This year¹s trAce/Alt-X call for entries asked for work
that stretched our preconceived notions of what writing is. So when
I agreed to judge this year¹s entries, I was hoping to be tested. I
was. The shortlisted entries were all impressive in different ways,
but one piece answered that challenge in dazzling style. The wide
black screen of Talan Memmott's stunning, difficult Lexia to
Perplexia is a kind of theater in which luminous symbols and
sentences (which look more like formulae) come and go. At times the
lucid graphic icons are more readable than the layered scrims of
text. Is this still writing?
Certainly, the reader¹s first pleasure will probably be a
visual one. This is a gorgeous piece. But the visuals though
beautiful are not only decorative but syntactical. Some of Memmott¹s
most elegant arguments are made visually, through the logic of
layout and the grammar of the link. While in much new media writing
it is possible to consider the design and the ³content² separately
(sadly, it is usually the content that comes up short), this piece
calls such distinctions into question. It is impossible to decide
where design ends and the text proper begins. This improper text is
as much made up of buried coding and spatial logic as it is of
ordinary English words. In fact such words as it contains are
neither ordinary nor exactly English anymore. A new media writer has
to be good at writing code as well as sentences. Reflecting on this,
Memmott borrows as much from the conventions of html code as from
the not much less difficult codes of Deleuzian theory,
metamorphosing them into a jammed, fractured diction full of
slashes, dots and brackets. There is a purpose to this besides play,
since the piece is about the code-mediated relationship between the
reader, the (electronic) text, and the author. This sounds like
postmodern critical theory, and it is, but one could also call it
fiction, because it not only analyzes but dramatizes a relationship.
However, since it involves the reader in creating that very
relationship, it is maybe not so much a fiction as a fact: a
performance or even a happening, in the theatrical sense. What
you-the-reader do IS the text.
Another piece deserves mention. Less innovative, but
almost perfect in its own way, The Ed Report is a cunning piece of
mimickry that manages to maintain an almost chinkless front of
officialese while telling a funny, surreal, even touching story.
Purporting to be a report on an ill-fated attempt by the CIA to
employ civilians (including Bruce Springsteen) with a gift for
ancient languages as code-talkers on a secret narcotics mission, and
complete with documentary trimmings, it patches into the dynamics of
rumor and urban myth to run its operation in the grey area between
fact and fiction--a project perfectly suited to the web, where grey
areas abound. It also exploits the ease of internet publishing to
resurrect the Victorian model of serial publishing. Its design,
which is conservative, is perfectly apt for its deadpan narrative
approach; here an attention-grabbing treatment would be out of
place.
Good work, boys and girls. Keep scaring
us.
Shelley Jackson
Shelley Jackson holds an AB in art from Stanford
University and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University. She
continues to divide her attention between art, writing, and other
forms of misbehavior, on and off-line. She is the author of the
acclaimed hypertext novel Patchwork Girl (Eastgate 1995), a feminist
reworking of the Frankenstein myth. Her other e-publications include
the award-winning My Body (Alt-X 1997), a semi-fictional
autobiography in hypertext, and her own ever-expanding web site,
Shelley Jackson's Ineradicable Stain (http://www.ineradicablestain.com). Works in print include short
stories in Conjunctions, Fence, Gargoyle, the Fetish anthology and
other journals, and she is also the author and illustrator of two
children's books. Forthcoming are a collection of stories and a
novel
