e-mail literature

Grandtextauto published commentary today about a New York Times article that discusses electronic literature.

On one hand, it is nice to see that the New York Times has diverged from their old fixation on “The Death of Print”. During my research for thesis, I got annoyed by the debate. It seems silly to me. I read somewhere the analogy of print to handwriting, noting that we do still write by hand, even after the development of print.

But the “e-mail literature” thing… it seems almost as silly, to me. I remember reading “Dracula” as a kid, it being a book composed of journal entries and letters. When something does electronically what can be done otherwise, unless it is in a dramatically different way, it doesn’t strike me as powerfully, that’s all.

There was a book: “Exegesis” which was an absolute page-turner about a computer that gains consciousness and starts writing to people and doing things. It is in print, of course, but could just as easily have been delivered electronically.

Still, it is good to see that electronic literature is getting some good press.

I have some things to say that resemble the negative press, though.

First of all, the New York Times article does mention: “Intimacies,” by Eric Brown, is drawing notice more for its style than for its content. ” This is sadly so often the case with this type of thing.

The structure of “Intimacies” seems to be such that it over emphasizes the different ways in which messages are transmitted, rather than the kind of messages being transmitted. I’ll have to read the story myself before I make any more comment.

On another note, the article also says

“Mr. Wittig, whose current project is a fictional blog, www.robwit.net, said he believed that Mr. Brown’s interface for “Intimacies” and the composition software he plans to market were the first of their kind.”

This is’t exactly true, and I do get skeptical of too much stress on newness”. I’m sure that the same things this story does can be done with Flash Animation, other conventional web design methods or with Eastgate’s Story Space I will be curious to see what the differences are.

One thing that did get my attention was:

“A second version due this month will deliver the messages at timed intervals, Mr. Brown said, so that reading them will more closely resemble the experience of receiving e-mail and instant messages.”

One of my peers is working on an idea he calls “chronological realism,” where the reader encounters an experience in text, and in time as realistically as possible so that it takes as long to read about an experience as it takes for the experience to happen. It seems likely that electronic media might be fertile ground for experimentation with this sort of thing.