Back in November of 2007, Christian Bök introduced The Xenotext Experiment, “a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics.” Basically, Bök wants to write a long anomalous poem, cipher it into an organism’s DNA, track its progress, and write a book. An article from Shotgun Review gives more of the particulars, but if you have time, it would be worth checking out Bök’s whole pitch.

What makes his experiment different from others that have ciphered data or text into organisms (Pak Wong ciphered the lyrics to “It’s a Small World After All” into a bacterium, which I find hilarious) is that Bök’s organism would produce a protein based on the DNA. The organism would write a “response” poem in that protein. In this way, Bök hopes to show that organisms can be more than storage vessels for poems, they can be writing machines.

Aside from drawing science and art together, from finally making that love sonnet profess your “eternal” affection, this experiment excites me because it raises many questions about the future of poetry. What is the axis of poetry and technology? How will we deal with authorship of the protein-generated poems? Is it even ethical to make an organism a poem or a writer of poems? Will writers use organisms in the future to make their writing “better” or “newer?” Will we be able to, or even want to, cipher a poem into a person’s DNA? If so, would be be able to carry our favorite poetry within our own DNA, making us biological libraries? Can poetry be the cultural code that these experiments want to preserve through the apocalypse?

By the time you read this, I will have been in Costa Rica for almost two weeks and should be on my way home. Hopefully I managed to marry off my youngest sister last weekend without bumping into Rush Limbaugh.  

Other than what I’ve been reading on the beach while on vacation, I have nothing interesting to say about books or writing. Instead, I leave you with these two (kind of) related links:

The “German Court Grants Injunction Against Rapidshare” article and My Favorite Source of Legal and Free Online Books.

Coming soon to a field near you.

OK, so it’s nearly baseball season, and my fiancée—a Target employee—is currently touring Minnesota’s new Target Field right now. Sadly, the event was for Target employees only, so I couldn’t attend. Instead, I had to stay home, sigh a lot, and cry. (As a poet, this is what I usually do anyway.)

In the tradition of Shawn’s great post about writing and basketball, I wanted to try to draft an American league all-star baseball team. For my purposes, The American League team will only consist of folks born in the U.S. If someone lived as an expatriate (Eliot, Pound) and faked foreign accents for most of his/her life, I don’t care, they were still born here so we’re taking them. And to make it a fair game, I’m only going to count folks from the 19^th century on. Otherwise the game would be a laugher. Can you imagine the Inter(national) league’s team? They’d have Dante, Petrarch, King David, Sappho, Shakespeare, Keats etc. Yikes. It’d be a bloodbath.

I’m also not going to include a lot of current folks for either team, as I’m considering them rookies, unless they’ve been around for some time. Finally, I’m going to assume that we’re playing somewhere in the States, so there will be a DH and the pitchers won’t have to bat.

The Pitching Rotation (four-pitcher rotation)

#1 (Ace) Emily Dickinson. Always lights out. As dominant and consistent as they get.  Season record, 25-5, ERA: 1.87

#2 William Carlos Williams. The second half of the great American 1-2 punch of 20 game-winners. Season record, 20-9. ERA: 2.75.

#3 Walt Whitman. The innings eater—he revised Leaves of Grass for 33 years. It went from 12 poems to 400 –some pages. He finished the last version on his deathbed. That is, he literally pitched until his arm fell off. And he was good, too. Season record: 16-10, ERA: 3.23.

#4 Russell Edson. A rarity, Edson is a knuckleballer; you never know how his fluttering, woozy knuckler will cross the plate, or if it will at all, but that doesn’t matter because he’s got four pitches to burn, and sooner or later he’ll get the ball across and when he does you won’t be able to hit it. Season record: 12-6. ERA: 3.50.

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Check out this article on hard copy markup, complete with an image of the hand edits on Obama’s health care speech.

Trying to explain why something is funny is an awkward endeavor. Remember that episode of King of the Hill where Bobby, the sweetly, naturally funny young son of a propane and propane accessories salesman, enrolls in clown school? His teacher, mired in academics, has lost touch with what actually makes people laugh. The teacher reduces humor to equations and jargon, and by the time he’s done with Bobby, the boy has a stage name – Tartuffe the Wonder Dog, inspired by the character in Moliere’s play – and a sadly unfunny act. You can’t dissect funny into parts, reproduce them, reassemble them in a particular order and expect an uproarious response. It’s called a sense of humor because it takes a sense, a certain kind of intelligence, to invent and recognize something funny. A donkey in a canoe might be funny, depending on how the donkey got into the canoe or what he says to the chicken on the shore. Or it might just be dumb. It takes a talent to make it the former.

However: If you haven’t the talent and you still really want to be a little bit funny, you might work in some words with the K sound in them. Such as donkey. Or canoe. Or chicken. In Neil Simon’s play The Sunshine Boys, the character Willy explains it: “Fifty-seven years in this business, you learn a few things. You know what words are funny and which words are not funny. Alka Seltzer is funny. You say ‘Alka Seltzer,’ you get a laugh … Words with K in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that’s a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny.”

Some words and phrases do seem to be funnier than others, not only for the K sound but for other aural reasons as well: assonance (aardvark), alliteration (holiday ham), consonance (duck bucket). For some reason, underpants are way funnier than underwear, even though they both cover up your butt.

Here is a list of words other people find intrinsically funny (on the same site: inherently funny diseases, animals and more). Do any words or phrases give you the titters? Or is there really no such thing as inherently funny?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFPLbNtYHyI

This is what the internet is for: David Mamet wrote a memo, in all caps, to the writers on his show The Unit. It’s about the definitions of drama, about what drives a narrative. Of course, someone posted it online. Mamet’s clearly frustrated, but there’s tons of great advice. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Not all of it is relevant to fiction, but some—here are my favorite points (picture Mamet yelling each one):

THE AUDIENCE WILL NOT TUNE IN TO WATCH INFORMATION. YOU WOULDN’T, I WOULDN’T. NO ONE WOULD OR WILL. THE AUDIENCE WILL ONLY TUNE IN AND STAY TUNED TO WATCH DRAMA. Read more »

Not sure why, but for the past week I’ve been digging into the music archives. The reasons behind this sudden glut of nostalgia are not clear– I tend to do this at least once a year– but if the world is ending* I sure hope this is the soundtrack:

Archers of Loaf

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Many of us in the MFA program at Eastern will be graduating in (OMG!) three months, at which time our professors will throw us to the wolves. So this is a request for people who have the inside scoop on the Pacific Northwest literary scene to share their knowledge. From Montana to Washington, Idaho to Oregon, I want to know where people go when they need a literary fix. Where are the best readings, retreats, bookstores, coffeehouses, festivals? Where do you go to write if you live in one of these places? What are the local literary magazines? What small presses should we check out? In other words, if you live in the PNW and you’re a writer, what sustains you? Where do you find a writing community? Why is your city a good one to write in?