Metahistorical Romance
Christopher DouglasOn Amy Elias's view of fabulation in the moment of American corporate power, a postmodern novelistic aesthetic that is consistent with Sir Walter Scott's early nineteenth-century mix of romance and Enlightenment-inspired historiography.
The Language of Music and Sound
Olivia Block
Against the notion that music is the most abstract of art forms, Olivia Block thinks of music as a language with its own vocabulary of sounds, patterns, rhythms, notes. On the day of a performance in Kyoto, Japan, these reflections alter Block's sense of her own language, English, deconstructed by Japanese advertisements, tee-shirts, "American" candy-bar wrappers, and text-cell phones.
The Code is not the Text (Unless It Is the Text)
John Cayley
An argument against the collapse of categories by an author who has, yes, himself perpetrated a few codeworks.
The Rules of the Game
Virginia Kuhn
Virginia Kuhn reviews an essay collection - Cybertext: Yearbook 2000 - ambivalent about its own printed status.
The Present of Fiction
R. M. BerryRecent fiction by Curtis White, Alex Shakar, Michael Martone, and others read through the lens of Gertrude Stein and Wittgenstein.
Working Progress, Working Title [Automystifstical Plaice]
John Matthiasgraphics: Artists Rights Society; Performance for MIDI keyboard, pianola configurations, and click-track:G. Schirmer Rental; studio portrait of Hedy Lamarr: Roy George and Associates.
Learning to Wish for More
Lance OlsenLance Olsen tells the story of a creative writing professor who walked.
New Media and Old: The Limits of Continuity
GeniwateLev Manovich makes the first sustained case for a new media theory, but with cinema as his starting point he has a hard time engaging the non-representational artforms and aural explorations to be found there. So argues the Australian media writer, geniwate.
Jane’s Soliloquy
Ronald SukenickSukenick responds to Fleisher's feminist critique of "Narralogues" in the voice of his own fictional jeune-fille, Jane.
Reformation Under Way
Sandy HussSandy Huss suggests that the reform envisioned by Amato and Fleisher is already underway.