This Sunday’s Living section of the Los Angeles Times featured an article about the recent 2002 ELO State of the Arts Symposium at UCLA. Aside from a couple of factual inaccuracies (while the mention of Michael Joyce’s Aftermath brought a smile to some of our faces, the actual title of Eastgate’s classic hypertext is afternoon: a story) the article is a fine bit of journalism that captures the spirit of what many are already calling the most important gathering in the history of the nascent field of electronic literature. (Abstract available, article can be purchased for $2.95)
[Link updated April 2005; the article was removed from the Web]
ELO on NPR
Listen to John Cayley, Larry McCaffery and Scott Rettberg discuss electronic literature on Chicago Public Radio’s “Odyssey.” (Program description) (52 minute Realaudio stream)
[Links updated April 2005]
Pushing Hypertext in New Directions
Matthew Mirapaul’s New York Times column today focuses on two of the most interesting new hypertext releases of the summer – Judd Morrisey’s “The Jew’s Daughter,” which uses Flash to build a shifiting hypertext narrative via mousever links, and “aspergillum gently,” a a multimedia adaptation of “Pedro Páramo,” an existentialist 1955 novel by the Mexican author Juan Rulfo constructed by New York artist Isabel Chang.
EPC: A Web Site Grows New Poems
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY-Buffalo, led by ELO Literary Advisor Loss Glazier. The Chronicle covers the amazing reach of the site, which logs more than 10 million visits a year, and the nature of the art at EPC, which includes a wide variety of approaches to poetry designed for the electronic media.
Thinking Outside the Book
An LA Times article describes ELO’s first reading event, held this May at the home of Richard Bangs in Redmond, WA. The article includes interviews with e-lit authors and critics including Robert Coover, M.D. Coverley, Katherine Hayles, Shelley Jackson, Dirk Stratton and Rob Wittig. LA Times writer Kim Murphy focuses the piece on the artistic and economic implications of electronic lit. (Abstract available, article can be purchsed for $2.95)
[Link updated April 2005; the article was removed from the Web]
What About E-Reading?
The July/August issue of Book magazine offers a well-balanced survey of the field of electronic publishing, from Project Gutenberg to the latest in e-book and E-ink technology.
The article, by Rob Brookman, offers the insights of both authors and technologists. When asked if he’d be interested in exploring the interactive and hypertextual potential of e-books, Mark Danielewski, the author of the innovative novel House of Leaves, says he’d “rather give House of Leaves to a computer guy and see what he came up with.”