Coover's Kelly Writers House Fellows Events

Please remember that Robert Coover will be taking part in two events which will be broadcast live over the web tonight and tomorrow morning:

• Tonight (2/23) at 6:30 PM, Coover will be giving a reading at the Kelly Writers House
• Tomorrow (2/24) at 10:30AM, Coover and Al Filreis will have a conversation and Q&A session

You can (and should) tune in to these events through the KWH-TV website (follow the first link for "view live video") — the live feed should start shortly before the events themselves (so if you pull it up now, you'll get an error message). There are some troubleshooting tips further down the page itself, however as long as your browser and Quicktime are updated and working, it should play for you without any troubles. For more general information about Coover's visit, please check out the Kelly Writers House Fellows Coover homepage.

Please use this thread to comment on the reading, and especially Coover's answers during the Q&A session. I'll be giving extra credit for particularly thoughtful responses.

Some Coover Links

To start, here's the Kelly Writers House Fellows page on Coover, assembled in preparation for his visit next week to UPenn's campus. You'll have the opportunity to tune in to a live webcast of his reading Monday evening, as well as his conversation with Al Filreis (director of Penn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing) on Tuesday morning:

• Kelly Writers House Fellows

Here are the original New York Times reviews for the two books we're reading (hold off on reading the second one until you've finished the novel):

• Pricksongs and Descants: Fictions
• The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.

Here's what ostensibly passes for a book review — of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, of all things — in which Coover, working in a very Coover-like manner, creates an imaginative work of metafiction by sampling liberally from that famous collection's aphorisms:

• Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

Coover is also well-known as a proponent of hyperfiction — a computer-aided form of literature, once housed on CD-ROMs, and now drafted in HTML or XML, which, like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel, allows readers to take more control over their reading experience. There's still some interesting work being produced in this area (a few links below), but admittedly, a lot of the material seems very thin and clunky to contemporary eyes. Coover spelled out some of the implications of this genre in a pair of articles, also in the Times, in 1992 and 1993:

• "The End of Fiction"
• "Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer"

Coover is also a founder and head of the Electronic Literature Foundation, a group "founded in 1999 to foster and promote the reading, writing, teaching, and understanding of literature as it develops and persists in a changing digital environment." You can read some electronic texts by visiting the Electronic Literature Directory. Also, here are a pair of PennSound pages which showcase discussions of electronic literature, complete with links to example texts. Stefans (who studied with Coover at Brown) talks more about the future potential for computer-aided poetics, while Funkhouser gives a wonderful overview of the history of computer-writing:

• Brian Kim Stefans' "Language as Gameplay"
• Chris Funkhouser's "IBM Poetry: Exploring Restriction in Computer Poems"

Following this link will take you to Al Filreis' blog entry on "The Cave," a virtual-reality literary environment Coover helped create at the University of Iowa. You can even see a brief video recreation of what it's like to experience "The Cave." Finally, here are a few more videos featuring Coover:



a trailer for the film adaptation of "The Babysitter," which gives you some idea of just how bad it is



A History of the Future of Narrative: Robert Coover from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

Robert Coover Readings (Weeks 6, 7 and into 8)

Now that the midterm's behind us, we can move on to our unit on Robert Coover, the sole living member of our quartet of postmodern authors this quarter (so alive, in fact, that we'll be taking part in a Q&A with him in a few weeks). I'll post more background info on Coover shortly, but for now, here's the reading schedule for the next six classes:



Week 6

• Wednesday, Feb. 11: Pricksongs and Descants: "The Door: a Prologue of Sorts," "The Magic Poker," "Morris in Chains" and "The Gingerbread House"
• Friday, Feb. 13: Pricksongs and Descants: "Seven Exemplary Fictions," "The Elevator"

Week 7

• Monday, Feb. 16: Pricksongs and Descants: "Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady," "Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl," "A Pedestrian Accident," "The Babysitter"
• Wednesday, Feb. 18: The Universal Baseball Association . . .: Chapters 1 & 2
  
• Friday, Feb. 20: The Universal Baseball Association . . .: Chapters 3 & 4
  

Week 8

• Monday, Feb. 23: The Universal Baseball Association . . .: Chapters 5 - 8
  

Week 5: Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle

First published in 1963, Cat's Cradle was the first novel to bring Kurt Vonnegut to the attention of wider audiences, even though it would take several years to achieve that popularity.

Though Vonnegut disdained the "science fiction" label, this is a book which is firmly rooted in the realm of science, and much of its technological inspiration is drawn from the author's time as a public relations agent at the General Electric complex in Schenectady, NY (which he'd transform into the fictional city of Illium). At G.E., scientists were hired to do "pure research" — i.e. to work on whatever pet projects might interest them — and Vonnegut's job was to interview them in search of human interest stories. One scientist in particular, Nobel Prize-winner Irving Langmuir, would serve as the foundation of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, who sets the novel's action in motion.

Aside from science, the other main force driving the novel is faith, in the form of the fictional religion Bokononism, through which Vonnegut is able to trace the role of religion in society and the balance between church and state. The University of Chicago turned down Vonnegut's original master's thesis in Anthropology, but years later, in 1971, they'd award him his degree on the strength of Cat's Cradle as an anthropological investigation. To keep some of the Bokononist terms straight, you might want to check out the Wikipedia page on Bokononism.

Here's the reading schedule for the novel:

• Monday, February 2nd: Ch. 1, "The Day the World Ended," to Ch. 66, "The Strongest Thing There Is"
• Wednesday, February 4th: Ch. 67, "Hy-u-o-ook-kuh," to Ch. 94, "The Highest Mountain"
  
• Friday, February 6th: Ch. 95, "I See the Hook," to Ch. 127, "The End"
  

Schedule (Non-)Update

I hope you all enjoyed our snow day, and that you're all safe and warm with power and without dented automobiles. I've been divided as to how we should proceed, but I think the best course of action is to keep to the schedule as we currently have it, wrapping up Slaughterhouse-Five tomorrow, and if necessary carrying our discussion over into the start of Cat's Cradle on Monday.

The reason I want to do this is that it'll keep us on schedule to finish our unit on Robert Coover on the day that his Kelly Writers House fellowship begins (which means you'll be able to watch his reading and discussion having spent two weeks digesting his work). If it becomes clear that we need to reshuffle things a bit, then we can certainly do so. I'll see you all tomorrow.

Weather (Non-)Update

It looks like we'll have to wait until the morning to see whether UC will be open or closed, and I'll defer to the powers that be's judgment in that regard (though looking at the forecast, I can't imagine them thinking it'll be safe to have thousands of students commuting on icy roads and unplowed side-streets). Stay tuned to local TV, or wait for that e-mail from Greg Hand, and I'll either see you tomorrow, or on Friday.

Two Last Bits of Brautigan

Richard Brautigan's poem, "Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4," (shown above as a broadside printed by The Communication Company in San Francisco — click for a larger image) seems like a fitting ending as we move on from his gentle breeziness to the very different (but no less enoyable) tone of Kurt Vonnegut. In particular, it's empty ending fits perfectly with both novels we've read (even if A Confederate General from Big Sur had multiple endings, it's still kind of no ending). The poem's reprinted more legibly below:

Karma Repair Kit:
Items 1-4

1. Get enough food to eat,
and eat it.

2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet,
and sleep there.

3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise
until you arrive at the silence of yourself,
and listen to it.

4.

Second, here's one last wonderful bit of sixties conceptual ephemera, in the form of Brautigan's Please Plant This Book, a folio of eight seed packets with poems printed on them, which he published in 1968. You can navigate a virtual edition of this limited-edition oddity by following this link (sorry, no actual seeds included).