Speech as publication: on translating Beo. 259

ell, tonight has certainly been interesting. It’s a scorcher here in New Haven; I recently developed a sudden, inexplicable pain in my knee; and oh, yeah, my last blog post was just plagiarized. And plagiarized poorly, I might add.

As I sat in my kitchen, icing my knee with a bag of frozen peas and pondering the inanity of thieving e-content, only to immediately (re)publish it on another WordPress blog and (inadvertently?) alert the original author by creating a temporary trackback link to the thieved work (!)—as I sat there, the answer to a three-day-long puzzle I’ve been working on came galumphing right outta the air. It went something like this (angels sing):

requited him with words long treasured up

Why Twitter is already monetized, and what you can do about it

Chancing across the inescapable SEO chatter on Twitter, you’d think that most interwebs users are waiting with breath ybaited for Twitter or some third party to come up with Teh Ultimate Monetization of Twitter. But as some of you Tweeple might already suspect, Twitter has been thoroughly monetized ever since He Who Shall Not Be Cast—let’s call him Kashton Utcher—first popularized the microblogging startup among celebrities and other minor ailments.

University Presses on Twitter: an annotated list

A lot of university presses have begun to harness the power of Twitter to keep folks updated on their goings-on. Here’s a comprehensive list of official university press Twitter accounts. Enjoy!

Four things Twitter could learn from medieval monks

Myne gentle readers,

Yesterday I read this bloggung by Jeff Sexton at GrokDotCom, identifying a Twitter crisis (essentially, spam) and laying out three possible paths for Twitter going forward: (1) Twitter adapts; (2) Twitter users adapt; or (3) DER TOD (that’s German for “Aw, shit” and ought to be spoken in a low rasp).

This got me thinking, Aren’t Queens of the Stone Age just so underrated? The self-described “robot rockers” have all but cornered the market on intelligent modal hard rock. Here’s the entirety of their live performance at the 2005 Eurockéennes:

Then I thought, Wait, isn’t there some analogy for Twitter I keep bringing up? Oh, right. Medieval manuscripts.

“The rest is just backwash”: a brief history of sparseness

In ancient times, sparseness was the enemy. To prevail, states needed to obtain more power, more knowledge, and more people than the opposition. The complementary ancient concepts of virtue and barbarity are concepts of abundance, in the form of a simple imperative: do well (Gk. eu prattein), and do it often, or submit to the uncivilized hordes. As a result of a series of horrifying imperial campaigns, the populations of the dominant societies, having quelled the imminent threats to their existence, boomed, setting the stage for the decadence of late antiquity.

Modernity recuperated this ancient aesthetic, favoring the baroque in art, architecture, literature, and philosophy, and finding its apotheosis in the bourgeoisie, a class defined by its constant striving toward abundance. As a result of a series of horrifying imperial campaigns, the populations of the dominant societies, having quelled the imminent threats to their existence, boomed. Though warfare had undergone considerable development since antiquity, modern wars still pitted abundance against abundance. The Cold War in particular stood as the epitome of the modern war: silent, nebulous, frenetic, an arms race, a population race, and a propaganda contest. The norms and institutions that survived the modern wars can in good faith be characterized as “the shit that stuck.”

Globalization, the archive, and really, really good bookstores

Today I created a public, editable map of world bookstores on ZeeMaps. The idea is that people add their favorite bookstores, creating a geographical concordance of the best places to buy interesting new and used books. As with all crowdsourced endeavors, the meaning of “interesting” will evolve along with the userbase.

This has the potential to become the Wikipedia of bookstore recommendations. (Actually, I am considering renaming the map Wikibibliotheque.) On this kind of user-sourced map, the private routines of individuals are published directly as recommendations; the research that would go into an analogous corporate project is instead expressed as life experience; and instead of a commercial catchphrase, or, worse, the store’s own slogans, the map offers user-generated tags and annotations.

Conversely, the map scores the immensity of Earth with flavorful pointers. Even if you have never been to Greenport, NY (or the Western Hemisphere), its reality for you is assured by my having uploaded markers for two local bookstores.

Viewed as a sort of geographical poetry, this database is pre-eminently unmodern, substituting indexicality for narrative, and an overt representational system (the map) for biographical verisimilitude.

If this takes off, I may consider other ways to collect and publish the information. (It has, for instance, been suggested that the map ought to be integrated with other internet tools.) As always, your feedback is welcome.

10 ways to expand your Twitter network without following anyone

Everybody knows that mass-following on Twitter is an easy way to score some exceptionally uninterested, random followers. If the emergence of so-called “Twitter whales” (users with over 10,000 followers) has proven anything, it’s that any shmuck with some programming skills, a super-bland e-persona, and too much free time can manufacture an impressive follower count. But that kind of strategy is really not valuable to you or your followers, and essentially degrades the entire meaning of following on Twitter.

The best kind of followers are the ones who actively follow you because they are already interested in what you have to say. Moreover, your social reach and your followership are not completely coterminous. Here are some simple ways to expand your Twitter network without following anyone.

The medieval blogge: Or, unmodernity explainified

It is only right to begin with this post over at Unlocked Wordhoard, which helped me contextualize my feelings toward medieval literature, modernity, and emergent tech. I didn’t know it at the time, but the moment I read that post, @unmodern was born. Suddenly I wasn’t so unimaginable! Here was a community of up-and-coming or established medievalists who embraced blogging and internet lingo with gusto. For those of you who do not share these sentiments in full, this may sound absurd, but reading references to my favorite medieval texts slathered in wry meme-speak at Got Medieval or Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog was as fulfilling as seventeen seminars on Beowulf. In what follows I briefly outline the virtues of an unmodern mindset.

Why poetry is still relevant: a community- based model

A few years ago Bruce Wexler wrote in to Newsweek glibly declaring the death of poetry. In this witty and widely disseminated letter, Wexler argues that the me-first, impatient mentality of the last half-century has proved fatal to poetry:

By the ’90s, it was all over. If you doubt this statement, consider that poetry is the only art form where the number of people creating it is far greater than the number of people appreciating it. Anyone can write a bad poem. To appreciate a good one, though, takes knowledge and commitment. As a society, we lack this knowledge and commitment. People don’t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren’t willing to let the words wash over them like a wave, demanding instead for the meaning to flow clearly and quickly. They want narrative-driven forms, stand-alone art that doesn’t require an understanding of the larger context.

I, too, want these things. I am part of a world that apotheosizes the trendy, and poetry is just about as untrendy as it gets. I want to read books with buzz–in part because I make my living as a ghostwriter of and collaborator on books–and I can’t remember the last book of poetry that created even a dying mosquito’s worth of hum. I am also lazy, and poetry takes work.

I do not dispute these general observations of Mr. Wexler’s; his definition of “dead” is quite the last word on the subject. I would suggest, however, that we disagree on what constitutes poetry today.

How to give good link on Twitter

The best use of Twitter, as far as I am concerned, is forwarding interesting links. It’s like Digg transmuted into a conversation. I don’t really browse the internet anymore, I just check out what my 200 favorite Twitterers have found. With that in mind, here is my quick 5-step guide to crafting enticing, informative, and well-mannered links on Twitter:

1. Always credit the source. Use RT to directly quote other Twitterers, and via for rephrasing and commenting on other tweets. If you are posting original material from the web, it is also good to identify the agency responsible for the content, e.g., “Huffpost: Same-sex marriage struggle has medieval roots. http://tr.im/rQOo.”