My Seduction into Electronic Literature: How Did I Get Here?
The story of my own location at the crossroads of literature and technology starts here in Normal, Illinois, in fact in the labs and classrooms of Stevenson Hall, where this conference is taking place. While I had always been interested in literature that took technology and the effects that it has had on our culture as its subject — ranging from the Kurt Vonnegut, Orson Scott Card, and Harlan Ellison I read in high school to the Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, even the David Wallace and Curtis White that I was reading the early nineties — I didn’t think a great deal about technology as a platform for or a medium of literature until I arrived here at Illinois State University in 1993. I was presented with my first email account on my arrival here. My first teaching experience, English 101, took place in a networked classroom. The assignments in my first graduate seminar, Ron Strickland’s Seminar in 17th Century British Literature, were weekly position papers to be “handed in” to a mailing list that went to both the professor and my fellow students. At the same time as I was taking fiction writing workshops with Curt White and David Wallace, where I was encouraged to focus on things like the authenticity of my diction and the Jamesian roundedness of my characters, back in Freshman Composition and in the Seventeenth Century, I was being taught to rethink the ways that we utilize technology as a communicative and literary medium.

Still, I was faithful to the word on the page, and saw the technology primarily as a pleasant diversion from the meatier tasks of writing for and reading from the printed page. In the fall of 1994, however, while I was enrolled in Jim Kalmbach’s course in Visible Rhetoric, something happened that changed the course of my professional and creative life. One day Jim interrupted the course of our lab session to insist that we drop whatever we doing to take some freeware for a spin, an Internet application recently developed down the road at the NSCA in Champaign, something called the Mosaic browser. The first time I saw this graphical interface, with its links to more than one hundred different “sites,” presented through a recognizable “page” metaphor, I found myself immediately enthralled with its potential as a publishing medium.

I wasn’t quite sure what I would do with the World Wide Web, but the force of my curiosity was such that I knew that I must do something. In its earliest days, exploring the World Wide Web took on the quality of a scavenger hunt. I found that there were many people like me, interested in literature of the past and present who, moving from the “home page” that was the first widespread content impulse, were developing online resources about their favorite books, about their favorite writers, and that there was also a strong impulse to place their most valued reference resources online. With the exception of a few exemplary resources, such as Alan Liu’s Voice of the Shuttle humanities portal <http://vos.ucsb.edu/>, there were, however, very few places on the Web where the majority of these resources could easily be accessed. So as I began my studies towards the Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati in 1995, I also began developing a site called “Books in Chains” as a kind of hobby.

The Internet Archive Project that I’m utilizing right now, by the way, released this public interface, the “Internet Wayback Machine” earlier this year. The project is an attempt to periodically archive as much of the Web as possible. The archive has its problems: for instance while it archives HTML, it cannot preserve the different applications and standards that were in place at a given time. External links are also problematic: these links of the past will deliver you not to the resources that they linked to in the past, but to those resources as they exist now, or more often, to a 404 error. Still, it’s the most valuable and comprehensive publicly accessible attempt to date to preserve the World Wide Web as it existed in the past. I wish Brewster Kayley and his colleagues luck as they attempt not only to keep this vital project funded, but also to surmount the substantial copyright and intellectual property issues that any attempt to archive the entire Web will involve. As you can see, through archive.org, I’m able to give you at least a sense of the Books in Chains project, which no longer exists on the academic server where it used to reside.

The purpose of “Books in Chains” was to organize a large set of links to literary resources from around the Internet. It was a hobby that soon became quite time-consuming. The University of Cincinnati’s English Department, while populated with sharp-minded faculty, operated within a much more traditional structure than that here at ISU. My work on the Internet had very little to do with the fiction writing, or studies in contemporary American fiction, drama and Irish literature I was engaged in at UC. And yet as I proceeded with my Web hobby, I found not only that my hobbywork was getting noticed and being utilized by thousands of people, but also that I was becoming part of a very energetic and devoted community of humanists, for whom the Internet represented an opportunity to share knowledge with each other, and with the (wired) world.

In late 1996, I got an email from someone representing a new venture called the Mining Company, asking if I’d like to get paid for doing the kind of work that I was doing on “Books in Chains,” by developing and maintaining a literature site for their portal, which would be developed by a network of expert independent contractors. At first I thought this must be a scam, but after investigating further, I decided to give it a go. For the next three years, I served as the Authors guide at the Mining Company, which then became About.com before it was then swallowed up by the Primedia empire. At first this was a great experience: the company allowed the guides a great deal of autonomy. I was able to develop not only a link portal, but also an online book review, featuring intelligent reviews of contemporary literature written by a network of grad students and faculty across the country. We were able to review many books of value that were not getting press in the traditional organs, and to present those reviews to a substantial audience. Gradually, of course, the forces of commodification took hold: the company grew larger and then had its IPO. The content of About.com suffered drastically from the desires of its marketing executives, who were desperate to sell advertising at all costs. What was once one of the best subnetworks on the Web devolved into a pop-up-ad-driven nightmare, featuring little bits of knowledge layered into an offensive barrage of banal commerce. I ended my relationship with About.com in 2000, though they continued to use much of the content that I wrote, misattributed to another author, in cavalier violation of my contract and of copyright law.

The Power of Fun
My experiment in writing fiction created specifically for the Internet began in June of 1998, when my friend and fellow ISU alum William Gillespie and poet Dirk Stratton gathered in Cincinnati for a weekend of writing games. We got together with the express intention of collaborating on a creative project, though we didn’t quite know what we wanted to do. After briefly discussing the idea of writing a screenplay (Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh meets Quentin Tarantino, if I recall correctly), we shucked that and instead decided that we should publish each other’s existing work, borrowing from the collective publishing model of the Fiction Collective. It struck us that given recent advances in publishing technology, it would not be too great of a feat to put together, edit, and distribute a book ourselves, cutting out altogether the middleman and the publishing industry whose hoops and insider trading of favors we collectively despised. We arrived at the goal of our project: The Unknown: An Anthology, a book composed of unknown writing by unknown writers, that is, by us. Having come to this agreement, and not finding all of the work that we would like to include on-hand, we instead decided to try our hand at writing hypertext fiction. We reasoned that a short hypertext fiction about the book tour that we planned to go on after publishing the print anthology would serve as a great web-based promotional mechanism for the anthology itself. And would be fun, as well.

We underestimated the power of fun. Seventy-two hours later, we’d written some hundred scenes of what would become The Unknown: A Hypertext Novel. I think that it was not only the fun of writing about, poking fun at, ridiculing each other as fictional characters, nor the fun of lampooning our favorite writers and certain aspects of the media culture of the present, but also the discovery of hypertext as a mode of collaboration that drove us, not only for those sleepless night, but also through the summer and years which followed. In writing our silly road trip novel, we were discovering the network as a medium in its own right, one with staggering potential. Having finally (more or less) concluded writing The Unknown, a Hypertext Novel in late 2001, we recently printed The Unknown: An Anthology, bringing that circle to a close. While we’re proud of this little collection, were we to print it in its entirety, the hypertext novel would dwarf our printbound work. The online project, begun as a slight comic offshoot of the print project, took on a life and personality of its own.

Coover Welcomes the Barbarians at the Gate
Less than a year after the project was initiated, Robert Coover selected The Unknown as co-winner of the 1998/99 trAce/AltX International Hypertext Competition, and invited us out to Brown for the Technology Platforms for 21st Century Literature Conference. This was a unique gathering, the first of its kind. I’m sure that many of you are familiar with Robert Coover’s work as a novelist. He is one of the most prolific and intrepid writers of our time, the author of many innovative novels, short story collections and plays. A fact less known about Coover is that he will also be remembered as one of the great communitarians of 20th Century literature. Coover has been the friend not only of electronic literature and hypertext, but also the literary avant-garde, the postmodern, Latin American fiction, translation, and postcolonial literature, serving not only as a prolific author, but also helping to foster a sense of literary community. Coover is a builder not only of elaborative narrative structures, but also of literary movements. TP21CL in April of 1999 was his latest stab at energizing and motivating the community of hypertext writers he had adopted during the late eighties and shepherded since. For the purpose of this conference, Coover had teamed up with an old friend from his Midwestern years, Jeff Ballowe, who had had some success in the technology and Internet business, having led the launch of ZDNet before retiring in his early forties to work on the board of several Internet ventures. The main idea of the conference was to get the toolmakers together with the writers who were using the tools creatively. This made for some strange juxtapositions: the author of the first notable hypertext fiction, afternoon, a story, Michael Joyce, on one side of a table, the arrogant creator of Director and founder of Macromedia, Marc Cantor, on the other.

For William, Dirk and myself, this was both our first exposure to the world of technology executives, and our first exposure to the community of hypertext writers. We were surprised to find that there were quite intense divisions within this community of writers and scholars. I think that Coover, in selecting the irreverent Unknown for the trAce/Alt-X award, might have been hoping to shake things up a bit. For some, The Unknown signified something frightening. Here was a hypertext novel, as substantial as anything written in the form, which was distributed not on under the imprimatur of the “serious” hypertext publisher Eastgate Systems on $20 CD-ROMs, but for free on the World Wide Web. Even more egregiously, this was a hypertext that did not in most respects take itself, hypertext theory, its authors, or anyone else seriously. Furthermore, before arriving at Brown, we had made an aesthetic decision to do our best to play the part of the troublemakers we described as characters in the novel, and so threw hotel parties every night, attempting to ply the few publishers and agents on hand with the several bottles of expensive liquor upon which my coauthor Dirk Stratton had expended his share of the prize money. We were the barbarians at the gate, and unfortunately noted hypertext theorist Jay David Bolter was staying in the suite next to our own. I recall one of the gathered literary lions referring to our work in a funerary tone as “that MTV garbage.” Yet Coover seemed to be enjoying our antics immensely, as he himself was a troublemaker from way back.