly these days'

Facebook's status update bar may be its most popular, enduring and influential feature (given the rise of Twitter's real time fixes for the focus-challenged). For writers Darren Wershler and Bill Kennedy, status updates are also poetry. Or, rather, it becomes poetry after the RRS feeds of thousands of Facebook users have been harvested, shorn of the user names and attached to the names of dead poets or writers.

(Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)

Last Sunday, following up on a tip from Ed Pien, Kenny Goldsmith and I stopped by The Textile Museum of Canada to see Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan. Both The Toronto Star and Now listed it as one of the best gallery shows of 2008, and it did not disappoint: curator Max Allen has assembled 118 rugs from the period of the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan (1979) up to the present.

(Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)

Last night (January 9), Mercer Union launched "Street Poets & Visionaries: Selections from the UbuWeb Collection" to a packed house. The text that I wrote for the catalogue follows, as does a link to a Flickr set of images of the event.

The quality of mind in the radio telescope is its will to select.
-- Christopher Dewdney, "Parasite Maintenance" [1]

What are the outer limits of appropriation?

Digital culture is obsessed with this question, from both an aesthetic and a legal perspective. On the one hand is an entire century of artistic practices that gleefully encourage the copying and recirculation of cultural materials, from Delta blues and Dada to Flarf and mashups. On the other hand is an increasingly restrictive legal climate, which, as Siva Vaidhyanathan has argued at length, is entirely incapable of dealing effectively with "emerging communication technologies, techniques and aesthetics" [2].

(Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)

On November 19, Microsoft relaunched the XBox Live Network with a brand-new (bearing in mind that with Microsoft, new is always a relative state of mind) avatar-based interface, and the XBox-based portion of my online identity received an extreme makeover.

(Click “Read more” below, or the title above, for the full post.)