EL- Module 12-13

Module 12

Part 1: Response (Around half page)

Readings

Rachel Stone,  The Trump-Era Boom in Erasure Poetry Solmaz Sharif,  The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure M. NourbeSe Philip,  PDF excerpt from Zong!   [Optional:  MP3 of a live reading of "Zong #1" ] Amaranth Borsuk, Jesper Juul, and Nick Montfort,  The Deletionist Wave Books,  Erasures  

 

Assignment

Please choose a paragraph or two from one of the first two readings (either of the two articles). Use this text as material to create an erasure of your own as a response to the readings. This erasure will be your main forum post for this week. Try to capture your own thoughts or ideas about this week's readings in the erasure text. Possible ways you could do this: - Photoshop (or other graphic software): take a screenshot, then erase words you don't want to keep. - Word processor: copy and paste, then remove words and keep spacing intact by turning some of them white. Then take a screenshot. Or you could just replace words with spaces. - You could just copy the text and delete parts of it, either cutting words completely (omitting spaces) or replacing them with ______, etc. - You could also print the paragraph out, then actually cut the paper or use a sharpie to black out parts of it, then take a photo. Maybe blacking out words makes more sense for your response than erasing words. - Or any other method that you'd prefer. Attach your image to your post. If you can post it inline so it's visible, great, if not just use the attachment function. I want to emphasize again that I want you to try to really respond to the readings in this constrained and poetic format. This will be tricky. Failure and settling for something imprecise is to be expected, but please do try.

Part 2: 2 peer Response

Student A

As a result of reading Rachel Villari’ s poem  I  now  visualize the terror that immigrants face with Trump in power. I can see how Trump is effectively destroying the lives of immigrants.Through this  reinterpretation of the form, Rachel’s poem reminds us of the horror that children of immigrants feel  when they are ripped away from their parents and placed in cages. Fear of what Trump  will do their children  is rampant among immigrants. The children of immigrants disappear if they cannot see them again. Rachel sends the message that theseimmigrants are being hunted and persecuted, confirming that they are not American citizens. Invoking fear stands against the freedoms America provides. I can see how Trump iseffectively disrupting the lives of immigrants. The poem turns Trump appear as if he into a dictator who has people running for their lives.

Student B

“The first time I confronted erasure as an aesthetic tactic I was horrified,” wrote poet and theorist Solmaz Sharif in 2013. Sharif thought of erasure “as what a state does” and has done in places like Guantánamo, censoring and destroying the language of detainees. Though she wanted to explore the “communication interrupted by state and political forces,” she decided, in her own work, not to manipulate previously existing language. Instead, she created the text she would later erase, so that the only words she would obliterate were her own. 

Module 13

Part 1: Response (500 woods)

The book's title is intended as a reference to those spacecrafts, which have both left our solar system and entered interstellar space, traveling farther away into the unknown than any other human-created objects in history.  After reading the book (and its epilogues), please write a response post Consider the way the book was written, how it connects to the Voyager spacecraft and golden record, and to ideas about selective renditions (and omissions) of history. How does the book, as well as the process of poetic/selective erasure of language, connect back to the black box concept and digital platforms?

Reading

Srikanth Reddy, Voyager

Part 2: peer response (2X 250 words)

Student A

Voyager continues the on theme of blackbox poetry that has been discussed throughout this course. Each poem, paragraph, and erasure piece from the epilogue has its own hidden story, for which only the author has context behind. Much of the poems and other pieces from this book share themes common in erasure poetry about political figures and wars. The book heavily alluded to both World War I and World War II, though many pieces can allude to war in general. However, going on the idea that the book alludes to one or both of the World Wars, it itself is symbolic as with each passing day, the book grows further in age from the wars it discusses. Similarly to the Voyager space crafts, they both age from when they were first launched in the late twentieth century as well as in distance from Earth with each passing day. To specify to the Voyager's gold record, the songs, while many of them classical, are still considered outdated. This theme furthers with the choice putting Chuck Barry in the vinyl. If the record were put together today, it likely may not have been Chuck Barry, but a timeless classic (like perhaps Bohemian Rhapsody) or a newer pop song (like, for example, Poker Face by Lady Gaga). Both Voyager space crafts and book, however as they move further from things, also move towards something. The space crafts near stars, and possibly other life forms. The book moves towards being read by more people, sending a message about the past.  The epilogues went perfectly with last weeks module about erasure poetry. Each epilogue sent a different message due to the difference in which specific words were crossed out and bolded. Again, they sent particular messages about the government and other political topics and figures, which further pushed the epilogues into the political erasure poetry idea that we have seen so much of over the last week. The messages again, were powerful statements, and also pertained to the narrator's life as well as the war and politics he alluded to. the epilogues, as they are all based on the same words, function similarly to the Voyager space craft's gold record. One medium (same words of the epilogue, same vinyl record), however each piece (individual epilogue or song on the vinyl record) says something different.  Both book and space craft send a message about aging, but also about moving towards something. Even the space crafts fall into the blackbox category. Suppose one day they do reach other planets with other life forms. Are those life forms going to know what to do with the space craft and record? Will they even be able to do anything with it (as in will their body parts be able to work to get the record to work?)? The space crafts will be total black boxes to them, too. 

Student B And before you ask, yes, this is an Elton John reference. To further compound unrelated things, I remember seeing the Voyager Golden Disk on Beast Wars as a kid so talking about it now scratches my itch for nostalgia. Anyway, the beginning of book one corresponds with the Voyager, I assume, as a sort of nonsensical series of words that replicate the same feelings an outsider would have when understanding the voices on the Golden Disk while talking about Voyager. The lines "Black palace//One would not wish this account to become a catalogue of the disappeared" refer to space initially as well as a lament that perhaps the voyager disc may be the last remnants of Earth should something catastrophic happen to it. There are more direct notes about the craft: such as in lines "There is no distinction between ideology and image. One. He records his name on a gold medallion. Two. The philosopher must say is. The world is legion." Working backwards, the world being legion refers to the world, which comprised of many people, as a singular definable entity. The gold medallion is obviously a reference to the golden disc, but "he" probably refers to Carl Sagan, though it also could refer to the first speaker on the track. The lack of difference between ideology and image might refer to the fact that every written thing or compilation argues something. By having a particular person construct the contents of the disc, they are, whether knowingly or unknowingly, imprinting their view of the world onto potential aliens. So their ideology then becomes the image that outsiders would see, and conversely, the image makes up a specific ideology. The disc is ultimately black box poetry, not because we don't know how it works, but because we don't know the process with which they select these things. Like erasure poetry, they don't show various things that mankind is capable of. They only show the good and sometimes weird stuff. As if an alien cares how we eat things. I understand why people would be iffy on adding things relating to human atrocities, but the fact that it's erased makes it seem that we want to have this peaceful veneer over our less civilized parts of history. This is a complicated issue for me. On one hand, war isn't something that humankind is particularly proud about and we should try to show the good sides of Earth because there certainly is some (video games, dogs, ice cream). Conversely, it is important to not give a false image of ourselves. We do horrible things to each other and to nature in general. We should be honest with ourselves if we are to be honest with a distant life form unless our goal is to lie to them as much as we lie to ourselves.