Weekly Reader

  • Daniel Green writes about Dewey’s Art as Experience yet again.
  • Fred Hammer from It’s Alive Fanzine interviews Greg Cameron, who drummed for the excellent SST band October Faction over at Double Cross.
  • Grand Text Auto announces a new issue of New River.  There are some really good works of electronic literature in this issue which I will comment on soon.
  • The rather famous, it seems, classic game Oregon Trail is being ported to the IPhone.  Hopefully a version for the Nintendo DS will come afterwards.

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    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.

    Weekly Reader

    Meanwhile, on Twitter…

    And…

    Weekly Reader

  • Two more from the winter issue of The Quarterly Conversation: reviews of David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous and three of Cesar Aira’s novels.
  • Two from the May issue of Postmodern Culture: Jeffrey T. Nealon’s The Swerve Around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation and Kyle A. Wiggins’ Futures of Negation: Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future and Utopian Science Fiction. No links, I am not linking to closed access journals anymore.
  • Via Grand Text Auto, a New Yorker article about the disgusting “Myspace Hoax” suicide.  As I note in the comment section, as a teenager I was the victim of fake love notes for months one year.  This was before I was online; I cannot even begin to imagine what being a teenager who is fucked with like this in the Internet age.
  • I am also reading Julian Dibbell’s A Rape In Cyberspace, which GTA also linked to.

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    Weekly Reader

     

    Two New Publications From The ELO

    Via Scott Rettberg, GTxA, and the Electronic Literature Organization itself, I am happy and very proud to pass along word that there are two new publications available from the ELO.  I will let the ELO’s own descriptions speak for themselves:

    N. Katherine Hayles’s “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” establishes a foundation for understanding e-lit in its various forms and differentiates creative e-lit from other types of digital materials. This primer serves the twin purposes of reaching general readers and serving students and institutional audiences by providing descriptions of major characteristics of electronic literature and reflections on the nature of the field. This piece will also appear as the introductory chapter of Hayles’s book Electronic Literature: Playing, Interpreting, and Teaching (coming from Notre Dame Press in fall 2007). The book will also include the CD-ROM of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One — a compendium of 60 digital works of poetry and prose, published by the ELO in October 2006.

    Joseph Tabbi’s “Setting a Direction for the Directory: Toward a Semantic Literary Web” outlines and analyzes the critical issues relating to the description and classification of e-lit. Tabbi describes an approach that will allow the ELO Directory and other digital resources to be more useful, maintainable, transparent, and integrated with evolving technologies. The work organizes the terms of the problem into a call for an overall strategy of editorial and community-driven discourse about e-lit that will also be dependent on metadata solutions that are convergent with those described and implemented in other ELO publications.

    I was very impressed by Hayles’ keynote address last month at the ELO’s symposium.  I look forward to reading both of these new publications.

     

    The Future Of Electronic Literature

    The Future Of Electronic Literature conference in May looks very promising.  I am hoping to make an attempt at attending at least the second day.  Via Grand Text Auto, here is more information:

    MITH and the Electronic Literature Organization are pleased to announce a public symposium on the Future of Electronic Literature, May 2 and 3 at the University of Maryland, College Park, with co-sponsorship from the University Libraries and Department of English. The keynote speakers will be Kate Hayles (John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature at UCLA) and Kenneth Thibodeau (Director of Electronic Records Archives Program, National Archives and Records Administration).