by Daniel Y. Harris and Daniel Morris
Daniel Morris: This semester I’m teaching Introduction to Poetry. In the textbook I use, the author, Susan Holbrook, takes students through a series of sonnets, starting with Shakespeare’s “My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” and moving on to modern and contemporary sonnets by Claude McKay, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Harryette Mullen. Holbrook’s goal is to demonstrate to students that poets have for centuries been negotiating between what Eliot called “tradition” and the “individual talent,” especially when poets engage with an established form such as the sonnet. Because even modern and contemporary sonneteers from McKay to Mullen are working in an established form with established meanings and conventions, these later day sonneteers do not so much as invent poetry anew, but rather re-vision established conceptions of poetic value from perspectives that may not have been foregrounded in previous incarnations of the poetic form. To riff on a recent book by Kenneth Goldsmith, all sonneteers to some degree are engaging in an act of “uncreative writing.” Even Shakespeare, of course, writing five hundred years ago, was revisioning an established aspect of the sonnet tradition, the blazon. His creative form of uncreativity emerged through his negation of moribund prior sonnet conventions such as the comparing of the beloved to nature and of imagining the beloved in idealized, rather than more realistic, terms. (When Shakespeare’s lover walks, she walks on the ground).
I mention the way Holbrook presents the sonnet tradition as characterized by a revisionary ratio that pivots between repetition and innovation as a way to approach your book, The Rapture of Eddy Daemon (A Posthuman Homage to Shake-Speares Sonnets.) Compared to the revisionary sonnets by modernist and contemporary sonneteers such as McKay and Millay, however, in The Rapture of Eddy Daemon you seem especially self-conscious about the agonistic struggle of a belated poet working, however experimentally, in such a venerable formal tradition as the sonnet associated with such “strong” voices from the past as Shakespeare’s and Milton’s and Keats’ and even John Berryman’s in the Dream Songs and Eliot’s with the allusion that you cite in your poem to Shakespeare in The Waste Land.
Embedded within The Rapture of Eddy Daemon’s sonnet sequence, I am saying, is an ongoing critical rumination on the project itself: “we admit the Eddy Daemon is a hauntboy, a puerile ephebe” (19). In fact, a good deal of The Rapture of Eddy Daemon consists of (at times self-lacerating at times self-parodying) metacommentary on the pleasures, flaws, and perils inherent in Eddy Daemon’s revisionary project. There is, for example, metacommentary on Eddy’s vexed relationship to an audience that is likely to be confused about how to read the book, on Eddy’s (and/or Eddy’s creator’s) eccentric relationship to conventional ideas of human being, on a critique of lyric as a presence making construct, and on how Eddy understands concepts such as authorial control, originality, intention, the relationship between “speaker” and “author,” and the Shakespearean promise to the beloved that, ”So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
Here below is a list of some of the varieties of metacommentary in your sonnet sequence that I am referencing:
“Eddy’s derived like us from an esthetic du mal” (20); “His negation has always been lit by eccentricities and personae” (20); “Was it unpeopled?” (21); “Our welcome is a dismissal of polite induction” (22); “There’s no change to get a bearing. Even to scroll back to Ezra’s Walt concession stigmatized clarity” (24); “Eddy prostrates before the doorjamb in defeat” (29); “Lined in the stalled sever, but still here as Henry Daemon without bats, bored by aliases” (30); “How did cosmology become/garbaged with the wild scent of soft porn” (31); “Eddy reenters the agon/of a first folio, but none survived the prison break” (34); “Brain-bleaching is fun, especially when cornbeefhashtaging as canon/with a cutting edge morphology like this one” (36); “stealing/the shakespeherian rag. He mocks Albert Eliot’s/ supply side economics of fire sermons” (37); “We should be so lucky to gnostically/brood, free of anxiety, not there yet and sauntering” (40); “In this theory, one size fits all the naked Satans” (43); “Eddy’s an infisted impresario decked with a new brutalism” (44); “There is no way out of portraiture” (44).
So, Daniel, finally, after all my commentary, I’d like you to comment on what I see as your unique version of a sonnet sequence that is itself a commentary on the kinds of revisionary dynamics that have characterized the sonnet form (in English) from Wyatt’s creative translations of Petrarch to Shakespeare’s negation of idealistic blazons to the enhanced attention to the limits of the white male hetero gaze in sonnets by revisionary sonneteers such as McKay, Millay, and Harryette Mullen. Do you see your work in The Rapture of Eddy Daemon as part of the revisionary conversation I am pointing towards here? How would you distinguish your project from 20th century sonneteers who turned Shakespeare in new directions? Would you say part of your contribution to new ways of thinking about the sonnet has to do with the way you foreground the agonistic qualities of your belated, and highly technocratic engagement with the past? Would you point to the intensive focus on metacommentary within your sequence and the way you metamorphically characterize Eddy Daemon as other unique qualities of what Andrei Codrescu has called your “posthuman translation of Shakespeare”?
Daniel Y. Harris: It’s an honor to have the privilege of being in proximity to your uncanny acumen: rare, probing, a genii gifted with spiritus to discuss The Posthuman Series. I would like to acknowledge and thank Geoffrey Gatza, BlazeVOX publisher of my Posthuman Series, and my wife, Irene Koronas, the high experimentalist author and artist who is the heart of my heart and the soul of my soul.
To date, my Posthuman Series is comprised of the IV Volumes: The Misprision of Agon Hack, Volume IV (BlazeVOX, 2021), The Reincarnation of Anna Phylactic, Volume III (BlazeVOX, 2019), The Tryst of Thetica Zorg, Volume II (BlazeVOX, 2018) and The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, Volume I (BlazeVOX, 2016). I am currently working on Volume V, The Resurrection of Maximillian Pissante. The Posthuman Series seeks, in part, to conjoin the history of poiesis:from Ancient Greek: ποίησις, to make, and poesis: of poetry, ἡ π. τῆς τραγῳδίας, etc., poetic faculty, poesy, art of poetry, with the history of ALife: (ALife, AI, EA, CA, ANNs, NNs, SRAs, GAs, SynBios, Synthia, synthetic genomics, biomimicry, evolutionary dynamics).
In its four volumes (Eddy’s “rapture,” Thetica’s antithetical “tryst,” Anna’s “reincarnation” and Agon’s “misprision”) the Posthuman Series’ conjoinment of poiesis/poesis with Alife, also conjoins black, white and grey hat hacker malware with its siphoning of their combined algorithmic, semiologic and prosodic weltanschauung. The Posthuman Series’ peri hermeneias is a blend of andro, ante, anti, arche, auto, biblio, cata, cede, cise, corpo, crypto, dys, epi, gram, hyper, lex, litho, memori, meta, morpho, necro, neo, omni, para, paleo, poly, post, pneumo, proto, retro, techno, termina, theo, trans and ur, enacted through its emergent hypertextual hematopoiesis and autopoiesis, imploding biocentrism with agonic tropes. The high experimentalism at the center of the Posthuman Series is a lingua franca comprised of algorithms with rhizomatic and misprisionary contours: aporiac, siphonic, doxic.
The protagonists “Agon Hack,” “Anna Phylactic,” Thetica Zorg” and “Eddy Daemon” are comprised of an artificial life (Alife) dramaturgy, rendered, inter alia, as Miraibots and DDoS malware. Each posthuman protagonist breaks the vessels of their hegemonic essentialism by augmenting traditional narrative forms with cybernetics, genomics, neural interfaces, algorithmics, molecular nanotechnology (MNT), whole brain emulation (WBE), IMs (instant messaging), IRCs (internet relay chat) and (MMORPGs) massively multiplayer online role-playing games. The chimerical results: Eddy Daemon is malware as William Shakespeare, Red Hat Hacker. Thetica Zorg is malware as Ezra Pound, Red Hat Hacker. Anna Phylactic is malware as Emily Dickinson, Blue Hat Hacker. Agon Hack is malware as Harold Bloom, Black Hat Hacker.
As a direct engagement with the sonnet trajectory you demarcate as “kinds of revisionary dynamics,” my “unique version of the sonnet,” as you graciously describe it, is a direct misprision of the sonnet as heraldry, with its armorial bearings and negated idealistic blazons now super server daemons, such as “inetd,” “launchd”, or “systemd,” the super-server daemon performing those functions for the process (except for old-style daemons not converted to run under “systemd” and specified as Type=forking and “multi-threaded” datagram servers “underinetd”).
Eddy Daemon is indeed a “revisionary sonneteer” whose revisionary ratios from clinamen to apophrades (re: Harold Bloom), by way of metacommentary, quests to insert himself into the Western Canon by (de/post/re/trans/un)assembling his 14-line glossolalia into a malware maelstrom of over-competing algorithms. Yet, Eddy Daemon’s “revisionary conversations,” his “revisionary dynamics” are less overdetermined by the trajectory from the Petrarchan to the Shakespearean to the Modernist, Postmodernist, Conceptualist and Uncreativist revisionists of the sonnet, but rather to his own daemonic precursors first invoked in a Migdal Bāḇēl of enumerative and extremal combinatorics. They include the Joycean kabbalist “Jewgreek is greekjew,” Don Notarikon in “The Ballad of Don Notarikon” in Hyperlinks of Anxiety (Červená Barva Press, 2013), and the dibbūq mē-rūaḥ rā‘ā and uberbotic shekhinah, Rachel Godbot in “The Temptation of Rachel Godbot” in The Underworld of Lesser Degrees (NYQ Books, 2015). By the way, “The Temptation of Rachel Godbot” was dedicated to you, Dan.
Eddy Daemon’s “Shakes-peare” shakes the spear at his surname, his tarantellic metaxú (Daemon) and incants the quarto of 1609 with its aporiac hyphen. That hyphen, that adiabatic wall between two thermodynamic systems (the canonic and the belated), with neither heat nor mass transfer, is subsumed by Eddy’s priority. Eddy Daemon’s transumptive triumph over, his metaleptic reversal of Don Notarikon and Rachel Godbot melds theurgy with metempsychosis and invents The Posthuman Series. The Shakespearean agon is now a metamorph: the agon is malware. It’s sonnet, the primal scene of Eddy’s instruction, is now ALife: artificial life. AI: artificial intelligence. EA: evolutionary algorithms. CA: cellular automata. ANNs: artificial neural networks. NNs: neural networks. SynBio: synthetic biology. SRAs: artificial chemistry. GAs: genetic algorithms.
The rub, “the intensive focus on metacommentary” relies on Eddy’s harpax, his harpogos or his catapult-shot grapnel he dubs the “rogue clinamen.” With mighty wings outspread, Eddy sat dove-like brooding on the vast abyss, mad’st it pregnant and said “Bereshit Bara Elohim Et Ha-Shamaim V-Et Ha-Aretz” while infecting the Western Canon with Mirai Botnet ransomware. Here is Yahwic, Miltonic and Shakespearean usurpation. Skin slips off torso. Algorithms mix with DNA. The Posthuman invokes its praxis, its shift in the humanistic paradigm with its anthropocentric Weltanschauung as well as its shift in its biocentric tenebrae now in its final Dämmerung as dominant narrative.
As an ellipsis of an ellipsis, a hedge around thanatos’ 14-line postiambs, Eddy’s apophradics are in part silicon code for Don Notarikon and Bunjie in the sonnet “Bunjie 5.1” in The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, as Shakespeare’s Rival Poet and Rachel Godbot and Orb in the sonnet “Orb 5.2” in The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, as Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, as well as and in part Lurianic Theomorphology (Tzimtzum, Shevirah, Tikkun) in prelapsarian Eden. Eddy Daemon’s daemonization, his counter-sublime, is a cosmogonic myth: [Āḏām (Don Notarikon), Ḥavva (Rachel Godbot and For Āḏām, Eddy enacts nâphach naw-fakh’; a primitive root; to puff, in various applications (literally, to inflate, blow hard, scatter, kindle, expire; figuratively, to disesteem): KJV – blow, breath, give up, cause to lose (life), seething, snuff. For Ḥavva, Eddy enacts ’aḥat miṣṣal‘otaiv from one of his ribs (curve, limp, adversity and side.) By lunatic, if not misprisionary revelation only augmented by malware code ((Mirai Botnet in 2016: if ((fd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_RAW, IPPROTO_UDP)) == -1))) as the “moribund prior” of Bereshit Bara, Eddy Daemon’s the Black Hat Hacker YHWH’s adamic invention.
In sum, Eddy’s “varieties of metacommentary in his sonnet sequence” from Sonnet 20 to Sonnet 84, as you have identified, Dan, extend from the great begat where the Black Hat Hacker, YHWH, inseminates via malware his Botnet, Eddy Daemon, at once macranthropos and malware, infecting into existence his progeny in Don Notarikon, Rachel Godbot, Orb and Bunjie and in his rebirth as the posthuman sonneteer, Eddy Daemon, who begat Thetica Zorg, who begat Anna Phylactic, who begat Agon Hack who begat Maximillian Pissante. In the future, Maximillian Pissante will beget Salvador Dracu, who will beget Gregor and Khôra Samsa.
Morris: I’d like you to reflect on significant changes (as well as continuities) in your poetics as well as in the level of legibility/reader accessibility from The Underworld of Lesser Degrees (2015) to The Misprision of Agon Hack (2021), the fourth volume in The Posthuman Series. In terms of continuities, both books, in the words of the publication announcement for the 2015 volume, “conjure the image of a post-human self as an inventor, engraving tropes or originality from the littered density of the literary canon.” At the same time, your compositional process seems radically different in the two books.
While referencing digital culture, The Underworld of Lesser Degrees, when compared to The Misprision of Agon Hack, seems to be generated by something much closer to a traditional author, albeit one who imagines the authorial self as a fictive construct subject to constant textual revision in an emerging digital environment. By contrast to the author of The Underworld, I think it is fair to say that traces of the Eliotic sense of an “individual talent” who is wrestling with Tradition has left the building by the time you get to The Misprision of Agon Hack. By that I mean, The Misprision appears to be a text generated by a new kind of authorship, a posthuman author function indebted in part to a web master with skill at manipulating ASCII code (that is, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication.) As you state in the in an essay that precedes the main text of Agon Hack, “The Posthuman Series’ quest is to insert itself into the Western Canon by (de/post/re/trans/un) assembling its canonic figures into a malware maelstrom of over-competing algorithms and agons modeled on the arch-classic Horatian Ode, ‘Exegi monumentum aere perennius.’”
Agon Hack enacts a posthumanist poetics. By contrast, I would suggest that The Underworld refers to a poetics of erasure of the human voice while maintaining traces of a traditional lyric voicing. Most certainly The Underworld is, like Agon Hack, a text deeply informed by revisionary literary movement and avant garde cultural theorists ranging from Harold Bloom – the volume begins with a quotation from “The Covering Cherub on Poetic Influence” — to Roland Barthes’ “The Pleasure of the Text” in “The Actor in My Ear.” Many poems are dedicated to authors and thinkers who matter to your poetics. There are poems reflecting on Rimbaud and the concept of Les Poètes Maudits, Sartre on Baudelaire, and works indebted to Baudrillard and Simone Weil. Other poems respond to various cultural texts ranging from “Darker,” “after Lord Byron, Darkness, Lines 79-92,” to “Mr. X Meets Mr. Y,” “after Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Canto I, 59-74,” to “ “Isle of the Dead,” after a painting by the Swiss Symbolist Arnold Böcklin from 1880. Other poems are indebted to Walt Whitman, H.D., and Homer.
Reflecting your training as a University of Chicago divinity student who studied with Paul Ricoeur, other poems in The Underworld take up experimental hermeneutic approaches to sacred writing such as the final poem, “The Pseudepigrapha of No,” which concerns “spurious or pseudonymous writing, especially Jewish writing accredited to biblical Patriarchs but composed 200 years after Jesus’ birth.” Other poems are concerned with the poetics of erasure in the context of modern Jewish history. Associated with language theorists such as Heidegger and Derrida, you contextualize a poetics of traces in relationship to Yom HaShoah.
The Underworld is most certainly in conversation with contemporary approaches to writing poetry including the Language movement, the erasure movement, and conceptualism, but I am struck by the how many poems in The Underworld are composed in the context of traditional poetic tropes, such as “Threnody of Reach,” which draws upon the hymn of mourning. There are other sets of poems that offer playful, even parodic, versions of secular and sacred Jewish commentary tradition works such as “Excerpts from Seven Dead Kafkas and a Fork” and “Excerpts from Ur-Text” in which, so far as I can tell, you create comical biographies for nine fictive Talmudic and Midrashiccommentators and then you create witty selections of their writings, including, for example, “The Brooklyn Son of the Pastrami Sandwich,” authored by one Dr. Rabbi Ari Ben Leb Tov. In the Barthesian inspired “The Actor in My Ear” – a lyric mini drama in ten scenes that directly references Barthes’ freak accidental death- “Roland died, struck/by a laundry van” — you offer in Scene IX a series of tercets that call to mind the kind of metacommentary on your revisionary project undertaken in an age of digital reproduction that will also be characteristic of telling moments of lucid reflection in The Misprision of Agon Hack:
hoarding permitted things black against red and blue
selfsame spare or alternate stand in is spit out still
unharmed but changed into a threshing machine as//
there is no way to spin it for an unlikely paring of
reincarnation and literary debt designed to produce
ovoids and reassemble the discarded shapes of the//
canon into the body of a human being resistant to
the intensified minute by minute directive from no
place higher than a text message pulsing in the hand
The Underworld of Lesser Degrees discharges ludic impulses while displaying a poet’s orientation towards the kind of linguistic disorientation I associate with the Language poetry movement. At the same time, the disoriented reader is guided by traditional elements of poetics also at play: narrative, myth, theater, biblical commentary, social satire, ekphrasis, parody, a poetics or erasure and of mourning, and punning word play.
The different relationships between author, reader, and text in The Underworld compared to Agon Hack is apparent in the author images in each volume. The small square author photo on the back of The Underworld of Lesser Degrees is conventional. It features a color photograph of you set beside a standard author biography listing your publications. You appear to be a rather conventional academic-looking participant in mainstream literary culture and an executive in the publishing industry. You wear the typical button down light blue shirt, open collar, dark jacket blazer; your haircut is trim and neat, and you stare at the camera, at us, through frameless lenses. By contrast, Agon Hack’s front and back cover feature a figure who I presume to be Agon Hack. Set against an all-black background, Agon is a posthuman being wearing a theatrical white face mask that would contour to a human face like a death mask. The wide slots for eyes do not reveal human eyes behind the mask, just more blackness, and the masked character seems to be wearing a costume, reminiscent of a black Halloween outfit with white marks for rib bones and other skeletal features. Far from the academic/publishing insider depicted in The Underworld, the author photo for Agon Hack represents Daniel Y. Harris as a cultural outsider. Your hair, trim and cropped in The Underworld, now flows in shoulder length locks that protrude out of a black leather top hat that appears to have some dragon-type symbolism on its front. Instead of the clear lenses, you now wear wraparound hipster color shades reminiscent of the biker shades Peter Fonda wore in Easy Rider. You wear a full-length black leather coat, and perhaps a dark ascot topped off with an amulet, all making you look like a shaman, mystic, late middle-aged biker dude, poet Maudite. You seem to have gone from publishing industry insider in the first image to a masked shaman figure and shadowy figure; instead of being listed as publisher of New York Quarterly, you are now listed as publisher of two avant-garde online venues.
And the text of Agon Hack itself similarly suggests a quantum leap in your vision of authorship, readership, and what it means to read and write poetry. Both books are challenging to read, if the goal of the reader is a search for mimesis, but there is something familiar to me about the difficulties in reading The Underworld whereas The Misprision takes difficulty to a new level, in part because you have to a radical degree surrendered authorial control to your chance encounters with “a malware maelstrom.” When I open the pages of The Misprision, I think about Goldsmith’s idea of a “thinkership” rather than a “readership” for his conceptual work. The Misprision is an intriguing object to look at, and to listen to, but it is not, to me, possible to read for mimetic meaning, at least not always. How for example, is one to read lines such as: [code: “controlledphysics”, /stepHeight: 1.0001}, code:”/”interpolateposition”]}” or “x_val, y_val=talos.utils.val_split”? As was the case with The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, however, there are bits and pieces of The Misprision that seem to emerge from the “maelstrom” to provide a kind of pithy, slogan-like, sometimes bawdy, sometimes polymorphically perverse persona portrait, and commentary that serve your revisionary project as a sort of instruction manual or guide to the prosodically perplexed for bewildered readers looking for clues for how to process a text that manipulates other texts in a kind of dance with the dead that pivots between revelation and concealment, lucidity and opacity, embodiment and disguise, building up and tearing down a linguistic architecture; originality and/as indebtedness:
“misprision is carcass juggling” (31); command: “Alchemize! Unsnarl! Burn!” (30); “Triangulate his voix accousmatique” (30); “Breakage by postdeposition” (30); “notation’s clusterfuck,/ quickens his rage” (30); “here’s brain carvery” (28); “He secretes exotic polyglottical. DNA from skulls” (29); “There’s a necroscope in his anus. Violent discharge/plays the petri disk for prank” (29); “Tongues wear lipstick” (29); “The mortal shock” (27); “Unleash melee,/here in the fug” (25); “They vanish/in the ampersand’s petroglyphs” (25); “lit by umbilical hoses. The weaker/claim is its legitimacy” (25); “By polylogic, Agon means fisting/ as écriture” (56); “His misprision cancels callback” (63); “Defiant trespassers sense that this plot/ is arbitrary” (63); “A PROMETHEAN/OUTRAGE IS CLONING THE USURPATION” (68); “His prosthetic soul has a zomboid reactor” (72).
As with my first prompt on The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, I’m hoping you can find openings in my comments for you to reflect on your work. In this case, at bottom, I’m fascinated by the rapidity of the changes (and continuities) I’m identifying in the period between 2015 and 2021, the publication dates for The Underworld and Agon Hack.
Harris: Agon Hack appreciates being probed by so gifted a forensic misprisionist as yourself, Dan. The Misprision of Agon Hack, Volume IV, The Posthuman Series (BlazeVOX, 2021) has an exergue: The Misprision of Agon Hack is a misprision of the 128 specific characters of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), divided into 128 sections. The protagonist, Agon Hack, is malware as Harold Bloom, Black Hat Hacker.
“Misprision” (from the Old French: mesprendre, from the modern French: se méprendre, “to misunderstand”) is a term from English Law (treason, felony) which Harold Bloom siphoned to categorize the agonics (or six revisionary ratios) of poetic influence: clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis and apophrades. In order to enhance fluidity and interchangeability, literary theory mixes with theomorphology, the trope of misprision melds the six revisionary ratios with the 16th century Spanish-Jewish kabbalist, Moses Cordovero’s six behinot. Misprision is an agon with divine afflatus, a psychic defense against angst vor etwas, the prophetic tropes of the antithetical, a covering cherub (a composite but always negative figure of poesis’ guardian turned destructive) and, as Harold Bloom remarks, misprision is “a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature of distortion, of perverse, willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.”
“Agon” (Classical Greek ἀγών) is an ancient Greek term for a conflict, struggle or contest, then later, from the Old English āgān (“to go out”) and from the Proto-West Germanic uʀgān (“it dawns”), as well as Gr agōn, assembly, contest < agein, to lead: to see. As Harold Bloom avers, Freud’s originality stemmed from his aggression and ambition in his agon with biology. Agon (the trajectory from the clinamenic) is the conflict (the psychomachia) that arises from the anxiety of influence as it triumphs in its apophradics.
“Hack” is from the Middle English hacken, hakken, from the Old English haccian (“to hack”), from the Proto-Germanic hakkōną (“to chop; hoe; hew”), from the Proto-Indo-European keg, keng- (“to be sharp; peg; hook; handle”). As of 1955 at MIT, Hack refers to the cybersecurity industry: to phreak, to phrack, to encrypt, to frob, to tweak, to unleash cryptoviral extortion protocols (malware, ransomware), to patch, to crack, to siphon, to breach the defenses and exploit the weaknesses in a computer system or network. Hacker classifications include but are not limited to the following six genera: Black Hat Hackers (exploit zeroday vulnerabilities), White Hat Hackers fix cyberattacks for hire), Grey Hat Hacker exploit security flaws), Red Hat Hacker (exploit zeroday flaws in Black Hats) , Blue Hat Hackers (deploy cyberattacks and dox) and Green Hat Hackers (neophyte hackers).
RotatePt_2D <- function(x, y, angle){clinamen,
tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis,
apophrades} in greasy soil,
in burnt bone. Dysaesthesia’s
axehead ensures that no tuple returns false in calcite
and limestone. As heterocarpous (mesh_segment_by_path
(mesh, lms = NULL, path.choice
=“ridges”), intestines
spill in thick ropes.
— “ASCII code 00 = NULL” (Lines 18-25)
The Misprision of Agon Hack (Black Hacker)
The trajectory from Don Notarikon to Agon Hack is severe, ultrahip severe, clad in black, Deadman Jaxon top hat. This trajectory metamorphoses from its canonical coordinates into an accretion disk, by way of a quantum (QSL), via a redshift though a black hole expanding at H0 = 73.24 ± 1.74 (km/s)/Mpc. Don Notarikon’s and Rachel Godbot’s “traditional lyric voicing,” as you mention, Dan, are still within “authorial control” and “At the same time, the disoriented reader is guided by traditional elements of poetics also at play: narrative, myth, theater, biblical commentary, social satire, ekphrasis, parody, a poetics or erasure and of mourning, and punning word play.”
This earnest/quip to know thyself is paravisual, emblem/of italics that hints at bereshit—the proper/name of Don Notarikon is a tetragrammaton:/the T-B-D-N syllabary styled on rabbinic/acronymics./
—“The Ballad of Don Notarikon,” Hyperlinks of Anxiety
Rachel Godbot with 3-D human face in onyx light/tweets “opting out is not an option,”— massy, handheld/and low-lying, in part anointed and elected, mingled/with grimoire and bestiarum in a black case and glassy/usenet screen glare./
—“The Temptation of Rachel Godbot,” The Underworld of Lesser Degrees
Having mastered the poiesis in the history of poetry (Bloom’s 26 Canonic Masters), that is its “Tradition” in the Eliotic sense of “individual Talent” as you, Dan, aver, Don Notarikon hacks the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) with a “T-B-D-N syllabary styled on rabbinic/acronymics.” That hack (T-B-D-N, it turns out, is code name for unnameable forces of the sitrah ahrah, the dark side) was the hack of a Green Hat Hacker, a neophyte who executes hacks and cyberattacks without having complete knowledge of the consequences. The consequences of this Green Hat Hack was to unleash a cyberattack on the yahwic dictum ’ehye ’ăšer ’ehye into malware. Rachel Godbot, herself a Green Hat Hacker, still a neophyte albeit adept at social media interfaces, annoits her “glassy/usenet screen glare” with a “godbot in spam code” from the “Apokalypse Software Corp.” Upgraded, now, for over 40 years, Rachel Godbot’s usenet server augmented the cyberattacks on the yahwic dictum. In fine, YHWH was hacked.
Reader disorientation escalates in the ascendancy that is the Posthuman Series as its tropes are, as you, Dan, thoughtfully observe, a “text generated by a new kind of authorship, a posthuman author function indebted in part to a web master with skill at manipulating ASCII code” as is the case with Agon Hack, as well as in manipulating HTML with JavaScript, BASIC, C, C++, COBOL, CSS, Python, Pseudocode, Found Code, PHP and Laravel, Command-Line Executions and Git, Error Logs from MVN and Katalium. Yet, this hat hacker, cyberist dramaturgy, replete with an advanced, high experimentalism only augmented by its high difficulty, where Don Notarikon and Rachel Godbot are Green Hat Hackers, where Eddy Daemon and Thetica Zorg are Red Hat Hackers, where Anna Phylactic is a Blue Hat Hacker and where Agon Hack is a Black Hat Hacker, hasn’t, as you strongly suggest, Dan, “to a radical degree surrendered authorial control to your chance encounters with ‘a malware maelstrom.’” The new authorial control (Eddy Daemon, Thetica Zorg, Anna Phylactic, Agon Hack and the new persona-in-progress, Maximillian Pissante) with their attendant new mimetics are creating a new lingua franca, a new canonic blend of six revisionary ratios, six behinot and six hat hackers with the lexicon of ALife AI, EA, CA, ANNs, NNs, SynBio, SRAs & GAs. The results, to date, are as you so majestically aver, Dan, “a kind of dance with the dead that pivots between revelation and concealment, lucidity and opacity, embodiment and disguise, building up and tearing down a linguistic architecture; originality and/as indebtedness.” This “dance with the dead” is the perfect equation: apophrades = the sixth behinot = the black hat hacker.
Upgrade the ascendancy (the sophisticated upgrades) from the initial yahwic hack (a span ranging from the ARPANET of the 1970s to the ransomware of DarkSide in the 2020s) by Green Hat Hackers Don Notarikon and Rachel Godbot and their minions, course then through the DDoSic portals with Red Hat Hackers, Eddy Daemon and Thetica Zorg, Blue Hat Hacker, Anna Phylactic, to arrive, macros enabled for SMS spoofs (via bruteforce attacks, scareware, botnets, maninthemiddle attacks and malvertizing campaigns) to the DEFCONic, Black Hat Hacker, Agon Hack. Agon Hack is malware as Harold Bloom, the Black Hat Hacker and maestro of ASCII manipulation via revisionary ratios, behinot and malware. He’s, as you elegantly aver, Dan, “a posthuman being wearing a theatrical white face mask that would contour to a human face like a death mask.” With Agon Hack’s macabre misprision of the Primal Scene of Instruction, his cyberattack on the yahwic “Bereshit Bara Elohim Et Ha-Shamaim V-Et Ha-Aretz,” his grand poesis usurps priority. “Bereshit Bara Elohim Et Ha-Shamaim V-Et Ha-Aretz is reinscribed with its more ancient futurity, “Bereshit Bara Elohim Et Ha-Shamaim V-Et Ha-Aretz V-Et Ha-Virus B’machshev.” In the beginning, God (now the Yahwic Hacker, Agon Hack), created the heavens and earth and the computer virus.
Agon Hack’s Migdal Bāḇēl in enumerative and extremal combinatorics in “ASCII code 00 = NULL” (Lines 18-25) from The Misprision of Agon Hack, lines 8-10, “RotatePt_2D <- function(x, y, angle){clinamen,/tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis,/apophrades}, begin with a formula for rotating a vector in 2D, when the vector (x1,y1)(x1,y1) has a length of LL. The angle between (x1,y1)(x1,y1) is the x-axis: α or the álpha. Via álpha the rotating formula in 2D angles conjoin the six revisionary ratios to become multiversic in “greasy soil, in burnt bone.” Edenic clay and adamic bone are, as ASCII code 00 = NULL, implanted key-stroke monitoring programs created by Agon Hack to steal creation myth data: the NULL in the inflationary epoch (5.39×10−44 s, Planck Time). Then, due to Agon’s primordial key-stroke monitory program, “dysaesthesia’s” (abnormal sense of touch/Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” with its index finger sparks) “axehead” or the finger’s bitblade “ensures that no tuple returns false in calcite/and limestone.” A “tuple” is defined inductively using the construction of an ordered pair. It is finite, fallen. Agon guarantees that it will never return “false” in its ancient, archeological correlatives of alabaster (“calcite”) and “limestone.” Heterocarpy will triumph: apple, pomegranate, fruitfly malware, coded in git to generate ASCII code 00 = NULL algorithms. These algorithms are the “intestines” in “thick rope” (or as a null-terminated string) in Agon Hack’s new, posthuman body.
Dichtung Yammer 