Calls for help

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Apr 142004

Probably because my CV is online, and because the end of the semester is near, over the past week I've gotten calls for help from several students at schools other than mine. Doing what I can . . .

My favorite came in tonight — from Mohamed Salhm in Egypt:

Dear Professor Rettberg,

Let me introduce myself.I am an MA Egyptian student interested in Brian friel and tom Murphy plays.UI am doing a thesis on Brian friel plays entitled “Home Where The Heartache is:Physical and Spiritual Exile as Reflected in Selected plays by Brian Friel.

There are very very few professor here in Egypt interested in my topic and there are vcery very few books and varticles on Brian Friel and Tom Murphy.

Let me ask you please for God sake

I am in badly need of your article on Brian Friel and Murhy,please

“The Myth of the American Dream in Three Contemporary Irish Plays by Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy, and Joseph O'Connor.”Texts & Contexts: The Journal of the Comparative Drama Conference, 1996.

Please if you can send it to my online mail or I will,if you agree ,I will send you my postal address,please.

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

–

I recognize that “for God sake” sense of urgency from my senior sem students, who are racing to complete their seminar papers.

Unfortunately, I found that I'm unable to import my old Wordperfect docs to Word format. I sent him the WP doc — hopefully he'll be able to convert it. My first academic publication. Gee whiz.

Blue Company is Back Online

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Mar 242004

The archive of Rob Wittig's email-and-sketches fiction Blue Company, which inspired my own email fiction Kind of Blue, is back online, and available free of charge. We're talking about finally trying to get the two of them together for some kind of reunion in printed form. feetarrow:

Smart Kid Writes Essay About "The Meddlesome Passenger"

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Dec 162003

Hey — this makes my night. Robert Ford, a student in Matt Kirschenbaum's Spring 2003 graduate Introduction to Digital Studies course, just published Scott Rettberg’s Writerly Text, “The Meddlesome Passenger”: Reading as Writing/Consumption as Production, a reading of my hyperfiction “The Meddlesome Passenger” in the context of Roland Barthes' concept of the writerly text. This Ford is one smart guy, he pretty much got it, and I'm grateful to have that kind of attentive reader. The essay was published on Wordcircuits in a collection along with several other essays from Kirschenbaum's seminar, titled “E-Lit Up Close.”

One bummer — I just realized that the javascripts that deliver half the text of “The Meddlesome Passenger” don't friggin work in Safari. So if you want to read it, open up Explorer.

While I'm pimping critical reaction to my own recent work: I was kind of disappointed that there wasn't more reaction to Kind of Blue, that is disappointed until I realized that it had been written up (alright well a line or two) in both The Honolulu Advertiser and in some Italian newspaper. Forget The New York Review of Books — the best kind of criticism is criticism in a language you can't even read.

A Response to the Unknown Rumors

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Dec 142003

I've gotten several calls and emails over the past week, and I just wanted to write a brief note to respond to the rumors swirling about the electronic literature community that the Unknown are planning to write a second hypertext novel together in 2004. They are completely unfounded. Putting the band back together at this point in our careers is almost completely unthinkable. Sure, there's a short reading planned for February in Philadelphia, but that doesn't mean that the three or four of us are actually talking about putting together a second album or for that matter hypertext novel on the scale of the first. I don't know where these things get started, but frankly, I suspect that Rob Wittig is behind the rumors. I never underestimate that evil genius or the power of his invisible broadcasting network operating out of a bunker somewhere in Duluth. The bunk stops here. Let me state this clearly — there is not now, nor has there ever been, any plan to write a second gargantuan hypertext novel which would resolve all the cliffhangers of the first. The rumors that Dirk, William and I have intitiated talks on resuscitating The Unknown Time Machine or for that matter started Being and the Unknown are completely untrue. Whoever called Wired and the New York Times and Rain Taxi and The New York Review of Books and The Iowa Review and Seventeen should be ashamed of him or herself or themselves. There is not now, nor has there at any time been, any plan to publish The Unknown 2 or UnK2 or The Unknowncameron or whatever code word you happen to assign to the nonexistant project. It simply doesn't exist, even as a figment. Stop the calls now. The joke, funny after the first call, is no longer amusing. We haven't negotiated anything, nor have our attorneys been talking to each other, nor any of the major studios. We're all involved in solo projects at this time, and don't have any plans for a reunion tour.

MA Thesis, Michael Bérubé, Pavic

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Aug 222003

A few people have actually read my dissertation since I made it available online (actually, all theses and dissertations at the University of Cincinnati are now published as .pdfs), so I decided to see if I could rescue my MA Thesis from back in the dark ages (1995) and put that online as well. I lost some of the formatting in the conversion, but “Unfinished Paintings” is now available for anyone who cares to read it. Eight eight year-old stories by a twenty-five year-ole me. Man, I was young back then. Who knows, maybe I'll try and track down my senior honor's thesis and throw that up too. I'm fairly sure the twenty-one year-old me writer would be embarrassing. Of course, ten years from now, I'll probably wonder at the fool who helped write The Unknown.

Partially inspired to do some of this archival work by running across Michael Bérub&eacute'’s blog. Bérub&eacute is one of my favorite progressive thinkers, one of the most productive scholars in English Studies, and he has a keen sense of humor. His blog is a kind of live cultural studies notepad. He's made an impressive effort of making his essays available online. It makes a great deal of sense to me that more people are doing this — online is the logical place for scholarly discourse to take place. Bérub&eacute, who has written in the past about the role of the “public intellectual,” is putting his text where his public is.

If Bérub&eacute hasn't left me with enough reading to get caught up on, there was exciting news last week that Wordcircuits has published a new hypertext by Milorad Pavic, the Serbian author of the print hypertexty novel The Dictionary of the Khazars. The new hypertext is titled The Glass Snail and is described as “a haunting hypertext tale of two people brought together by a shared compulsion.”

Kind of Blue

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Aug 122003

**Assignations, Frustrations, Meditations, Lamentations, Revelations, Assassinations**

Kind of Blue, the serial email novel I wrote during the Summer of 2002, has just been published by frAme, Journal of Art and Technology at the the trAce online writing center.

—
(A couple days later) One of the joys of publishing things on the Web is the possibility of near-instant response. Nick read KoB at a bar in Philly and wrote an instant review at Grandtextauto, and Jill read it while it rained in Norway and blogged it on jill/txt, and Vika emailed in a reader report from California. My favorite critical response to the project, however, remains Larry McCaffery's email of June 26, 2002.

The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies

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Jun 212003

The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies issue #2 — “Mediations” finally arrived in the mail the other day (a bit late for Fall 2002, but these things happen). It includes the START HERE> project that I curated along with Joe Tabbi, Michelle Citron, Niki Nolin, Rob Wittig, Andrew Stern, and Kurt Heintz. The issue itself has a good variety of material, including an interview with Kate Hayles, and essays by Shelley Jackson, Michael Joyce, Mark Poster and others. Worth the $10 cover price. Subscription information is available online.

The editor's announcement:

This special issue of the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies focuses on the effects of media technologies from the typewriter and the photograph to hypertext and the World Wide Web, and it offers a wide variety of approaches to understanding the ways in which texts are influenced by the material conditions of their production and distribution.  Contributors include prominent cultural critics, such as N. Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and Lisa Nakamura, as well as a variety of writers, filmmakers, and computer programmers.  A large section of this issue is devoted specifically to the history and future of electronic writing, including contributions from two of the most well-known hypertext writers, Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson, who take a retrospective look at their careers and address some of the fears and anxieties that critics have voiced concerning hypertext.  This section also includes excerpts from the “START HERE>” project, a gallery of new electronic writing produced for the Version>02 Festival in April 2002 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

It's kind of strange thinking that the MCA show was only 15 months back. In some ways, it feels like a lifetime ago.

New Media Studies Reviews online at ebr

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Mar 312003

The Electronic Book Review has released the New Media Studies review cluster I edited, which was also published in print last month in the American Book review. From my intro:

This cluster of reviews is intended to give its reader some sense of what we talk about when we talk about New Media Studies. Matthew Kirschenbaum reviews what is undoubtedly the most important publication in New Media Studies released this year, The New Media Reader, published by the MIT Press and edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. The Reader is an 800-plus page tome (with CD-ROM) that aggregates articles, papers, and creative work developed in the formative years of the new media from the 1940s until the development of the World Wide Web. The Reader's publication is an important event, as it offers this interdisciplinary field a core reading list, a set of common referents that might serve as a kind of Rosetta Stone as New Media Studies develops across multiple disciplines. Raine Koskimaa reviews N. Katherine Hayles' Writing Machines, a publication in which the accomplished critic and vocal advocate of electronic literature takes her readers on a tour of her own journey towards an appreciation of the materiality of literature and the possibilities of technotexts. Chris Funkhouser surveys Stephanie Strickland’s V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una. This work by the accomplished print and hypertext poet, author of True North (1997) and “The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot,” marks another milestone — the first time that a major commercial publisher (Penguin) has released a hybrid print-and-electronic work. Scott Hermanson offers a reading of literary critic Joseph Tabbi’s Cognitive Fictions, a work in which Tabbi situates autopoietic fictions within a contemporary media ecology. (This review appears only in the ABR print version – ed.) The study of digital culture is also within the purview of New Media Studies and, along those lines, I provide a reading of David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web.

Finally, any treatment of New Media Studies would be lacking without some pointers towards works that are themselves published in the electronic media. Print poet Maureen Seaton offers (in the ABR print version) an omnibus review of several electronic poems that were featured in the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2002 State of the Arts Symposium Gallery. Rob Wittig argues that Justin Hall’s links.net, arguably the first Web log, should be read as literature in the same vein as the correspondence of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.

ABR New Media Studies Focus

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Feb 222003

So I just read my intro to the ABR New Media Studies focus with a combination of elation and fear. It's always strange when you write something and then someone else edits it and then the next time you see it is in print and out on its own in the world where a dozen or more people will read it. On the one hand, I love the illustration. On the other hand, one of the changes I sent in only got halfway through. “literary critic editor Joseph Tabbi” should have been just “literary critic Joseph Tabbi.” Shite. But typos happen. Well, I'm happy to see it in print and spotted no aggregious errors other than that one.

It's funny, as a Web writer, I've grown accustomed to the luxury of spotting errors, only to chuckle, leap in, and edit them. The frightening fixity of print . . . Lilliputian, should have that been capitalized? Net or 'net? And how did I let myself use argues and arguably in the same sentence?

Regardless (or irregardless, as Grandma always says, whether or not that has a shade of sense, the ir to it), the New Media Studies issue is out. I haven't had a chance to enage in the always-mortifying round of typo-spotting on the actual print issue, but I think that the batch of reviews will offer its readers a fairly good impression of what New Media Studies is, is in the process of becoming, or might yet be.

Sigh.

No Lawsuit After All

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Feb 202003

Just a quick note to note that several people have emailed me to ask what lawsuit I was talking about when I posted that last post quickly while demonstrating to my New Media Students how to post.

After the Unknown collaboratively wrote this letter to Steve Bentz, proprietor of Pages for All Ages, who had more or less sent us a kind of halfassed cease and desist order for mentioning his store in the aging but exuberant hypertext novel, he responded politely, saying

> Dear Mr. Gillespie (and associates),
>
> Thanks much for your note. I never imagined that I'd actually receive a reply to my original email, much less one running to six pages in length. Honestly, I assumed that the posting in question was from an “orphaned” site–part of a prank created long ago and since forgotten by its author. Anyway, I gladly withdraw my (rather poorly worded, I'm afraid) request that the page be removed from the web. My concern was that it might confuse people wanting to access our website, but this, as you've so eloquently and exhaustively argued, is just our tough luck. I can say with absolute certainty that there was never any intention at Pages For All Ages of taking legal action over this thing.

So that's good. Anyway, just in case any more relatives or longlost pals email to ask about the litigation (people actually read this thing, I guess, so maybe I should write in it — or at least post recipes — coming soon) nothing going on there, nothing to worry about at least. The main reason we got our undies in such a bundle was that we've been waiting for years for Microsoft, Bertellsman, or Ted Turner to come after us . . . maybe that would have sold some books.

Nuff.

And nuff snow already I thought South Jersey was supposed to be balmy in comparison to Chicago. Flooding expected this weekend.

I vote against the war on Iraq and want the Bush adminstration to bring back the Work Programs Administration, specifically so that he can employ artists to make sculptures from snow in times of Northeastern emergency.

Oh hey, here's a link to a video of Joe Futrelle reading my poem You Are Dreaming of a Poem at the Newspoetry year-end Newspoetry RIP bash which I regretfully did not attend at the turn of the New Year. I'm grateful to Joe for his rendition. I think that's the first time I've been . . . er . . . published . . . in that fashion. How do I cite that on my vita?

Experiments in Irrational Exuberance

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Dec 192002

The talk I gave this spring at the Computers and Writing conference in Normal, Illinois: Experiments in Irrational Exuberance: The Present and Future of Electronic Literature or How I Became E-Literate was recently published online at Kairos.

There's a typo in there that I've decided to just leave in there, describing Spineless Books' “may other surprises” — I meant to say “many other” — but who likes perfect things anyway? and I kind of like the idea of the phrase “may other surprises.”

The New Media Studies focus of the American Book Review that I'm editing (for March/April 2003) came together beautifully over the last few weeks. Almost everyone got their pieces in on time, and I'm excited about the seven reviews — it's a nice cluster. Hopefully the editors of ABR will like it as much I do. The cluster will also be published online at the electronic book review this spring. Looking at all the reviews together, it's amazing how much activity is going on in e-lit/new media publishing over the next several months.

Back to grading papers. My worst moment in that process — one of my students plagiarized — through hamhanded ignorance — several writers by cut/pasting online w/ little or no attribution. The worst part — one of those writers was me. A particularly stupid way to underscore an F. But a couple of papers turned in have been a delight to read — including a very good one on weblogs.

October, November, and probably this is it for December

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Dec 102002

Well, those months went to my dissertation. Which is done. Finally. (and some teaching). I feel like a guilty blogger. So many things I should have written about/should write about. First semester trials and tribulations, successes and failures at teaching new media (next week is the last week of class). To do and not to do not next semester. Works to teach and not to teach. Pedagogies to embrace and avoid. Observations about New Jersey cuisine. Watching my students take to blogging (and not take to it). Reminder to self to write about the students who took to it and made actual cool web logs at the same time as they fulfilled the assignments. Conversation with Wardrip Fruin about his take on electronic writing. Talking elit archiving in Santa Fe after too little sleep and too much stress (see dissertation). Resolution to study Moulthrop's Reagan Library more carefully and to teach it. Reading Kind of Blue, the serial email novel thingie I wrote last summer in NYC. Tips to stay sane for new faculty finishing dissertations. Recipes. Thoughts on redistribution of said email novel. Thoughts about collaborative writing assignments for next semester's multimedia production class. Resolution never to try cooking fresh cranberries in rice again. Finally, a vegetarian lasagna I can live with. Resolution to quit smoking cigarettes, for real this time. Thoughts on Yuengling beer (pronounced Ying Ling) and why I like ordering it more than drinking it. Observations on southern Jersey resort culture. Thought that I could never be any but an irresponsible blogger. Could blog only when other pressing concerns (such as book review half written) were pressing, as distraction. Note to cite student Mary Beth Fisher I think comment on blogging while knowing that her teachers are reading it. Shock that this blog thing is the first thing that comes up when you do a google search on me. Mortified. Rant against New Jersey automobile registration procedures and exorbitant insurance rates. Thoughts on turning thirty-two, 2x2x2x2x2. Elation over successful defense, corresponding improvement in love life. List of films involving madness and creativity. Resolution to start using two spaces after a period again because it now feels charmingly anachronistic. Search for email system to distribute Kind of Blue as a single-user anytime opt-in mailing. After proofreading it. But not putting in any semicolons. And bringing murder subplot to less abrupt resolution. More Ernesto. Resolution to accomplish said in early spring. Resolution never to become stressed out again by deadlines. Resolution concerning UN Resolutions. Note to make list of New Year's resolutions. Realization that I only got caught up on my electronic literature reading by forcing students to do presentations on works I hadn't read. Resolution to do the same next semester. Thoughts on actual critical book Electronic Literature: a User's Manual. Private note to analyze why I like recycling other people's titles. List of people to interview for book. Resolution to interview Larry McCaffery on interviewing people before interviewing anyone else. Resolution to try at least six new recipes before the end of February, including three vegetarian. Appreciation of Chicago visit. Thoughts on language acquisition. Appreciation of Karen's cooking. Resolution to purchase pasta maker. At some point. Thoughts on likelihood that I will get searched at airport. Oh yes Shelley Jackson's visit and story idea I should have recommended to her for that GQ knockoff mag she's writing for –on eroticism of contemporary airport searches. Also remarks I should have written on her reading of “Phlegm” in Jersey. Also remarks on the Remote Lounge where I read with Montfort and Steph Strickland, the venue far more interesting than we were. Obvious Foucauldian aspects might make such ironically difficult to theorize. Rants. More rants. Resolution to write a short story for print this summer. Resolution to learn Flash but not to become seduced by it. Resolution to travel to another country, even Canada. To stay in better touch with friends. And where are the great American hypertext novels? Resolution to send Mark Bernstein a note of congratulations as soon as he conquers this task by finishing his enovel about the perverted elf photographer. Can't believe I mentioned that. Mortified. Resolution to stop writing resolutions. Resolution to write more less serious hypertext. Appreciation of Joseph Tabbi as sommelier. Comparison and contrast on Nick Montfort and Dirk Stratton's habits re: exotic beverages. Resolution to write about Atlantic City. Regrets on bit lit project Montfort owed. Resolution to stop writing in the blog and to get back to the second page of that book review. Resolution to finish my book review before Koskimaa finishes his. Preferably now. Resolution to publish something in the New Yorker within the next few months, failing that the Paris Review, failing that GQ (see piece on eroticism of airport searches), failing that, Boy's Life, failing that, Newspoetry. Expression of regrets that Newspoetry, for the last several years the sole publisher of my poetry, now more or less going under mothballs, yet another casualty of the Bush economy. Regrets on not writing on last election. Resolution to return to my comic roots periodically. Resolution to write another play. To always wear a jacket and tie to Christmas parties if I'm unsure of their formality. To begin cheering for one of the successful Philadelphia sports franchises without giving up my self-abusingly ingrained fandom for Chicago's losers. Resolution to read more Algren. Where are the great American novels? Resolution to catch up on Chabon book over break and additionally all other novels written by great American novelists now funded by the Department of State as part of the cultural war on terrorism. Note to self: drop note to Dept. of State volunteering to be funded by them. Note to self: never pass up a junket to Europe again, or Asia. Remember to buy flowers. Write more. Develop secret agenda and publish it in your weblog. Spend several hours before the end of the year proofreading the Unknown. For laughs. Do this at least once a year. With mulled wine, or hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps. Learn how to order Indian food capably without Wittig's help. Iron trousers. Start reviewing restaurants in South Jersey and publish said reviews in your Web log. Add relatives’ birthdays to computer calendar. Send emails to friends you've not written to in several years. Attach new recipes. Read Richard Powers' new novel. And Nabokov's Pale Fire. Before the New Year read Pale Fire. That about covers it. Never reveal the secret of your internal disorganization, but always publish your secret agenda. Less TV. Catch up on videogames for scholarly reasons. More satisfaction. Get Elvis album with that song. Also soundtrack to I am Sam with all the cool Beatles covers. Note to self: write long essay on note to self as a subgenre of metafiction. Try William's trick of writing without stopping each day for thirty minutes. Write Harry Mathews a holiday note using an obscure oulipan technique without explaining to him what that trick is. Read Harry Mathews Cigarettes and Journalist by Spring. Back to the book review.

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