The Solitude of Palliative Care

I read One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1996, while my mother and I nursed her mother through the final months of terminal cancer. I had grown up with my grandmother and her stories. She was born in 1912 and did not go to school, instead she rode wild horses through prickly pear on the central western Queensland cattle property her father had built from scrub. She grew up with tribal Aborigines, with the Depression, self-sufficiency, but also dressing for dinner and having books sent out from England by boat.

The experience of reading One Hundred Years of Solitude at this time changed my life. My grandmother died about the same time I finished the book, and I returned to my inner city bohemian share house in Sydney and sold all my possessions. I then began four years of constant travel around Australia and around the world. I earned my money by being a street musician, boat builder, farm laborer and smuggler. I had entered the world of possibility and coincidence.

For me the fluid, cyclical and charmed world of One Hundred Years of Solitude cast a glow over everyday life. It gave me courage to take a chance, to throw caution to the wind and step outside the habits and routines of what is expected by some unwritten social code. The characters shimmered and flickered and died, not living safe and predictable lives, but remaining true to their inner thoughts and feelings. The world is amazing. This is what Gabriel Garcia Marquez taught me.
 

Published in The Guardian Online: The Solitude of Palliative Care

Preserving Digital Literature: 'Alleph: A Self Portrait' by Sakab Bashir (2003)

'Alleph: A Self Portrait' won a BAFTA Interactive Arts Award in 2003 for its author Sakab Bashir. The work is no longer available online, but I include some screen shots here from a prolonged study I made of it as part of my graduate work for a earlier incarnation of my PhD thesis. 'Alleph' is a beautiful multimedia production in which links opened to audio and video loops. Seven spaces linked together to provide an allegory of the major stages of life. Material was lifted from the 12th Century Sufi poem The Conference of the Birds and intertwines with material sampled from popular films from the 20th Century, images of a school, a prison, a hospital, a workshop and a menhirs on a hill. There are adaptations of seven verse stories from The Conference of the Birds in Alleph; ‘A Pauper in Love’, ‘The Heron and the Sea’, ‘Rabe’eh and the Two Grains of Sand’, ‘The Ambiguous Courtesan’, ‘The Devil Complains’, ‘Joseph and the Well’ and ‘The Martyrdom of Hallaj’. Titles flowed across the screen and one manipulated and navigated the text of 'Alleph'. As one navigated further through the work the flowers opened around the main image, thus positioning the reader in the looping structure of 'Alleph' (it resumed again once the final image had been completed for links and media).

I present a few screen shots here to give an idea of what 'Alleph' looked.

Frankenstein for the Now

Neo, the hero of The Matrix is rebuilt following his release from the controlling program

Mary Shelley's  Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus published in 1818 is seen as  a historical and literary divergence between the poetic and the technical, and is today recognized as a significant reaction against this split as part of English Romanticism.

The monster of Frankenstein is an abomination that results from the misguided belief in science. Victor Frankenstein believes that  “The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. ” But he is wrong with the monster, his creation murdering a child. Victor hunts down his creation and attempts to destroy it.

In contrast we have the contemporary figure of Neo, the young hacker turned savior in the Matrix trilogy. When Neo is rebuilt it is very suggestive of the unnatural birth of the monster in Frankenstein. In this context the reborn man is released from the illusional world of the computer program that holds all humanity in a 'neo'-platonic grip. At the same time Neo has mastered the illusion; he controls technology because he is as one with it. As a telekinetic child says to Neo in the first Matrix film; "There is no spoon." For Neo there is no technology, only extensions of his own self. For this reason he can control the space around him, but at the same time the space around him must be controlled.

The huge difference between Neo and the monstrosity created by Victor Frankenstein is that Neo is here to save humanity; science and poetry have at last joined. Neo is that union. Avital Ronell in conversation with Werner Herzog said, “One text that shows the disaster of the divorce between science and poetry would be the one by Mary Shelley whose name is Frankenstein.” But the digital revolution that has Neo as the Chosen One is the marriage of science and poetry.The monster in Frankenstein is Neo's sibling that was abandoned when science no longer needed poetry and poetry stopped understanding science. This occurred when poetry got obsessed with form. Science lost interest in poetry when it began splitting atoms.

For Neo poetic form and atoms are the same thing. Reality is one great poem, a dance of code that can be read, interpreted and responded to with a Will to Power:

"My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (its will to power) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power. And the process goes on"- Nietzsche, The Will to Power.

The lie of the matrix is not the illusion of material reality, it is the will to power, the desire to master the space. While the power of the matrix could be use to liberate minds, it is being used to control space, in a violent and ongoing war, waged with the same technology that provides the awareness of reality -  which is defined by the struggle to control it and so on ad infinitum.

White Horse Tavern New York

The White Horse Tavern, located in New York City's borough of Manhattan at Hudson Street and 11th Street, is known for its 1950s and 1960s Bohemian culture. It is one of the few major gathering-places for writers and artists from this period in Greenwich Village that remains open. The bar opened in 1880, but was known more as a longshoremen's bar than a literary center until Dylan Thomas and other writers began frequenting it in the early 1950s. Due to its literary fame, in the past few decades the White Horse has become a popular destination among tourists.

The White Horse is perhaps most famous as the place where Dylan Thomas drank, before returning home and eventually becoming ill and dying a few days later of unrelated causes. Other famous patrons include The Clancy Brothers (who also performed at the establishment), Bob Dylan, Mary Travers, Jim Morrison, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Michael Harrington, Seymour Krim, Delmore Schwartz, Richard Fariña, Jane Jacobs, and Hunter S. Thompson. The White Horse is the tavern - "Once upon a time there was a tavern" - in the opening line of Gene Raskin's song Those Were the Days, adapted from a Russian folk song of the 1920s.

The White Horse's other famous patrons included Jack Kerouac, who was bounced from the establishment more than once. Because of this someone scrawled on the bathroom wall: "JACK GO HOME!" At that time, Kerouac was staying in an apartment in the building located on the NW corner of West 11th St.

About the same time, the White Horse was a gathering place for labor members and organizers and socialists. The Catholic Workers hung out here and the idea for the Village Voice was discussed here. The Village Voice original offices were within blocks of the White Horse. Much of the content was discussed here by the editors.

The Eternal Word Horde of a Master Musician

Reflections on Writing the Born-Digital Text

Authorship of a so-called born-digital text demands skills and forms of expression that are radically different from works that are digitized or that employ remediated authoring methods.

The born-digital work "refers to materials that originate in a digital form. This is in contrast to digital reformatting, through which analog materials become digital. It is most often used in relation to digital libraries and the issues that go along with said organizations, such as digital preservation and intellectual property. However, as technologies have advanced and spread, the concept of being born-digital has also been discussed in relation to personal consumer-based sectors, with the rise of e-books and evolving digital music. Other terms that might be encountered as synonymous include “natively digital,” “digital-first,” and “digital-exclusive'" (Wikipedia).

Authoring the born-digital text demands a skill set the includes those needed for the analogue texts that feed into the digital via remediation:

"According to their book Remediation: Understanding New Media by J. David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin, remediation is a defining characteristic of new digital media because digital media is constantly remediating its predecessors (television, radio, print journalism and other forms of old media). Remediation can be complete or visible. A film based on a book is remediating the printed story. The film may not provide any reference to the original medium or acknowledgement that it is an adaptation. By attempting to absorb the old medium entirely, the new medium presents itself without any connection to its original source. On the other hand, a medium such as a movie clip can torn out of context and inserted into a new medium such as music. Bolter and Grusin describe this as visible remediation because, "The work becomes a mosaic in which we are simultaneously aware of the individual pieces' and their new, inappropriate setting."(New New Media Wiki)

It is important to comprehend remediation as including practices associated with older media, which change as a result of the fusion with newer media. Examples of this dual-directional influence include film spectatorship, which has been dramatically altered in the last ten years as a result of the pervasiveness of moving images manufactured for, and distributed by the Internet. In the same way newspapers have changed their production and distribution techniques in response to an information economy radically altered by digital media. Consumption of newspapers has changed as a result of this multi-layered series of influence on how people take in news.

So how should one think about authorship in relation to born-digital texts? Of course it is simpler to break it down into the reading practices that can be associated with the media. The visual includes moving and still images, along with 3D navigable spaces and all the dynamics that can be coded into written text using digital media. One has to only consider the speed and movement of Young.Hae Chang Heavy Industries to see how words become images in a born-digital work:

The visual in a Young.Hae Chang Heavy Industries work is the written word, but it is more than that. With rhythm, dimensions and addressive syntax what can be termed a poem in the analogue sense becomes an experience for the reader. The role of audio in this experience cannot be understated.

Sound is an important consideration in any born-digital work. Sound creates space, contextualizes objects, provides rhythm for the text and guides the reader along a set path of interpretation. Ignoring sound in the authoring process is to present a digital work without its legs.

The creation of space is achieved with the visual and the audile, but relies on the interrelated quality of perspective. Perspective is a vast field of knowledge. Sufficient to say the era of the marriage between realism and quattrocento perspective in the Western Hemisphere is coming to an end.

ur perception of space is dominated by perspective, in the sense of a reduction of the projected size of objects with distance. One of the key jobs of the visual brain is to decode this size diminution as distance in the third dimension, or egocentric distance. If the eye were a pinhole cameras, the projection of the world onto the back plane would be in perfect linear perspective (and in perfect focus). The succession of images projected on the curved retina within the eye what Leonardo da Vinci termed natural perspective, a series of distorted projections that needs to be integrated over time in a representation in the brain as the eye moves around the scene. How the brain decodes the information in natural perspective into an accurate appreciation of the spatial layout has yet to be resolved. (Principles of Perspective)

In many examples of online visual 3D media (e.g. Second Life, World of Warcraft) depth of focus is infinite and there is no central vanishing point. Natural perspective is gradually being coded by digital media in the current age. This is an exciting prospect. My advice is look to the artists and not the geometers.

The American Novel Since 1945 with Amy Hungerford: Jack Keroauc 'On the Road'

The American Novel Since 1945 (ENGL 291)

Yale Professor Amy Hungerford's lecture on Kerouac's On the Road begins by contrasting the Beats' ambition for language's direct relation to lived experience with a Modernist sense of difficulty and mediation. She goes on to discuss the ways that desire structures the novel, though not in the ways that we might immediately expect. The very blatant pursuit of sex with women in the novel, for example, obscures the more significant desire for connection among men, particularly the narrator Sal's love for Dean Moriarty. The apparent desire for the freedom of the open road, too, Hungerford argues, exists in a necessary conjunction with the idealized comforts of a certain middle-class American domesticity, signaled by the repeated appearance of pie.

00:00 - Chapter 1. The Beats: Similarities and Differences to Literary Modernism
09:46 - Chapter 2. A New Use of Language: Mirroring the Speed of Experience
18:13 - Chapter 3. "The Prophet of 'Wow'": The Language of Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady
29:48 - Chapter 4. Dean and Sal: Tangled Sexual Tensions
33:56 - Chapter 5. The Hunger Metaphor: The American Culture of Consumption
40:21 - Chapter 6. Modes of Craftedness: Carlo Marx's Papier-Mache Mountains

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

This course was recorded in Spring 2008.

In this second lecture on On The Road, Yale Professor Amy Hungerford addresses some of the obstacles and failures to the novel's high ambitions for achieving American community through an immediacy of communication. Sal Paradise's desire to cross racial boundaries, for example, seems ultimately more exploitative than expansive; Dean's exuberant language of "Yes!" and "Wow!" devolves into meaningless gibberish. And yet the novel's mystical vision of something called "America" persists, a cultural icon that continues to engage the interest of readers, scholars, and artists. Among these latter is the digital art collaborative Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, with whose online work DAKOTA Hungerford concludes the class.

00:00 - Chapter 1. Kerouac's Mythical America: Trans-historical Communities
22:03 - Chapter 2. Defining American Identity: Sal's Illusory Vision of Mystical Oneness
30:01 - Chapter 3. Dean and Sal, Again: The Theme of Sadness
41:12 - Chapter 4. The Publication History: Creating a Literary Object

Sylvère Lotringer. Capitalism, Leisure, and Potlatch. 2011

Sylvère Lotringer, literary critic and cultural theorist talking about Jean Baudrillard's "Symbolic Exchange and Death," Throstein Veblen and the leisure class. In this lecture Sylvère Lotringer discusses the concepts of potlatch, sacrifice and exchange through the work of Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud, Marshall McLuhan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011. Sylvère Lotringer.

Sylvère Lotringer, Ph.D., born in Paris in 1938, is Jean Baudrillard Chair at the European Graduate School EGS and Professor Emeritus of French literature and philosophy at Columbia University. He is based in New York and Baja, California. Sylvère Lotringer is a literary critic and cultural theorist, and as general editor of Semiotext(e) and Foreign Agents book series was instrumental in introducing French theory to the United States. His interests range from philosophy, literature and art to architecture, anthropology, semiotics, avant-garde movements, structuralism and post-structuralism.

Sylvère Lotringer studied at the Sorbonne and received his doctorate from the École Pratique des Hautes Études VIe section, Paris (1967). As General Editor of Semiotext(e) and of the "Foreign Agents" series, Lotringer was instrumental in introducing French theory to the United States. His teaching interests include Dada and surrealism, situationism, Mallarmé, Proust, structuralism and post-structuralism, as well as anthropology, semiotics, philosophy and art in relation to 20th-century literature.

Among the books Sylvère Lotringer has published, he has co-written with Paul Virilio: Pure War (1983), Crepuscular Dawn (2002), and The Accident of Art (2005), and with Jean Baudrillard: Forget Foucault (1986), Oublier Artaud (2005), and The Conspiracy of Art (2005). Sylvère Lotringer has also written extensively on Georges Bataille, Simone Weil, L. F. Céline, Marguerite Duras, and Robert Antelme, and is the author of Antonin Artaud (1990), French Theory in America (2001), Hatred of Capitalism (2002), David Wojnarowicz (2006), and Overexposed (2007). Silvère Lotringer frequently lectures on art and has published catalogue essays for the MOMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Musee du Jeu de Paume, Modern Kunst and has edited numerous magazines and books such as Philosopher-Artist (1986), Foreign Agent: Kunst in den Zeiten der Theorie (1991), and Nancy Spero (1995).

For background reading on this lecture see "For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign" By Jean Baudrillard, Charles Levin, which includes The Ideological Genesis of Needs.

Ozymandias as Machinima (2000)

Praised by everyone from New York Times Arts columnist Matt Mirapaul, to film critic Roger Ebert, through to games journalists and literature professors, Strange Company's groundbreaking visual adaptation of the Shelley poem remains one of the most evocative pieces of Machinima.

Developed using an early version of Strange Company's Lithtech Film Producer software (a project which was later dropped, sadly), "Ozymandias" was created in just over a week for a demonstration show. However, the idea had been in director Hugh Hancock's mind for much longer.

"I've wanted to visualise to poem for years" says Hugh. "The imagery and the feel of the words is so strong that it really is crying out to be made into a film - and indeed, our adaptation stands as the latest of a number of films based on the poem."

Roger Ebert compared the film's minimalist construction to seminal Anime work "Grave of the Fireflies", and its attempt to capture the spirit of the poem was judged so successful that several literature courses used the film as part of their teaching program. Dell used the film as part of their demonstration at the Windows 2000 launch, and it appeared at several film festivals as part of Strange Company's Machinima showcase.

"As with all of these things, I had no idea that "Ozymandias" was going to be so successful when we were making it." says Hugh. "This was one of the most off-the-wall ideas I'd come up with, and its success has been very gratifying."

Download Ozymandias

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)

vast multiplicities of ideas and images

“Sartre and Kerouac attempted to organize vast multiplicities of ideas and images through some forms of totalizing structure. This was Sartre’s project in The Critique, and it was also the function of the theory of spontaneous-bop poetics. Sartre used Hegel and Marx to try and achieve a “theory of practical ensembles”; Kerouac and the other Beat writers used jazz or Mahayana Buddhism to work through spontaneity or improvisation to produce self-organizing texts. In both cases, the writers tried to find a way of going beyond meaning. This was the great challenge of cybernetic culture - the idea of “the net” being its most current form. Sartre and the Beatniks stand on two sides of the great divide opened up by post-World War II civilization: Sartre trying to hold on to rationalism, even as rationalism decimates larger and larger human populations, while the Beats flee into the transcendental East – both fueled by over-the-counter stimulants”
Marcus Boon, 'The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs’ p201.

John Berger reads Ghassan Khanafani’s Letter from Gaza

John Berger reads Ghassan Khanafani's Letter from Gaza from Palestine Festival of Literature on Vimeo.

I have seen few examples of online videos that demonstrate such powerful ability to evoke emotion. Berger reads Khanafani with an understated certainty and warmth that is extremely moving. This is brilliant.

From People's Geography

Lectures on Milton

Milton's political tract Areopagitica is discussed at length. The author's complicated take on state censorship and licensing, both practiced by the English government with respect to printed materials at the time, is examined. His eclectic use of pagan mythology, Christian scripture, and the metaphors of eating and digestion in defense of his position are probed. Lastly, Milton's insistence that moral truths must be examined and tested in order for goodness to be known is explored as an early manifestation of the rhetoric that will be used to depict the Fall in Paradise Lost.

This lecture is number eight in a series of twenty four on John Milton by John Rogers, Professor of English at Yale University. It comes to us via Academic Earth, a fine source of academic materials on the web. All of them free.

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon's teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
- Milton, John

What Did Shakespeare Look Like?

Copies of the painting we now refer to as the Cobbe portrait were identified as Shakespeare within living memory of the poet. The original was almost certainly owned by Shakespeare's only known literary patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, to whom the Cobbe family is distantly related. The sitter would appear to have been identified as a playwright in the 17th century. The Latin inscription along its top edge, 'Principum Amicitias!', is a quotation from an ode by the classical writer Horace (Book II, Ode I). In Horace's poem, the words--which can be translated as 'the alliances of princes!'-- were addressed to the tragic playwright Pollio. Horace's words warned Pollio of the dangers of writing vividly about recent major historical events (dangers of which Shakespeare was all too well aware) and contrasted the playwright's historical and tragic writings. But even more importantly, the Cobbe portrait seems to have been the model or source (through a copy) for Martin Droeshout's familiar engraving of Shakespeare for the First Folio of 1623.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen's classic novel to new legions of fans.

Order HERE.

Orwell's Diaries as Blog

The diaries of George Orwell ( born Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) are to be published as a blog:

From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco [recovered from a life-threatening lung haemorrhage], his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

The Link is HERE for the Orwell Diary Blog.

We in the Diamond Age

"A constable from the Shanghai police, legs strapped into a pedomotive, was coming down the street with the tremendous loping strides afforded by such devices, escorted by a couple of power-skating Ashantis." Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age.

I am reading Stephenson's The Diamond Age (1995) in between bouts of thesis writing. I know it is old, but Stephenson is the one holy trinity psycho-si-fi author (the others being Dick - my favorite- and Gibson) that I had not read...until now.
The Diamond Age has been cited as a source of inspiration for Second Life, somewhere I have been spending quite of bit of time over the past year. I am 50 pages in and am enjoying the understated steampunk aesthetic and the expected (post)cyberpunk noir.
Then this morning on the front page of our national daily of choice the above image was prominently featured. These are security guards for the 2008 Olympic village. And it was then that I realized we are now in The Diamond Age.....

The Shandean Way

--But for heaven's sake, let us not
talk of quarts or gallons -- let us take
the story straight before us ; it is so nice
and intricate a one, it will scarce bear
the transposition of a single title ; and
some how or other, you have got me
thrust almost into the middle of it --

-- I beg we may take more care.
Tristram Shandy Vol VIII, Chapter VII

Happily I declare, "There is a good hypertext version of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman online."
I am using the design features of Tristram Shandy as an example of the antecedents of the virtual text object (nothing major, just a footnote), where presentation takes over from representation in a narrative, conveying meaning in a 'real' sense.


Design Devices in Tristram Shandy.
Plot ; we get no Life and little of the opinions of TS who appears only in volume 4, is breeched in vol vi, and then disappears. Walter Shandy of Shandy Hall, his brother, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim. Yorick the Parson, Dr.Slop and Mrs Shandy. The tradition of Learned Wit, Cervantes and Rabelais. "We'll not stop two moments, my dear sir - only, as we have got thought these five volumes (do Sir sit down upon a set - they are better than nothing "

1. The diagrammatic intervention to describe narrative and movement.
2. The sudden advancement of the marbling.
3. Experiments in punctuation.
4. Attempts to render dialogue.
5. The presence of the page, and its echo in the illustration.
6. The parallel text.
7. The depiction of silence and humming.
8. The blank pages.
9. Evoking the other arts in the form of the printed book, theatre, painting and music.

The Atlas of Scandinavian Writers

Even if you cannot understand Norwegian, your Finish is rusty, or Danish non-existent The Atlas of Scandinavian Writers (Nordisk forfatteratlas) is an interesting example of the visualization of information. I translate (quickly) from the website:

The Atlas of Scandinavian Writers has as its goal to encourage interest for Scandinavian literature using an exciting visual mode. The Atlas informs about Scandinavian literature and provides inspiration for the reading of those works that are written in the North. It can be a source of inspiration for the user with tips on other writers in the same style or genre that the user has a personal attachment to, which the user has or has not encountered before.

(Nordisk forfatteratlas har til formål at fremme interessen for nordisk litteratur på en spændende visuel måde. Atlasset oplyser om nordisk litteratur og inspirerer til at øge læsningen af de værker, der er skrevet i Norden. Det kan derfor bruges som inspirationsværkstøj for brugerne med tips om andre forfattere i samme stil eller genre som brugeren personligt foretrækker, som brugeren ellers ikke ville være stødt på.)

It is a cooperative project between Scandinavian TV stations
Danish TV has been the leader of the project, but the Scandinavian Writes Atlas is a Scandinavian cooperation, that is initiated, produced and financed by the Scandinavian Broadcasters DR (Denmark), SVT (Sweden), NRK (Norway) and YLE (Finland). There over there has been support given to the project from Nordvisionens Kabelfond, Nordisk Ministerråds Kulturfond og Nord Plus Språk.

(Et samarbejde imellem nordiske TV-stationer
DR har været projektholdere på projektet, men Nordisk forfatteratlas er et nordisk samarbejde, der er udviklet, produceret og finansieret af de nordiske broadcast-stationer DR (Danmark), SVT (Sverige), NRK (Norge) og YLE (Finland). Derudover er der givet støtte til projektet af Nordvisionens Kabelfond, Nordisk Ministerråds Kulturfond og Nord Plus Språk.)

Its done in Flash (of course) but integrates video and text with a sort of mind map arranged along a time line going as far back as 1670 (Petter Dass). The 5 most popular writers from user's inquires so far are:

Karen Blixen
Tove Jansson
Per Petterson
Selma Lagerlöf
Søren Ulrik Thomsen

The Scandinavian Writers Atlas is also interesting due to who was left out. Do we have a canon here?

An Infernal Canon

There has been debate in local and international media recently that there should be a canon of texts decided upon and taught to the young (Denmark has one, Australia may need one and Sweden seems to have voted for one).
I find the canon a difficult concept to come to terms with as the texts I tend to like nobody else does - both Facebook and Myspace my 'favorite books and films' often leaves me the only one on the list when I click on the link to each of their names:-(
After listening to a swedish radio program where it was suggested we need to formulate and adhere to a literature canon as quickly as possible, I started making a list of books which have had a tremendous impact on me. I call it the Infernal Canon, not due to it's Satanic bent as much because it seems to center around the weaknesses of humanity and the dark depths of the soul. Welcome to my canon (I think everyone should have one). In no particular order:

Doris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971)

Junichiro Tanizaki, Diary of a Mad Old Man (1962)

Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye (1969)

Yasunari Kawabata, House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961)

M. Ageyev, Novel With Cocaine (1934, 1984)

Paul Bowles, Let It Come Down (1952)

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature (1884, 1928)

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945)

William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)

Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend (1922)

Shohei Ooka, Fires on the Plain (1951)

Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen (1988, 1993)

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory (1940)

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Devil on the Cross (1980, 1987)

Antonin Artaud, Heliogabalus, or the Crowned Anarchist (1934)

William Golding, The Double Tongue (1995)

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (1984)

André Gide Strait is the Gate (1909)

Nick Cave, And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989)

Jean Cocteau, Opium: The Diary of a Cure (1958)

Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell/ The Drunken Boat

Allen Ginsberg, Indian Journals (1978)

New Hayles Book on the Horizon

Released 1st March 2008:

N. Katherine Hayles, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (ND Ward Phillips Lectures)

A visible presence for some two decades, electronic literature has already produced many works that deserve the rigorous scrutiny critics have long practiced with print literature. Only now, however, with Electronic Literature by N. Katherine Hayles, do we have the first systematic survey of the field and an analysis of its importance, breadth, and wide-ranging implications for literary study.
Hayles's book is designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom. Her systematic survey of the field addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary theory, and the complex and compelling issues at stake. She develops a theoretical framework for understanding how electronic literature both draws on the print tradition and requires new reading and interpretive strategies. Grounding her approach in the evolutionary dynamic between humans and technology, Hayles argues that neither the body nor the machine should be given absolute theoretical priority. Rather, she focuses on the interconnections between embodied writers and users and the intelligent machines that perform electronic texts.

Through close readings of important works, Hayles demonstrates that a new mode of narration is emerging that differs significantly from previous models. Key to her argument is the observation that almost all contemporary literature has its genesis as electronic files, so that print becomes a specific mode for electronic text rather than an entirely different medium. Hayles illustrates the implications of this condition with three contemporary novels that bear the mark of the digital.

Included with the book is a CD, The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1, containing sixty new and recent works of electronic literature with keyword index, authors' notes, and editorial headnotes. Representing multiple modalities of electronic writing--hypertext fiction, kinetic poetry, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, narrative animations, installation pieces, and Flash poetry--the ELC 1 encompasses comparatively low-tech work alongside heavily coded pieces. Complementing the text and the CD-ROM is a website offering resources for teachers and students, including sample syllabi, original essays, author biographies, and useful links. Together, the three elements provide an exceptional pedagogical opportunity.

Ive ordered mine already........