This space will be inactive for a bit as I move from Ohio and the University of Akron to North Carolina where I have accepted a position as Rare Book Research Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I’ll be posting updates here in the coming months on a paper I am preparing for the Society for Textual Scholarship 2011 conference at Penn State and an update about a paper I was asked to contribute to an upcoming online issue of Dichtung-Digital.

I am very much looking forward to serving in this new role at UNC, working with my future colleagues there, and working with an excellent and rich collection within a vibrant scholarly community both at UNC and in the Research Triangle generally.

Months ago, I started drafting an entry on Jhave Johnston’s “human-mind-machine” for the Electronic Literature Directory. In the meantime, while the draft entry languished on my hard drive, Davin Heckman already drafted an entry.

I’ve been wanting to write about Johnston’s work for some time and have puzzled over the best way to do this. But what interested me most about this particular work by Johnston is its inextricable connection, in my mind, with another work of contemporary poetry, Rachel Levitsky’s Neighbor.

I added my notes comparing Levitsky and Johnston’s work to the comments field of Davin’s entry on “human-mind-machine.” View them there or after the jump.

While experiencing “human-mind-machine” I couldn’t help but think of Rachel Levitsky’s Neighbor, another work of contemporary poetry I deeply admire. Likewise, while coming across Levitsky’s title poem, “Neighbor,” on the web recently, it made me think of Johnston’s work.

Both Levitsky and Johnston are contemporary poets of distinction, not because of enormous bodies of work, but because of the singularity of their individual aesthetic approaches, their highly individual poetic modes. And except for this intersection of subject matter—the neighbor—, their work seems to have very little in common.

In the title poem of Neighbor (which stands as a sort of portal into the world of the book and the complex play with narrative subjectivity it employs), Levitsky writes:

At the time I type this
I’ve been at it for one yearthe last six months
completely in my head all in my head

where there are many levels.
The problem is whether they

are connected or if
they are levels

at all. “A level” may connote a
piece in a unified structure,

or unity of disconnected parts
firmly housed.

Part of the challenge that Jhave Johnston’s work presents centers upon this “unity of disconnected parts” across the audio, visual, and textual elements of his digital poems. Levitsky employs both the first and third person while playing up the possibilities of this shifting of voice (which “I” is this? the “I” of the author, the “I” of a character? Both?), so too does Johnston’s work decenter the poem so that there are many voices (on many levels).

While Levitsky’s poems are meticulously constructed and feel very intentionally strung together as a book. Jhave’s work often has a loose and performative feel to it, but this is undercut by the networks of coding and technology that go into composing the works (and perhaps this looseness and performativity also serve to provide a living breathing core amidst all the technological processes the works require).

The morphic text of “human-mind-machine” seems to be composed of excrement as it deforms from “human” to “machine” to “mind.” Perhaps this is a fitting metaphor that weaves together the narrative voice of the poem, the bodies it references, and the reader/viewer of the poem: the output turned input churned out again from mind, body, machine in a network of transformations and transmissions. But can we access it? Can we (or the poet) speak clearly or be heard? Perhaps in this way, we are neighbor: bound together but separated by information, architecture, machines, our own feeble bodies, and our subjective interiorities.

Note: I intend to write more about Johnston’s work here, by connecting his 21st century approach to the tradition of the emblem book from the 16th and 17th centuries. Also, for more on Levitsky’s Neighbor you should buy the book or get it from your local library, but you can also see this interview here.

The difference between ELD version 1.0 and 2.0 is analogous to looking at a digital card catalog (a minimal bibliographical record) in ELD1.0 vs. an encyclopedic entry tied to social networking functionality in ELD 2.0. The improvement should be readily apparent:

Compare the entry for the same work in the new version (the image links to the live webpage on the ELD):

This screen shot does not show the metadata fields, “Discussion” comment feature, or tags.  For a better view see the “Anatomy of an ELD entry” page that I created for the entry on “My Body – a Wunderkammer”.

The ELD version 1.0 will be made available at a later date. The old ELD site was hacked before it was taken down and some issues related to this are apparently being resolved, though all information remains intact and is being preserved for later access. As you can see from the ELD 1.0 entry linked to the image above, these can also be viewed through the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive.  It is a bit fussy and takes a bit of working with, but you can even see the development of the ELD v 1.0 over time.

Below is my response to Diane Greco’s response to my last post which was a response to Mark Bernstein’s post… (Are you following? Good.) I am now going to examine an uncatalogued 16th century emblem book and not think about electronic literature for awhile.

A response to Diane Greco:

I appreciate your thoughtful response to my post. I also share your concerns regarding the preservation of elit work and with ensuring that the work of the ELD 1.0 is preserved.

I am librarian. As a special collections librarian (and assistant professor of bibliography), I work daily to provide and ensure access to information (including works of literature) and to ensure that this access sustains into the distant future through the preservation and conservation of the material embodiment of this information (even if this embodiment takes the form of data on distant servers, or works of elit on CDROM). I take the responsibility of these tasks very seriously and have dedicated much of my life to both the study, practice, and critical examination of these efforts.

I would also like to address some factual errors in what you write here.

You assume that the ELD version 1.0 (ELD1.0) has been discarded, but this is not the case. (I take your assumption to be instructive to our efforts and as a prompt that we should be more transparent in our activities.) As we announced at the ELOAI conference in the panel announcing the launch of the new version of the ELD (version 2.0), we are mining the ELD1.0 for entries and editors are adapting and improving these, but this takes substantial time and is largely a volunteer effort. The ELD version 1.0 content has been preserved on a spreadsheet, it also remains accessible via the Wayback Machine (I was just looking at it this morning), and a legacy version will eventually be made available on the Electronic Literature Organization website.

In short, your penultimate paragraph misunderstands and misrepresents the aims and efforts of the Electronic Literature Directory project. I will endeavor to ensure that our aims and activities are made more transparent (and am happy to answer any questions you may have, again I am in no way a spokesperson only a dedicated participant) and I hope you will verify the accuracy of your claims about the ELD in the future.

In my post, I made reference to research I completed in 2006 on Eastgate utilizing quantitative analysis to study and document a partial history of the published works of Eastgate Systems. (I will post more on this soon on my own blog.) Through this effort, I personally have preserved metadata from 46 Eastgate titles listed in the ELD1.0 in 2006, which I used to compare with data from Eastgate’s catalogue and WorldCat library holdings. I plan on doing a study next year to track changes over the past five years in library holdings of Eastgate titles to assess whether or not these titles are being collected and preserved by collecting institutions. I fear they are not, and I hope my findings can be used to advocate for the preservation and continued acquisition of these works by libraries. (The Michael Joyce collection at the Ransom Center is the first of a growing number of notable efforts to preserve, in depth, significant work in the field.) Why would I go through all of the effort to do this? Because I believe in the importance of the work of Eastgate and authors like you. Even the phrase “enforced amnesia” makes me shiver. The only “irony” I see is this phrase being applied to work with which I have dedicated myself, because I think it is important and urgently needed if we are to document the field for future readers and scholars. (Like the dedicated publishers you describe, it certainly isn’t money that motivates me.)

Again, I hope to pull back the curtain, to use your analogy, so that the work of the ELD editors is made more transparent and also so that it is open to constructive criticism by those invested in the field like yourself. I welcome this criticism, encourage sustained dialogue, and I trust that it can take place in the spirit of mutual respect for the benefit of the field and the growing community of practitioners, readers, and scholars that constitute this field.

You are already making valuable contributions to the work of the ELD. Following or during ELOAI (which was only last month), you tweeted:

“#eloai If anyone would like to add a few of my hypertexts to ELO’s
directory, would you email me? To add them myself is against the
rules.”

Scott Rettberg forwarded this to the ELD email list. With the following comment:

“I happen to agree with Diane on this — I think it is really important to allow authors to create at least “stub” entries that the working group can follow up on, edit and/or redraft. I understand the distinction between the critical/reviewed activity of description taking place in the new directory and author-generated descriptions of their own work, but I think it is essential that authors are enabled to participate in the process of making their work visible in the ELD.”

This was seconded by Davin Heckman who is leading up the ELD editorial team (and you’ll be hard pressed to find a more selfless, inclusive, all around nice guy than Davin Heckman). I too noted that I thought this would make for a more inclusive and comprehensive ELD. While it has not be announced publicly, nor has our policy changed officially on the website (again this conversation has only taken place in the past month), we are making this change because of feedback from you and others. We were proactive about this even though your original tweet wasn’t asking for this, because we want the ELD to serve folks like you that have made substantial contributions to the field. You note that some works may have small audiences, even audiences of one, yet these works (ideally, at least) should be included. I agree, and we are doing everything to ensure that we adapt and respond to make the best ELD possible. Yes, our inclusion criteria is evolving because our aim is to respond to the community of practitioners, scholars, critics, teachers, readers, students, and others that are using the ELD and contributing to the field it seeks to describe and aid in preserving. But we also must have a clear vision for the ultimate purpose of the project and criteria for its critical and descriptive functions.

You note the inclusive nature of the previous version of the ELD. The benefits of this were mixed, as it quickly began to be filled with works that were not electronic literature. Materials like PDFs of poems, conventional short fiction simply published online, or audio recordings of poetry readings began to dilute the content and call into question the original aims of the ELD. While the preservation of materials such of these is certainly worthy, it was not the aim of the ELD project nor did it fit within the stated mission of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Of course, this brings us to the “power” question. Who gets to determine what constitutes “electronic literature”? I believe an engaged community and not any one person or organization will determines this, but certainly organizations like the ELO and Eastgate can help to ensure that the history of elit is recorded and that works of elit are read, promoted, and acknowledged within the academy and in the greater literary / arts community.

You raise concerns that the ELD version 2.0 is not open enough, while at the same time Bernstein voices concerns about the “crowd”. (You want the crowd to have the power it seems, Bernstein worries that the crowd is potentially sinister, going so far as to cite 1930s Germany for his example when discussing the perils of crowdsourcing, a common feature of web 2.0 technologies used by libraries and museums and social networking sites.) By allowing entries to be added by anyone while also establishing an editorial team of folks dedicated to the field, we are hoping to strike a middle path, one that is open but also monitored for abuse and out-of-scope content within an infrastructure that enables and promotes dialogue (e.g. each entry has a comment field). Power permeates every endeavor; to ensure that it is not abused requires sustained criticism and open dialogue.

In addition to your tweet. You have contributed by your comments here. And I want you to know that your post has been shared with our entire editorial team. I sent an email to our ELD editors list informing others involved about our recent exchange (these responses to response…).

One person on the list emailed back:

“Yes, there is a power in the ELD…. but it is a power that people are invited to shape, guide, cultivate. If I invited everyone I know to join me at the park for a picnic, but only ten people showed up… it might be true that the ten people at the park had a role in shaping the conversations that took place at the picnic… but this is not the same thing as having a party that is by invitation only, with thick-necked bouncers kicking the riffraff to the curb. People can show up to this party if they want to, and they will get support and encouragement. And if people with knowledge, experience, a reputation, and a professed desire to care for the field of e-lit decline the invitation to participate (or to lend nominal support)… is this not also an exercise of power?” [ellipsis are in the original]

In a comment on my blog you write, “The more we are able to recognize and honor the mutuality of endeavor between Eastgate and ELO, the better off electronic literature will be.” I couldn’t agree with you more. I welcome continued dialogue about these issues followed by actions that help support, promote, and preserve the history of the field. Let’s make what you suggest here a reality.

In a recent post, I briefly outlined the history of my involvement with the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) and Electronic Literature Directory (ELD). Since December of last year, I have been actively working with the editorial team of the ELD to theorize, test, improve, promote, and populate the Directory with entries. I should also note that the ELD is still in an early phase (a redesign is in the works and functionality will continue to be tweaked and added to it as needed).

The impetus for this post came in response to a recent post on Mark Bernstein’s blog about the ELD project. Bernstein is the founder and “chief scientist” of Eastgate Systems, the pioneering publisher of hypertext fiction on portable media (first floppy disks and now mostly on CDROMs).

Who has made a more substantial contribution to the field of electronic literature than Mark Bernstein? This makes for a fun parlor game if you know anything about the field. You could name individual authors whose works helped to legitimize the field of born-digital literature. If you go with this approach, you may suggest Michael Joyce, Shelley Jackson, or Stuart Moulthrop, yet all these authors were published on Bernstein’s Eastgate Systems. (Perhaps less than a dozen others could be named who have made substantial contributions to the field including Robert Coover, Stephanie Strickland, Scott Rettberg, George Landow, et al.)

Eastgate is synonymous with early hypertext fiction. The contributions of Eastgate Systems and Bernstein in particular are immense. Because I believe this most sincerely, I think Bernstein’s recent critiques deserve a thoughtful response and I will add that his post has been discussed amongst the editors and other contributors to the ELD project and contributed to our ongoing conversations. I should also pause and say that all of the opinions I express here are fully my own. I do not speak for the other editors or anyone else involved with this project. One of the pleasures of working on this project is that I am working with others with very different sets of knowledge and sometimes very different opinions and perspectives than my own.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working with and thinking about the ELD lately, so Bernstein’s post is as good a reason as any to both address his concerns and to work out some of my own ideas. At first glance, I think some of his complaints are superficial and others are quite substantive. I also am very interested in considering the role of Eastgate Systems within the frameworks of the history of publishing and the history of the book. (So some of my thoughts here will wander—constructively, I hope—in that direction.)

His post begins with what I would characterize as a superficial critique and perhaps it hints at some of the motivations behind this critique. He begins by quoting Lisa Swanstrom’s recent entry for Shelley Jackson’s hypertext “My Body”:

While Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) must be purchased on CD and downloaded onto one’s computer before one can read it, her shorter hypertext narrative, “My Body & a Wunderkammer” (1997), is freely available online, both on the ELO’s Collection of Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, and the ALTX Online Network.

I think it is pretty clear what Swanstrom is getting at here. She is saying that “My Body” is a freely available introduction to Jackson’s highly acclaimed early hypertext work. Her point is about accessibility. I suspect, on this front, Bernstein’s critique comes from a vigorous defense of his business. His conclusion that “the most important thing to say about this work is that you don’t need to read Patchwork Girl” seems to be a very strange reading of this entry. In fact the entry (as of July 8, 2010) makes reference to Patchwork Girl four times in its four brief paragraphs. If anything, it highlights the primary importance of Patchwork Girl in the corpus of Jackson’s hypertext fiction.

I have only anecdotal evidence to back up my hunch is that many more people have heard about Shelley Jackson’s “Patchwork Girl” than have actually read it. (I will come back to why this is.) Swanstrom performs a public service to those interested in learning more about electronic literature by pointing out that an early Jackson hypertext work is available freely online. By analogy, “My Body” is to a short story as Patchwork Girl is to a novel. Patchwork Girl is the more substantial and significant work. Yet, the works do share many common concerns (“the body” as theme, etc.) and both works contain similar woodcut-like black and white images, which accompany and, in some way, organize the texts. Swanstrom does a very good job in her brief entry of outlining the themes of the work, linking the work to Patchwork Girl, and giving a brief contextual and critical overview.

Bernstein could not have known the behind-the-scenes activity around Swanstrom’s entry. New entries are emailed every Monday in a list to all ELD editors. At this point, the new entries are discussed and suggestions are made for improvements, additions, etc. (I should note that anyone can add an entry to the ELD, or add tags to an existing entry.) Her introductory paragraph was discussed over the listserv, and I exchanged emails with Swanstrom about the title of the work. And this title question is an interesting one that Bernstein also underscores.

Bernstein writes, “The Web site gives the title as ‘my body — a Wunderkammer.’” Which website? The title, in the form Bernstein cites here, appears on the website for the Electronic Literature Collection (ELC), Vol. 1 (ELC1) but it does not appear anywhere in the work itself as far as I can see. In fact, if one were to apply cataloging rules used by libraries for transcribing titles, one would transcribe the title as it appears on the title page. The title page of the work itself is this:

This clearly reads “my body & a Wunderkammer.” (One can question whether the library rules and the “title page” analogy should be applied in this context, but this seems as good a starting place as any for making a critical judgment.) Why does the ELC1 display the title as “my body — a Wunderkammer”?  Perhaps, this comes from the author herself. (I know that the sound file didn’t work in the original Alt-X version, but the ELC1 editors discovered it in the files and, with the author’s input, got it to work for the ELC version.) It may also stand in for the author’s signature. The link between the “&” and the author’s name is revealed in two linked lexia (here and here) within the work, but this calls for quite a bit of extrapolation. I have always heard this work referred to simply as “My Body.” In conversation over email Swanstrom commented that she always heard of it simply as “ Wunderkammer”. The Electronic Literature Organization’s projects, both the ELD and the ELC, initiate these sorts of discussions about these works, bring attention to their significance, and can help to preserve the works and the discussions around these works for later generations. As with any edition or anthology of literature, some level of textual criticism is necessary. The discovery of the music file and the incorporation of this into the ELC1 version in some sense “restores” the work to something closer to an “ideal copy” that didn’t previously exist. We are lucky because we can simply ask the author herself about the preferred or intended title (or whether or not the music file should be included), rather than simply speculating and offering theories to justify our decisions. Clearly it is better to begin facing these questions now and to begin adapting bibliographical and preservation strategies specifically to elit born-digital materials. Our print models are instructive but insufficient in this regard. I believe the ELD can play a role in fostering this critical/bibliographical work. Elit is a new frontier begging for a resurgence of bibliographical theory and textual criticism as practice.

Next, Bernstein notes several works that, at the time of his writing, were not added to the ELD. Note that more than half of the titles he lists are Eastgate System titles. His reading of the Swanstrom entry as an excuse not to buy Patchwork Girl, plus the Eastgate-heaviness of this list may indicate that he wishes the ELD could serve as a (better) marketing vehicle for Eastgate System titles or at least do a better job of giving Eastgate its due credit. Or perhaps he simply believes these works are paragons of the field and should be included in any inclusive reference resource on the subject worth its salt. So why aren’t more Eastgate titles in the ELD?

I have owned copies of both Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story.  I have since lost my copy of Joyce’s afternoon and I had to pay for a new version of Patchwork Girl as my old copy wouldn’t play on my OSX (10.5) Mac.  (I think it is Eastgate’s policy to provide new copies at a discounted rate if you are replacing an older version that no longer works on your system.) If I hadn’t lost afternoon, I imagine that it also wouldn’t work on my new system and I’d have to replace it as well. The problem of technological obsolescence and the numerous other preservation concerns with born-digital materials are now well known. Notable works exist on this subject including Mathew Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms and the ELO’s “Acid-Free Bits” and related later publications, not to mention the growing literature in the broader field of born-digital records within library science. But there is a basic problem with getting Eastgate System titles into the ELD.

The challenge is this: you need to buy (most) Eastgate titles to read them. And this challenge is more complicated than it appears at first glance. (I should note that at least three of the titles that Bernstein lists in his blog post are available freely on the Eastgate website, including Michael Joyce’s “Twelve Blue,” which is also available via the ELC1.) The challenge isn’t just that you have to buy Eastgate titles, it is also that you cannot get Eastgate titles from interlibrary loan. Most libraries don’t send out multimedia materials via interlibrary loan. If your library doesn’t have an Eastgate title and you can’t borrow it from a friend, you have to buy it blind from the website. (To counter this situation, urge your public or university/school library to buy specific Eastgate titles if you are interested in reading them. Every academic library should have Patchwork Girl and Eastgate titles by Michael Joyce and Stuart Moulthrop to name a few.) What is the result of this situation? Few people read Eastgate titles. They are not nearly as accessible as books. And they are much less accessible than the majority of post-Eastgate era works, which are almost universally available freely online. (Steve Tomasula’s TOC, distributed on DVD, is a notable exception, but if you look at how long this project was in development, it has its origins in the pre-2000 Eastgate era.)

The challenge with Eastgate is, in large part, a problem with print culture.

Eastgate is a pioneer in the field, and because of this it has suffered from a lack of market infrastructure capable of properly distributing, marketing, reviewing, and promoting its output. Remember that Gutenberg’s business (initially) failed, Johann Fust called back his loan to Gutenberg and it is Fust that turned the press into a successful business. Guttenberg’s invention and his first (though perhaps not his final) foray into printing ended in bankruptcy. Bernstein’s accomplishments are many, and while I don’t mean to imply that Bernstein is our era’s Gutenberg, I can only imagine that Eastgate as a business, like Gutenberg’s business, has suffered for being too far ahead of the curve—the market doesn’t always reward vision. What is remarkable is that Eastgate is still in business, the titles remain in “print,” and I can only credit this to Bernstein’s commitment to his work and his own wholly justified belief that it is important. I think sometimes his more bristly comments come from this steadfast belief in the importance of his work and I can only respect this.

So how do we get more Eastgate titles in the ELD? Over the years, I have contributed book reviews to several publications from literary magazines to alt-weeklies in major media markets to academic journals. I never have paid for any of the books that I have reviewed. When I was ordering a replacement copy of Patchwork Girl, I called Eastgate’s office and Bernstein answered the phone. I mentioned that I was an editor of the ELD and I asked about getting review copies of Eastgate titles for the ELD. (I’ve had similar conversations with several marketing people at publishing houses and always was sent whatever I was hoping to review, but again this is within the codified realms of print culture.) His response was one of exasperation, he didn’t want to give away Eastgate titles, and he said (I’m paraphrasing), “If you want to have an Electronic Literature Directory without Eastgate titles that’s fine with me.” Perhaps having an entry in the ELD isn’t as attractive to a publisher as having a review in an alt-weekly, but it is certainly likely to reach a bigger audience than a review in a literary magazine (which is not to say this is going to lead to any sales). While Bernstein’s frustration is understandable, editors of the ELD are going to a have a difficult time writing entries if they do not have copies of the Eastgate titles. (If Mark Bernstein reads this and wants to make copies of works available for this purpose, I would be happy to try and secure entry writers for entries on specific Eastgate works and then request copies from him to facilitate this.) The ELD should have every Eastgate title in it. But how will this happen?

The ELD relies on engaged users to take the time to draft entries about works of elit. The fact that Eastgate titles are not easily accessible (for the reasons outlined above) makes it difficult to ensure that Eastgate System titles get into the ELD. From anecdotal evidence, I believe that few people read Eastgate titles beyond what I would call the big three: Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story; Jackson’s Patchwork Girl; and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden. (A survey using WorldCat that I completed in June 2006 indicated that these were the Eastgate works most collected by libraries, and I would guess that these are also the most purchased titles by individuals. They certainly appear most frequently in the critical literature on elit. More on this survey in another post.)

As someone active in the “history of the book” as a field of study, Eastgate Systems is unparalleled in its importance from an historical perspective. As someone connected to contemporary innovative literature circles, I also know that many Eastgate titles now often seem dated. Again, Eastgate suffers because of print culture coupled with changes in digital technology and literacy. The literary content of Eastgate works are not any more dated than the literary works published by a late 90s early aughts small press publisher of innovative fiction or poetry. However, the interfaces of Eastgate works now also seem of another era. (Works like Patchwork Girl and afternoon, a story hold up despite these inherent challenges.) I’ve taught Patchwork Girl and watched students who grew up with the internet and video games struggle to acclimate to the navigation structure (and have experienced minor quirks and occasional glitches while navigating the work in the latest version on my Mac). Print culture dictates that we expect our books to behave in certain ways (see Adrian Johns’ Nature of the Book for the strongest exploration of this concept that I have read). Conversely, digital culture doesn’t have the benefit of 500 years of history; it changes rapidly and our digital artifacts from only ten years ago now seem outmoded and their functionality seems frustrating at worst or simply quaint if it has held up fairly well. Eastgate works have bravely explored the space in between these two media spheres, bringing the literary into the digital, and doing it in a transformative not mimetic way.

But because of all of this, Eastgate works are extremely niche, relatively inaccessible, and owned and held by libraries in very small numbers. (The claim about ownership figures is admittedly anecdotally informed speculation, while the claim about library holdings is supported by WorldCat data—though this later figure (842 individual items as of 2006) is relatively strong when compared with the holdings of a literary small press).

My point is this: Eastgate’s importance is unquestionable. Yet the prospect of getting a majority of Eastgate titles into the ELD is dependent upon an engaged readership of Eastgate titles. I suspect this is going to be a challenge. A dedicated group of Eastgate fans will need to be to step up or Eastgate titles will need to be contributed as review copies for this purpose. Or we can turn to the ELD version 1 and mine it for entries, as Eastgate had more real estate in the field only five or so years ago.) As of 2006, 46 Eastgate titles were listed in the ELD. Especially impressive as only 39 titles were listed as being held by collecting libraries in WorldCat. (This underscores the important role the ELD plays in documenting the history of the field.) Because of the nature of the ELD 2.0, if users are not engaging with the works than we will not see entries written or tags tagged or comments proliferating on the entries themselves.

This takes me to Bernstein’s criticism of open tagging. His overblown rhetoric here is a repetition of something he Tweeted at ELOAI. He writes, “The creators place a lot of faith in tags and folksonomy for this application, of which I am skeptical. What literary categories would have been created, for example, in an open folksonomy in 1930’s Germany?” Is Flickr fascist? Are our digital library catalogues and their card catalogues predecessor’s fascist (is metadata itself the problem)? Tagging is small “d” democratic. Should we turn away from these user-driven, democratic modes of information exchange and look to christen some organization or leader as the chosen authoritarian regime that will save us from the unwashed masses? Really. It’s just user-driven metadata. Comment fields and tagging are as good as those that use them. Anyone who has seen the comment streams on Youtube know that these can reach very low lows, but that is why the ELD has editors, to keep things on topic and appropriate. However, vigorous debate and significant difference is to be encouraged, not stifled.

Also, I think we, as editors, can take Bernstein’s critique as motivation to solicit entries on specific works by smart scholars, critics, and writers that we know. Wherever we see engagement with elit by smart people with knowledge of the field, we should be directing them toward the ELD. (I’ve tried to do this recently by soliciting Whitney Trettien to write two antecedent entries; her excellent contributions are here and here. Jason Nelson is also leading a future effort in this direction that will be revealed soon.) I think it is in the next year or so that the lasting character of the ELD will be determined. I hope Bernstein will join us in this effort. (He is welcome to contribute entries on works with which he is not affiliated and perhaps to provide stubs for Eastgate titles that are not yet in the ELD.) We should encourage and solicit comments and critiques of entries to ensure that the ELD is a site of dialogue and debate, as well as a useful and used reference resource on the field.

Bernstein does make a good point about stubs. However, as the ELD is currently set up, a stub would then prohibit anyone but an editor of the ELD from changing the entry at a later date. This is a problem that hopefully will be resolved and we have already been discussing this, especially in relation to authors attempting to contribute entries on their own works (a practice that is discouraged for obvious conflict of interest reasons, but these could function usefully as stubs). Again, the ELD is still only in its initial launch phase. The design will change and functionality will be added. As editors, we are monitoring and addressing these issues as they arise.

Also, the current design does not encourage user-generated tags as much as it should, though our aims and our rhetoric about the ELD does emphasize the importance of tagging. To add a tag to someone else’s entry, you need to click on the “Tags” tab next to “View” at the top of the entry. This is awkwardly situated. This awkwardness is in part a result of the architecture of the page and how this maps onto the act of reading. (You read to the bottom of the page, yet this tab is at the top.) This is something that needs to be addressed by the new ELD designer. And I trust it will be addressed.

(And as for his comment about searching on “These Waves of Girls,” I found it easily searching on this phrase, searching with and without quotations and in two different browsers. In all cases the entry was the only hit.)

After we move beyond the initial launch phase, add additional functionality, hone the design, and cultivate an active community of users to populate and create sustained dialogue about the field, with the ELD as an established site for this dialogue, we can begin to utilize the ELD to create a snapshot of the field. Bernstein is worried that the ELD will become dated and we may currently be using terms or keywords that will seem foolish five years from now. But isn’t this also valuable, to record and document the evolution of discussion around the still-emerging field of elit within the ELD? And then again his hunch might not hold up. I think our digital culture is growing in sophistication and freeing itself from print paradigms. (The Kindle is one example a retrospective mimetic technology, limited by its adherence to the features of the codex. The functionality made possible by the iPad and most elit is a step beyond this retrospective framework.)

And as for Eastgate… I think I have made clear both my admiration for Bernstein and my belief in the importance of Eastgate. I have heard rumors(?), rumblings(?), perhaps even Tweets from Bernstein himself(?) (or maybe this is wishful thinking on my part?) that Eastgate may be developing apps for the iPad, etc. to make its catalog available on current devices. I hope this is true, this would address many of the distribution and accessibility issues that I describe here. I also hope the navigation structures on Eastgate works are improved. New versions for new platforms (with new or adapted code—I’m not a programmer so excuse my imprecise language) constitute new editions. This raises all sorts of interesting bibliographical issues and problems to be addressed by textual critics. I think we are ready for scholarly editions of Patchwork Girl, afternoon, and Victory Garden. But I think we need more accessible distribution methods and more updated platforms and navigation structures. (I, for one, would love to be involved in an effort such as this.) I think we are nearing a moment rich with confluence where elit will meet the critical writings of David Greetham, Jerome McGann, even classic bibliographers like Tanselle and Bowers, alongside the work from within the elit field and community, namely the work of Mathew Kirschenbaum and N. Katherine Hayles. I think we are moving in the direction where the importance of project such as this—a scholarly edition of a work of electronic literature—will be recognized outside of our niche community at the margins of the digital humanities, where it intersects with contemporary literature/creative writing communities (which I fear  constitutes yet another niche community). The ELD, I hope, is playing a part in making this wider recognition a reality, in further establishing the field as one worthy of consideration and study, and providing many examples illustrating that digital media have tremendous potential for literary production, proliferation, and engagement.

Aldus Manutius is my favorite printer. When I first started at the University of Akron, one of the great pleasures on one of my first days was going through the uncataloged rare books and unearthing a slim octavo in a limp vellum binding and seeing the dolphin and anchor that told me I had discovered a late Manutius. Late, indeed. It was printed after Aldus’ death, when his son was running the shop. Anyhow, I took this as a sort of house warming jesture from the book gods. The great Italian humanist was here. All was okay.

Today, I was looking at the NYTimes online. In the style section, I found an article about Tipoteca Italiana, a typography and printing museum forty miles north of Venice. But then I read this: “Aldus Manutius (1449-1515), a typographer and the first publisher of printed books.”

So I had to write a comment. I was fortunate to attend lectures by Martin Davies on the early Italian book while studying the history of the book in London. My hand was forced. I had to write a corrective comment, though now I notice they have not published any comments dated after July 7, 2010 the date the article appeared. So I now leave it here and all of this is indebted to Davies and his inimitable knowledge, except of course any errors I have introduced, those of course are all mine…

“Aldus Manutius (1449-1515), a typographer and the first publisher of printed books.” This simply isn’t true. He isn’t even the first publisher of printed books in Italy, though he is one of the greatest. The definition of “publisher” is somewhat ahistorical when discussing this period and must be situated somewhere between printer and bookseller. Arnold Pannartz and Konrad Sweinheim were printing in Italy before Aldus Manutius (specifically in Subiaco and Rome from as early as 1465). Gutenberg’s successor (and funder) Johann Fust, with Peter Schöffer, may be the first commercially successful printer/publisher of books.

It is because of Aldus Manutius that “italics” have their name, a lingering trace of the geographic origins of this typographic style. Italics allowed for elegantly fitting more words on the page, especially useful in the slim Aldine octavo volumes, an innovation in style and form developed from 1501 to 1505 that included editions of Petrarch and Dante and can be seen as the precursor to the past century’s Penguin pocket editions. Also, I don’t think there is evidence supporting the claim that Manutius was himself a typographer, though he did oversee the work of one the greatest printshops of all time. Francesco Griffo of Bologna, a goldsmith turned type designer around 1475, is known as his type designer of choice. We can see Aldus as the figure responsible for perfecting the printed book in Greek (a very complicated tasks because of ligatures and contractions) and as the first printer of an entire book printed in Greek in 1476, though again Aldus himself is not likely to have designed or cut the types. Aldus Manutius is also well known for producing the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499, the first vernacular text he printed (in a hybrid of Italian and Latin)–a beautifully strange and gorgeously illustrated book, though it is likely one that Manutius printed purely for financial reasons (and also was centrally featured in the 2004 novel The Rule of Four). For more on Aldus Manutius see Martin Davies’ Aldus Manutius: Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice (The British Library, 1995).

The image is from the University of Illinois’ exhibition on Dante, available online here.

I intend to unpack some of my own thinking and summarize some of the more interesting presentations, discussions, and concepts brought up at both of these conferences. This will happen over a few posts titled, “ELO-AI & RBMS10.”

I’ve written plenty on this blog about my ideas leading up to my paper that I delivered at ELOAI on the “body and the book” in the late age of print, using Steve Tomasula’s VAS and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl to examine the material relationships between readers and books in our current moment of media change. What I have not written much about is my role as an editor of the Electronic Literature Directory (ELD), a recently launched project of the Electronic Literature Organization. Or I should say, a relaunching of the ELD in a version 2.0 that takes selective—more on why ‘selective’ later—advantage of web 2.0 technologies such as the wiki platform and crowd-source tagging. The ELD was publically launched and presented in a panel (of which I was a participating panelist) at ELOAI. I’d also like to mention that the ELD was brought up at the RBMS preconference in James Ascher’s (et al.) wonderful discussion session on “Progressive Bibliography: Catalogers, Curators, and Crowdsourcing.” The ELD was noted as a model of a catalog using new media and social networking create new functionality and to actively engage its audience as participants and contributors. Synergy.

But first some background…

I have been involved with the Electronic Literature Organization since it’s very early days. As an undergraduate in my senior year as an English major at Loyola University in Chicago at the turn of the millennium (e.g. circa 2000), I had been daydreaming about the computer’s potential for revolutionizing literature. I was also working (read: volunteering) as an assistant editor of the long-running independent literary journal, Another Chicago Magazine (ACM). Full of energy and enthusiasm I wandered (unannounced, I think) into the small loft office of the recently formed Electronic Literature Organization. Could I have a job or a paid internship? I asked. Scott Rettberg, ELO’s founding executive director, apparently didn’t want to crush my dreams for the utopian future of a digital literature, so I found myself as an intern, soon-to-be “programs assistant” in the very eartly start-up days of the ELO.

It was here in the heady days of the pre-bubble bust internet economy that I toiled as the in-house underling at the ELO working in our cramped little loft space in Ravenswood, helping with the planning for the first version of the Electronic Literature Directory and helping plan the first-ever (and only, so far) Electronic Literature Awards held at the New School in New York in 2001.

Soon after this the dot.com bubble burst, promised funding fell out from underneath the organization, and luckily the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) stepped in to take in the previously independent ELO (I think this was initiated by Dr. N. Katherine Hayles, then at UCLA).

Now nearly a decade later, I find myself once again deeply engaged with the ELD. Since these green just out of undergraduate days, I have turned to special collections / rare book librarianship as my chosen profession and with my scholarly interests focusing on the history of the book and media change. Within this framework, I find myself considering the role of technological and cultural changes that shaped the form and content of early printed books, while also considering how today’s technological and cultural changes are shaping contemporary literary production, resituating our literary past, and changing our vital connection to the written word.

The Electronic Literature Directory (ELD) Explained & My Efforts on the Project

The ELD exists somewhere between an archive and a catalog. It is not an archive because it does not aim to preserve works of electronic literature for future use. (A secondary project of the ELD does intend to do this.) The ELD does serve as a catalog of works of electronic literature, though it’s functionality and aims are different than a typical library catalog that describes, for example, the holdings of a particular institution. If the ELD is an archive of anything, it is an archive of metadata about works of electronic literature. This metadata centers upon an encyclopedic entry, both critical and contextual, that serves to describe and classify a work of electronic literature. The ELD also is a site for critical dialog and exchange about the field of born-digital literature. Anyone can contribute entries or add tags to existing entries. And each entry allows for comments (much in the same way as this blog allows for comments on individual posts).

My own work on the ELD has focused on fronts. First, I will be taking a leading role in our collaboration with the Library of Congress and the Internet Archive (Archive-It.org). This is an archival initiative to ensure lasting access to web-based works. If the work is accessible on the web via an internet address, we can preserve it for later generations (emulation of current systems on future systems maybe necessary, however). In addition to this work, I have been working to create and populate an “antecedent” category. This category of entries intends to situate a deeper history of literature that informs and precedes today’s electronic literature. Sometimes they have an electronic component (as in Jackson Mac Low and Charles Hartman’s collaborations which used the computer to compose printed books) and sometimes they do not (as in Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, a proto-hypertext novel in print). Whitney Trettien’s recent contributions of “antecedent” entries for both Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés (1897) and Harsdörffer’s Denckring (1651) illustrate how brief descriptive writing can elucidate a literary prehistory for electronic literature that opens up the discussion to how technology and interactivity have enabled earlier (often seldom considered) modes of literary production outside the seemingly set conventions for print. Of course, where do the boundaries for this category begin or end? Well, determining this, and creating a critical discussion around this issue is part of the point. This is one example of the role played by the ELD to encourage, organize, and documenting

In addition to this work, I am working to build partnerships and collaborations with the ELD and institutions that are collecting the papers and digital files of writers of elit (e.g. the Ransom Center’s Michael Joyce collection, Duke’s Stephanie Strickland collection, and MITH’s Deena Larsen collection) and other elit focused collections (e.g. Brown University’s attempts to document the rich history of promoting the use of digital tools for literary production).

My engagement with the ELD project has opened up new ways of seeing medieval manuscripts and early printed books, while scholarship in bibliography and the history of the book has much to offer the community of scholars (most of whom are literary critics or writer/artist practitioners) that have gathered around the emerging field of electronic literature.

Or… The Rise to Prominence of the Book Work

The book is now being clarified.  The work to illustrate this does not yet exist. Or there is only an initial fraction of the work to be. The corpus of work defining the “book work”, in this manner, is under way, but only in the earliest stages.

The book has not yet been fully liberated from its primary function. The book is to be read. The book exists for reading: textual and pictorial.

These are the last days when image-text belongs to the book. Or the last days when it primarily belongs to the book in the contemporary context. The image-text has already moved beyond the book. But where, where has image-text taken up residence?  We can draft a list, but the book remains the home of image-text. Because a new home cannot be simply conjured, it is not a manifest thing. But a new home will be found. A new mode or modes will be established. The book will become quaint.

This is when the book work will emerge.  This is when the book form will reach its apotheosis. The book will not be dead. It will be born anew.

We must be better attuned to the early book works hinting toward the clarified book to be.

{Image: Anselm Kiefer’s “Book with Wings” (1992-94) via  www.artslant.com }

The Monstrous Book and the Manufactured Body in the Late Age of Print: Material Strategies for Innovative Fiction in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland

In recent decades a growing number of innovative writers have begun exploring the possibility of creating new literary forms through the use of digital technology. Yet literary production and reception does not occur in a vacuum. Print culture is five hundred years in the making, and thus new literary forms must contend with readers’ expectations and habits shaped by print. Shelley Jackson’s hyptertextual digital novel Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s innovative print novel VAS: An Opera in Flatland both problematize the conventions of how book and reader interact. In both works an enfolding occurs wherein the notion of the body and the book are taken in counterpoint and become productively confused. This calls attention to what I will call a dual dualism, a circuit of interaction between mind and body and the literary work and its interface (most commonly a printed book), wherein it is envisioned that body engages with book to facilitate the mind engaging with the literary work. Patchwork Girl and VAS problematize this dual dualism as their authors simultaneously exploit it for literary effect.

…

Both VAS and Patchwork Girl invite the productive confusion between body and book, while also dramatizing our shifting textual landscape and its implications for our literatures past and future. VAS is styled like a body. It’s cover (in the Chicago edition) depicts semi-transparent skin revealing blue veins underneath, reminding the reader of the book’s rich history, when medieval codices were written on animal skins, while also perhaps drawing a link to the circulatory systems of narrative and literary meaning contained within. The page is a skin in VAS (as shown through the design). The (counter)narrative is stitched together from different sources, as the page itself is visually depicted as being stitched together like a wound, just as the patchwork monster in Patchwork Girl parallels the patchwork text. And thus both works initiate an enfolding between book and body within the metaphorical / material space of the book. The physical book and the literary text are enmeshed and intertwined in disrupting ways, and we, as readers, get our wires crossed, we are both inside and outside, we are sewing together the narrative and making meaning, yet the work is also forcing our hand, pushing us into foreign spaces, ejecting us back into our bodies but left with a lingering strangeness.

Following from both VAS and Patchwork Girl, I would draw attention to the practice of reading itself, and the dual dualism of the circuit embodied by the interaction between reader and the literary object.(1) Of the history of reading the scholar and book historian Robert Darnton writes, “The history of reading will have to take account of the ways that texts constrain readers as well as the ways that readers take liberties with texts.” He concludes, “The tension between those tendencies has existed wherever [readers] confronted books” (79). This confrontation is both a physical and an intellectual one, and it has existed at least since the invention of writing (and was perhaps made more complex as the practice of silent reading gained prominence, thus closing the circuit—one reader, one book—as I have described it here). In his essay on Ronald Sukenick “Taking the Line for a Walk: In Form to Narralogues, A History in Medias Res,” Tomasula addresses the shifting relationship between readers and novels, while hinting at the dual dualism of the reading experience, which I have sought to characterize here. He writes:

A novel was a thing the reader actually holds in his or her hands. It should also be a part of the reader’s actual experience, and not a facsimile of some exterior reality, negating its status as print by inviting readers to enter a dream state as does the traditional novel in which the story is conceived of as a kind of virtual reality that lulls readers into forgetting that the words they are reading are a construction on a page. (27)

VAS and Patchwork Girl disrupt this soporific mode of the novel. Both works jolt readers from their dream state, and force them to consider the physicality of the technology of literature and to become aware of their own embodied being. In this way, both works problematize the reader’s relationship to the physical text. They circumscribe a problematics of the book in the late age of print, when print is increasingly supplanted by new means of storing and displaying textual and graphic information. This can be characterized as a problematics of the extimacy of the book—the book as external, yet intimate Other: the book as an uncanny reflection of our mind in the mirror.(2) Within the productive confusion of this circuit we sense a path from noumenon—the thought of only—to the phenomenon—the physically manifest thing—bound in a recursive loop extending out through the author-figure and feeding back from/to an ill-defined and unseen reading public of which we as reader are either an indistinct and unnecessary, or originary part.

…

These works force us to ask questions of the literary artifact. Does the literary work exist as an abstract immaterial concept? Is it just a text, in the sense of an alphanumeric code, requiring only an arbitrary display mechanism, be it the pages of a paperback book or the display on an Amazon Kindle? Or is the literary work most fully realized as the embodied thing? Mallarmé has called the book a spiritual instrument, and, in fact, the rise to prominence of the codex over the scroll emerges contemporaneously with the early development of the cult of Christianity. To take Mallarme’s characterization further, are we to understand the literary work as the soul of the book? (It seems the answer to this question may depend on the book.) Both Patchwork Girl and VAS provide complex examples, indicative of a potential literary art where the medium and means of embodiment matter. While one can argue that the means of embodiment for literature always matters, the power of print culture is that the means of how our literature is produced, manufactured, and presented becomes virtually invisible to the reader.(3) We expect our books to be organized in specific codified ways. In fact the Kindle is a technology based on this generalized understanding of books as essentially their alphanumeric codes displayed in strictly codified ways.

So too do literary theorists and critics largely construct the space of the novel as an imaginative space where the text serves as the instructions that transport the reader into the space imagined by the author. The book is discounted in this formulation as a mere means to an end. It must simply deliver its code. While most will recognize this as a gross oversimplification, it should also be recognized that literary critics almost universally discount the material manifestation of literature. (Following from the soporific model of literature, which Tomasula warns against but acknowledges as the rule, we can perhaps conclude that the majority of our critics and scholars would rather remain asleep, unshaken from their dream-state.) Bibliographers and textual critics have long argued for the importance and significance of the book’s materiality, and it is not surprising that electronic-literature scholars like Matthew Kirschenbaum and N. Katherine Hayles have turned to these fields to address our emerging digital textual landscape.(4) Works like VAS and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl undermine the implicit assumption of most of our literary criticism that embodiment does not matter. These works force us to wrestle with literature as both a linguistic and material/technological mode of art.

…

How can we separate the book and its work from the thinking self during the act of reading? Where do the physical limits of this circuit begin and end? Perhaps our most persuasive new literature—or at least a radical strain of it—will encourage and further this productive confusion wherein the line between reader and that which is read becomes confused. But perhaps literature has always walked this line, and it is only as technology is rapidly changing that we revisit this question anew.

If these two works ask: How does technology determine our bodies? They also raise the question: How does technology determine our literature? And in this liminal space between these two questions, between the space of literary questioning and the space of understanding our own embodiment, perhaps we can contemplate our existence in new ways. This is the dual dualism I am concerned with, this is the territorialization these works elicit.

In this approach, I see a potential literature, a possibility for an electronic literature that is self-aware of its transgressions, that utilizes new tools to achieve new effects, while remaining conscientious of the expectations of the reader and the traditions of genre (even as it seeks to disrupt or subvert them), aware of the very process of reading as it plays out from author to work to reader, aware of how this transaction occurs and where it can be transformed and reimagined. As the book is transformed, its ghost-book, a past essence lingers, a potential powerfully resonant metaphor.

Both Patchwork Girl and VAS look back to literatures past as they point towards literatures future. As critics and scholars of books, we need to establish deeper histories and contexts for reading and situating works of electronic literature. We need to understand the rich history of books as both vehicles for literature and as evolving technologies. Yet, if we are to assert that the form of the book cannot be understood as language alone, then what of our criticism? If we are to take these questions seriously, do we not also require new forms of criticism?

A Note on “Notes” and “Works Cited”: I’ve included all of them from the paper, rather than take the time to figure out which are referenced in the selections from the paper pasted below. So be it.

Notes

1. See Darnton 68, for his famous “communications circuit” for a contrasting, more sociological model of the relationship between readers and books in the early modern period. Darnton’s model served as the inspiration for the “circuit” framework and description.
2. Extimacy is a term borrowed from Jacques Lacan, and I am indebted to James Pate for introducing me to the term via his essay in Action, Yes.
3. See the introduction to Johns, 1-57, for a discussion of the assumptions of modern readrs about the nature of books in the late age of print, situated within the greater context of the history of the book.
4. See Hayles’ My Mother Was a Computer 103-104, and Kirschenbaum for more on bibliography and electronic literature.
5. See Trettien for more on volvelles as precursors to multi-media and digital literature.
6. See Hansen for an insightful analysis of the “haptic” in the context of new media art and literature.
7. See Halpern for one of many sources addressing the so-called “iPad revolution.”
8. See Montfort for more on the history of interactive fiction as genre.

Works Cited

Abbott, Edwin Abbott. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, with Illustrations by the Author, a Square. London: Seeley, 1884. Print.

Chevaillier, Flore. “Literary and Bodily Evolution in Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell’s Vas: an Opera in Flatland.” 4th Biennial &NOW: A Conference on Innovative Writing & the Literary Arts. Hyatt-Regency, Buffalo, New York. 16 October 2009. Lecture.

Darnton, Robert. “What is the History of Books?” Representations and Realities. Spec. issue of Daedalus. 111.3 (Summer 1982): 65-83. JSTOR. Web. 14 May 2010.

Halpern, Sue. “The iPad Revolution.” The New York Review of Books. 57.10 (10 June 2010): n. pag. Web. 20 May 2010.

Hansen, Mark B. N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Flesh and Metal Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments.” Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information. Eds. Robert Mitchell and Phililip Thurtle. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

- – -. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2005. Print.

- – -. Writing Machines. MEDIAWORK pamphlet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Print.

Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl by Mary/Shelley and Herself: a graveyard, a journal, a quilt, a story & broken accents. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995. CD-ROM.

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1998. Ebook.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. Mechanisms New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Print.

Mallarmé, Stéphane. “The Book as Spiritual Instrument.” Divagations. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2007. 226-230. Print.

Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Print.

Pate, James. “Clayton Eshleman and the Spirits of the Head.” Action, Yes: Online Quarterly. 1.2 (Winter 2010): n. pag. Web. 1 May 2010. <http://www.actionyes.org/issue9/pate/pate1.html>

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus: The Original Two-volume Novel of 1816-1817 from the Bodleian Library manuscripts. Ed. Charles E. Robinson. New York: Vintage, 2009 Print.

Tissut, Anne-Laure. “Mutating Languages in Vas: an Opera in Flatland by Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell.” 4th Biennial &NOW: A Conference on Innovative Writing & the Literary Arts. Hyatt-Regency, Buffalo, New York. 16 October 2009. Lecture.

Tomasula, Steve. VAS: An Opera in Flatland: A Novel. Art and design by Stephen Farrell. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2004. Print.

—. “Taking the Line for a Walk: In Form to Narralogues, A History in Medias Res.” Musing the Mosaic: Approaches to Ronald Sukenick. Ed. Matthew Roberson. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003. 13-38. Print.

Trettien, Whitney. “Computers, Cut-ups, & Combinatory Volvelles: An Archaeology of Text-generating Mechanisms.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2009. Web. 1 May 2010. <http://www.whitneyannetrettien.com/thesis/>

Traveled to Oberlin tonight to see a lecture by Johanna Drucker and an artists’ books show. I came home to work, was flipping through my notebooks hoping to resurrect some idea, and came across this quote from D&G (cut down to my liking):

A book…is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent god to explain geological movements… There is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made… As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages… A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation… of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc. — and an abstract machine that sweeps them along?

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

The Drucker talk was certainly worth the 2+ hours in the car. (Drucker mentioned nothing of Deleuze, the connection is mine… or an old notebook’s.)

I’ll also note that I don’t find D&G particularly helpful in my thinking about “the book,” though this fragment was very much in line with my thoughts on the ride home.

Aside: I do find Blanchot and Leiris helpful in comparison. ( I’m not anti French philosophy.) Blanchot also writes of the “pure exteriority of the book.” I do love how D&G come out as (passionate) readers and curators in the Capitalism and Schizophrenia of a literary stable: Beckett, Kafka, Genet, Artaud…