Writing Post-Person

Don't we all get so much "disposable discourse" and "information garbage" in our mailboxes? How nice to be reminded that we can recycle it and, in doing so, refresh the language they debase and ultimately devalue. Moving on, we could do the same for press releases and marketing copy. "Poetics, Literacy and Sustainability in the Age of Disposable Discourse" by Kedrick James, cross-posted from Poetics, post by visual poet Jim Andrews who writes: Writing Post-Person: Poetics, Literacy and Sustainability in the Age of Disposable Discourse is Kedrick James's 2009 doctoral dissertation. It's a terrific look at the history of automated spam and how "spoets" (spam poets) are situated in that environment. He also develops very useful perspectives on informational garbage and recycling toward a poetics of sustainability and informational environmentalism. How do writers and and how does writing move forward in the age of automated, disposable discourse when writing is devalued by automated excess, and the proliferation of other, competing media? Kedrick James's thesis is hopeful, actually, in what many perceive to be a dark time for literary writing and education, and that hope is partly in what he sees arising from active engagement by writers in these issues. What I've done at http://vispo.com/dbcinema/kedrick/slideshow.htm is to take four samples of writing from his thesis, together with photos of Kedrick and some of his graphical collages, and collage them in dbCinema in appreciation of what he's doing. I've also created a stir fry text at http://vispo.com/StirFryTexts/kedrick.htm from those samples of his thesis. You can read the quotations themselves by clicking on the rectangle in the stir fry or mix them together by mousing over the text I think his thesis is significant to contemporary writing and encourage you to visit his website,  http://kedrickjames.net  and his band's site http://disciplineofchaos.com -- he's  in a collaging/sampling band. The thesis is not available online but if you want to read it, contact him.