Frankenstein vs. the World

One nearly has to be a diviner of the low-res video-game arcana posted on his blog to realize that Chris Sylvester is selling a book, but I think this weird tome is just about worth the mere $5.84 that’s being asked on Lulu. A conceptual poem, GRID is (as they say) “deceptively simple” to paraphrase: it’s basically a googleable walkthrough of the world/map for the Nintendo Entertainment System’s original Legend of Zelda game, spread out line-by-line (i.e., screen-by-screen) over 130 sparse pages. Which is funny, because one of the first things you’ll discover when you do google the source text is this comically ambivalent disclaimer by its original author, an (I speculate) “In the Garage” type who published it some years ago under the awesome handle “AceC-DC”:

This FAQ was created by AceC-DC. It is copyrighted under my name and is my property. I am not usually so anal about these things and even if you did copy it is not the end of the world but I am saying this mainly because if somebody is going to try and make a profit of what is mine, then this is to stop it. That is basically why I want it. If you want to post this on your site, I suppose you can, I don’t care really, just as long as you are not making a profit from it. Try to give the credit to me though, that’d be nice. On that note, the copyright is below.

Copyright 2003-2004 AceC-DC

Ambivalence is an affective motif of GRID, a current that runs from this odd disclaimer (omitted in the walkthrough’s second life as poetry), through AceC-DC’s unamused editorializing (”quite pointless really” . . . “Another plot of cemetery” . . . “They really put too much cemetery in this game” . . . “There are not even any enemies on this screen” . . . “Another pointless screen,” etc.), and on to the book’s ultra-minamalist design aesthetic and almost imperceptible release.

But in its kinda-sorta utter pointlessness, GRID makes for a surprisingly absorbing read. Conspicuously listed under the “Travel” section on Lulu, the “pointlessness” lamented in the lines above takes on a curious new significance in Sylvester’s appropriation. Although game walkthoughs are nothing if not purpose-driven, object-oriented enterprises — cheat-sheets meant to accelerate a player’s quest through a game’s world by organizing it around a strategic, narrative teleology — GRID suggests something a bit more like nomadic drift simply by honing in on the way map overviews like this one actually reorder game spaces under a logic that would seem relatively pointless in such a context. Unlike the proper “Walkthru” section of AceC-DC’s full study (a prose essay more like a traveler’s guidebook), the “Map” portion from which GRID sources its text (a lineated list of coordinates visually closer to poetry) actually doesn’t begin with the home screen of gameplay and take the reader step-by-step though essential objectives, but instead proceeds in a strict Cartesian fashion from the upper-left to bottom-right of the game’s total territory (& for the most part omitting any advice about gameplay). The overview thus becomes a peculiar species of landscape art; levels appear and disappear out-of-order, as the priority is instead on the aesthetic and on a Lewis-&-Clark sort of journalism or reportage (”A bridge crossing the creek that divides the region east and west” . . . “A valley. There is a cave” . . . “To the south is an ocean which leads to more vast lands which are not in this game,” etc.).

Another instantly likable aspect of the book is AceC-DC’s persona itself; he is a fine wordsmith, and his extemporaneous & agrammatical asides throughout GRID provide some of the book’s best moments. Although I myself feel a kind of ambivalence in general about the current trend of Conceptual writing, partly because so much of the work so avowedly eschews the personal, there’s a funny undercurrent here that breaks through that. AceC-DC’s entertaining combination of apathy and expediency (e.g., “A dead end at the end of Death Mountain. There is virtually nothing here at all” . . . “If you walk into the waterfall then there will be a lady that will let you gamble for the information she wants to tell you. I know that information so no need gambling with her” . . . “It does have a cave here on the mountain although I honestly do not remember for sure what is inside which I apologize for”) add a goofy verism to the text that both strangely characterizes it and makes it eminently quotable.

Probably some of my appreciation for the book has to do with my fondness for the game itself (for whatever reason, the 8-bit Zelda was the only video game that ever truly absorbed me; the fact that AceC-DC penned his walkthrough in 2003 speaks to the cartridge’s enduring charm.) Nonetheless, Sylvester’s bizarre but impassioned project (he posts somewhere in the neighborhood of five video-game poems a day on SisterAct) should not be mistaken for nostalgia . . . Etymologically speaking, nostalgia identifies a desire not for home but for going home; while it may do other things, this pointless book certainly won’t take you there.

Tags: chris sylvester.

Tags: david trinidad.

It’s wonderful news tonight that CAConrad and Jack Krick have edited an EPC page sparkling with rare & obscure work for one of my very favorite poets, John Wieners.

Tags: john wieners.

Sat., 7/31

Magdelena Zurawski
Joey Yearous-Algozin
Holly Melgard
Robert Dewhurst

2 p.m., SW corner of 6th & Market
(the milkweed sculpture-fountain next to the Dow Chemical building)
hosted by CAConrad / Transgressors
Philadelphia

Tags: holly melgard, joey yearous-algozin, magdelena zurawski.

I marry you world, my stolen heart
dispersed into the fray of clothes
I’ll get back by wearing everything

– Alice Notley

Tags: alice notley.

AMERICA THE LARGE

Matchbooks say Thank you in today’s America
Telephone operators tell you Have a nice day
Restaurant checks say Please come again
And so do the men
Color TV gets better reception here than over there
Criminals spend less time rotting in jail
Everybody has a lot of rights, even the poor
Although they are often too poor to notice
A lot of people’s homes are heated in winter
And even those without heat thank their lucky stars
They aren’t in England pushing luncheon vouchers
Across a greasy steam table in some cafeteria
Landlords are wonderful they never come around
Except to say Hi!
Artists can always get a grant from somewhere
Or someone at least will buy them a drink
Glamorous people invariably get into glamorous magazines
Malcontents find themselves humanely humored by a benevolent government
And nuclear submarines have no parking problems at any naval base.
The radiation level in America is way below the danger level
Established by impartial scientists.
And scientists can always get a grant too.
These are only a few things that are good about America.
There are many more.
Friendly, well trained police.
Expert murderers and rapists to keep them employed.
Nukes, and anti-nukes.
Matter, and anti-matter.
Bonnie and her corresponding Clyde.
Mamie and her ever-presidential Ike.
Rockwells, George Lincoln and Norman
J. Edgar, Herbert, and Buxte Hoover.
There is nothing mysterious about America.
Our only sphinxes adorn Mt. Rushmore like real men
And not some half-breed enigmas nobody ever heard of.
Patti Hearst Patti Page Patti Astor Patti Smith Patty Cake
This is a fantastic, Pat-Happy Nation.
A nation united by surrealism
All fifty states locked in multiple orgasm by a
Real amazing constitution.
Never coming to a climax except in police actions and military
Interventions.
One nation under God
Expunger of Nixon
Bomber of Hanoi
Executioner of the dreaded Rosenbergs, Ethel and Julius
Napalm rainfall for communist demon children
Assassin of Allende, Diem, Kennedy John, Mossadegh, Martin
Luthur King Jr. Malcolm X Kennedy Robert George Jackson
Flag-hoisting icon of Iwo Jima, Tripoli, Guyana
Two-fisted scourge of the enemies of freedom and the freedom of enemies
We salute you OH AMERICA
INVENTOR OF EVERYTHING
DEBTOR OF NOBODY
PROTECTOR OF NATURAL LUBRICANTS FROM THE SORDID
DOMINION OF SMELLY SHEIKS AND THE MUSLIM HOARDES THEY
SQUASH AND ELECTRIFY IN THEIR ELECTRIFYING PRISONS
OMNISCIENT NAVIGATOR OF MESSIAH HELICOPTERS
LEAKING OIL TANKERS AND VOLCANOS

LONG MAY YOU WAVE GOODBYE

– Gary Indiana, 1976

Tags: gary indiana.

Tags: anne waldman.

I was delighted to write a long-distance intro for Bruce Boone’s reading in Portland’s Spare Room series this past Wednesday:

Bruce has been all over the place lately. Robin Tremblay-McGaw quietly reprinted the entire Ted chap in question a couple months back over at X Poetics, alongside her own not-so-mini essay on the text to boot. Plus more reviews of Century of Clouds popping up at 3 A.M. (by Colin Herd) and Sustainable Aircraft (by Dana Ward). And Rob Halpern takes on Boone, Jameson, and Perelman — all via Steve Abbott’s Soup — over at Jacket.

Tags: bruce boone.

This is my favorite issue of Satellite Telephone yet. New writing by: BRUCE BOONE, JOSHUA BECKMAN, MARIE BUCK, TODD COLBY, CACONRAD, THOM DONOVAN, TANYA LARKIN, HEDI EL KHOLTI, ISH KLEIN, CHRIS KRAUS, NICOLE MAURO, SHARON MESMER, REBEKAH RUTKOFF, and ROD SMITH. Original cover drawing by TRACEY EMIN.

$7, ppd.

Paypal and precious valentine image here.

Tags: ****, bears, bruce boone, caconrad, chris kraus, fashion, frozen beauty, gregory markopoulos, hedi el kholti, helium, ish klein, joe dante, jolly roger, joshua beckman, marie buck, monstrous impulses, nicole mauro, rebekah rutkoff, rhombic triacontahedron, rod smith, satellite telephone, sharon mesmer, so-called misery, steve abbott, tanya larkin, the letter y, thom donovan, todd colby, tracey emin, trees.

I’m reading at the ZINC Bar this Sunday:

Corina Copp
Robert Dewhurst
Maggie Nelson

with dancing by

Kathryn TeBordo and her Workshop for Potential Movement

and

Rebecca Ketchum and Rachel Cohen of Racoco Productions

82 w 3rd
b/w Thompson & Sullivan

nyc
6:30 p.m.

Details here: ZINC Bar Reading Series.

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