ichard Powers was very excited about our hypertext. He had come across it on the World Wide Web when he was using Yahoo! to search for the string “Richard Powers.” He said a lot of things about hypertext being a four-dimensional “space.” (He indicated the quotation marks with upraised, bent index and middle fingers.) He paid for our lunch. He had a Monkey Stuff (#8 I remember from when I waited tables there) which is a four-dollar peanut butter sandwich. At one point he started playing with his sandwich—I mean he was opening one slice of bread and pretending that the sandwich was the mouth of a dog, which started barking and chasing an imaginary cat around the table. We tried to get him to stop talking about the hypertext and ease him onto the subject of The Unknown anthology (which, at the reading, he hadn’t even picked up much less bought) but he was talking about computers and a piece he did for Omni magazine. We were surprised to find out that he liked Monique Wittig. A lot. He was a good guy, Powers was, though he couldn’t eat and he played with his sandwich.

Richard Powers Read 4/15/99 at the AWP Conference 1:05 123K RealAudio Clip