Paterson is a long poem in four parts — that a man in himself is a city, beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life in ways which the various aspects of a city may embody — if imaginatively conceived — any city, all the details of which may be made to voice his most intimate convictions. Part One introduces the elemental character of the place. The Second Part comprises the modern replicas. Three will seek a language to make them vocal, and Four, the river below the falls, will be reminiscent of episodes — all that any one man may achieve in a lifetime.

— William Carlos Williams, “Author’s Note” to Paterson

[Note: This is one of 50 posts about cyborgs a project to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the coining of the term.]

[Note 2: This is also very literary, and very weird.]

William Carlos Williams knew plenty about bodies. He was a pediatrician and general practitioner in Rutherford, NJ, and his great poem “To Elsie,” which begins “The pure products of America / go crazy —” moves seamfully from the flesh to aimless machines:

voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us–
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky
…

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

And then there is the mighty fragment from Spring and All, “The rose is obsolete,” imagining a new, cubo-futurist symbol of beauty with the delicacy and strength of organic steel. We could go on.

But Paterson is the poem, the book to be reckoned with, which conceives of a body as a city and a city as a body and both as a flow of heteroclite information, the poem a machine containing them all.

To make two bold statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.

Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

And this is what we see in Paterson. The italicized faux-definition on the first page in verso calls it “an identification and a plan for action to supplant a plan for action… a dispersal and a metamorphosis” but also “a gathering up; a celebration.” In other words, a book.

To make a start,
out of particulars,
and make them general, rolling
up the sum, by defective means–

Or as he would write (and repeat) a handful of pages later, “–Say it, no ideas but in things–” which is to say (he tries to refine) “no ideas but in facts” but also:

Say it! No ideas but in things. Mr.
Paterson has gone away
to rest and write. Inside the bus one sees
his thoughts sitting and standing. His
thoughts alight and scatter–

Paterson, whose ideas are themselves cities criss-crossing his streets in machines made from the mind, is both the Passaic Falls (“the outline of his back”) and the bridge thrown across those falls, and the men who dare each other to jump from the bridge, the women who mysteriously disappear, and finally the fragments of texts from newspapers and letters Williams gathers (the gathering at the same time a dispersal, a release of the information confined in the archive) to make the outline of his poem.

So far everything had gone smoothly. The pulley and ropes were securely fastened on each side of the chasm, and everything made in readiness to pull the clumsy bridge into position. It was a wooden structure boarded up on both sides, and a roof. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon and a large crowd had fathered — a large crowd for that time, as the town only numbered about four thousand — to watch the bridge placed in position.

That day was a great day for old Paterson. It being Saturday, the mills were shut down, so to give the people a chance to celebrate. Among those who came in for a good part of the celebration was Sam Patch, then a resident in Paterson, who was a boss over cotton spinners in one of the mills. He was my boss, and many a time he gave me a cuff over the ears.

Such prose fragments are dropped into the text of Paterson like stones in the Passaic Falls, or like Sam Patch’s body when, after a career of daredevil jumps inaugurated in Paterson (“a national hero”), it’s found frozen downstream after a jump from Niagara.

Sometimes the language is reincorporated later (or before) in the narrative (such as it is) of the poem. Williams describes Paterson as a search for language, the river like the language itself, many languages, bearing many kinds of information:

A false language. A true. A false language pouring— a
language (misunderstood) pouring (misinterpreted) without
dignity, without minister, crashing upon a stone ear.

And with this we are on the terrain of Claude Shannon’s mathematical cryptography, elaborated in the 1940s with the help of John von Neumann, Alan Turing, and others, just miles away, the engineering and metaphorical aspects of which fascinated Williams. In information theory, the medium of information is immaterial (both in the sense that is abstract and not relevant to the calculus), only its degree of distortion, compression, storage, and loss. Signals with(out) the codes to decipher them.

Once we can abstract from the medium, information does not need to be a letter, a photograph, or a radio wave. It can be a body, or the movement of bodies across a city, or any system, whether synthetic, organic, or hybrid.

Williams is known for his work as a physician, for his friendship with avant-garde artists, writers, and photographers in New York (the Williams-Marcel Duchamp-Man Ray friendship was especially fertile), but his interest in science and engineering was equally profound. In 1945, the year he forged Book One of Paterson, he received an honorary degree from the University of Buffalo, where he struck up a long conversation and fast friendship with Vannevar Bush, who that year would write “As We May Think“:

Among the rest the man Bush, the head of the atomic bomb project, was the most interesting to me. I liked him at once. It is amazing what he and his associates have accomplished—looked at simply as work, as brains. He seemed curious about me and was astonished to know I was a physician. I told him that I was deeply impressed by the sheer accomplishments of the persons on the platform. He replied that it took a lot of energy also to write books
(see T. Hugh Crawford, “Paterson, Memex, and Hypertext”)

How could we retrieve disconnected fragments, to make their hidden connections manifest? This was Williams’s problem as a poet, Bush’s as a researcher, Shannon’s as an engineer. To create a network of things — to roll up the universal out of particulars, and make what’s long kept in storage MOVE, faster than microfilm:

Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed, in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. . . . Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path

Or as Williams writes in Paterson:

Texts mount and complicate them-
selves, lead to further texts and those
to synopses, digests and emendations

A new line, for a new mind; a new mind, to be the mind of a city.

The library, the library is on fire by Book III of Paterson:

Hell’s fire. Fire. Sit your horny ass
down. What’s your game? Beat you
at your own game, Fire. Outlast you:
Poet Beats Fire at Its Own Game! The bottle!
the bottle! the bottle! the bottle! I
give you the bottle! What’s burning
now, Fire?

The Library?

Whirling flames, leaping
from house to house, building to building

carried by the wind

the Library is in their path

Beautiful thing! aflame .

a defiance of authority
— burnt Sappho’s poems, burned
by intention (or are they still hid
in the Vatican crypts?) :
beauty is
a defiance of authority :

for they were
unwrapped, fragment by fragment, from
outer mummy cases of papier mâché, inside
Egyptian sarcophagi .

Knowledge cannot lie dead, buried in tombs, it must be transmitted, brought to action, by electrical means if necessary, by film if necessary, fire if necessary, every destruction a liberation, bearing with it the possibility of rebirth.

That is, at least — if one conceives of the body as something more than flesh — as network — as city. As a machine made of words.

A machine with a man inside.

Plenty of my posts at Wired.com’s Gadget Lab are pretty different from what I used to post, or even would want to post, here at Snarkmarket. (We don’t do a whole lot of product hands-on, industry news, or microprocessor specs, for example, here at Snarkmarket.)

Some of them, though, are totally SM-appropriate. Here’s a short list of posts that Snarkmarket readers might have missed in the past week that I think you’d love under any masthead:

• Tracing the Army Knife’s Swiss History
• E-Books Are Still Waiting for Their Avant-Garde
• How Google Instant Could Reinvent Channel Flipping
  
• Why You Should Get Excited About New Mobile Processors
• Games, Chat, ePub: Imagining the Future of Apps for Kindle
• Should You Give Up Gadgets for a Day? (NB: This one makes no sense, b/c editorial swapped out the photo of Mel Gibson that led it. It just reads like I’m weirdly obsessed with Mel Gibson,)
• The Hidden Link Between E-Readers and Sheep (It’s Not What You Think)
• Text-Free Computers Find Work for India’s Unlettered

Hope you enjoy! (And please, comment! We need an injection of Snarkmarket comment awesomeness at Wired badly. It’s a bad vibe over there.)

I’ve reading semi-extensively (i.e., as much as I can without breaking down and buying any more books) about the history of Islam. I’m partly motivated by a desire to better understand its philosophy and manuscript traditions, partly for a half-dozen other reasons too complicated to explain, but mostly just from long-standing interest. A few of my Kottke posts came out of this, as Robin pointed out.

So the best article I’ve come across in a while that touches on all of these things is “What is the Koran?” which appeared in The Atlantic back in 1999. It’s an examination of scholarly debates over the historicity of the Koran, and the propriety of Western scholars applying empirical/rationalist techniques to a holy text (especially when, historically-speaking, Orientalism of this kind hasn’t been motivated by knowledge for knowledge’s sake), plus clampdowns on Muslim writers who’ve brought the traditional history into question.

(Brief summary: Mohammed didn’t write, but received revelations from God, which he recited and others memorized and/or wrote down. A while later, just as with Christianity, a council produced an officially sanctioned text, knocking out variant copies and apocryphal texts, some of which were… extremely interesting. So, let’s imagine the Gnostic Gospels coming out in a country ruled by fundamentalists.)

Anyways, part of the problem these scholars are struggling with is just how FAST Islam grew from outsider rebels to ruling establishment:

Not surprisingly, given the explosive expansion of early Islam and the passage of time between the religion’s birth and the first systematic documenting of its history, Muhammad’s world and the worlds of the historians who subsequently wrote about him were dramatically different. During Islam’s first century alone a provincial band of pagan desert tribesmen became the guardians of a vast international empire of institutional monotheism that teemed with unprecedented literary and scientific activity. Many contemporary historians argue that one cannot expect Islam’s stories about its own origins—particularly given the oral tradition of the early centuries—to have survived this tremendous social transformation intact. Nor can one expect a Muslim historian writing in ninth- or tenth-century Iraq to have discarded his social and intellectual background (and theological convictions) in order accurately to describe a deeply unfamiliar seventh-century Arabian context. R. Stephen Humphreys, writing in Islamic History: A Framework for Inquiry (1988), concisely summed up the issue that historians confront in studying early Islam.

If our goal is to comprehend the way in which Muslims of the late 2nd/8th and 3rd/9th centuries [Islamic calendar / Christian calendar] understood the origins of their society, then we are very well off indeed. But if our aim is to find out “what really happened,” in terms of reliably documented answers to modern questions about the earliest decades of Islamic society, then we are in trouble.

But one of the things that happened during this period is that Islam went from wild, oral, incomprehensible traditions to scholarly/poetic/cultural flowering to clamped-down authoritarian fundamentalism:

As Muslims increasingly came into contact with Christians during the eighth century, the wars of conquest were accompanied by theological polemics, in which Christians and others latched on to the confusing literary state of the Koran as proof of its human origins. Muslim scholars themselves were fastidiously cataloguing the problematic aspects of the Koran—unfamiliar vocabulary, seeming omissions of text, grammatical incongruities, deviant readings, and so on. A major theological debate in fact arose within Islam in the late eighth century, pitting those who believed in the Koran as the “uncreated” and eternal Word of God against those who believed in it as created in time, like anything that isn’t God himself. Under the Caliph al-Ma’mun (813-833) this latter view briefly became orthodox doctrine. It was supported by several schools of thought, including an influential one known as Mu’tazilism, that developed a complex theology based partly on a metaphorical rather than simply literal understanding of the Koran.

By the end of the tenth century the influence of the Mu’tazili school had waned, for complicated political reasons, and the official doctrine had become that of i’jaz, or the “inimitability” of the Koran. (As a result, the Koran has traditionally not been translated by Muslims for non-Arabic-speaking Muslims. Instead it is read and recited in the original by Muslims worldwide, the majority of whom do not speak Arabic. The translations that do exist are considered to be nothing more than scriptural aids and paraphrases.) The adoption of the doctrine of inimitability was a major turning point in Islamic history, and from the tenth century to this day the mainstream Muslim understanding of the Koran as the literal and uncreated Word of God has remained constant.

Okay. Now let’s read The Economist, “The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution“:

THE first internet boom, a decade and a half ago, resembled a religious movement. Omnipresent cyber-gurus, often framed by colourful PowerPoint presentations reminiscent of stained glass, prophesied a digital paradise in which not only would commerce be frictionless and growth exponential, but democracy would be direct and the nation-state would no longer exist…

Fifteen years after its first manifestation as a global, unifying network, it has entered its second phase: it appears to be balkanising, torn apart by three separate, but related forces…. It is still too early to say that the internet has fragmented into “internets”, but there is a danger that it may splinter along geographical and commercial boundaries… To grasp why the internet might unravel, it is necessary to understand how, in the words of Mr Werbach, “it pulled itself together” in the first place. Even today, this seems like something of a miracle…

One reason may be that the rapid rise of the internet, originally an obscure academic network funded by America’s Department of Defence, took everyone by surprise. “The internet was able to develop quietly and organically for years before it became widely known,” writes Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard University, in his 2008 book, “The Future of the Internet—And How To Stop It”. In other words, had telecoms firms, for instance, suspected how big it would become, they might have tried earlier to change its rules.

Maybe this is a much more common pattern than we might realize; things start out radical and unpredictable, resolve into a productive, self-generating force, then stagnate and become fixed or die. Boil it down, and it sounds fairly typical. That how stars work, that’s how cities work, maybe that’s just how life works.

But in both articles, Islam and the Internet are presented as outliers. Judaism and Christianity didn’t grow as fast as Islam did, and their textual tradition produces similar problems, but don’t appear to be as sharp. Likewise, information networks like railroads, the telegraph, and telephone are presented as normally-developing; the internet is weird. Either this pattern is more common than we think it is, or it isn’t. Either way, it’s a meaningful congruence.

If that’s the case — if we can use the history of Islam to think about the internet, and vice versa, then what are the lessons? What are the porential consequences? What interventions, if necessary, are possible? (We have to confront the possibility in both cases that any intervention might be ruinous.)

A Labor Day meditation by Princeton prof/Nation columnist/all-around smartness Melissa Harris-Lacewell:

This is Alexis Madrigal talking to the Columbia Journalism Review about staying up all night editing the first issue of Longshot:

I slept on Friday night, but didn’t sleep at all Saturday. It’s really easy to stay up because there’s so much to do, the adrenaline is going. But definitely the hours between, say, five and seven late Saturday night were really miserable. Those are the worst hours. That’s also usually when the big hairy pieces are getting edited down, that’s when the heavy lifting is happening, like crunching 2,000 words into a 750 word piece.

Um, yeah (raises hand); that was me.

I turned in a crazy, chimerical, multi-constellational draft that I wrote in a feverish hour-and-a-half after finishing my work day for Wired, just went ahead and sent it in early Friday night because I knew I was going to need a day off on Saturday.

Alexis wrote me on Sunday morning and said that they liked it but they couldn’t give me more than a page. “OK, it’s your piece and me in the Velodrome! She’s gonna get a lot shorter.” I didn’t know what velodrome meant. “Ah, yes, I meant thunderdome.” Alexis was clearly very sleepy.

I offered to help with cutting it down, so I needed a target. Alexis: “About 650. it’s got its own page, and with the layout that’s about all we can squeeze.” Exhale. My original draft had been about 2100 words. The rough cut Madrigal had sent me back knocking out whole sections was 1300-1400. I had to cut it in half again at the sentence level. “It’s all about focusing on the throughline. You’re a brilliant aside writer(see graf on non-odysseus nostos making), but we need tight…lemme know if this kills it 4 you.”

Anyways, as Milhouse says in the Simpsons Radioactive Man/Fallout Boy episode, “we did it. It took seven hours, but we did it. It’s done.”

It even got a new title, “Hero’s Welcome.” And I really liked how it turned out. Not just that I was able to get it squeezed in — it has a completely different quality. It was Homeric and rambling when I wrote it, but it’s enigmatic and Abrahamic now. (If this makes no sense, it will once you read it.)

Anyways, for the sake of posterity and those of you who may be interested, I’ve decided to post my original draft of the story here. Longshot readers will have the chance to compare and contrast to the thing as finished. All typos and malepropisms are original, authentic artifacts of the Carmody writing process.

I want to read the whole shaggy thing

Another Storify experiment, this time about my so-far 71%-successful effort to lobby for followers on Twitter.

A reminder: Wonder Woman is fucking awesome.

Earlier: Warriors of Themyscira, or why Miss USA is not-so-secretly an Amazon warrior.

My favorite post that I wrote for Kottke.org might be “Digging in the crates (or Why my generation is into history),” which used a Ta-Nehisi Coates riff on hip-hop’s omnivorous hunger for obscure/great old music as a kind of vernacular historical barometer.

But of course, crate-digging isn’t just a hip-hop thing; it’s also always been a huge part of indie rock culture. This is why every time I hear M.I.A. growl The Modern Lovers’ “Road runner, road runner” over hip-hop & Bollywood beats at the start of “Bamboo Banga,” or James Murphy shout “Gil! Scott! Heron!” at the climax of “Losing My Edge,” I feel like Sasha Frere-Jones had his head up his ass.

Then I think about Bob Dylan stealing old Woody Guthrie records from his friend’s houses in Minneapolis, and I think maybe my generation just isn’t so different:

Read more…

It’s nice today, on the anniversary of the March on Washington, while our friends at Longshot are in LA putting together issue #1, to find something small but inspiring that connects those dots:

Bayard Rustin’s first rule of management was to make lists of every conceivable task. If somebody thinks that something can possibly go wrong, come up with a specific solution, and put it on the list. Organizing anything — a massive march, a union picket, a training program, a newspaper — succeeds or fails because of details.

All day long, Rustin and his team crossed off completed tasks and added new tasks to the three- and four-page lists:

Briefing of Marshals
Sy does press release on cars to Negro press
Telephone for top command
Find out when office tent goes up
Wire Mahalia Jackson
Call Joe Rauh on insurance and inspection
Clarify with Washington police Rockwell’s intentions
Small national office at the Statler

I’m fascinated with Bayard Rustin, have been for years — about a year ago I finally picked up his Collected Writings, Time on Two Crosses. At the end of his life, Rustin became a forceful advocate for gay rights, and a lot of his writing from this period connects the two movements. But in everything I’ve read about Rustin, I’d never heard this story:

At the end of every workday, Rustin convened a staff meeting. Everyone was invited — and expected — to attend, from the heavies like Tom Kahn and Cleveland Robinson down to lowly interns like Peter Orris and Elliott Linzer.

Rustin let everyone else talk. Staffers reported on how many people had written requesting brochures and buttons. They reported on how many buses had been booked for Akron and Albany and New York. They raised questions about security arrangements or coordination with Walter Fauntroy’s operation in Washington.

As others talked, Rustin doodled. As he scribbled notes and crossed out completed tasks, he drew squares and triangles that looked like mazes. Peter Orris, a brainy high school student, was convinced that the doodles helped Rustin think through the relationships between the many-layered tasks. He got Rustin to autograph one of his doodles.

Sometimes, like a herald from the past, Rustin suddenly interrupted the chatter with an old spiritual, his voice sweet and high pitched:

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long ways from home,
A true believer
Sometimes I feel like I’m almos’ gone
Way up in the heab’nly lan’
True believer

Sometimes he sang alone. But he also called out songs everyone knew. Always the teacher, he told them where the song came from, what it meant. He talked to them, for example, about the syncopation in “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel” and the call-and-response patterns in “Swing Low.” He sang the old spirituals with new words targeting Bull Connor, George Wallace, Ross Barnett, and Jim Clark, the most notorious symbols of segregation in the South.

As Harlem slept, the music of slaves and sharecroppers, sit-inners and picketers, gospel choirs and a capella college ensembles, filled the muggy night air.

Listen to this speech.

Listen to it!

I heard King’s “I Have a Dream” on the radio this afternoon. Despite the grandeur of the visuals of the March on Washington, and the power of the text, I think that radio is the best way to experience it. I am amazed, as a writer, teacher, poet, and speaker, at the range of King’s elocutionary instrument.

He doesn’t just use every sonorous rhetorical tool in the book. He makes words rhyme which shouldn’t. He finds transitory consonants and bends them to fit his alliterative schemes. He has the most versatile spondaic foot I’ve ever heard, so much so it could pass for iambic. (Try to find a genuinely unstressed syllable — or unstressed thought — in the way King says “We Will Not Be Satisfied.”)

And he matches and varies his pitch to highlight his parallelisms of matter and mind, in his voice and in the air; a small, thickly built man, speaking from the roots of the trees, from the center of the earth, knowing that the extension of his own gravity stretches like a column from the molten core to the orbit of the moon. He is a single still point with the granted power to bend straight the crooked lines of history.

Originally published January 19, 2009