Reading over the Electronic Book Review and the Future of the Book I was particularly interested in how the internet and the process of electronic writing will change the position of editor. It's my belief that it's only a matter of time before electronic literature gets commodified in some way, be it through an online publishing company of some sort or a community of writers/critics who filter and market content, or some other variation. The possibilities for creation within the form are so great and the internet audience is so large. There's big money to be made.

At the same time, it seems unrealistic to think this electronic editor will be similar to those that control the publishing world. Sure the basic task of cleaning up grammar and punctuation will still be needed, but in electronic literature the form and interaction between the different types of media and the user are in many ways as important as the words that make up the literature. Thus I see the electronic editor as having more in common with Hollywood talent scouts than with traditional publishers. The mark of a good electronic editor will be their ability to find and develop talent. Comb the internet for the next artist or face that can be sold to the internet public.

<LOOKATME!>I</LOOKATME!>

Some see blogs as poor substitute for novels because they so often seem too personal to be taken for art. One could object that the intrusive I, traditionally typical of immature or unpracticed authors, is symptomatic of the flood of amateurs who blog. But I doubt this will hold empirically. Plenty of blogs deal impersonally with external subjects. (I like to read Noam Chomsky's blog occasionally, for example). But these blogs not only seem unbloggy (debloggé?), they resemble exposition, not narrative.

Apparently, if the author or narrator doesn't get in and throw a few low punches, no one else does either.

If experimental hypertexts generally suffer from syntagmatic discontinuity, a solution may have already arrived.

Text will continue to become more notably and markedly visual, but these highly inflected texts will supplant or augment not narrative, but lyric forms because they function similarly.

To show how this works, let me show you a favorite Emily Dickinson piece.

Circumference, thou bride
Of awe, -- possessing, thou
Shalt be possessed by
Every hallowed knight
That dares to covet thee.

Etext has many advantages which were much discussed in

I'd like to call attention to an important comment Lulu made to my recent post about hypertext composition method. She discusses how ideas develop during and out of the process of writing -- an idea that I think doesn't get enough play in discussions of writing process and poetics, perhaps because some of us (like me) find it difficult to pin down and analyze. She mentions preferring non-visual modes of operation. This interests me because I think my own extensive and reflexive dependence on visuality may tend to lead me into analyzing things, including Websites and hypertext narratives, as static or non-temporal -- something that might be applied to Patchwork Girl and Victory Garden, for instance, which use spatial, nontemporal metaphors for narrative.

I wish to notify everyone that I will allow an imaginary friend, Jack Mole, to use my account to upload regular entries to this site.

This is probably a lousy way to introduce a friend, but I hereby apologize for Jack in advance. He expresses ideas and opinions neither I nor anyone else I know endorses. Further, he seems to consider his fictional world at least as real as our own. I usually find this charming in personae, but it may lead him to act in ways not appropriate to a classroom environment, since he feels that this is only a publishing convenience, not a classroom or even, really, a social setting in any usual sense.

Plus,

My reaction to Caroline and Jemma doesn’t stand out from the rest of the class who has blogged on them: they weren’t my favorite. I’ll admit, it was fun to hear British accents and relive some of the British abbreviations from my study abroad days, but the content of the both of the sites was less than interesting. The intense sexual and/or alcohol themes of both simulations annoyed me and made me believe that these are designed for teenagers who want a peek at either uni life (however realistic it may be) or the life of a young working woman. Emails from Jemma’s coffee date reading “Fancy something stronger tonight?” and Caroline’s drunkenness with Simon in her first video turned me off.

So, like Shock and Awe, I was thoroughly seduced by Kind of Blue. Which means that I spent a couple hours glued to the computer screen, and towards the end of that time, I was pretty sure that my eyes were going to fall out.

And let's be clear: I am no computer-screen-staring lightweight. My summer/winter break job=eight hours a day sitting in a cubicle staring at a computer screen. One of my hobbies involves writing jibberish (code) in a text editor. I blog, I scour four or five news sites every day, and Facebook kind of owns me.

So, I was excited to see that First Person talks about gaming, as that topic has spawned a few of the more interesting conversations on this blog. What I wasn't expecting was how closely the articles would tie in with the conversations we've been having about electronic literature--and particularly the complains a lot of us have made about the artificiality/awkwardness of the e-lit we've looked at.

In Bryan Loyall's response to the first article (Janet Murray's) he writes: "One property of Murray's three main examples is that the participant is consciously aware of the story and actively manipulating it. These forms give powerful ways to tell new types of stories, but for me, one of the joys of a story is when I forget about it being a story. I am simply there."