// SLIDVID
// By Jim Andrews, January 2010, version 1.1

// Customize these values.

var gSeriesTitle="Kedrick James"
//This specifies the title of the series.
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//How long each image is displayed after the
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//A boolean that specifies whether the transition between
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//Specifies the path to the folder that contains the icons.
//Relative to the location of index.htm.
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var gNotes=["WRITING POST-PERSON:", "LITERACY, POETICS, AND SUSTAINABILITY IN THE AGE OF DISPOSABLE DISCOURSE", "This monograph addresses the mail,", "in particular the rise of mass electronic mail,", "and its illicit form commonly known as spam email.", "When I began studying spam,", "I was asking questions about information environments", "and, taking a poetic approach, I wondered", "if there were methods by which", "we could recycle waste in information environments.", "I hoped to satisfy two agendas:", "one, to provide a strategic focus for qualitative research", "into the prevailing conditions in a communicative medium", "on which many people the world over have come to depend;", "and two, to understand how language under its new high speed,", "high volume digital conditions informs how we live", "and learn as writers.", "Much is to be gained in the study of contemporary language", "and literacy by concerning ourselves with the texture", "of the current information environment,", "and with how language, literacy and literature", "are caught up within the web of high-tech—even robotic—discourse.", "My approach to the subject of spam", "reflects the personal background I bring to this work", "as a Canadian scholar, researcher, poet and educator.", "The history of correspondence and postal networks", "provides many opportunities to think through contemporary social practices.", "The problems and advantages of electronic mail", "affect millions of people worldwide,", "and help shape new cultural habits,", "social networks and patterns of language use.", "Acknowledging the Western (specifically, European and North American)", "biases of the research, this work is restricted to English-language mail.", "I neither account for the linguistic and cultural complexity", "in North America nor for the history", "of postal services that have existed from antiquity", "in parts of the world other than Europe or North America.", "I chose to limit myself in this fashion", "for two reasons: first, a comprehensive history", "and examination of trends globally", "is beyond the scope of a single thesis;", "second, I do not have", "the linguistic or cultural background", "to do justice to a study of electronic mail", "in languages other than English.", "That said, the developments", "in systems of public correspondence", "described herein led to the creation of a digital network", "environment and infrastructure in which spammers thrive,", "and from which I was able to gather a corpus of data", "for qualitative analysis.", "Spam email typifies textual excess.", "The exuberance of spammers", "is something few people would defend.", "Like other forms of excess and waste,", "spam threatens the stability and utility of the environments it pollutes.", "However, I write to examine spam, not to condemn it:", "thus, the poet and educator in me", "instigates a further bias", "with respect to the literary perception and", "study of texts and information systems.", "My approach to spam is idiosyncratic.", "Most research and journalism about spam", "is situated within discourses of war and crime.", "I have chosen to use a literary lens", "instead—to observe the developments that have led to", "the current situation of spam", "from a viewpoint of language and literacy;", "in particular, writing and poetry.", "And so I invite fellow researchers, scholars, educators and writers", "to view the developments that gave rise to spam", "from a personal-linguistic rather than", "techno-militaristic perspective.", "In education we are compelled to understand today", "what the student will contend with tomorrow and,", "in the course of teaching,", "to inspire notions realized well into the future.", "It is this future", "that the concept of writing post-person attempts to address,", "analyzing the conditions of literate correspondence,", "both by framing a historical perspective on writing", "as public discourse and by looking toward", "a new construct of the author in the digital age.", "Although spam is a genre that is native to the digital realm,", "the problem it presents is not.", "That problem has accompanied the development of public mail", "since the mid-nineteenth century postal reforms.", "Thus, writing post-person extends the pun in two theoretical directions:", "Writing in the post-personal age,", "an age of mass production, commercialization and", "automated dissemination of information,", "and writing as a person of the post, a poster of messages,", "a source of data, the object rather than the subject of networks.", "My use of this term implies no nostalgia for a pre-digital era of correspondence,", "nor does it suggest any deprecation of the role of new technologies in modern life.", "The post-person reflects merely one stage in", "the long journey we might call the authorship of the self.", "I have attempted to introduce poetic possibilities for", "an appreciation of contemporary writing practices,", "to revisit the past to understand how to embrace and educate for the future.", "...", " THE ART OF RECYCLING IN AN AGE OF AUTOMATED CORRESPONDENCE", "Investigating the information environment", "is something I approach as a teacher and teacher educator,", "because I cannot do my work without a sense of the environment", "from which, and into which, my students come and go;", "it is something, moreover, that we can do together.", "But the recycling of information", "is something that requires an additional personal perspective,", "drawing on the work of learning as a poet.", "Poetry is important to cultural recycling for several reasons:", "it is one of the oldest means of discursive recycling;", "poetry focuses on language qua language.", "In other words,", "poetry reflects the conditions of the system of meaning-making", "as its primary referent;", "it compacts expression and compresses meaning.", "It hones aesthetic proclivities of linguistic selection", "and self-discovery,", "gleaning linguistic treasures along the way.", "But the effects of this process are not merely quaint,", "restoring a pastoral field of pristine reflection", "on hallowed texts.", "Cultural recycling, Moser (2007, p. 8) argues,", "is not obliged to adopt a notion of an eternal return", "as the repetition of cycles:", "“Quite the contrary, ‘recycling’,", "especially in the cultural sphere,", "always concerns the idea of transformation and metamorphosis.", "It never brings a system, or a material,", "back to the same position, or to its former identity.”", "Nor is recycling merely generative of newness;", "rather, it combines the process of erasure and reduction", "with reemergence,", "interpolating “a negative and a positive moment” (p. 9).", "This moment,", "by definition ecstatic,", "is the central thematic of Bohrer’s (1994, p. 51) conceptualization of suddenness", "as central to the Modern aesthetic", "and “the ecstasy of the moment", "which is so striking in modern poetry.”", "Quoting Junger’s “Sicilian letter to the man in the moon,”", "Bohrer states that these are", "“‘moments of an indeterminate expectation’", "in which one listens to", "the ‘voice of the unknown.’”", "Here, at the moment in which the text becomes a stranger-to-itself,", "the recycling processes begin.", "The recycling moment is", "“a conceptual common denominator”", "to “processes and procedures that already have their own historical and discursive existence,", "such as parody, pastiche, collage, montage, epigonism,", "re-writing, remaking, sampling, reconversion, mixing, etc.” (Moser, 2007, p. 9).", "These traditions of cultural recycling", "take on a broader literary-historical significance", "in Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) “chronotope” theory of folklore", "and its rise into novelist discourse,", "traceable from the Greeks on,", "as the force of social practice upon the production of cultural forms", "and the point of the accession of waste and excess to culture,", "recycled through language.", "He explores this sociocultural transformation of the world", "in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel,", "in which all the refuse of the body,", "of language and the social order,", "is flushed to the surface of narrative and,", "in the process of destroying the traditional matrices of objects,", "phenomena, ideas and words, Rabelais puts together", "new and more authentic matrices and links", "that correspond to ‘nature,’", "and that link up all aspects of the world", "by means of the most marvelous grotesque and fantastic images", "and combinations of images.", "In this complex and contradictory flow of images,", "Rabelais brings about a restoration of", "the most ancient-object associations;", "this flow enters one of the most fundamental channels", "of literary thematics.", "The channel of literary thematics he addresses is", "the generative principle of discourse,", "the transition of waste into novelty and excess in effect.", "The (stratified) world de-composes, and degrades,", "but in principle it is never disposable.", "The author-as-cultural-recycler calls forth", "the wreckage of history and makes it", "correspond with the present:", "the object, phenomena, idea, or word regains answerability.", "Through these links, correspondences and processes,", "a culture’s life-force becomes invigorated."]

//gNotes is an array of strings. one string for each of the
//gLastFile images. gNotes[i] is displayed in the slideshow
//when image i+1 is displayed. If you don't have notes to 
//display, don't worry about making gNotes long enough.
//If it isn't long enough, the program pads it out.