May 10th, 2011 / 8:55 am
 Snippets
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Christian Bök’s The Xenotext; Ron Silliman on The Xenotext.

5 Comments

  1. May 10th, 2011 / 3:55 pm deadgod—

      Boek’s three “experts” don’t exactly agree as to the immutability of the texts or ‘texts’ they’re talking about.

      Wong wants to encode messages “where such messages persist, undamaged and unaltered”, and Davies projects “self-maintaining, self-replicating machines that perpetuate their data over eons”.

      But Kac’s idea of ‘mutagenic-radiation “editing”‘ points to one – I would have guessed: obvious and no longer controversial – source of common, frequent, and rapid genetic mutation. (There are others: for example, chemical damage to (or – less judgmentally – transformation of) nucleotide sequences.)

      There’s nothing permanent about a sequence of base-pairs; all this talk of “eons” and inter-galactic transmission wouldn’t fly past a high-school nerd, would it??

      More disturbing to me is the cavalier safety assurance:

      only the most miniscule, most negligible, chance whatsoever of producing any dangerous contagion (despite the alarmism of critics outside biology)

      This mischaracterization of the alarm of many biologists (at the unforeseen consequences of genetic tinkering) is so insipidly hyperbolic as to suggest a hoax.

      I mean that the phrase “viable, benign protein” is an oxymoron, is it not?

      The errant terminology doesn’t inspire confidence, either: “an astonomic expert”? genes are “nanoscopic […] emissaries” (- does Boek know what a ‘nanometer’ is?)?

      Geneticists have been ‘inscribing text’ into DNA for decades now, with plenty of “viable” enzymous results indeed, though the jury is far out on “benign”.

      It’s not enough to write a poem that is processed by and simultaneously processes people linguistically?
      That’s a shame!

  2. May 10th, 2011 / 3:56 pm Cal A. Mari—
  3. May 10th, 2011 / 4:10 pm deadgod—

      I also think that Silliman’s literary point is apt: the reconfigured cell won’t be writing, but rather printing proteins.

      – which will be legible as products of the poem that was translated into base-pairs only for as long as that code survives culturally alongside those engineered cells.

      How is that decoding knowledge – physically outside the cells – surviving longer than Boek’s original or ‘original’ poem will culturally survive?

      I just can’t be the only nerd who doesn’t need to be talked into thinking that science has always been a mode or bundle of modes of and for apprehending and en-joying the beauty of “beautiful” things/processes/events.

  4. May 10th, 2011 / 4:10 pm deadgod—

      I also think that Silliman’s literary point is apt: the reconfigured cell won’t be writing, but rather printing proteins.

      – which will be legible as products of the poem that was translated into base-pairs only for as long as that code survives culturally alongside those engineered cells.

      How is that decoding knowledge – physically outside the cells – surviving longer than Boek’s original or ‘original’ poem will culturally survive?

      I just can’t be the only nerd who doesn’t need to be talked into thinking that science has always been a mode or bundle of modes of and for apprehending and en-joying the beauty of “beautiful” things/processes/events.

  5. May 10th, 2011 / 4:28 pm mimi—

      you are not the only nerd, i’m with you
      btw, i’ve always considered ‘culture’ a part of ‘nature’, a natural ‘process’ beautiful, even in all its warts and bruises