April 25, 2004
four men and a prose poem
| ROB stands in the gentle snow of a Northland April morning in just a T-SHIRT. Damned if he's going to wear a JACKET on APRIL THE DARNED 25th! | ||
Have you ever watched someone write? No, no, no . . . not watched the writer's body . . . but, rather, the writer's words . . . as they appear on a screen one by one, Well . . . this weekend I had the privilege (and weird supreme language arts pleasure) of writing with the Unknown . . . working the same document at the same time from four different locations (Rhode Island, New Jersey, Ohio, Minnesota). . . producing this result. Imagine the eager blinking of four different cursors on the page you're writing on! The Unknown (Scott Rettberg, Wm. Gillespie, Dirk Stratton) are the notorious hypertext authors of this rambling marvelous hypertext novel, and inspiring to me not only for the quality of their words, but also the delirious enthusiasm of their process. These men love to write, and write together, and they'll write in bars, whilst trashing hotel rooms, and by invitation at educational institutions of ill repute. |
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| ROB sits in the BACK YARD on a FROSTY STUMP. ROB used to be in a band called FROSTY STUMP. It was a Seals & Crofts tribute band. | ||
Scott had us set up on a collaborative work program called SubEthaEdit. Each writer's words are marked in a different color. You can find exactly where someone else is writing at the moment by clicking on I spent a fair amount of time just watching the others compose. Then I got into a weird little "haunting" game --- jumping right in ahead of, say, William's cursor and writing something lamely postmodern like "William could feel the presence of another author in the text," then erasing it and running off to pester Dirk for a while. When I die, I think I'll make a really good ghost. |
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