New Reading

Spent part of the weekend looking at various (fairly) new types of publications. New Directions is bringing out the works of B.S. Johnson and The Unfortunates is quite an interesting experiment, a sort of boxed-set of sequence-able book pieces. It seems to have led to some of the electronic work that easily allows for fiction without fixed sequence, such as Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls, "published" in 2001, which is fun but I would love to see more mature work in electronic format. This stuff will work well on e-readers and I would even love to see an iPod-like "shuffle" so that the work itself will change with each reading, while the reader has no control over the sequence. A few of the other finalists in the Electronic Literature Organization's 2001 prize program are also interesting. For conservative newbies like me writers like Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson are revelations.