t was the end of the Unknown. Or so the critics hoped. The Unknown had succesfully pissed off the critics by remaining a jump ahead of their own criticism. By not finishing their work. Using Web technology and print-on-demand, revising constantly, always incorporating into their work the criticism of it, as well as their rejoinders to aforementioned criticism. In essence making fools of anyone who tried to criticize. Whatever didn’t diminish them made them bigger. For those critics would churn out a paragraph and publish it, as if scrawling their words in wet concrete which would harden into the permanence of a line etched into a CV. But the hypertext of the Unknown was perpetually wet clay, and, in spasms and fits and jerks, its sculptors would continually revise. What one critic claimed was a cheap rip-off of Michaelangelo’s David would inexplicably become overnight a cheap ripoff of the Sistine Chapel, rendering the criticism in retrospect somewhat misguided and silly.

Someday, the critics hoped, they would all die together. Those Unknown, whoever the hell it or they were. Ideally in a plane crash, like Buddy Holly. And then, finally, like desperate vultures, the critics would close in around the corpse of the beast. And begin to label its flaws.