[Newspoetry] FW: ED REPORT LAUDED

[Scott Rettberg]

'THE ED REPORT' LAUDED IN                      -For immediate release-
INTERNATIONAL LITERARY CONTEST

Work of William Gillespie, Dylan Meissner, and Nick Montfort gets
"honourable mention" in 2nd trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Competition
______________________________________________________________________

THE INTERNET, JAN 15 -- The formerly top-secret government document
known as The Ed Report has been awarded an honorable mention in the
Second trAce/Alt-X Competition for New Media Writing. The Ed Report
was the only work selected for this distinction by the competition's
judge, Shelley Jackson, author of Patchwork Girl and My Body. Jackson
chose Talan Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia as the winner of the 1000 GBP
prize, calling that "stunning" work "a kind of theater in which
luminous symbols and sentences (which look more like formulae) come
and go."

Citing The Ed Report as "almost perfect in its own way," Jackson
called it "a cunning piece of mimickry that manages to maintain an
almost chinkless front of officialese while telling a funny, surreal,
even touching story. Purporting to be a report on an ill-fated attempt
by the CIA to employ civilians (including Bruce Springsteen) with a
gift for ancient languages as code-talkers on a secret narcotics
mission, and complete with documentary trimmings, it patches into the
dynamics of rumor and urban myth to run its operation in the grey area
between fact and fiction -- a project perfectly suited to the web,
where grey areas abound. It also exploits the ease of internet
publishing to resurrect the Victorian model of serial publishing. Its
design, which is conservative, is perfectly apt for its deadpan
narrative approach."

Sue Thomas of the trAce Online Writing Community and Mark Amerika of
the Alt-X Online Publishing Network announced the results of the
competition today.

The Ed Report, a document originally written in hypertext by a
government committee known as the Ed Commission, headed by James Ed,
was brought to light by William Gillespie, Dylan Meissner, and Nick
Montfort. Montfort and Gillespie discovered the report and pressed for
its declassification, while Meissner converted it to Web format. Press
conferences in which  Montfort and Gillespie describe the contents of
the report, read from it, and take questions have been held in New
York, Chicago, and Bergen, Norway.

"It has always been my opinion that the literary output of government
committees has been underappreciated," Montfort said. "The Starr
Report was a touching love story written in a lucid, clear style. The
Warren Report has similarly been slighted by most writers and critics,
but was recognized by Don DeLillo as an extraordinary achievement,
which could hold its own as a sequel to Finnegan's Wake. We are very
pleased the government's fine accomplishments with narrative prose
have been acknowledged today."

Gillespie was less sanguine about the recognition. "I am deeply
honored by Jackson's words," he said. "But I can't help but be
suspicious about the circumstances surrounding this honorable mention.
I wonder whether this is an intentional effort on the part of parties
unknown to discredit this important document by dismissing it as
'art.'"

Meissner is an artist and web developer believed to be currently
living in Seattle, Washington. He did not comment on the award by
email and could not be reached by phone before press time.

In addition to being an investigative journalist, Gillespie is a poet
and fiction writer. He is the founder of the alternative online news
source Newspoetry and co-author of The Unknown, which shared first
place in the 1998 trAce/Alt-X contest judged by Robert Coover. His
novel Johnny Werd: the Fire Continues was published last year under
the pseudonym Q. Synopsis. His electronic writing is available for
free, online, at wordwork.org.

Montfort writes for Technology Review, Suck.com, and other reputable
news outlets, also writing fiction and poetry. His Ad Verbum was
ranked first by IF authors in the 2000 Interactive Fiction Contest. He
created Winchester's Nightmare, the first "novel machine" to be issued
in hardback, in an edition which includes a working computer. He is
now at Boston University studying poetry in the graduate creative
writing program. His digital works can be found for free at nickm.com.

THE ED REPORT: www.edreport.com / CONTACT: eds at edreport.com
TRACE/ALT-X ANNOUNCEMENT: http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/comp.cfm

                                 # # #

-Nick Montfort                    We put the "er..." back into hypertext.
<www.nickm.com> <nickm at nickm.com>       The Ed Report. <www.edreport.com>



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