toward a hello kitty afterword
I feel a little strange starting this before precisely finishing the hello kitty poem (Hello Phantasm / Mime), but I am trying to get accustomed to the sensation of not every finishing it, and hoping that something I write may lead into a sense of finality. Plus, since I've got some preliminary comment on Barrent Watten's site, when the poem, already started, changed irrevocably to its current perhaps unfinishable according to my current practice state, and since Eileen Tabios has an afterword on her Ahadada book, well, I might as well get started.
HP/M is my perverse version of flarf. In effect, it is the opposite of flarf, because I started with parts of the poem taken from a Hello Kitty coloring book (purchased in Vancouver in a dollar store in the basement of the Hudson Bay Company, I think) which exhorts on the front cover, "USE YOUR IMAGINATION!" Of course, using a coloring book seems the opposite of using one's imagination to me. This coloring book has very simple word games and other sorts of assignments as well.
And so, leading as I usually do into WHAT I have done rather than WHY, as though WHY would be perfectly obvious, I used the seeds of text from the coloring book as well as what I'd already written in search engines. I figured I'd use the search engine results as I would normally use free-association in "this sort of poem," which was written in a mode AFTER a manuscript called PHYLUM which uses children's school workbooks, notably several with perception excercises [I'm working on that to send to Blue Lion, yes it is that long], and after "Palm Anthology" in DaDaDa and the poems in "OOD: Object-Oriented Design" (published around here and there but not in book form). I write "written in a mode" except that of course writing this poem -- as any large bust-up -- has pretty much called everything about that mode into question, in a relatively destructive (rather than constructive) way. For example, if "I" were "really writing" this "poem" it would "mean something" and I would be in "control" of some of what that "meaning" was, or at least know it. And I would rewrite to heighten that. If I were writing the Hello Kitty / her twin sister Mimmy poem, it would be *lots sexier." It would be about a lack of opening, a closure, about security in some way; it would have way more about cosplay; it would have a lot more about manufactured japanese americans use verses manufactured english japanese use.
Continuing to "cover" how this was "constructed," so I used google to write the section called "Ogle." Whenever I had a question, I used google, when I wanted to elaborate, accumulate, around a word or moment, I used google. Then, not having kept terribly good notes, I went back to the source coloring book, and used Alta Vista to "translate" or rewrite the poem using the different search engine. Since I originally used alta vista as my perferred searcher and since I am more comfy with the technical references alta vista turns up with greater regularity, I liked "View" initially far more, although it is a colder (and much shorter! since there's less I wrote) poem. Then, I did it all again with dictionary.com, althugh I was using first their web search, which uses google, and then I used their article search.
Then I translated the whole HK section. I know, I know, it was a pile of translations. THEN I TRANSLATED IT using the precursor practice to flarf, which is babelfishing. Because I'd been thinking about Japanese fake English, and because HK and M are Japanese, I translated to Japanese and back. I also used print.google.com (using while it lasts!), Auerback's Mimesis (one of the few books both Ron and I owned -- another was Derrida's WRITING AND DIFFERENCE), and a lot of Adorno. This is because Hello Kitty is a mass media product with a twin sister.
Of my coinages, I'm particularly enamoured of "googlemancy."
I feel a little strange starting this before precisely finishing the hello kitty poem (Hello Phantasm / Mime), but I am trying to get accustomed to the sensation of not every finishing it, and hoping that something I write may lead into a sense of finality. Plus, since I've got some preliminary comment on Barrent Watten's site, when the poem, already started, changed irrevocably to its current perhaps unfinishable according to my current practice state, and since Eileen Tabios has an afterword on her Ahadada book, well, I might as well get started.
HP/M is my perverse version of flarf. In effect, it is the opposite of flarf, because I started with parts of the poem taken from a Hello Kitty coloring book (purchased in Vancouver in a dollar store in the basement of the Hudson Bay Company, I think) which exhorts on the front cover, "USE YOUR IMAGINATION!" Of course, using a coloring book seems the opposite of using one's imagination to me. This coloring book has very simple word games and other sorts of assignments as well.
And so, leading as I usually do into WHAT I have done rather than WHY, as though WHY would be perfectly obvious, I used the seeds of text from the coloring book as well as what I'd already written in search engines. I figured I'd use the search engine results as I would normally use free-association in "this sort of poem," which was written in a mode AFTER a manuscript called PHYLUM which uses children's school workbooks, notably several with perception excercises [I'm working on that to send to Blue Lion, yes it is that long], and after "Palm Anthology" in DaDaDa and the poems in "OOD: Object-Oriented Design" (published around here and there but not in book form). I write "written in a mode" except that of course writing this poem -- as any large bust-up -- has pretty much called everything about that mode into question, in a relatively destructive (rather than constructive) way. For example, if "I" were "really writing" this "poem" it would "mean something" and I would be in "control" of some of what that "meaning" was, or at least know it. And I would rewrite to heighten that. If I were writing the Hello Kitty / her twin sister Mimmy poem, it would be *lots sexier." It would be about a lack of opening, a closure, about security in some way; it would have way more about cosplay; it would have a lot more about manufactured japanese americans use verses manufactured english japanese use.
Continuing to "cover" how this was "constructed," so I used google to write the section called "Ogle." Whenever I had a question, I used google, when I wanted to elaborate, accumulate, around a word or moment, I used google. Then, not having kept terribly good notes, I went back to the source coloring book, and used Alta Vista to "translate" or rewrite the poem using the different search engine. Since I originally used alta vista as my perferred searcher and since I am more comfy with the technical references alta vista turns up with greater regularity, I liked "View" initially far more, although it is a colder (and much shorter! since there's less I wrote) poem. Then, I did it all again with dictionary.com, althugh I was using first their web search, which uses google, and then I used their article search.
Then I translated the whole HK section. I know, I know, it was a pile of translations. THEN I TRANSLATED IT using the precursor practice to flarf, which is babelfishing. Because I'd been thinking about Japanese fake English, and because HK and M are Japanese, I translated to Japanese and back. I also used print.google.com (using while it lasts!), Auerback's Mimesis (one of the few books both Ron and I owned -- another was Derrida's WRITING AND DIFFERENCE), and a lot of Adorno. This is because Hello Kitty is a mass media product with a twin sister.
Of my coinages, I'm particularly enamoured of "googlemancy."
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