Weekly Reader

  • Amanda French’s creative use of Ada Lovelace Day to discuss Mary Shelley.  I really like her argument that Shelley was the first science fiction novelist.
  • Having read a lot of John Barth’s essays in the past year, I found Conversational Reading’s post discussing suggestions for reading his fiction to be quite timely.
  • Emily Short on the role of agency in Interactive Fiction.
  • Lauren Elkin discusses the new collection of Susan Sontag’s journals in the new issue of The Quarterly Conversation.

    •  

    The Guilty Parties

    (inspiration)

    During the fall of 2004, the following are guilty as charged of offering inspiration for what you are reading.

    • Scott Rettberg’s hypertext fiction The Meddlesome Passenger.
    • Jorge Luis Borges’ collection Labyrinths, especially The Library Of Babel, The Immortal, and The Circular Ruins.
    • The literary weblog Conversational Reading, which, beyond generally getting me excited about literature, introduced me to the work of Gilbert Sorrentino, referenced in the penultimate lexia.
    • Jill/txt was a daily, still, source of inspiration.  A conversation with Jill in real life inspired a lexia.
    • Grand Text Auto in general.
    • Shelley Jackson’s My Body a Wunderkammer, which made me cry more than once and pushed me to be brave enough to write about sexuality issues.
    • Of course, The Unknown Collective’s The Unknown, which greatly influenced how I both read and write hypertext, and my aesthetic vision for hypertext fiction.
    • Derik Badman’s, who I met on a Buffy The Vampire Slayer listserv, writing about constraints at the time I was writing War Prayers inspired me to try to write three hundred word, exact, entries.
    • Although offline, Rettberg and Nick Montfort’s sticker novel Implementation was paradoxically what made me create a blog to document War Prayers.  I had to get my words onto a screen somewhere.  I even created a few summary stickers, one of which still is on a wall at The Richard Stockton College Of New Jersey underneath an Implementation sticker.

    By now you've seen the horror that has ravaged through parts of Asia this week.  As I type this over 78,000 have been confirmed dead.  The Boston Globe has a good article up about where you can donate money to help with the effort to non profits.  ZDNET has an article up about blogs in the affected region and how they are assisting relief efforts.  A blog has been set up to try to coordinate efforts out there.  Amazon has a page up where you can donate to the Red Cross. 

    Bloggied via Conversational Reading, Political Physics, Boing Boing