Fellow GTxAer Nick Montfort and yours truly are going to be speaking next month at “Copyright and the Networked Computer” (Nov 6-8, Washington DC). This is another conference organized by William Warner and the Digital Cultures Project of the University of California. In the spring this same group put together the very successful e(X)literature Conference, which was co-sponsored with the Electronic Literature Organization. If you can make it, I’d recommend the trip — Nick and I will have company ranging from Wendy Seltzer (the EFF) to Dawn Bridges (Warner Music), J. Hillis Miller (UC Irvine), and Mark Hosler (Negativland).

I got my copy of Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play in the mail yesterday (check out the table of contents link from that page). Hopefully this means the physical and online booksellers (e.g., Booksense) will have it in stock soon.

It’s impressive, even though I’ve been expecting it to be impressive. There’s a lot here — the pages the same oversize (almost square) dimensions used for The New Media Reader, and nearly 700 of them, many with double-column layout — it makes space for conceptual definitions, wide-ranging discussions, lots of examples, and playable games (including one that utilizes the gutters of the pages).

I’m a bit disappointed that the “mini-interviews” Eric and Katie conducted in 2001 appear to have ended up on the cutting room floor. They interviewed some sharp folks (and, yes, the occasional not-so-sharp character like myself). Maybe the interviews will find a home on the Rules of Play website or something. If there is a website — my Google-fu was not sufficient to find anything but the one at MITP.

I’m going to have to read the book before saying much more, but it strikes me as incredibly ambitious. It’s a theoretical argument, and a textbook in part based on that argument. It’s also a bit of a survey of the field, and it’s playful, and it’s playable. Is it too much? Will those who disagree with the argument not want to use the textbook? Will those who love the theory feel alienated by the textbook form? Or will these talented authors have managed the alchemical fusion, bringing the best of these different discourses together in print — as happens in discussions around the tables of the seminar rooms and design studios we most enjoy inhabiting?

My brother and I had an apartment we shared in New York until early Wednesday morning. It was at the corner of Greenwich St and 11th St, and from our window you could see the stretch of sidewalk where Dylan Thomas stumbled and died — the White Horse Tavern, from which he stumbled, reminds visitors of this event by putting his portrait on several of the walls. It was a nice neighborhood to walk in — though Bleeker St Books and Kim’s Video had been forced out recently, along with many of the other small business that made the neighborhood what it was. There are a lot of empty storefronts now, with landlords apparently hoping to land one of the designer clothing shops and cramped-looking day spas that have in the last few years replaced some of my favorite places in the Village (Moondog ice cream, we hardly knew ye).

We’d had the apartment seven years. We were harassed out by our landlord. We were completely within our legal rights, but we consulted with a lawyer who’d fought our landlord before and he told us it would take a year of court dates and $10,000 in legal fees to hold onto our home. He told us we’d probably get our court costs back in the end, because we’d certainly win the case, but there was always the possibility that a judge would decide not to award them to us.

This isn’t the most outrageous thing our landlord has done. Last summer this blog was silent for June and most of July — shortly after its initiation. One reason for this was that our landlord pulled in the roof of our apartment building with less than 2hrs notice — leaving me and my brother homeless for most of the summer while “emergency” work was performed (we learned later that he’d had a permit since February and simply not told his tenants).

Anyway, now, instead of splitting my time between New York and Providence, I’m just a New Englander. For those of you who had a permanent address for me that turned out not to be that permanent, here’s a mailing address you can use: Creative Writing, Box 1852, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912.

Speaking of mail, while I was traveling this summer some great things arrived in my mailbox. One I want to write about soon is Brian Kim Stefans’s Fashionable Noise. And I should probably mention that earlier today I got into some online writing on grandtextauto.org about computer media grappling with what it means to be alive.