If you’re going to send us comment spam, I suppose you might as well make it a pithy reference to Don DeLillo’s White Noise.

But I just turned to it and said fusillade, and deleted it.

Keep ‘em coming, Richard! So glad you’ve stopped by GTxA.

I wrote these words last year, as a commission from the BBC, who wanted a “fiction” that could be read aloud on the radio in seven minutes. I gave it to the wizards at Ninth Letter (do hunt down the graphically stunning print magazine, if you can), and the rest is all theirs. The concept and execution of the Flash theater is the work of the immensely talented Jessica Mullen, an Art and Design undergraduate at Illinois, who will graduate this spring. I shared many of the above-mentioned responses and discoveries, when I saw the finished collaboration just a couple of weeks ago.

For the record, my own first venture into e-lit occurred back in 1977, when I wrote a few pieces of “stochastic concrete poetry” in the Tutor language for the legendary PLATO system – a network that was the precursor for many later web fixtures such as e-mail, IRC, multi-user games, and much more. Developments in the genre in the last couple of years have been breathtaking. But with truly collaborative open-source narrative spaces just now opening up, I’m tempted to cite another precursor transformative moment and say, “You ain’t heard nothing yet.”

It’s clearly a different type of experience than email novels which might, at their best, live in the medium, on its terms, rather than offering delivery from it.

This is a smart piece. It doesn’t simply condemn the medium; it’s an elegy, but one that acknowledges the world we live in as the real. Sure, I confess that I identify with the sensation of being “convinced there was an invention, something as simple and obvious as writing, something that would change all the places we might still get to. Some clean and potent way of holding ourselves up to the light” and to sometimes feeling nostalgiac for the clarity of book culture.

My favorite bit of this piece is that it, like most of Powers’ writing, embraces the human inside the machine. In that penultimate paragraph, the fake sender spam sends us back to a memory of someone we once knew: “before you condemn this message safely to the recycle bin, the name comes back to you. That fake sender�s name.” The artificial, the medium that assaults us, also reminds us of the real, or rather unearths the real within us (stainless-steel rat humans inclined to hear poetry in traffic).

Powers is a critic of technology, but a critic who lives in a technological world, and a damn fine novelist. This is a wonderful meditation on the nature of email in relation to the world of unmediated story, of sincere undiluted telling. Like his 2002 “Literary Devices” (now apparently disappeared from the Web), this is a short meditation on living in the internet, which ultimately favors writing in more time-tested formats. I agree with Nick that this is a powerful piece of writing, but I also agree with Eric in wishing that Powers (I can’t think of anyone who would do it better) would take electronic writing for more than a spin around the block. It’s entirely possible to write both behind the screen and on it simultaneously.

I think there are two clear advantages to including the “whole” story in the final email, though. First, it is an invitation to re-read everything, one that I was glad to get and that I accepted. It was also an invitation to read the story in a different way. The print-like PDF presentation shows that the Flash presentation was actually a different reading experience – had you read the story initially on the page, it would have been different.

As for whether or not the piece was too costly in terms of time and effort, I’m used to spending dozens of hours with interactive fiction pieces, so taking a few minutes to read two pages of Richard Powers’s text wasn’t an issue for me. I agree that the cost could have been lowered with few ill effects, though, since the interactive options are very limited and this is quite a “rail game” that is mainly intended to give the feel of an email interface and add a metafictional touch at the end.

The popups are annoying. I’d accept it if they were a result of reading the spam, but they happen anyway. And when several happen at once, you have to dismiss them in a particular order.

I didn’t get to the end, I didn’t have the patience. I get enough spam as it is, without deliberately courting more of it. There should at least be a way of deleting the spam without reading it. That would give me some satisfaction.

That said, I did like the text, what I saw of it. It was interesting to read and contained some interesting reflections. But the price just became too high. Which, I guess, is a comment on spam in itself.

Malcolm

However, isn’t true, as you write, that I “had to read it [the spam], or at least click on it, or nothing would happen.” I just went through the piece without ever clicking on the first or second spam messages. This seems to be a bug, rather than a feature: I think the high-level interface implementation assumes that you always click on the highlighted message, but you can click on something else and re-read it, instead, getting the pop-ups you should have gotten with spam message X but instead re-reading the “story” email Y.

More later, but I wanted to address that…

I started writing a response here, but it ended up so long I put it in my own blog. Which is acting up about trackbacks, so here’s a direct link to what I wrote.

15/12/2004

[more on “Steady Stream”]

There’s more interesting discussion of Richard Powers’s email piece at Grand Text Auto. [...]