[Newspoetry] STEPHEN KING BUYS OUT HYPERTEXT (fwd)

[William Gillespie]

Hey Scott,

Can we publish this on our webzine Newspoetry?

Cheers.


To: prosaics at colorado.edu, unknown at www.soa.uc.edu
Subject: [UNKNOWN]STEPHEN KING BUYS OUT HYPERTEXT

Dear Prosaics,

Following the recent thread, was shocked to run across this article today:
----------
KING PURCHASES "HYPERTEXT" -- CLAIMS TO BE FIRST AUTHOR TO OWN ENTIRE GENRE
--Publisher's Weekly -- Sept 1, 00

The experimental fiction world today is reportedly in a state of collective,
though disjointed, fractured, shock. Stephen King, an American author best
known for a novel about a possessed car and a novel about a possessed dog
and a novel about a haunted house and a novel about haunted hotel and a
novel about a bad prom and a novel about a psycho fan and an e-book about a
car crash and an e-book about a plant, has reportedly purchased an obscure,
much-maligned, and little-read genre, "hypertext."

"Why would I stop at e-books?" King asked our reporter, "I've already made
history with my decision to eliminate the publishing industry from the
process of people paying me to write, so I thought it was time to turn
things up a notch. Nobody's ever done this before."

"Hypertext" is apparently a decade-or-so-old literary form, practiced in a
small number of eastern universities and championed by a bizarre but
dedicated population of CD-ROM and World Wide Web users worldwide. The
strange form involves "clicking" on "links" which lead people to other
"nodes" of these "stories" and "poems" without turning any "pages."

It's not entirely clear how the monies King paid (reportedly in the high
millions) will be distributed, although author Mark Amerika marked the
occasion by purchasing a small jet, shortly after announcing that he was no
longer a writer, but had become a digital artist. Much of the work in
question was previously distributed for free on the World Wide Web. King now
claims that this previously gratis work will now come with a $1 download fee
attached. If the readers pay the fee, the hypertext authors will be
permitted to continue to write.

"It excites me that this an international thing, that people have read it in
Australia, Sweden, places like that," King said, "and that it scares the
shit out of a lot of people. I don't read it myself, but anything that has
so many people up in arms, staining their sheets and screaming bloody murder
about the end of literature is my kind of blood-curdling read."

Word on the street is that if enough readers pay the $1 download fee, King
might be in the market for other obscure literary forms. "I'm not saying
anything right now, and I wouldn't make any announcements ahead of time,"
King announced, "but I hear this combinatorial literature thing is very big
with French mathematicians."

Much of the media is struggling to find an analogous situation in any media
-- though the New York Times did note that Michael Jackson now owns the
entire Beatles catalog.