Download or read book Uncreative Writing written by Kenneth Goldsmith and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning.
Download or read book Day written by Kenneth Goldsmith and published by Geoffrey Young. This book was released on 2003 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. "I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity. On Friday, September 1, 2000, I began retyping the day's NEW YORK TIMES word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, page by page." With these words, Kenneth Goldsmith embarked upon a project which he termed "uncreative writing", that is: uncreativity as a constraint-based process; uncreativity as a creative practice. By typing page upon page, making no distinction between article, editorial and advertisement, disregarding all typographic and graphical treatments, Goldsmith levels the daily newspaper. DAY is a monument to the ephemeral, comprised of yesterday's news, a fleeting moment concretized, captured, then reframed into the discourse of literature. "When I reach 40, I hope to have cleansed myself of all creativity"-Kenneth Goldsmith.
Download or read book Wasting Time on the Internet written by Kenneth Goldsmith and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using clear, readable prose, conceptual artist and poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s manifesto shows how our time on the internet is not really wasted but is quite productive and creative as he puts the experience in its proper theoretical and philosophical context. Kenneth Goldsmith wants you to rethink the internet. Many people feel guilty after spending hours watching cat videos or clicking link after link after link. But Goldsmith sees that “wasted” time differently. Unlike old media, the internet demands active engagement—and it’s actually making us more social, more creative, even more productive. When Goldsmith, a renowned conceptual artist and poet, introduced a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Wasting Time on the Internet”, he nearly broke the internet. The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Slate, Vice, Time, CNN, the Telegraph, and many more, ran articles expressing their shock, dismay, and, ultimately, their curiosity. Goldsmith’s ideas struck a nerve, because they are brilliantly subversive—and endlessly shareable. In Wasting Time on the Internet, Goldsmith expands upon his provocative insights, contending that our digital lives are remaking human experience. When we’re “wasting time,” we’re actually creating a culture of collaboration. We’re reading and writing more—and quite differently. And we’re turning concepts of authority and authenticity upside-down. The internet puts us in a state between deep focus and subconscious flow, a state that Goldsmith argues is ideal for creativity. Where that creativity takes us will be one of the stories of the twenty-first century. Wide-ranging, counterintuitive, engrossing, unpredictable—like the internet itself—Wasting Time on the Internet is the manifesto you didn’t know you needed.
Download or read book Sin and Syntax written by Constance Hale and published by Crown. This book was released on 2013-08-13 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fully revised and updated edition with writing prompts and challenges in every chapter Today’s writers need more spunk than Strunk: whether it's the Great American e-mail, Madison Avenue advertising, or Grammy Award-winning rap lyrics, memorable writing must jump off the page. Copy veteran Constance Hale is on a mission to make creative communication, both the lyrical and the unlawful, an option for everyone. With its crisp, witty tone, Sin and Syntax covers grammar’s ground rules while revealing countless unconventional syntax secrets (such as how to use—Gasp!—interjections or when to pepper your prose with slang) that make for sinfully good writing. Discover how to: *Distinguish between words that are “pearls” and words that are “potatoes” * Avoid “couch potato thinking” and “commitment phobia” when choosing verbs * Use literary devices such as onomatopoeia, alliteration, and metaphor (and understand what you're doing) Everyone needs to know how to write stylish prose—students, professionals, and seasoned writers alike. Whether you’re writing to sell, shock, or just sing, Sin and Syntax—now celebrating 20 years in print—is the guide you need to improve your command of the English language.
Download or read book Duchamp is My Lawyer written by Kenneth Goldsmith and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996, during the relatively early days of the web, Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb to post hard-to-find works of concrete poetry. What started out as a site to share works from a relatively obscure literary movement grew into an essential archive of twentieth- and twenty-first-century avant-garde and experimental literature, film, and music. Visitors around the world now have access to both obscure and canonical works, from artists such as Kara Walker, Yoko Ono, Pauline Oliveros, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Cecil Taylor, Glenn Ligon, William Burroughs, and Jean-Luc Godard. In Duchamp Is My Lawyer, Goldsmith tells the history of UbuWeb, explaining the motivations behind its creation and how artistic works are archived, consumed, and distributed online. Based on his own experiences and interviews with a variety of experts, Goldsmith describes how the site navigates issues of copyright and the ways that UbuWeb challenges familiar configurations and histories of the avant-garde. The book also portrays the growth of other "shadow libraries" and includes a section on the artists whose works reflect the aims, aesthetics, and ethos of UbuWeb. Goldsmith concludes by contrasting UbuWeb's commitment to the free-culture movement and giving access to a wide range of artistic works with today's gatekeepers of algorithmic culture, such as Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify.
Download or read book Unoriginal Genius written by Marjorie Perloff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marjorie Perloff here explores this intriguing development in contemporary poetry: the embrace of "unoriginal" writing. Paradoxically, she argues, such citational and often constraint-based poetry is more accessible and, in a sense, "personal" than was the hermetic poetry of the 1980's and 90's. --
Download or read book Against Expression written by Craig Dworkin and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-17 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Bernstein has described conceptual "poetry pregnant with thought." Against Expression, the premier anthology of conceptual writing, presents work that is by turns thoughtful, funny, provocative, and disturbing. Editors Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith chart the trajectory of the conceptual aesthetic from early precursors such as Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp through major avant-garde groups of the past century, including Dada, Oulipo, Fluxus, and language poetry, to name just a few. The works of more than a hundred writers from Aasprong to Zykov demonstrate a remarkable variety of new ways of thinking about the nature of texts, information, and art, using found, appropriated, and randomly generated texts to explore the possibilities of non-expressive language. --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Traffic written by Kenneth Goldsmith and published by Make Now Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry.The latest in Goldsmith's transcription and defamiliarization efforts, TRAFFIC exhibits the author's signature mode: remediating found texts and crossing artifice with everyday life". "In both form and content, Kenneth Goldsmith's TRAFFIC recalls nothing so much as the extended tracking shot in Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film Week-End, and the book's audacious sustain elicits the same series of responses: surprise, admiration, amusement, incredulity, horror, recognition, terror, boredom, impatience, awe...."--Craig Dworkin.
Download or read book Capital written by Kenneth Goldsmith and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page homage to New York City Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis. It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Central Park,” “Commodity,” “Loneliness,” “Gentrification,” “Advertising,” and “Mapplethorpe.” Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly ever be captured in words? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible project.
Download or read book Becoming a Writer written by Dorothea Brande and published by BEYOND BOOKS HUB. This book was released on 2024-07-28 with total page 8 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlock your writing potential with Dorothea Brande's classic guide, "Becoming a Writer." This book provides aspiring writers with essential tools and techniques to develop their craft and cultivate a disciplined writing habit. Brande's practical advice and inspirational insights will empower you to overcome creative blocks and bring your literary dreams to life. Start your journey towards becoming a confident and successful writer today.
Download or read book Mrs Lincoln s Dressmaker written by Jennifer Chiaverini and published by Dutton. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Chiaverini's compelling historical novel unveils the private lives of Abraham and Mary Lincoln through the perspective of the First Lady's most trusted confidante and friend, her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley. In a life that spanned nearly a century and witnessed some of the most momentous events in American history, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was born a slave. A gifted seamstress, she earned her freedom by the skill of her needle, and won the friendship of First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln by her devotion. A sweeping historical novel, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker illuminates the extraordinary relationship the two women shared, beginning in the hallowed halls of the White House during the trials of the Civil War and enduring almost, but not quite, to the end of Mrs. Lincoln's days.
Download or read book Microstyle The Art of Writing Little written by Christopher Johnson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-07-25 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A work of pop linguistics . . . [that] synthesizes . . . grammar, branding, cognitive science and Web theory . . . with intelligence and friendly wit.”—New York Times Welcome to the age of the incredible shrinking message. Your guide to this new landscape, Christopher Johnson reveals the once-secret knowledge of poets, copywriters, brand namers, political speechwriters, and other professional verbal miniaturists. Each chapter discusses one tool that helps short messages grab attention, communicate instantly, stick in the mind, and roll off the tongue. Piled high with examples from corporate slogans to movie titles to product names, Microstyle shows readers how to say the most with the least, while offering a lively romp through the historic transformation of mass media into the media of the personal.
Download or read book Congratulations On Everything written by Nathan Whitlock and published by ECW Press. This book was released on 2016-05-01 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dark and comic novel, Congratulations On Everything tracks the struggles, frailties and cruelly pyrrhic victories of the middle-aged owner of a bar-restaurant and a 30ish lunch shift waitress. Jeremy has bought into the teachings of an empowerment and success guru, hook, line and sinker. A Toronto service industry lifer, he's risen through the ranks until he finally takes the keys to his destiny and opens his own place, The Ice Shack. Everyone assumes Ice Shack daytime waitress Charlene is innocent and empathetic, but in reality she's desperately unhappy and looking for a way out of her marriage to her high-school sweetheart. A drunken encounter between Charlene and her boss Jeremy sends them both careening. The Ice Shack stops being an oasis of sanity and, as Jeremy struggles to keep his business afloat, he'll stop at nothing to maintain his successful, good guy self-image. In an era when foodies rule and chefs become superstars, Congratulations On Everything is a hilarious and occasionally uncomfortable dose of anti-foodie reality that reveals what goes on when the customers and Instagrammers aren't around — and even sometimes when they are.
Download or read book Composition Creative Writing Studies and the Digital Humanities written by Adam Koehler and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an era of blurred generic boundaries, multimedia storytelling, and open-source culture, creative writing scholars stand poised to consider the role that technology-and the creative writer's playful engagement with technology-has occupied in the evolution of its theory and practice. Composition, Creative Writing Studies and the Digital Humanities is the first book to bring these three fields together to open up new opportunities and directions for creative writing studies. Placing the rise of Creative Writing Studies alongside the rise of the digital humanities in Composition/Rhetoric, Adam Koehler shows that the use of new media and its attendant re-evaluation of fundamental assumptions in the field stands to guide Creative Writing Studies into a new era. Covering current developments in composition and the digital humanities, this book re-examines established assumptions about process, genre, authority/authorship and pedagogical practice in the creative writing classroom.
Download or read book Anything You Want written by Derek Sivers and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You can follow the beaten path and call yourself an entrepreneur or you can blaze your own trail and really be one. When Derek Sivers started CD Baby, he wasn’t planning on building a major business. He was a successful independent musician who just wanted to sell his CDs online. When no one would help him do it, he set out on his own and built an online store from scratch. He started in 1998 by helping his friends sell their CDs. In 2000, he hired his first employee. Eight years later, he sold CD Baby for $22 million. Sivers didn’t need a business plan, and neither do you. You don’t need to think big; in fact, it’s better if you don’t. Start with what you have, care about your customers more than yourself, and run your business like you don’t need the money.
Download or read book Creative Writing in the Digital Age written by Michael Dean Clark and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-29 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creative Writing in the Digital Age explores the vast array of opportunities that technology provides the Creative Writing teacher, ranging from effective online workshop models to methods that blur the boundaries of genre. From social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to more advanced software like Inform 7, the book investigates the benefits and potential challenges these technologies present instructors in the classroom. Written with the everyday instructor in mind, the book includes practical classroom lessons that can be easily adapted to creative writing courses regardless of the instructor's technical expertise.
Download or read book Getting Inside Jack Kerouac s Head written by Jack Kerouac and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Retyping On the Road is not only a remarkable performance – of endurance, concentration, and apprenticeship – it is also a deadpan experiment in textual literary criticism. Kerouac's original typescript was oriented toward the writer. Morris' practice collapses reader and writer, reorienting Kerouac's typescript to the digital, discontinuous unit of the published codex page. In doing so, Morris both inverts Kerouac's style of production – pecking slowly and methodically where his predecessor sped along at a reputed one-hundred-words-per-benzedrine-fuelled-minute – and he simultaneously fulfils its legend. A constrained and unexpressive homage to the era that heralded unconstrained and improvisatory expressionism, Getting Inside Jack Kerouac's Head showcases the critical power of the extended techniques of conceptually rigorous 'uncreative writing.' In the process it reclaims Truman Capote's Parthian shot as a point of pride: 'it isn't writing at all – it's typing.' And type – as Kerouac used the word in On the Road – is all about genre.' (Professor Craig Dworkin, University of Utah)
