Reading in Feb, and Harry Mathews Exhibition at Penn

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Oct 302003

The ever-intrepid Nick Montfort has arranged a reading for February at Penn. Nick, William Gillespie and I will be reading from three collaborative projects, The Unknown (Gillespie, Rettberg, Stratton), 2002: a Palindrome Story (Gillespie, Montfort) and Implementation, the sticker novel that Nick and I are currently working on. The reading is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, February 14th, 2004 at Kelly Writer's House.

The reading will coincide with a visit to Penn by Harry Mathews. Nick is curating an exhibition of Mathews' papers, which are now housed in the Penn Library. Mathews is the only American member of the Oulipo, author of the The Journalist, Cigarettes, and several other novels, essay collections, and short story collections. The Mathews' exhibition will open with a reception on Thursday, February 12th.

I'm looking forward to seeing Harry again, and to reading with Nick and William. It will be the first time that William and I have done a reading of The Unknown since March 2002 in California. Harry's a wonderful writer, a raconteur, and a connoisseur. I had a great evening with Harry, Joe Tabbi, and Rob Wittig back in Chicago a couple years ago.

Two Conferences (Three I Guess)

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Sep 232003

Okay, so next August, I intend to go to ISEA 2004, a three Baltic city (Helsinki, Tallinn, and Helsinki) and a boat conference with a bunch of digital artists and critics and probably lots of interesting happenings provided they accept one or both of the proposals I was part of submitting, a panel on Network Literature with William Gillespie and Joseph Tabbi, and the sticker novel / web art / mail art / situationist type project, Implementation, that Nick Montfort and I have been working on in recent months and will launch in January. Oh I don't know if I'll be able to afford it, but I'm betting I'll be on the boat. All those new media people packed onto a ferry should give new meaning to the phrase “don't want to sail on no ship of fools.” In other words, it rates high on the funometer. Plus Tabbi just bought a place in Latvia and is musing doing some kind of new media center or at the very least new media crashpad and it's really not too far from where Jill Walker lives, and she's the smartist Australian Norwegian blogger I know. Plus her accent makes my knees weak. The combination of those three things convinces me that I need to go to Scandinavia and the Baltics this summer to widen my horizons.

Not sure that I'll be able to shirk my teaching duties, but I'd sure like to go to Copyright and the Networked Computer: A Stakeholders' Congress in Washington D.C., November 6-8, 2003. Forget Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin and all the really great experts on copyrights and wrongs, this conference has Negativland. I'll probably try to make it into DC for at least a day or two of that.

And this year's standard institutional conference engagement will be the AWP in Chicago. It will be the AWP, so there will be lots of poets desperate for other poets to read their work (conferences with hundreds of writers sound like fun until you're a writer surrounded by hundreds of other writers at which point the whole thing starts to feel like an unwholesome undertaking — writers getting institutionalized together, sigh — last time I went to one of these it was in Albany, and it was like some kind of dystopia — a writers' conference in a town that had a law against having bookstores downtown). But, on the upside, it'll be in Chicago, so I'll see my friends and the pizza will be great. and it will be fun as always to discourse with other ELO people as we try to convince a bunch of print writers that we have no intention of eliminating books but want to coexist peacefully and drink wine at the same parties and bullshit about obscure Irish fiction and ancient Japanese poetry just like they do. That's March 24-27, 2004. Maybe I'll dance with some poets or score some free books or blow off most of the conference and catch a show or two at the Hideout or Empty Bottle instead or run into Curt White and talk politics.

Five Years Unknown

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Sep 052003

Hey the Unknown turns five years old this week, sort of. We gave our first reading of the hypertext novel on September 5, 1998, at a labor day party that was well-attended by labor activists, at Mike's backyard in Urbana, Illinois. The reading is still online, and I think the RealAudio files still work. Five years, a lot of liquids under bridges over troubled waters, many texts later. And also William is turning middle-aged, like 34 or something so I should say Happy Birthday and also just as a side note I should have said Happy Birthday to Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who just turned 16 last week and finished his third MIT Press book the same day as he got his driver's license (drive safe and remember that the car is a lethal weapon — Puhleese!). But don't expect me to dedicate this blog to Birthday wishes, please. Sorry. That would get insane and I have dozens of friends and relations. Dirk, for instance, is also considerably older now. There's gray in his beard if you look close. Frank is wiser, and I've more or less stayed exactly the same as I was that day. Time flies even faster than hypertext.

Spineless Grows and Grows Like a Carbuncle or a Coral Reef

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Sep 042003

william with boats:

William Gillespie was on the island last week en route to his new gig at Brown, where he'll get his MFA as the second Electronic Writing Fellow (Talan Memmott is the first). I had a great time hanging out with William and Lorien. William and I have been friends and writing buddies for nearly a decade now — he's the type of friend who I can simply sit down with and break into spontaneous mutual laughter over a joke we started telling each other years before. And I get writing done when he's around. Brown is a big move for William. Essentially since the date of his birth, he's been at the center of a thriving alt.culture scene in Champaign/Urbana, Illinois, where he participated in a variety of collectives (theater, art, radio, lit, potluck, community gardening, you name it he did it). After William left, I took a little time to get caught up on his endeavors at Spineless Books, where some amazing online and offline publishing has been taking place. In addition to distributing print oddities, such as 2002: a palindrome and The Unknown: an Anthology, Spineless hosts a large collection of Electronic Works, a bunch of brief Book Views, some of the aforementioned Urbana Radio Theatre, various manifestos, such as this gem on collaborative writing and a just hot damn terrific collection of writing by

Larry in Chicago:

Larry McCaffery, who is to literary criticism what punk rock was to American music. Not to mention Federman. Sadly, in the Philosophy of Teaching Writing section, William rejects the Chicken Based Poetry Pedagogy I utilized with such great success at Illinois State University lo those many years ago. In spite of this difference of philosophy, William and I remain friends and I remain a Spineless media consumer.

Written in the Flesh

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Aug 242003

Talking on the phone with Shelley Jackson yesterday, the hypertext pioneer, illustrator and author of The Melancholy of Anatomy discussed plans for what may be her most interesting use of multimedia to date. Shelley's working on a story called “Skin” which will be published on the flesh of volunteer participants in the form of single-word tattoos. I trust that every word in the story will count. There are sure to be some unique challenges to this form of publication — i.e. the participants won't necessarily get to choose which word they'll be inscribed with. Shelley published a call for participants in the latest issue of Cabinet magazine and will shortly be publishing a more thorough explanation on her website's news section. Got some free ankle space? Here's your chance to be part of a unique literary experience.

Here's a picture of Shelley at work in her studio in Brooklyn, first thing in the morning about a month ago (she let me crash on her couch inbetween Jersey and LaGuardia). That girl can be out on the town until the wee hours and still get up and write.

Sept 1st Update: Read the call for flesh.

Shelley Jackson at Work:

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