If you thought my OuLiPo love was a little kooky, just wait 'till you check out OuMyPo [thanks, Sean!]. That's short for "Ouvroir de MySpace Potentielle," which means exactly what you think it means: Workshop of Potential MySpace.

OuMyPo "seeks to uncover new MySpace structures, patterns and behaviors," such as:

the "F+7″ method: Replace every friend in your "Top Friends" list with the friend seven entries after that person in your "My Friends" list

…and…

try the "Pimp My MySpace HTML Lipogram" whereby you cannot use any HTML codes containing the letters h, t, m, or l when constructing your page

According to the first comment on this post on Poetry Foundation's blog harriet, OuMyPo is the work of one Luke McGowan, though this is otherwise unverifiable, at least through google.

If this all sounds absurdly silly, consider the fact that my younger brother spends an amount of creative energy on his MySpace (well, now Facebook) profile comprable to that which I spent rewriting bad pop-punk song lyrics to make fun of my high school, drawing terrible cartoons featuring myself and my two best friends as the dubious superheros "the triangle girls," and compiling an epic compendium of (then-)hilarious quotes from friends, family, and teachers alike.

OuFaPo, anyone?

Yes, I might be the biggest nerd alive. (And, yes, I know, I'm late and the LOL backlash has begun.) But after stumbling across those loltheorists, I couldn't help but think, don't the non-theoretical writers who provided the material that inspired all that literary theory to begin with deserve as much LOL love as their theorist counterparts?

Yes, of course they do! And what authors offer better LOL fodder than members of the OULIPO—the mostly French cliqué of writers and mathematicians who unleashed their creativity by writing under unusual (and generally mathematically significant) constraints. OULIPO, in case you were wondering, is an acronym, and the words it stands for in French translate roughly to "workshop of potential literature."

Anyway, here's my lolOULIPO:

Georges Perec, whose novel La Disparition does not include the letter "e" even once in 300 pages.

Raymond Queneau, whose collection of ten sonnets is printed on paper that's sliced to allow the reader to flip through individual lines, providing a hundred thousand billion unique sonnets.

Italo Calvino, whose novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler includes the reader as a character.

Now, so you don't think I've totally gone bananas with this LOL nonsense, here's a handful of the best OULIPO materials to be found online:

interactive Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
Create your own sonnet (of the hundred thousand billion available) in French and English.

OULIPO collection
A special issue of the online literary mag drunken boat. From the introductory essay, "OULIPO at 45" by OULIPO president Paul Fournel:

…the role assigned to Oulipo is simply that of proposing a constraint, giving a model of that constraint, and thus, allowing it to meet the text that will take on its form. […] There is no ideal Oulipian text. The proposed structure is like that of the sonnet, into which Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé may choose to pour their singular talent.

Into the Maze
An essay by poet/translator Mónica de la Torre. Quote: "the more difficult the task, the better it feels to achieve it."

official OULIPO site
For francophones only.

I couldn't tell you why, but I can't stop loving this meme. Even more appropriate for kenspeckling than lolcode, I give you the loltheorists community on livejournal [via masters of media], featuring lol-riffic literary theorists, psychologists, computer scientists, media theorists, and moar!

It doesn't seem very moderated—the quality varies a lot and the better ones tend to have been posted earlier, so you have to dig for 'em. My favorites are below.

lolbarthes

lolfreud

lol p.k.dick

loleinstein

lolnietzhe

lolschrödinger

lollovelace

lolmcluhan

lolfoucault

If you've noticed that posting's been even lighter than usual in the past two months, I have a great addition to the list of why-I-haven't-blogged excuses: I've finally been writing the my thesis to complete my M.A. in English Literature.

And to make up for lost time, you can read my thesis!

A Proprietary Protocol: How Search Defines Authority Online*

For those of you balking, I have to protest that my topic is pretty darn cool—the paper's about how search engines construct authoritativeness online (as you might gather from the title), both by lending authority to other sites and by acting as authoritative sources themselves. Because of this amazingly rockin' topic my citations range from everyone's favorite internet theorist Alexander Galloway to Kant to John Battelle and a few folks who made search engines to boing boing, waxy, and valleywag. Yup, I cited boing boing in an academic paper.

A good number of people I've talked to about this in casual conversation seem to find it interesting, so hopefully some of my intrepid visitors will as well. I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out, but of course it is an M.A. thesis and not the holy grail of web theory, so there's always more that could be said. I would've particularly liked to go into the authoritativeness of wikipedia (since its authority is mutually reinforcing with search engines') and the categorical power of tagging (since categorization is a means to authority). But at ~15,000 words this is already one long M.A. thesis by departmental guidelines.

In addition to "wow, that's cool," I've gotten a lot of comments along the lines of "that's a paper for an English degree???" I was extremely lucky to find an (awesome!) adviser, Cliff Siskin, who was interested in technology, but it should also be pointed out that literature departments—especially the English department at NYU, where I've been working on this degree—are interdisciplinary by nature and have been so for a very long time, if not forever. Note the section listing from the literary theory anthology I used my first semester in grad school:

• Formalisms
• Structuralism and Linguistics
• Psychoanalysis
• Marxism
• Post-Structuralism, Deconstruction, and Post-Modernism
• Feminism
• Gender Studies, Gay/Lesbian Studies, Queer Theory
• Historicisms
• Ethnic Studies, Post-Coloniality, and International Studies
• Cultural Studies

In other words, literary studies quite often concerns itself with far more than literature. Technological studies as concern the evolution of print media are widely acknowledged as legitimate in the literary world, though perhaps not totally mainstream. As digital technology changes our relationship with text and information, I'd argue that literature departments will have to concern themselves with it to survive.

On a lighter note though, I'm super-excited to have finally finished this degree. Oddly enough I've worked on my M.A. over a longer period of time than I worked on my B.A.—but in my own defense I've been up to a lot in the meantime, work-wise and otherwise.

*I'm not sure of the copyright restrictions NYU puts on M.A. theses, but I have a feeling that the university you complete a thesis at has some stake in it. I've put in an email to NYU's copyright people but haven't heard back yet. For now, I'd consider this as copyright (instead of CC licensed as the rest of my site) by me and probably NYU. But you are more than welcome to quote it or reference it in any way with proper citation. (In fact, I would be totally ecstatic if you did so.)

And, for the OCD citers among us, I'll point out that this pdf has been reformatted since I turned it into the English department, and the pagination is not the same as the department's copy. The changes are partially to save paper for those who might want to print it and partially because Asim shamed me into changing the font after I admitted to having handed it in in 12 pt Times New Roman. However, in my interpretation of MLA citation, you'll be fine using this pagination to cite as long as you provide the url of the pdf. I've included a sample citation on the document itself. Enjoy!

Jean Baudrillard, a famous French theorist of culture, media, and literature, whose work I'm unfortunately only slightly familiar with, passed away yesterday in Paris. After reading up a bit this morning I think I'll have to check out his work in more detail soon.

Baudrillard is known primarily for his work on hyperreality, a theoretical perspective on postmodern culture wherein representations ("simulacra" in Baudrillardian terminology) have replaced the "real" (whatever the real is supposed to be) to the point that "the real no longer exists."

I'm not sure the real ever existed in the sense Baudrillard means, but I'm fascinated to read more nonetheless. Wouldn't want my knowledge of Baudrillard to be drawn only from simulacra of his work.

[via rhizome]

Giorgio Agamben

"…the harmony between sound and sense that defines the very site of poetry."

"…poetry is defined by a constitutive disjunction between the intellect and language in which, while language speaks without comprehending ("almost moved by itself"), the intellect comprehends without being able to speak."

—"'Corn': From Anatomy to Poetics," The End of the Poem

[Unintentionally and anachronistically, of course…]

"…only those who could disappear "modestly" could really witness with authority rather than gawk curiously."—Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™

Donna Haraway

Which, of course, just goes to explain the popularity of T-H-E Gawker.

This is one of the few sentences in Haraway's book that I find even remotely intelligible. I don't know if it's me or the book—at the very least this is some darned dated technoscience reading (1997) that I'm doing for my grad class this semester, and I just don't feel so great about that.

And even if I take the book for its historical value, I really can't see why an author who touts her obsession with syntax and repeatedly points out that the title of her book is an email address wouldn't at least investigate the implications of creating an email address with completely invalid syntax.