The Unknown: The Blue Line.
  W: We were writing a hypertext together, and I thought that was, really—

D: Maybe that’s what we should be talking about.

W: Not only writing something together, but writing a hypertext together. These are two, um, kind of new ideas, that I don’t know of, that there being a lot of discourse surrounding, at least not discourse I’ve read—

S: I think—It’s actually been like thoroughly theorized. It’s one of those things where it’s almost been theorized outpacing the—

W: Hypertext?

S: Yeah. Hypertext is almost an example of criticism preceding the publication of the works which the criticism describes. In an interesting way, because there hasn’t really been—I mean I guess Michael Joyce does some interesting things, uh, who else? Mark Amerika did a big hypertext project. Didn’t really, ah, turn me on, but… but I mean there needs to be new hypertext, if the thing is gonna be real… it does raise some interesting textual/consciousness issues.

W: Maybe we should do some hypertext criticism of our current… hyper… text, um—

S: I suppose that would be sort of a mini-preparation for the whole anthology project.

W: Yeah, and it would be—

D: Already, I can tell you that our hypertext is critiquing regular hypertext. Because—despite hypertext’s pretensions towards liberating literature from linear time, and from authoritative foundationalism, in fact, every hypertext that I know of has only one author, anyway. Even though that author sets up multiple paths, it really comes down to a singular creator, seperate from the reader, blah blah blah. The same old Western bullshit.

[William laughs.]

S: B.S.!

W: Don’t say bullshit. That’s bad.

S: No seriously. You can’t say—that—on the radio, right?

D: No you can’t. No you can’t.

W: Shit fuck piss cunt cocksucker motherfucker and tits. That’s not the exact list, but it’s pretty close.

S: Okay, well this is gonna get, I mean you have the technology to sample this thing, to take little bits—

W: Technically, yeah. But—

D: But that takes time—

W: Will I bother? I’ll probably choose a chunk—I’ll probably keep it forever, first of all, and I’ll also choose part to play on the radio—maybe none. I can see that ah—

S: Although I do want you to run these promo slots—

W: For the book that we… haven’t made yet?

S: For the book we haven’t made yet—I think that that’s part of the whole project. I mean, now, okay, I could be going out on a limb here—how do you feel about publicizing the project before it has an actuality?

[William gets the shits and giggles.]

D: I think that it’s perfectly in keeping with the whole spirit of the project. I mean, we were anticipating criticism before the literature. Why not anticipate publicity before the criticism?

S: I think that this is something that goes on in the world, maybe way too much, where something gets buzzed before it is an actual thing. But I think, in this case… it’s in the interests of Art. And the other thing— which Art is important—and the other thing is, ah— we do have this book, actually—

D: Exactly.

S: We do have the actual anthology.

D: —We do have the anthology.

S: We have all the texts for the anthology.

D: —That’s true.

S: We spent some time today actually selecting many of the texts—

D: —That process has already begun.

S: There’s some refinements but—it’s pretty much gonna go. The Unknown Anthology.

D: It will be completed before the publicity reaches the ears of the waiting public.


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