In conversation, Scott Rettberg engages with Roderick Coover and his multiplicitous career that started off as a forest ranger, a cinema projectionist, "a ski bum" and (further along) a winemaker in Burgundy, a couple of years of participant observation in Africa, the first all-electronic dissertation at the University of Chicago, works of combinatory cinema and other "differing narratives" that emerged in a still (inter)active literary and multi-medial career.

Off center, wayward, slightly off path.... Rettberg and Luers discuss their longrunning encounters with writers, artists, computational film makers and other multidisciplinary "people who come to the electronic literature community, and it’s not only writers, but also artists, visual artists, and you find everyone has a similar kind of wayward path."

Rob Wittig chats with William Gillespie about working with constraints and word plays, all the while emphasizing the netprov’s community building potential (a particularly big ellipsis needed, anyone?)

A Review of Bookishness, by Jessica Pressman.

In this episode of "Off Center," Scott Rettberg, Director of the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, interviews Caitlin Fisher, a pioneer of immersive AR and VR and Director of the Immersive Storytelling Lab at York University.

Like so many generic literary reconstructions, comics are now being transformed into information -- a process that, for postdoctoral scholar Ilan Manouach, is concomitant with the expansion of tools and services in the field of generative AI. Like so many AI emergences (and emergencies), this one poses important challenges to the comics industry and the careers of comics professionals.

Can ChatGPT or other Chatbot interfaces really write anything better than a feeble imitation of postmodern cut-up techniques? Polina and James Mackay think so, and they offer some reasons for holding onto a human, guiding intelligence in the writing process.

A survey of Gaddis’s known and archived unpublished creative work in poetry and drama, from a parodic Elizabethan play and the complete script of Once at Antietam to a full western film screenplay and a year of failed pitches for TV drama. Each entry contains archival location information, historical information, description and analysis of the archived work, and discussion of any connection to the eventually published fiction.

A survey of Gaddis’s known and archived unpublished prose fiction, particularly short stories from before The Recognitions and incomplete forerunner projects for his eventually published novels. Those include the two aborted novels that evolved into The Recognitions, notes toward a projected novel about filmmaking that provided foundational material for Carpenter’s Gothic and A Frolic of His Own, and more. Each entry contains archival location information, historical information, description and analysis of the archived work, and discussion of any connection to the eventually published fiction.

With this brief look at Large Language Model surrealism, Nick Montfort locates and identifies "the id of the internet, of publishing, of podcasting."

Hypertext pioneer Robert Arellano discusses the genre with Scott Rettberg, Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN).

Elliot Yates examines Gaddis’s first corporate writing assignment, with the company Textron, which seems to coincide directly with his first conception of the plot for J R. Textron was one of the first US corporations to explicitly pursue conglomerate “diversification” through buying up seemingly unrelated businesses, and Yates shows how this not only helped generate the plot of J R, but functions as a key to understanding its formal design.

Further memories from yet another student of William Gaddis during the time when WG taught at Bard.

David Ting excavates the archived compositional history of Agapē Agape to test what we can learn from the marginal annotations in Gaddis’s working library, focusing on his copy of Susan Stebbing’s Philosophy and the Physicists. Ting finds Gaddis testing his own ideas against those of Stebbing and her sources, while making outward connections between this technical material and his literary reading in Plato and Faust. Illuminating the novel’s chronological evolution, Ting also provides us a case study in tracking how authors use their reading as a “means of invention.”

Kate Michelson Goldkamp surveys the Juvenilia preserved in Gaddis’s archive, finding, among other things, early prefigurations of his “delight[] in the macabre” in some illustrated mini-stories, hints of the boy JR's worldview in studies of US geography, and doodles that prefigure some of the published fiction’s hand-drawn illustrations.

Translator Francine Ozaki reads The Recognitions through the overarching debates of twentieth-century translation theory, finding the conflict between Wyatt’s and Otto’s handling of Forgery, Originality, and Authenticity illuminating the concerns of today's professional translators. Questions of credit, treachery, allegiance, payment, and dependency are so fully addressed in the novel that translators and translation theorists should be reading it to help make sense of their own artistic and professional roles.

Scott Zieher offers some creative non-fiction in praise of perhaps Gaddis’s least-lauded publication: the lavishly illustrated and sample-provisioned “masterwork of printed ephemera” A Pile Fabric Primer. How did this mysterious document come to be, and what does it tell us about the creative writer's working conditions?

Cole Fishman argues that Gaddis should be recognized for his contributions to philosophy, no matter what the "disciplinary gatekeepers" think.

After noting how J R was a reflection of postmodern society and antiheroic traditions in America in the 1970s, Lalita Kashoba Mohan signals a similar postmodern turn in her homeland, India, and other countries "whose economic development is now following America’s earlier path."

Jon Fain studied creative writing with William Gaddis at Bard College between 1976 and 1978, during Gaddis’s first university teaching job. It didn’t go perfectly, as Fain discusses in this retrospective, which includes a letter of Gaddis’s writing-feedback.