[syndicate] genesis genesis redux revisited

[Barbara Lattanzi]

Hi Alan.

this is brilliant (or at least something I feel that I can completely latch 
onto).

I just tried it with a short text.

the perl is straightforward enough, but also an object of contemplation in 
its own right.  Since I want to read the genesis text for which it was 
written, I am left to generate it on my own which must be a feat of 
durational cinema (or durational net radio if you could have it read aloud 
by a bot as each word was added).  And maybe running it on a slow computer 
would be something different from running it on a fast one ( e.g., 6 
seconds versus 6 days???)

...The perl code provocatively introduces the question of temporality into 
that open-sourced "vocalization into matter"..

Barbara

--------------------------------------
Barbara Lattanzi
www.wildernesspuppets.net



At 12:37 PM 2/11/2005, you wrote:


>genesis genesis redux revisited
>
>The explanation:
>
>genesis genesis redux is a reduction of the book of Genesis, the originary
>book from which the spiral of monotheism extends. Creation exists in the
>performativity of speech; "God says," which of course presupposes a
>language, sound and an atmosphere to convey it, throat, vocal cords, lips,
>teeth, and tongue to configure it.
>
>"God says," and it is done, completed, vocalization into matter. But there
>remains, at the beginning, as if in reverse, the remnant, the speaking
>itself, the origin and material grounding of that language, Hebrew,
>Akkadian, Assyrian, Ugaritic, for example, from which creation ensues.
>Wherever the account begins, began, in whatever district, desert, forest,
>marshland.
>
>A word is created only once. The creation of the word proceeds from the
>existence of language; language is always already there, just as
>information is: If we only had the means and patience to read it!
>
>genesis genesis redux borrows and extends the materialization of language;
>it also works through the aesthetics of the Thousand Character Essay.
>Ellen Zweig and I have been translating this, it seems, forever, stumbling
>across difficult classical Chinese, without any background 'for this sort
>of thing.' In the Essay, a thousand different characters are used; the
>essay itself is a thousand characters long, and there is no repetition.
>One begins anew with each character, and here we are.
>
>genesis genesis redux transforms the book of Genesis, and this is a better
>transformation than one I had previously completed, this is more accurate.
>
>This transformation is, and must be, the originary text of language, and
>therefore must be Important, and a source for scholars of Revelation in
>English.
>
>The words in genesis genesis redux are all unique; the programming below
>(with eliminate.pl a perl program by Florian Cramer, upon my request)
>takes the original text, such as King James would have it, and eliminates
>all redundancy. Every word is returned to its primordial uniqueness,
>regardless of syntax and placement. As such, the text descends into
>increasingly terse languaging, since the more common words are of course
>eliminated early on. By the end of it, the protolanguage code of all
>enunciation appears; the whole constitutes a supplication to language
>itself, my own production of the Word of God, with no emendation, with a
>purity that would have been well nigh inconceivable before the digital
>age.
>
>Here is an accounting.
>cat genesis.txt | tr -cs A-Za-z '\012' | tr A-Z a-z > yy
>perl eliminate.pl < yy > redux.txt
>where eliminate.pl is below:
>#!/usr/local/bin/perl5
>while (<STDIN>) {
>      @words = split /[\s]+/, $_;
>      @spaces = split /[\S]+/, $_;
>      for ($x=0; $x <= $#words; $x++) {
>          $word_count{$words[$x]}++;
>  if ($word_count{$words[$x]} == 1) {print $words[$x],$spaces[$x+1]}
>                 }
>         }
>
>
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