invitation:
if you are going to the music department event on friday, you are welcome to come by my house for drinks and heavy pupus before. say at around 6 or 6:30. feel free to bring dates and/or offspring.

ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
Death Ambient
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum
Toychestra
Carla Bozulich
Friday, September 3, 8:00 p.m.
$12 general, $6 seniors. free to mills students.

email me for directions.


***

UPDATE . . . REVISED 9/1

9/1presenting 1-5 pages of work
Meg Hamill
Dan Fischer
Jessea Perry
Dennis Somera


9/8presenting 1-5 pages of work
William Moore
Dillon Westbrook
Cathy Shin
Charles Legere


9/15presenting 1-5 pages of work
Gayle Mak
Maiana Minahal
Erika Abrahamian
Amiee Suzara


9/22workshop leader: Meg Hamill
participant Dillon Westbrook
participant Gayle Mak

performance leader: Dennis Somera
participant Erika Abrahamian
participant Cathy Shin

writing leader: Dan Fisher
participant Maiana Minahal
participant Amiee Suzara

reading leader: Jessea Perry
participant William Moore
participant Charles Legere


9/29poet Dan Fisher
reader A Amiee Suzara
reader B Erika Abrahamian

poet William Moore
reader A Maiana Minahal
reader B Gayle Mak


10/6
poet Meg Hamill
reader A Gayle Mak
reader B Amiee Suzara

poet Dennis Somera
reader A Erika Abrahamian
reader B Maiana Minahal


10/13
workshop leader: Gayle Mak
participant Erika Abrahamian
participant Charles Legere

performance leader: Maiana Minahal
participant Meg Hamill
participant Amiee Suzara

writing leader: William Moore
participant : Dennis Somera
participant Jessea Perry

reading leader: Dillon Westbrook
participant Cathy Shin
participant Dan Fisher


10/20
poet Jessea Perry
reader A Charles Legere
reader B Cathy Shin

poet Dillon Westbrook
reader A Dennis Somera
reader B William Moore


10/27
poet Cathy Shin
reader A William Moore
reader B Jessea Perry

poet Charles Legere
reader A Dan Fisher
reader B Dennis Somera


11/3
workshop leader: Cathy Shin
participant Dan Fisher
participant Maiana Minahal

performance leader: Amiee Suzara
participant Jessea Perry
participant William Moore

writing leader: Charles Legere
participant Dillon Westbrook
participant Gayle Mak

reading leader: Erika Abrahamian
participant Meg Hamill
participant : Dennis Somera


11/10
poet Gayle Mak
reader A Cathy Shin
reader B Dan Fisher

poet Maiana Minahal
reader A Dillon Westbrook
reader B Meg Hamill


11/17
poet Erika Abrahamian
reader A Meg Hamill
reader B Dillon Westbrook

poet Aimee Suzara
reader A Jessea Perry
reader B Charles Legere


11/24, Thanksgiving holiday; no class


12/1, last class

O, You Cosh-Boned Posers!

Awful poems sought and found: From spam to Google, flarf redefines random

August 24th, 2004 12:25 PM
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0434/essay.php

You've been getting their work in your inbox for months. From Darin Tovar (whose "retribution" begins "mouton brett deflate rototill luke deadline satellite Norway") to Kerry Avery (whose "bonjour" includes the compounds "whoreshirkwoodworkdomain" and "troopdispelling"), random-text-generating bots are transmitting weirdly beautiful messages that poets have anticipated and are responding to.

Recently wedded non-bot poet-bloggers Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan (co-authors of Swoon) were among the first to spot the increasing resemblance of spam to avant-garde poetry last December. In a post that asked "Is this paradise?" Gordon presented unmanipulated spam containing the musical observation that "Any sky can of, but it takes/a real foulmouth to nearest antimony over." Five points if you hear e.e. cummings's "anyone lived in a pretty how town," 50 if you hear the torqued splendor of Clark Coolidge's "Solution Passage."

Sullivan followed with a verbatim quotation from one of the thousands of spam messages in last year's random-word tercets: "humidifying creosote adenosine cosh boned posers ethers meticulous teacher scuffle" is one line. For admirers of John Cage, that damp-making creosote invokes the work of Cage's fellow traveler, the winner of the Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Award, Jackson Mac Low. Consider this line taken by chance operation from Mac Low's "Forties 30: Troelstrup Nightmare Flare": "ticket activity fantasy answer encyclical láff-movie Rupert in serigraph rubric telepathy." Poetry, lost and found.

What's behind the sudden popularity of apparently meaningless text is the will of spammers to evade filtering software. According to the e-mail monitoring company Brightmail, 65 percent of all e-mail sent in June was spam, up from January's 60 percent. To get past filters that screen out messages with key words and phrases common in unsolicited mass e-mail marketing, spammers have been adding random strings of words at the end of vaguely worded pitches. And as anybody with an inbox knows, some spammers don't even bother trying to make a sale, sending their text out into the world just to find out whether it's being received.

It isn't only avant-garde poetry that turns out to resemble spam. This spring, hiphopmusic.com's Jay Smooth gave out prizes to readers who could correctly identify whether given lines (e.g., "coconut civilian, 87 lexicon"; "alfalfa archer, intense caramel breadwinner") were Ghostface Killah lyrics or just random spam text.

Even as spam brings hip-hop and underground poetry to the millions, some writers aren't waiting to be simulated by a robot, but are going out and mining the sometimes literate enthusiasms of Usenet discussion groups, comment fields, and instant-message transcripts for their own work. Taking Kathy Acker's experiments in plagiarism as a model, Ben Friedlander's Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (Alabama) bends posts to the newsgroup alt.fan.madonna in an Onion-esque parody on literary flame wars:

I am normally a [Ron] Silliman fan to the max, but I
think I am slipping. What is the story on him
and Lyn Hejinian being terrorists? What was his
comment? Can anyone help?
—Erik

Absolutely Nothing.......

"Once the rumor is started, the truth is a thing
of the past... " Apparently some disgruntled
poet who heard about the Russia trip made the
comments that Ron and Lyn were degrading humanity
and should be sent to Pakistan to be dealt with
by this terrorist group. Garbage and more. Quit
listening to everything you hear. The media is so
warped especially where Silliman is involved.

K. Silem Mohammad's 2003 collection Deer Head Nation goes even further. In his essay "Sought Poems," Mohammad explains how he Googled the short poems in that book into existence. Sidestepping Eliot's and Emerson's famous takes on authorship (summarized as great poets steal), Mohammad writes of poets who have turned to the Web, where right-wing hate groups become bunkmates with Marxist ideologues, home-repair specialists, and lonely pet-owners, and their discourses sometimes form unlikely chemical reactions in such close proximity to one another.

You've heard of (and maybe even achieved) Googlewhack, the game where you come up with a two-word Google search query yielding exactly one result. In Deer Head Nation, Mohammad's game is to put together a string of words that will yield socially stupefying results; he succeeds time after time. His secret? Just add "deer head":

if the deer are all armored like that
you may of hit the nail on the head
giant oil companies behind this
Bush scared me, because he always
sniffs at the air like a deer
("Not a War Blog")

The deer heads keep coming, sometimes accompanied by Guns N' Roses T-shirts, always unnerving. As they inventory his trophies, Mohammad's poems recall Allen Ginsberg's noun-and-adjective clusters in "Howl" and "Wichita Vortex Sutra," which, come to think of it, anticipate spam subject lines. Given that the head of the NEA is reputed to be the man behind the legendary Kool-Aid Man campaign, these may turn out to be the poems the age is seeking.
Mohammad hasn't been Googling his poems in a vortex. With Sullivan, Gordon, Drew Gardner, Katie Degentesh, Michael Magee, and others, he's a prominent member of the Flarf collective, an informal e-mail alliance the motto of which might be "Worst thought, best thought." Flarf is defined by Sullivan as "a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. 'Not okay.' "

Flarf began in 2000 or 2001 when Sullivan entered a deliberately offensive poem in a scam poetry contest. ("I got fire inside/my "huppa"-chimp(TM)" is, possibly, the only quotable passage.) From id-stoked overhearings more than a little derivative of Bruce Andrews's "I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up" ("If pods could talk—so, how/about a sperm-a-thon?"), the movement made the switch from finding to seeking when Gardner (Sugar Pill) went to Google to see what the deliberately misspelled "Rogain bunny" search would yield. Gardner explains: "If you have a Googled/cut up poem that still has most of its social filters set too high, it may be interesting poetry but it's probably not flarfy."

Magee's small-press magazine Combo broke the flarf story first, in early 2003. A significant finding in that issue, currently required reading for Charles Bernstein's literature students at the University of Pennsylvania, is that Google searches on the phrase "aw yeah" yield more socially acceptable results as the number of w's in "aw" increases.

Of course, spam and poetry have been going together for years—consider Jack Collom's NEA-fellowship-winning acrostics for the tinned meat with a contraction of spiced ham for a name ("Suddenly, masked hombres seized/Petunia Pig/And/Made her into a sort of dense Jell-O.").
It will probably never be said of spam (as Blaise Cendrars did of advertising in 1927) that it is "the most beautiful expression of our epoch." It may yet serve a post-M.F.A. generation as a gateway drug to making their own accidental beauty out of words, though. Says Bernstein, "These spam poems have a purpose, unlike the great poetry which [they seem] to resemble, which has the virtue of having no purpose at all, in the great Kantian tradition of art." Or as Eve Massey put it in an e-mail of July 30, "cabot admissible chromium drive."

Jordan Davis is the author of Million Poems Journal (Faux). You could Google him, or you could go straight to jordandavis.com.

Lots of poetry in the news today...

Yemeni Poet Says He Is al - Qaida Member

August 26, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:05 p.m. ET

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) -- A Yemeni poet
accused of crafting al-Qaida propaganda defiantly admitted
Thursday to a U.S. military commission that he is a member
of Osama bin Laden's terror network.

Ali Hamza Ahmad Sulayman al Bahlul, 33, is charged with
conspiracy to commit war crimes.

``As God is my witness, and the United States did not put
any pressure on me, I am an al-Qaida member,'' the detainee
said through an Arabic interpreter.

Al Bahlul -- appearing with head shaved, tan pants and a
gray polo shirt -- started to speak about his relationship
to the Sept. 11 terror attacks but was cut off by the
presiding officer, Army Col. Peter E. Brownback.

Earlier, when al Bahlul was asked if he had any questions,
he replied: ``Am I allowed to represent myself?''

Brownback initially said the order setting up military
commissions did not allow for it. But he later appeared
willing to accommodate the request, asking if al Bahlul's
military-appointed attorney could file a ``friend of the
court'' brief to allow him to represent himself.

Al Bahlul said no, that he would prefer to keep the
argument an oral one and did not feel comfortable having
his lawyer file the brief. It was unclear if he was unhappy
with his defense, but he insisted no one represented him.

The military commission instructions say defendants must be
represented by either civilian or military attorneys who
are U.S. citizens and certified to practice law in the
United States.

``I have a large amount of knowledge,'' al Bahlul said,
when asked whether he had sufficient knowledge of American
culture to understand the proceedings.

Brownback warned that even if he were allowed to represent
himself, there might be evidence he would not be allowed to
see because he doesn't have clearance for classified
information.

``I don't think it is fair the evidence would not be
presented, and the accused cannot defend himself without
seeing such evidence,'' al Bahlul said.

He added: ``I would like to represent myself. If the
American system will not allow me to defend myself. ...
then I will be a listener only.''

Brownback then called a recess to consider the request.


Al Bahlul is one of four Guantanamo detainees being
arraigned at hearings this week as the first step toward
trials by a five-member military commission -- the first
such proceedings since German saboteurs were tried secretly
during World War II.

Bin Laden's chauffeur, 34-year-old Salim Ahmed Hamdan of
Yemen, declined to enter a plea in the first hearing
Tuesday. David Hicks, a 29-year-old Australian cowboy
accused of fighting with Afghanistan's ousted Taliban
regime, pleaded innocent Wednesday. Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud
al Qosi, a Sudanese born in 1960, is to be charged Friday.

The Pentagon has accused al Bahlul of being a ``key
al-Qaida propagandist who produced videos glorifying the
murder of Americans to recruit, inspire and motivate other
al-Qaida members'' to attack the United States and other
countries.

Al Bahlul's father, Hamza Ahmed, told The Associated Press
in previous interviews in Yemen that the family has
suffered from his son's detention, both ``psychologically
and financially.''

``He is cultured and peace-loving and he speaks English and
enjoys reading and writing poetry,'' said Ahmed, noting his
son used to send money home.

He said his son, who is married and has four children, told
him in a letter that Pakistan handed him over to the
Americans and that he had left Pakistan to seek medical
treatment for his grandson before the Sept. 11 attacks in
the United States.

``In his letters he told me how much he missed his wife and
children. He has not committed any crimes and he hates no
one,'' Ahmed said.

Al Bahlul's appointed lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Philip Sundel,
had been expected to challenge the impartiality of the
commission's five members, which has emerged as a key issue
in the hearings. The members could be disqualified for good
cause.

Hicks' lead civilian attorney, Joshua Dratel, began
Wednesday's hearing with a challenge to the impartiality of
Brownback, a former military judge, questioning the
presiding officer's relationship with John D. Altenburg
Jr., a retired Army general in charge of the proceedings.

Brownback served with Altenburg in Fort Bragg, N.C., and
his wife worked in Altenburg's office. He also attended the
wedding of Altenburg's son and spoke at a retirement roast
for the general.

``Our concern is for a full and fair process,'' Dratel
said.

Other panel members who have been challenged include one
who knew a firefighter killed in the Sept. 11 attacks and
another who arranged the logistics for detainees to be sent
from Afghanistan to Guantanamo.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Guantanamo-Trials.html?ex=1094537462&ei=1&en=5693e7b4a091ed68




Poetry to the people

A tragic epic by an Iraqi exile, only 1,000 copies were ever printed. Yet, secretly and by word of mouth, Brother Yasin became a symbol of resistance to Saddam. Jo Tatchell on the remarkable story of a poem that defied a dictator

Wednesday August 25, 2004
The Guardian

Ahmed Goda was among the first foreign journalists to enter Basra following its fall to coalition forces in May 2003. A writer with the respected Asharq Alwsat newspaper, he arrived amid the chaos of the invasion to find himself pursued through the streets by a hostile crowd who assumed the Egyptian would be sympathetic to Saddam. Goda explained he held no such partisan views and was, in fact, a journalist based in London who counted many exiled Iraqis among his friends. Among them, he went on, hoping to win the crowd over, was a man who had himself escaped imprisonment and torture at the hands of the regime.

The crowd demanded to know the name of this so-called "friend", and although Goda thought it a rather pointless request, he told them anyway: "Nabeel Yasin, he's a writer, a poet." The effect was immediate. Anger dissipated into generous applause, while many recited lines from Brother Yasin, a poem they seemed to know by heart. Goda was astonished. He had no idea that his friend's name meant anything to the people of Iraq - which Yasin had left in 1980 - nor that this poem, a personal recollection of life before and during Saddam's regime, published modestly in exile, had become the object of such obvious public affection.

Goda returned to London and immediately called Yasin - both poet and poem had got him out of a sticky situation. When Yasin heard the story he was similarly incredulous. The discovery that Brother Yasin and its sequel Brother Yasin Again had been smuggled into the country came as a total shock. No one, least of all its author, could have predicted the poems' decade-long journey right to the hearts of Yasin's countrymen and women.

Only 1,000 copies of the original works were published, in one private UK pressing back in 1994. That slim volume contained both the original Brother Yasin, (written in 1974 and published to great acclaim in Egypt and the Lebanon), and its follow-up, a more mature work flowing out of the experience of exile. Most copies were sold through Arabic bookshops and a handful of copies were sent abroad to a female poet in Amman. That was where Yasin believed the story ended. "Once it had been published I forgot all about it," he says today. "It was impossible to imagine it inside [Iraq] while I was in exile. In separating me from my country Saddam had effectively silenced my voice."

It was only on further investigation that Yasin discovered what had truly happened. The female poet (who still wishes to remain anonymous) had kick-started a journey that ended in Iraq. At the end of 1995 a lone copy was smuggled across the Jordanian border, legend has it, in a lorry carrying food supplies. Although the borders were supposedly impenetrable, it was possible to bribe the poorly paid guards and smuggle illegal materials - such as Yasin's banned poetry - across.

The penalty for both this and any distribution of such works was savage, ranging from imprisonment, the loss of a tongue or hand, to death with retribution against family and friends thrown in for good measure. There were, however, brave individuals who routinely risked their liberty and lives to ensure literature and culture were kept alive within Iraq.

One of these underground figures was known as Tawfiq the tailor. He ran one of Baghdad's most reputable garment repair shops and it was from here that many banned works were distributed, sewn into suit linings or hidden pockets. Among the people Tawfiq passed Brother Yasin to was Miqdad Addulrida, an actor and now director of Baghdad Radio. He ran a corner shop and with the aid of a rickety old photocopier, ran off copies of the poem. He would then travel alone by bus around Baghdad, delivering copies hidden about his person to individuals he knew to be sympathetic. Word-of-mouth soon helped spread the poem's reputation. Yasin had, without knowing it, touched an Iraqi psyche that was struggling under the daily hardships of the regime.

This proves all the more extraordinary given that Yasin's writing had been banned by Saddam Hussein himself in his famously indiscriminate cultural blacklist of 1978. Issued promptly after he assumed absolute power it prohibited thousands of names including such diverse luminaries as Virginia Woolf, Tin Tin and Sartre as well as the homegrown voices of Yasin, Saidi Yusuf and others. Only military literature survived the purge, together with the many books and articles that glorified Saddam's "triumphs" as leader.

Abdul Hameed Alsayah, an Iraqi writer and commentator, explains the poem's impact: "Brother Yasin and Brother Yasin Again became part of the body of work that has come to represent the secret, silent fight against Saddam Hussein's regime. It is one of the most important poems exploring, in a revolutionary way, the link between man's ethereal, spiritual nature and his everyday, habitual life. It expresses simple sentiments while yielding something new with each reading." Another writer says: "The Iraqis, who love tragedy, find themselves drawn to this."

However the writer himself had not intended it to become an anthem for the oppressed. These days, Yasin, who lives in west London, cuts a discreet figure with his small stack of papers and an Arab/English dictionary under his arm. He appears genuinely bemused, although grateful, at the reputation his poem has acquired.

It started life, he says, as a personal expression of the difficult path he and his family, with their leftist politics, had embarked on decades earlier, long before Saddam came to power. From the bloody riots at the 1960 International Worker's Festival that involved three of his brothers to the night in 1972 when he was attacked by the secret police for performing a reading of a new Arabic translation of King Lear at the Iraqi Writers Union their lives had been tainted with violence, intimidation and terror. Making it home that night, he saw the fear and relief on his mother's face and realised that her faith was central to the family's unity. It had kept them strong. This became the point of inspiration for the poem; with the family acting as a metaphor for the country as a whole.

Some artists chose to work under the wing of the regime. Yasin is one of many more that were ostracised. The year before he went into exile he was offered the post of director general of the Iraqi Cultural Office. He turned it down. Now that Saddam Hussein is gone, Yasin's contribution can be openly acknowledged. He does not have to rewrite his place in history as a victim of the regime, as others are doing.

Immediately after liberation in June 2003 Brother Yasin was taken up by a small coalition of new generation designers, artists and painters who designed, artworked and hand printed the poem themselves (this in a country where paper is as rare as gold dust) so that it could be made publicly available. And now, the Iraqi Ministry of Culture is set to further its legitimate circulation by publishing a new 2004 edition.

Yasin saw the bloodthirsty future in 1974, and the long road back to creating an Iraq for Iraqis while in exile. Now that people are free, Hassan Abdul Hameed, who wrote the first public critique of the work after liberation, says, "they are looking to poets like Yasin, books like The Poets Satirise the Kings, and are inspired to do the same." After all, even Saddam knew that a country needed its poets.

from NYTimes...

Arts Briefing
By BEN SISARIO

Published: August 12, 2004


HIGHLIGHTS

NEW POET AT THE TOP The Library of Congress said yesterday that it would name Ted Kooser, left, whose poems often depict the Midwest, as the nation's poet laureate. The appointment of Mr. Kooser, a visiting professor in the English department at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, who lives in Garland, Neb., is to be formally announced today. Mr. Kooser, 65, a retired life insurance executive, has written 10 poetry collections, including "Delights & Shadows" this year, and "Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison," which won the 2001 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. Of the appointment, the Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, said: "Ted Kooser is a major poetic voice for rural and small town American and the first poet laureate chosen from the Great Plains. His verse reaches beyond his native region to touch on universal themes in accessible ways." Mr. Kooser said, "We poets out here don't get a lot of attention, and now I will and I have some trepidation over that.'' Mr. Kooser will take over the position from the Pulitizer Prize-winning poet Louise E. Glück, 60, who is a writer in residence at Yale University, on Oct. 7 with a reading of his work. ELIZABETH OLSON

From: John Tranter [mailto:edit@jacketmagazine.com]
Sent: Sunday, August 08, 2004 10:12 PM
To: edit@jacketmagazine.com
Subject: Carl Rakosi, Barbara Guest, Kathleen Fraser and Gael Turnbull



Among dozens of other pieces, Jacket 25 will feature material on
Carl Rakosi, Barbara Guest, Kathleen Fraser and Gael Turnbull.
Some material is already posted, at

http://jacketmagazine.com/25/

I have room for a dozen more pieces, so if you would like to send something
relating to any of those writers -- a review, memoir, article, or poem --
I will consider further contributions between now and the end of September.

John Tranter, Editor, Jacket magazine

It is east coast poetry conference season.

Kevin Killian on Orono conference, #1, #2, #3, and #4.

And Alli Warren and Stephanie Young on the Boston Poetry Massacre.

There is an interesting article by Steve Evans in most recent issue of The Poker. It has three or so parts.

The first one is a sort of study of poetry prizes. And includes such lines as "Between 1997 and 2003, the period covered by my research, Bidart received something in the neighborhood of an additional $238,500 in prize winnings." and "Ellen Bryant Voigt, winner of more than $150,000; Louise Gluck, whose name appears most often on my list and who won in excess of $100,000; and B. H. Fairchild, author of The Art of the Lathe and also a winner of more than $100,000 in prizes." and "Whatever conquests in legitimacy this tradition [the "other" tradition? he doesn't name it really] has lately made, however many syllabi it has shown up on, however many actual readers it may claim (and that number certainly equals or exceeds the audience for a mainstream poetry that remains mesmerized by the phantasm of the 'general reader'), however many young poets it has excited and influenced, however many academic positions have been landed, or seats won on the Academy of American Poet's board of chancellors, one stronghold of the Dominant Poetic has proven impregnable, and that's the one where the cashbox is kept."

The second is a series of sentences that each contain the word "time." Such as "Time of the Bush Administration's occupation of the United States, and the US's occupation of Iraq. Time of the looters, the mercenaries, and the assassins. Time of the outsources job." etc. And mixes in also poetry culture observation: "Time of the Peter Gizzi student."

And then the last section contains a series of short reviews of the sort that show up on Evans's Third Factory website/blog.

It is an interesting model of how to write an article (or a seminar paper) on contemporary poetry. Part numerical documentation; part suggestive connection; part close reading.

I, thus, recomend purchase of The Poker so you can read the entire essay. You might want to send $10 (checks to Daniel Bouchard) to Daniel Bouchard P.O. Box 390408 Cambridge MA 02139 and ask for issue no. 4. Or better yet, send $34 and get all four issues. No. 2 has a special section on Iraqi poets. Also, go here http://www.durationpress.com/thepoker/.

to listen to
long a story continues
imagining goes
control sits silently
what remains remains
unfinished, continues
now continues here


(I can't remember is it has been three weeks?? Should I continue or maybe it's time to invent something else? BTW: This is superfun. Perhaps more could join!)

Juliana, I have been thinking about the impossible poetic topics. Maybe this has come from my work as a scriptwriter. I thought about discussion on writing itself, around the question of what it means to be a writer. Technically, I have made writing my income-generating occupation by being a TV script writer. But, doing this, I don't know how much of a "writer" I am. I feel like the job takes so much of my writing energy and there's no me in it!

This is (I hope) just a start. I'll try to pop in now and then when I can to talk more about it.
So, more soon!

TEXTPERIMENTATION: A CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP
from Angela Rawlings:

I'm a Canadian-based author who's been happily following the English 270 blog. I've been conscripted to facilitate an online creative writing workshop (focus: online text tools) this upcoming Wednesday, and wondered perhaps if you or your students might be interested in participating. The material covered will likely be familiar to many participants, but my hope is the workshop space will enable folks from across Canada and the States to meet and play together.

The workshop will take place on Wednesday, August 4th, hosted by terminus1525.ca. The workshop's both free and open to the public, and will run for an hour and a half, from 7-8:30 Eastern Standard Time. Full workshop details, including how to download IRC software and log on: http://www.terminus1525.ca/node/view/9068