ebr and Me: Early Days

The last screen/page available in the ebr archive is number 61, so I started there: 1995. On that first page, I found Mark Amerika (whom I met through Joe Tabbi thirty years ago, with whom Joe and I edited the “MSN: Music/Sound/Noise” issue in the Fall of 2001—and who lives, remarkably, twenty miles from my new home in Golden, Colorado). And I also found Paul Harris, who recently made a fantastic introduction, at my behest, to Michel Serres’ Hermes I: Communication, which we published a year and a half ago in Posthumanities series at the University of Minnesota Press. On the next page forward in time, there’s my first appearance in ebr (a response to an essay by Michael Berubé, then a Big Ten colleague at Illinois—I taught at Indiana at that time), and another piece by Mark, then a review essay by my former Indiana graduate student David Cassuto, and essays by Kate Hayles and Bob Markley (both of whom I met through the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, as maybe Joe did too. As with Mark, I’ve known them for roughly thirty years as well). That’s just the first two pages, out of 61.

I’m going into all this not to: a) remind you how long I’ve been around, or b) brag about how many people I know (academia is, after all, a small world). My point is that stories and connections like this abound at ebr—hundreds of them, maybe even thousands. And it’s all thanks to Joe Tabbi. Among Joe’s many talents as an intellectual, editorial impresario, and a person, perhaps this was and is his greatest gift: to get us all under one roof, providing the space for a kind of house party of critical debate, close reading, artistic creativity, and theoretical speculation. (Reminds me, in fact, of a couple of occasions at Joe’s warehouse flat on Division Street in Chicago!)

As I scroll through the pages, I see not just a gathering of talented, incisive, creative, and writerly minds, but a world—my world—inhabited by former students (David Cassuto, Andy McMurry, Walton Muyumba, Laura Walls) and colleagues (Stephen Kellert, De Witt Kilgore, Tom Cohen), former teachers and senior scholars I admired when I was young (Kate Hayles, Franco Moretti, Marjorie Perloff, Hillis Miller), people I published later as a series editor (Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Paul Harris, Stacie Alaimo, Bruce Clarke, Steve Shaviro, Matthew Fuller), and folks like Linda Brigham, Joe Amato, and Anne Burdick who did a whole lot of heavy lifting in the early going. I was along for the ride. They—and mainly Joe—were the ride.

But page 61 wasn’t the beginning. The beginning was sitting in Bloomington, Indiana on my porch sometime in the mid-90s and thumbing through the pages of the Utne Reader, which I picked up every now and then, and seeing an intriguing shortish notice about a new online journal called “electronic book review” being launched by this guy named Joseph Tabbi. I ended up sending him an email, back before email became email and devoured us all. (It was just a short letter on a computer; that was all), and I said I’d like to get involved. I thought to myself, “Wow, what a great idea!” Turns out lots of other people did too.