#Reading Response

[subtextures]

Quick Response to “The Laughter of the Sphinx” by Michael Palmer

I found “The Laughter of the Sphinx” by Michael Palmer on one of our bookshelves a couple of days ago. I finished it today. Back in the early 80’s while still an undergrad at UTAustin, I spent an inordinate amount of time in the Half-Price Book store which was then located at 15th and Lavaca (now torn down and replaced by a bank building, like much of Austin). I would spend hours going through the record albums, or poetry section, both of which were rather large. (Poetry is no longer a very large section in any of the Half-Price book stores nowadays). Emily Dickinson wrote that she knew something was poetry when the back of her head exploded when she read it. In the early 80’s, while my head did not explode, I would feel the words thicken on the page, taking on a physicality which went beyond the page. This would happen even if I could not understand what the poem was saying. I felt this when I read Pound and Ashbery for the first time, and still happens whenever I read Dickinson.  It happened when I read Michael Palmer’s “Notes for Echo Lake” standing in the cold aisle of the poorly heated Half-Price Books. Over the years I continued to read and buy copies of Palmer’s work. I’m not sure he has gotten easier to read, or I am not as shallow a reader as I was in my early 20’s, but I did find more to hang on to than I did in my youth. If you have not read Palmer, “The Laughter of the Sphinx” would be a good place to start. It is an abstract and surrealistic delight, while sometimes taking on the concrete feel of the Objectivists. Perhaps I’ve been reading too much George Oppen lately, but several times in “The Laughter of the Sphinx” the poems read like Objectivist pieces. In an interview I read with Palmer decades ago, he said he did not like the term avant-garde because it assumed a direction. I love getting lost in his poetry.

(February 22, 2025)

[m3llifiedman]

Accessibility and Digital Writing

Accessibility is more important than ever in this digital era. Since the world is becoming more connected, people are being exposed to different types of experiences that digital writing may need to account for. Accessibility options I see most often accounted for online is text-based programs like subtitles. Both YouTube and TikTok allow users to make subtitles for their videos, and even auto-generate subtitles if the original poster chose not to add them themselves. This not only makes visual content accessible for deaf and hard of hearing individuals, it also helps people who may not have these issues.

Though rare, this example is extremely important for digital writers to keep in mind. In Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery's book A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences, they explain why they believe that accommodating for people online should be a focus for writers. They note that "diversity is the richness of life," and that different kinds of people interacting with one another is "as essential as biodiversity is to the rich ecosystem of plants and animals." If we choose not to think about people with accessibility problems, we risk alienating a significant portion of the population. Not having properly designed websites, for example, "create[s] barriers that exclude people from using the web as it was intended."

[clementinenoah13]

Multimodality: An Introduction to this Course (and to this blog)

My name is Clementine, my pronouns are he/they, and welcome to my blog for my course Digital Rhetoric. This will essentially be response posts to the weekly readings.

For week one, we read some of Toward a Composition Made Whole by Jody Shipka.

Since the beginning of composition, and just entertainment in general, there has always been a backlash towards the "unknown and the unusual", the introductions brings up scrapbooks, comics, and a bunch of other forms that were popular in the 60s and 70s. I think these are great examples of how highly debated the new things can be. Even if they are different from what is highly debated now, it can provide us proof that humans really don't change.

Currently, the main debate topic is technology and our dependency on it. So many people in the newer and younger generations are growing up with technology in their hands, and this has been highly controversial since the beginning of the technological craze. Parents and older people cry out "you're always on your cellphones!" And, the younger generation are so used to being on it, we don't know life without it, in a way.

It also reminds me of the "I-Pad Kid" outcry. People are worried and running tests on people who grew up with I-pads in their hands as opposed to books. It is even being seen that these people express their emotions in a different way from people who grew up with books instead. Kind of similar to people with cellphones are more prone to anxiety and worry. And, there is also a parallel between communication issues and those who use cellphones.

Shipka makes a point of bringing these new forms of communication up a lot, and how this can contribute to the "nontraditional" forms of writing, similar to what we saw in the 60s and 70s. This, to me, makes a lot of sense to compare the two. Like I said above, people just like to debate the things that are new and unusual. It feels very similar to people's outcry over the cellphones and their original responses to the television when it became big, at least to me it feels similar. When the television became big, older people were upset and worried it would "rot our brains." Sounds very similar to older people's reaction to the cellphone now, right? But, with these tests being run, it makes sense for them to be worried.

Anyways, Shipka makes a point about how there is a whole bunch of new sets of tools for composition now, since it is no longer just writing. Specifically, keyboards can be seen as one. I can't help but to agree. I find it fascinating that there are so many tools that can contribute to this new form of composition. It's very similar to scrapbooking or comic books, because when you think about those, it is significantly more than just a pencil and paper, it is colors, markers, ink, stamps, pictures, and a whole bunch more depending on what you actually wanna use in there.

It's fascinating to me to see how significantly the world and how we respond to things can change so much as we change and as new tools are introduced. As we grow, so do the things around us. To me, that is so fascinating and says a lot about us as a species. We are prone to change, it has been a thing since the dawn of time. I think that composition (among other things) should reflect these changes we experience. If we can allow room for the comic books and scrapbooks, we can also allow room for the blog posts, YouTube videos, etc. I quite enjoyed reading this text and discussing It, and I look forward to discussing more!

[enemywasp]

"You're putting your sick fantasies onto fictional characters!!"

Oh!! Oh no! I was putting FANTASIES... onto FICTIONAL characters!?! Why did no one tell me!?

[embraceyourdestiny]

to any americans who feel "paralyzed" and "dont know what to do" to help with gaza:

reading a fucking book. i beg of you.

in a time of knowledge suppression is it your duty to arm yourself with knowledge.

read about americas occupations in the middle east.

read about 9/11 from outside of america and see how they inflicted senseless harm and violence to countless amounts of people and have been suppressing your rights for the past 2 fucking decades.

read about any of the countless wars from the past 30 years. especially from a civilian's. and the victims and survivors' perspective. listen to the horror stories and do not plug your fucking ears as to what your country is doing.

and read about fucking gaza and palestine and keep up with what is happening no matter how "sad" or "uncountable" you might get.

dont look away from this.

you dont have the right to be comfortable during countless active genocides.

if you're knowledgeable, you're powerful, and our current state doesnt fucking want that.

you have the power to change things if you open your eyes and scream to the world.

wake the fuck up.

Edit: please check the reblogs there are readings and ways to help

[monobagboii]

ACE 👏 PEOPLE 👏 CAN 👏 MAKE 👏 DIRTY 👏 JOKES

Then again, if you’re an aphobe, your mom already made the dirtiest fucking joke of all time, so why should we bother?

[za1ka]

oh no would you look at the time i can't believe Crowley's a chronic valentine's day misser! but thankfully it's never too late for amore so let's get sappyyyyyyyyyyyyy 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹

[infam10135]

why virality is more about emotional connection than luck

It makes sense to me that going viral is in some way about fostering a connection with the audience. In conversation with the TED talk by Amanda Palmer, it really is about evoking an emotional response from those you want to connect with if you are to be successful in cultivating a response. People like being happy. So try to make them happy.

[subtextures]

Quick Response to “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk.

I finished the RFB selection for October just now. My wife has been telling me that I would probably like “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” by Olga Tokarczuk for months now. So, I picked it for my selection for RFB (my book group). Tokarczuk is a Nobel Laureate. The book is a murder mystery by genre, although it was fairly obvious fairly quickly (at least to me) who did it, and why for the most part. When the why was finally made clear, I made the obvious connection to John Wick (although I doubt the novelist was thinking about Wick). I found the constant talk of names —— real and ones given by the protagonist— to be an interesting theme. Who are we really? What do our names say about ourselves? What do the names we call others have to do with how we perceive them/treat them? Etc. Other ideas which could be explored if one was of that bent: what constitutes reality (William Blake quotes), agism, patriarchal power, what country you are from, as well as fate (astrology), and language and how it translates into our life through use and custom. I’m not sure about the meaning of the title, other than it was one of the many William Blake quotes laced throughout the novel. I could probably come up with something if I wanted to spend the time to do so, but I don’t. “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” was okay overall, I would not be hesitant to read one of her other books. 

[m3llifiedman]

A.I. and Digital Writing

The advent of generative A.I. has a lot of implications for the future of digital writing, mostly in regards to how people choose it to complete tasks that require writing. For example, a Washington Post article on the subject covered the story of a man with dyslexia who started using GPT-3 to help spell check and correct his emails. Overall, A.I. has been a net positive for the man and his company, as now it translates every message into something "unfailingly professional and polite."

Cases like this are not unique, either. In the same article, the author brings up numerous occasions where people online have been playing around with GPT-3 and ChatGPT - one person even used to it find the words to comfort his girlfriend, the bot responding with "I'm here for you and always will support you." Perhaps to some people, this seems like a good thing; people who normally can't find the words can now ask an A.I. chat bot for help. However, to me, this reads as an overall negative for the future of digital writing. If we can't take the time to sit down and think about how to express our love for our partners, and instead have to ask an A.I. to do it, what does that mean for the future of not only writing, but human connection?

[illustriousmuses]

100 Days of Dante: Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy – Inferno: Canto 12

I’m probably slowing down a lot from now on. I’ve gotten a lot busier, but I’m committed to trying to finish the Divine Comedy. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, so even if it takes a long time, I’ll get through the 100 Days of Dante, which is helping me understand a lot about the Divine Comedy while reading it.  Questions for Reflection Dante meets many mythical creatures in…

[quadrantadvisor]

Thinking about DP x DC Jason Todd being a revenant again. Here's my scenario. Jason gets called that by some ghost. He's like "what the fuck is that supposed to mean?" He's heard the term before but he doesn't know any actual lore. He googles it. He scrolls past the Leonardo DiCaprio bear movie. He opens the wiki. Sees the words "animated corpse" and gets a chill diwn his spine. He starts reading the first section.

He closes Wikipedia.

That night he has a nightmare that his family buried him, again, this time with precautions. He wakes up in his own grave, full of stones, too heavy to move, to scream.

[somecluelessidiot]

Remus: Keep an eye on James today. He's going to say something stupid to Regulus and get punched.

Sirius: Sure, I'd love to see James get punched.

Remus: Try again.

Sirius: I... will stop James from getting punched.

Remus: There you go.

[blasphemousclaw]

worst guy in the world and his emotional support immortal ageless seer who knows he’s doomed but still hangs out with him anyway

[keferon]

Important info please read!!

I am a goddamn moron. And I reeeally fucked up.

You know that thing when you get in a new fandom not from watching/reading canon material but from looking at fanart and fanfics?

So your perception of what characters should look/behave like is based on things other people draw and write?

Yeah. I first discovered Texaid through fanfiction and then went to look for some fanart of it and then, like an absolUTE FUCKING IDIOT, assumed I knew what they looked like because I saw how other people draw them. When in reality I was basically drawing other person's design from memory this whole time??? And no one ever called me out about this until today?? Why no one told me sooner ohmyfuckingod I would stop this shit instantly

Guys. GUYS. Those Texaid designs belong to @disformer They were never mine. It's fucking important you all know that.

I'm going through all imaginable stages of grief rn I'm so sorry. I won't use the designs ever again. Stealing them wasn't my intention. I knew Vortex and First Aid as a rare pair never really had any interactions in canon so I didn't bother to do a proper research about them and just went with what I saw in fandom. I'll go search for my clown shoes now.

[artsekey]