Sunset Blvd blazed...
Sunset Boulevard blazed, empty, rinsed in sunshine, the stray cars like bugs streaming in the footprint of a vast lifted rock.
— Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet, 124.
Bill Bly's weblog
Sunset Boulevard blazed, empty, rinsed in sunshine, the stray cars like bugs streaming in the footprint of a vast lifted rock.
— Jonathan Lethem, You Don't Love Me Yet, 124.
It takes a long time for a mouse to realize he's in a trap, but, once he does, something inside him never stops shaking.
— Laurie Anderson, quoted in New Yorker Rock & Pop listings, for May 21, 2007, 10.
It was a strange land,
With many roads and few destinations.
There were signs everywhere
Instructing people to do this
Prohibiting people from doing that,
But mostly people did as they pleased,
And the only rules that were enforced
Were the one protecting those people in power,
The people who broke the rules most often.
In the blink of an eye,
The soft, irregular shapes of the land
Became hard and regular
And the people swarmed over them
At incredible speeds.
No one remembered the voice of the land;
They had forgotten it had one at all.
But the land cannot forget.
Everywhere are sad traces of its history.
Confused and astonished at how quickly it is dying
The land grieves and waits.
What does it wait for?
For someone to listen, to recognize its voice,
To hear its story.
But it also waits for its eventual rebirth.
It will happen, sooner or later.
The question is,
Will we be there to see it?
— Sharif Ezzat, from Like Stars in a clear night sky, in Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, October 2006. See also his site, www.youwerehere.com.
A week ago I attended the ELO/MITH Symposium on the Future of Electronic Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. It had been a long time since I'd seen many of my friends and colleagues from what we used to call the hypertext community, and it was wonderful to catch up on what they were doing.