www.loyalty.org/~schoen/haiku.html -> www.loyalty.org/%7Eschoen/haiku.html
The 456-stanza work, sometimes described as an epic, was an anonymous contribution to Prof. Touretzkys Gallery of CSS Descramblers, which collects a variety of ways of expressing technical information about the decryption of DVDs. The poem includes a traditional opening invocation to the Muse: Now help me, Muse, for I wish to tell a piece of controversial math. It proceeds to describe, using only haiku-like verses with lines of five, seven, and five syllables, all the mathematical steps required to convert an encrypted DVD into a usable form. Touretzky created his Gallery shortly after United States movie studios began their quest to suppress the publication of such information. Touretzky was concerned about the free speech implications of the case, and the purported distinction between computer software and other forms of expression. As Touretzky explains: If code that can be directly compiled and executed may be suppressed under the DMCA, as Judge Kaplan asserts in his preliminary ruling, but a textual description of the same algorithm may not be suppressed, then where exactly should the line be drawn? The Gallery of CSS Descramblers was created to explore this issue, and point out the absurdity of Judge Kaplans position that source code can be legally differentiated from other forms of written expression. Touretzky set about collecting a remarkably wide variety of descriptions of the DVD decryption process, with the aim of promoting critical thought about what expression people are prepared to censor, and why. This process resulted in an outpouring of creativity from the Internet community, with the DVD CSS algorithm described and redescribed from an assortment of scientific and artistic angles. Most contributors seemed to view the creation of each new adaptation of DeCSS as a form of political protest. As Touretzkys correspondence with the Motion Picture Association of America made clear, each adaptation was also a thorny new legal question: could this version be called a circumvention device?
So when the studios asked Touretzky to take his Gallery off the Internet, he put the question to them directly: which versions did they object to? They told him that they would consider the question and respond appropriately at the proper time. Impressed by other peoples contributions to the rapidly-growing gallery, I decided I had to make some kind of effort of my own. I had particularly admired Joe Weckers song Descramble This Function Is Void, and I imagined that my contribution would have to be in the realm of literature rather than of visual art. I toyed with translating a description of the algorithm into Latin on the theory that this might appeal to lawyers, who readily recognize that Latin is expressive and meaningful even though the vast majority of people cant understand it. I quickly abandoned this project when I ran into trouble with technical terminology such as array, bit, shift, pointer, etc. Algorithm could probably be ratio and loop might be iteratio , but there were still dozens of outstanding terminological difficulties. Instead, I settled on the idea of putting the algorithm into haiku form. A strange tradition current among programmers calls for the use of the 5-7-5 pattern - preferably cleverly - to express technology, or jokes about technology, or really anything at all, just for the fun or the challenge of writing within the constraint. I remember particularly that the UC Berkeley Computer Science Undergraduate Association has a mysterious tradition of writing haiku poems about the chemical element zinc. The tradition seemed to start with a 1995 transcript of a conversation in which CS students began to write poems about zinc, but it continued within and without the Berkeley CSUA, and I know that I personally helped spread the tradition to other forums and communities. I perpetrated Healthful supplement / present here where foods prepared: / its the kitchen zinc, Sensations coming / from metallic reactions: / a zinking feeling, Gossips and costly / seagoing vessels conjoined / thus: loose lips, zinc ships, and Rene Descartes finds / his elemental self: I / zinc, therefore I am. I wont / zinc to your level, but nonetheless offered Shipwreck survivor / either saves his load or flees.
Its hard to say, then, how this particular and rather odd haiku tradition started, or why it seemed to hold particular appeal for computer programmers. But it was obvious to me that a description of DVD decryption in haiku stanzas would fit perfectly into the tradition, and I decided to create one. Writing the bulk of the poem itself took me around 15 hours over the course of several days, excluding the CSS tables whose construction I describe below. As Leigh Ann Hildebrand observed, there were classical influences at work in my efforts; I realized immediately that I would need to begin with an invocation of the Muse. My poetic skills were not up to constructing dactyllic hexameters, and I had already settled on the haiku form. Touretzkys article The CSS Decryption Algorithm as my main source for the technical details, but I set myself a strict rule against using hexadecimal constants, because they seemed unpoetic. Everything had to come back into decimal form, because a number is a number. I also felt that it was important to include passages honoring and praising heroes even using an epithet in the traditional epic way: wise Andreas Bogk, only partly metri causa together with a substantial amount of context. After all, one of the ways long poetry maintains interest is by telling several stories at once, and by painting scenery. Finally, I felt that expressing the fear of censorship directly and repeatedly within the poem itself created an interesting tension. It emphasized that the poem had really been written by a human author with a human voice and his own interests and passions. Aware of the prospect of censorship, the poem confronts would-be censors directly and takes them to task. By contrast, most source code is relatively defenseless: it cant fight against its own suppression, and it gives less direct evidence of being in a human voice, leading some people to accept its stigmatization as merely mechanical or merely functional. I feel that it is essential that the poem constantly pleads for its own life - an effect accomplished comically yet powerfully by Joe Wecker in Descramble This Function Is Void: I hate the DMCA, It makes this song illegal. This says: if you censor this, you are not censoring a machine: you are censoring a person - a singer, a poet, an author, who knows you and knows what you are doing. Touretzky through an anonymous remailer, which concealed my identity even from him. In light of the DVD CCAs willingness to sue even a t-shirt vendor for printing the algorithm on clothing, I thought it might be prudent not to be publicly identified as the haiku author. Meanwhile, Touretzky who still didnt know my name was very pleased with my work and immediately included it in his Gallery. Touretzky responded to the lawsuit against the t-shirt publisher by saying, memorably, that if you can put it on a t-shirt, its speech. Henry, a writer in Seattle, complained about Western joke haiku forms , arguing that the practice I discussed above typically lacks literary merit, that it does not accord with the traditional Japanese cultural meaning of haiku, and that the verses produced in this way technically are not haiku but senryu . I think this critique should probably receive more attention than it has. Its clear that the practice of writing 5-7-5 verses and calling them haiku seizes on only one aspect of the haiku form and entirely removes it from its original cultural context. I freely admit that my poem has no cultural continuity with the ancient Japanese haiku artform, although I think it has its own sort of literary merit. There is in some sense more art in other forms of constrained writing such as lipography, in which a letter or group of letters, typically e, is omitted. I have in fact extensively practiced writing and speaking without the letter e, and have been able to do it reasonably naturally for hours at a time. I c...
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