Kenneth Goldsmith

Full of typos and, not unlike "Against Expression", marred by faulty argumentation and contradictions, "Uncreative Writing" is rich in examples and the topics of "uncreativity", plagiarism, detournement and so on are explored well enough. Goldsmith also discusses here some of his experiences with students who had picked his "uncreative writing" course. Once you read this and maybe also try to go through the same exercises... you'll either love or hate these approaches. But you'll arrive at conclusions with definitely better understanding. It is questionable what Goldsmith terms by "success" or "failure" in conceptual writing - probably one just have to not take things for granted while going for "precision". That on some pages he invokes identity politics, emotion or ecology and on other pages he simply praises outright theft (while the book itself contains a proper copyright section), exploitation or being downright transgressive is, again, all part of the bundle...

As idealist as one would like to be, there are many points here to keep in mind. Towards the end of the book, Christian Bök's words on his Xenotext experiment and the transhumanist necessity of considering the perpetuation of poetry through considering non-human readership. Or, in other words, "if poetry already lacks any meaningful readership among our own anthropoid population, what have we to lose by writing poetry for a robotic culture that must inevitably succeed our own? If we want to commit an act of poetic innovation in an era of formal exhaustion, we may have to consider this heretofore unimagined, but nevertheless prohibited, option: writing poetry for inhuman readers, who do not yet exist, because such aliens, clones, or robots have not yet evolved to read it."

Considering the reading skills (and especially reading expectations) of many people nowadays or, more likely, at any given time, it sounds like complex writing such as that of Joyce or of Bök himself will be definitely more popular among the non-human population. But for every RACTER story (of arguable success) there is a Tay story (of unintended effects...). So there you go...… (más)

This book presents a scholarly defense of the validity and art of human interaction online, an extended academic rephrasing of the argument made time and again on Tumblr and other vibrant online communities: conversation, dialogue, and communication through the internet are genuine, innovative, and do not indicate the downfall of humanity.
The aspects of Goldsmith's argument that made it more effective were his comparison to the surrealist movement, his classroom experiments in the application of these ideas, and most significantly, his comparison with various modern art exhibits. Goldsmith venerates internet culture as art, inevitable from his background as a poet, a professor, and poet laureate for the Museum of Modern Art. This leads to a pervasive sense of wonder throughout, which is largely charming but occasionally nauseating. Goldsmith also adopts a rather narrow perspective, that of someone with the means for constant connection to the internet and the art education to look at it without much thought to access problems, or the limits of practicality.
Goldsmith asserts that we should look at the internet as a massive arena for creativity, innovative in its technology but not its basic motivations for interaction. The reasoning that brings him to this conclusion, although from the lofty perspective of a self-proclaimed intellectual, are nonetheless interesting and worthwhile.… (más)

Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of Ubuweb by Kenneth Goldsmith serves as both a guidebook for creating and maintaining open areas of the internet as well as an introduction to ubuweb as both archive and artwork. Yes, I used both twice, sorry, this isn't something I am going to edit so...

I almost gave it a better rating but that would have been less about the book and more about me. I was unfamiliar with ubuweb before this book, which is why I wanted to read about it, and now I go there daily to explore a little more. While the book is very interesting and a wealth of information, I was not overly taken with the authorial voice. Nothing off-putting about it, but in the sections that appealed to me least it didn't succeed in keeping me engaged. That said, this book offers so much that it will be hard for every section to be equally appealing to every reader.

The information and history of how he started the site and the copyright/permission issues is surprisingly interesting. I say that because I don't deal with those issues in my world so they would normally be something I would find moderately interesting simply as background. Goldsmith does such a good job of contextualizing everything (within the larger history of the internet as well as within his own desires and interest in the site) that copyright conflicts were actually interesting. Who woulda thunk it?

I was mainly interested in the holdings, why they were chosen (because they were available and he felt like it!) and whether there was an overarching theme to the site (only in the very loosest and broadest terms). What I didn't expect was to begin to understand art in a slightly different way. The idea of poorer quality copies having a place and a collection of such copies being the equivalent of a live ongoing art installation. Plus the laudable task of broadening the definition and perception of avant-garde art.

I would recommend this to anyone interested in how to keep at least some of the internet free and open, copyright issues as they apply to online posting and sharing, and those interested in avant-garde art. These topics are all woven into a compelling narrative not often found in nonfiction books about the internet.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (más)

Against Translation is a text by American poet Kenneth Goldsmith (born 1961) published in eight volumes--English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Arabic. The author discusses the impasses and shortcomings of translation and the virtures of an unapologetic linguistic “displacement.” “Translation is the ultimate humanist gesture,” he states. “Polite and reasonable, it is an overly cautious bridge builder ... in the end, it always fails, for the discourse it sets forth is inevitably off-register.” Displacement, by contrast, never explains itself. Goldsmith cites the example of Mexican-American poet Mónica de la Torre, who, in the middle of a presentation at a 2010 poetics conference at Columbia, “broke out, full on, for ten minutes entirely in Spanish, leaving all those who pay lip service to multilingualism and diversity angry because they couldn’t understand what she was saying. De la Torre thereafter resumed her talk in English, never mentioning her intervention … Comprehension is optional; displacement is concretely demonstrative.”… (más)