electronic book review is delighted to publish a special gathering this month called "Decoding Canadian Digital Poetics," edited by Dani Spinosa (ELO Fellow and ELD Managing Editor) and Lai-Tze Fan (ebr Editor and Director of Communications, and tbr Co-Editor).

Happy new year to you and yours, and all best wishes for 2021!

This month we bring two insightful reviews: Sarah Whitcomb Laiola discusses Stephanie Strickland's wonderfully intricate new poetic book Ringing the Changes (Counterpath Press, 2020) and Stuart Moulthrop follows Noah Wardrip-Fruin in his effort to urge game studies into a new direction (How Pac-Man East, MIT Press, 2020).

“Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities,” edited by Scott Rettberg and Alex Saum-Pascual, gathers a selection of articles exploring the evolving relationship between electronic literature and the digital humanities in Europe, North and South America. The collection was originally presented at the Summer 2019 [Frame]works conference at UC Berkeley.

“Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities,” edited by Scott Rettberg and Alex Saum-Pascual, gathers a selection of articles exploring the evolving relationship between electronic literature and the digital humanities in Europe, North and South America. The collection was originally presented at the Summer 2019 [Frame]works conference at UC Berkeley.

“Electronic Literature [Frame]works for the Creative Digital Humanities,” edited by Scott Rettberg and Alex Saum-Pascual, gathers a selection of articles exploring the evolving relationship between electronic literature and the digital humanities in Europe, North and South America. The collection was originally presented at the Summer 2019 [Frame]works conference at UC Berkeley.

This month, ebr is publishing three essays, one riPOSTe, and one book review.

On Sunday, electronic book review and T**he Digital Review chose to postpone our launch of the inaugural issue of tdr until today, Tuesday, June 9, out of respect for George Floyd's memorial service this weekend and in support of related activities on Monday. In alignment with the ELO Board of Directors, we stand in solidarity with the Black community. Black Lives Matter.

We would like to issue a formal correction to our last newsletter. ebr was founded in 1995 by Mark Amerika, Joseph Tabbi, and Ron Sukenick, so 2020 marks its 25th anniversary.

March 2020 marked the 25th anniversary of electronic book review.

“Electronic Literature Experimentalism beyond the Great Divide. A Latin American Perspective” presents the text of Claudia Kozak’s keynote for the 2018 ELO conference. By beginning with various tensions, such as the tension between the occasionally excessive tendencies of a rigorously experimental avant-garde to reach a narrow audience and linking this to the often limited audience of e-lit, Kozak expertly historicizes the avant-gardes of the twentieth century—especially by building on the work of Susan Buck-Morss, Peter Bürger, and Andreas Huyssen—in order to not only show the extent to which e-lit remains entrenched in an experimental context, which is relatively common knowledge, but to argue for a possible extension of e-lit into a wider marketplace if it embraces some of the aspects of another “experimental” mode, namely fan fiction. 

ebr is delighted to announce that the 6th biennial Critical Code Studies Working Group has begun, led by Mark Marino and Jeremy Douglass. Many members of ELO and readers of ebr are contributors to this and previous CCSWGs, and this year’s Group extends previous conversations by focusing on special topics such as Indigenous Programming and Feminist AI. You can follow ongoing conversations (January 20 to February 9, 2020) as they unfold on the Group’s website.

Stephanie LeMenager's essay "Notes on a Civics for the Sixth Extinction" rhetorically navigates the condition of "living climate change." Here, living climate change refers to responses in the "ambitious cultural project that writers, artists, scholars, and activists have been undertaking" in creating public awareness and procedure in climate change. While LeMenager focuses on the US as a global superpower that is also a climate change denier, recently I have also thought of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison for his lack of action in the Australian bushfires (started in September 2019 and ongoing as of this publication date in January 2020).

This month’s special issue on “Natural Media” is edited by ebr’s Editors, Lisa Swanstrom and Eric Dean Rasmussen. This gathering developed out of a panel hosted by the MLA’s MS Forum on Visual Media, and it considers the critical intersections of communicative media and media technologies with natural spaces. The essays, reviews, and interview will be of special interest to ebr readers who explore areas that include the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, media archaeology, and ecofeminism.

This month, ebr publishes a review of Steve Clay and Ken Friedman’s Intermedia, Fluxus and the Something Else Press: Selected Writings by Dick Higgins, reviewed by Betsy Sullivan and Virgina Kuhn.

The question of whether or not computers can write autonomously is at this point moot (hello, AI and generative text!), but perhaps where the field of digital writing needs further exploration is in the re-examination of writing practices, as well as how they can be taught.

For many of us, September is the time to return to campuses, the time for seasonal change. This year, Fall comes early (or Summer lingers too long) all over the globe and weather patterns continue to be abnormal. We all hear about climate change, we discuss strange weather patterns, and we analyze the Anthropocene in classrooms; it has never been a more important topic.

This month, we have an essay from Bruce Clarke entitled “Margulis, Autopoiesis, Gaia,” in which Clarke recounts his own process of critically and pedagogically working with the concept of “gaia” (the relations of things, as they exist on our planet, in relation the sun) through scientific discourse. In Lynn Margulis’s work What is Life? and Symbiotic Planet, Clarke comes to the realization that “if Gaia is a system, then Gaia theory is a form of systems theory” that can also articulate autopoietic or self-producing systems. Embracing approaches to autopoiesis, Clarke describes the expansion of autopoiesis beyond its scientific contexts, inquiring into recursiveness in several well-known concepts and texts, with particular emphasis on Margulis’s body of work.

As you may notice, we have a new design for the ebr newsletter! I’d like to extend special thanks to our Managing Editor Will Luers for all the hard work that he put into developing this new template, which will offer our readers a more concise and visually organized update of our monthly issues. (If you are subscribed and have not received the June newsletter, it may have been blocked due to our recent changes. Please subscribe again with your preferred email.)

​Over​ the past two months, ebr has had the pleasure to publish two of the keynotes, an essay, and a response that emerged from the 2018 meeting of the ELO in Montréal, “Mind the Gap!” These efforts represent discussions that have continued around platforms and non-platforms for publishing, engaging in, and thinking through e-lit—discussions that ebr is happy to foster and share. In this spirit, we actively encourage our readers to write their own riPOSTes (thoughtful responses) to any or all of the issues raised in the essays; if you have an idea, write to us and let’s see if we can work together!