[Newspoetry] 1 from Cincinnati

[William Gillespie]

Newspoem

William: Well, I'm sitting here at the Holy Grail in Cincinatti with
Scott Rettberg of the Unknown and Rob Wittig of tank20. It's getting
late but I've just put a dollar in the jukebox. We're here in Ohio to
attend the Ropes lecture series at the University of Cincinnati and to
seriously contemplate the future of electronic literature. Among the
guest lecturers are eminent novelist Robert Coover, UCLA professor
Katherine Hayles, and, well, us. And Dirk.

I missed the roundtable this afternoon because I was teaching Dirk's
high school creative writing students how to write hypertext fiction.
Although they were skeptical when I presented the assignment this
afternoon, they are all now firmly entrenched in the hypertext canon.
Poor kids.

Scott: Well, the panel went pretty well. Rob Wittig says he'll pass a
photo onto the newspoetry list. Kate Hayles was really pretty brilliant.
She stressed, in a highly erudite yet very human way, the fact that
collaborations between writers and artists and programmers etc.
happening right now on the web are nothing for us to be scared of, as
people who love literature, that they are in fact symptoms of
increasingly exuberant period of experimentation, of which newspoetry is
a part. She mentioned the life-size bikini-clad poster of Joe Futrelle
she had hanging in her office at UCLA. Not really. That part was a lie.
But William Blake came up, we're going to post the realaudio at
http://www.eliterature.org. You should hear it, was pretty good stuff
and Coover was right on too. By now you know that Coover's a pretty
major figure - a great writer godfather to the hypertext movement and a
great man in the great man theory of history sense of the word. I
clicked for him last night. Rob Wittig will now provide you with further
details of the U of Cincinnati Ropes Lectures on the Electronic
Literature Experience.

Rob: Coover's angle this February is to look back on the past
decade-plus of off-line hypertext and label it a Golden Age . . . a
canny move that cuts several ways. First it places us (as he pointed out
near the top of his talk) at the beginning of the Age That Follows,
since Golden Ages are always only Golden in hindsight. Secondly, it
casts suspicion on  (or at least gives a warning about) the age that
follows, since Golden Ages are traditionally followed by Silvers  . . .
then we're cast into Irons. Third, it prepares his following to look to
new sources of reading pleasure beyond the suddenly canonized '80s-'90s
hypertext legends . . . legends he helped establish. (Fourth, and only
incidentally, it places him in the position of an Arbiter of Ages. )

The warning he's moved to give about the current age of hypertext is, in
my listening, prompted by his heartfelt devotion to a particular mode of
reading he most strongly experienced with through absorption in big
books . . . and which he's failed to find duplicated in his open-minded
browsing of the big wide web.

Kate Hayles pushed the room gently and articulately toward acceptance of
the different modes of reading that inevitably result from the
postmodern tinkering with the form and mechanics of storytelling. Kate
is a champ. "One of the gang," as Scott said during the excited chatter
after her evening lecture. She said, better than I've ever heard, the
basic facts that cry to be told during any comparison between electrolit
and paperlit: that books went through the same intense period of
exuberant experimentation that electronic literature is currently going
through. "The interrogation of the specificity of print first happened a
long time ago," she testified . . . and we best not forget that, and
make the mistake of taking the current state of print as somehow
"natural."

The sharpest uppercut of the Q & A was Kate's response to a question
about the scholarly response to electronic lit . . . when she drew a
deep breath, got a sparkle in her eye, and went: "I see a fork  in the
road. Universities will choose between having  departments of  Print
Literature and Departments of Literature. (pause) Departments of Print
Literature will continue to have a venerable place in the institution .
. . (pause) much like Departments of Classics."

(general gasp)

Scott: Rob's characterizations are correct, except that he is perhaps
underestimating Coover in the Agent Provacateur Department, which is to
say: Coover is often spinning tales for political effect. And his
message, at least as I hear it, is, "writers, get up off your asses and
create in this new medium, or the train will leave the station without
you and without what you treasure about reading." That's how I hear what
he's saying.

Rob: Scott is absolutely right. Where's that pitcher of Caffrey's?
Where's our pizza?

Wiiliam: Don't worry Rob: Cincinnati is always good to us, if only  in
the end. During her presentation this evening, Kate Hayles passed around
the auditorium about six artist's books. An artist's book is a book
where attention is paid to innovation in all aspects of bookmaking, from
the text itself through unusual choices of paper and binding techniques.
These books are gnerally costly, have a severely limited print run, and
are a genuine pleasure to hold. It was a generous move for her to share
her collection, and she opened herself to the risk of having her books
ripped off by unscruplulous, starving grad students. Her point was to
define "hypertext" as seperate from, although overlapping with,
electronic literature, and to establish "hypertext" as a tradition much
older and richer than its recent electronic manifestations. To be
honest, I think fewer than half the books she passed around meet her
lucid (!) definition of "hypertext" (most of them did not have multiple
reading paths), but I don't mind. I took notes on each book I got to
handle, which had the unfortunate consequence that I wasn't listening
when she talked about Moulthrop. Regardless, I now have the addresses of
a publisher of artist's/artists' books in Rochester, [add link] and a
store/gallery in the Village.

Scott: She figured out the logic behind Mouthrop's Reagan Library, which
isn't easy to do. Stuart's work is conceptually brilliant though not
transparently so.

A Humament by Tom Philips was one of  the two books she focused on in
particular. The first time I saw that book was in William's kitchen in
Urbana, before he moved into the penthouse and well before he moved into
the house. I believe that book was flipped through during one of the
early Unknown nights, maybe even the night when we did the blue
notecards. It occurs to me that Kate Hayles might offer William some
logical justifications he hasn't even yet contemplated for his sudden
addiction circa 1998 to electronic forms of literature.

William: It's true. Tonight I shared with Rob and Scott a "hypertext"
(multiple reading paths) poem I wrote in 1996: six stanzas on separate
postcards which can be read in any order. A Humament is a book I know a
few newspoets already own - it is a "treated Victorian novel." A London
painter named Tom Phillips purchased a "turgid" (Hayles' word) Victorian
novel at a thrift store for twopence, and proceded to paint over every
single page, only allowing a few fragments of the original text to show
through. As an artist's book, this book is unusually fortunate in that
it has enjoyed three print runs, each time an improved edition revised
by the artist. It is probably still in print. It is a true palimpsest, a
gorgeous work, and a damn silly idea. I'm glad it's getting some
professional criticism from an intellectual titan like Hayles.

Well, tomorrow is our reading. It's closing time, the stools are being
upturned onto the tables, and that's the way it is.

Scott: Still fighting the good fight we think. Unknown