Write This BookLineland: Mortality and Mercy on the Internet'sPynchon-L@Waste.Org Discussion List (IAM, 1997) by Jules Siegel, Christine Wexler, et al. a review by Briggs Nisbet
Some of the most direct, personal, and freewheeling writing today is
found on the Web. Sheer volume may partly account for this -
everybody on the Web has something to say to someone sometime.
It's as if we have returned to the epistolary era of Jane Austen when
letter writing was as common, and perhaps as frequent, as phone calls
are today. Although some are cursory in their e-mail correspondence,
for others this informal letter writing blossoms into impromptu literary
eloquence, or explodes into diatribe or humorous confessional. Many
on-line writing forums are not filtered through the conventional editing
process of print publications. Web 'zines are particularly democratic
in their submission and selection policies, if they have any at all.
Web writers are more available to their audiences than writers and
publishers in the print trade. Readers of on-line writing can usually
respond directly to the author's e-mail address. And often, authors
write back. Writers also find each other; collaborations occur;
friendships are made and, although no one's figured out how to cash
in on it, communities evolve. Not that all this hasn't happened before;
but before, writers had to gather in the same geographic locale - say,
Paris or North Beach - and now they can be at home, wherever they
are.
If Gutenberg's movable type made it possible for a First Amendment
that guaranteed a free press, then the Web may move that paper
boundary further, perhaps even past
the profit-margin barriers of corporate publishing companies.
Or not. One interesting manifestation of this transformation in the
world of literature is the Web book- a paper book of writing published
first on the Web. Bookstores haven't yet put up the "Web Books" sign
on their shelves but the new genre is in its infancy. There are
a handful of these books we're aware of,
more definitely on the way, and others undoubtedly available only in
limited circulation.
Lineland,
by Jules Siegel, Christine Wexler, et al. pushes the envelope of
what we think of as a book. The back cover blurb asks, "Is it a true-life
novel? Personal journalism? An uncanny hoax?" Perhaps all of the
above. But to regular readers of electronic mailing lists, the subtitle is
more explanatory: Mortality and Mercy on the Internet's
Pynchon-L@Waste.Org Discussion List. Not a mailing list reader myself,
only the reference to notoriously secretive novelist
Thomas Pynchon
gave me any clues as to what was behind the cover.
Not sure if it was fiction or fantasy, I picked up the moderately-sized
volume (192 pages, including frontmatter) and flipped to the back.
It has an index. Entries
range from "Beach Boys" to "Nabokov, Vladimir" and include several
references to Pynchon and his family members. Looking up "etaoin
shrdlu" I walked into this discussion of Pynchon's famous opus,
"Gravity's Rainbow" via e mail message:
Not yet older than 50, I was not familiar with this tidbit of printing lore.
I decided to go back to the book's beginning to see what I could make
of this literary quilt, passing a number of B&W photos of long-haired
women with bared breast(s) on my way to the publisher's Preface.
There I was introduced to a former software engineer who, when
queried by the author about a possible book about Thomas Pynchon,
responded, "Who the hell is Thomas Pynchon?" Luckily for the author,
the publisher was more interested in him than in the reclusive literary
lion.
IAM, or Intangible Assets Manufacturing, the press that published
Lineland, is the creation of Dale L. Larson, a former Amiga
programmer and entrepreneur, who progressed from publishing
Amiga-related software (to the dedicated community out there of
users commited to this formally defunct platform) to publishing an
Amiga book, to publishing books of literary content written or
collected by Internet authors. Through his e-mail correspondence
with Jules Siegel, Larson became interested in the man, and then the
book. Indeed, he decided he would have to spend time with Siegel in
the remote Mexican resort where the author had lived in near exile for
the last 15 years, as an essential part of publishing the book. Thus the
publisher's preface
starts the shifting of frames that constitutes the
structure of Lineland.
In the author's Introduction, Jules Siegel provides the reader with a
not-so-brief and decidedly personal summary of his life, including his
own definition of the author's "full creative control," and an unusually
succinct explanation of computers and the Internet. In addition, we
learn that he initiated his journalistic career in the 1960s and '70s
with articles in Playboy, and Rolling Stone, among other widely read
magazines of the day, and wrote several books. He also had friends -
like Mario Puzo, Bruce J. Friedman, and Pynchon - who became famous.
Much of Lineland is about Siegel's escapades in the Sixties, and his
memories of the famous and infamous from those times. It also
chronicles how the culture he was so intimate with has changed in the
meantime while Siegel has been laying low in Mexico. Memoirs of the
famous and near-famous are old hat in the book trade but Siegel
found his entre into the genre in an unusual way. He became the
central figure in an e-mail discussion group drama. And this is where
the memoir and Lineland part ways. Once again, the frames through
which the reader reads this book are shifting. Now, in addition to the
publisher and the author characters,
we have the on-line participants in the discussion group.
But first, we experience Jules Siegel discovering the Web. "After I
looked up my name, I looked at some sex sites and then I wrote Arthur
a letter." Arthur Kretchmer is Playboy's Editorial Director, with whom
Siegel carried on an e-mail correspondence, and who becomes
another of Lineland's characters. Kretchmer on e-mail: "...It's guy mail.
Neatness doesn't count. If it's more than eight lines long, I don't read
it." His inadvertent gender-association aside, neatness is irrelevant to
e-mail (it's letter writing after all), and the 8-line rule is only for
business execs and people on per diem. Lineland is proof that e-mail
is, in fact, the whole enchilada as far as many Web correspondents
are concerned.
The plot of Lineland is a little like Woody Allen's film The Purple Rose of
Cairo, in which Mia Farrow is romanced by a Hollywood leading man
who jumps right out of the movie screen and into her kitchen. In this
case, a somewhat obscure on-line discussion group is one day
presented with the virtual presence of an icon, well, a former
colleague of an icon anyway. This happens when Jules, surfing the Web
for himself, discovers that he is "...a sub-set of the Thomas Pynchon
industry..." An article of his published in Playboy,
"Who is Thomas
Pynchon.. and Why Is He Taking Off With My Wife?" was part of
the
Pynchon-L@Waste.Org discussion-group archive.
Siegel joins the list, and his outsize personality bursts onto the scene
like Elmer Gantry at a Methodist church picnic. The book reader, now
the "lurker" at this virtual Web interaction may give up in exasperation,
or be moved to tears and laughter as this unlikely combination of
characters wends their way to a conclusion, a disclaimer (from one of
the list participants who did not want his e-mail included in the book),
and an epilogue, in which Siegel expounds on the future of the book.
You may, like I did, become impatient with the Siegel personality as it
crowds the conversation with his exploits, opinions, and machismo.
But the story is more than its main character. This book isn't a
dialogue but a frame that one person, the author, has put around a
moment and a gathering of voices. The dialogue that was the original
list discussion is now a story and has just one author. But the
characters also wrote themselves.
Does Lineland succeed at being a book? Yes. Does the book succeed?
Yes. And no. It may depend on the reader. If there is a question about
whether or not the Web is creating a new literature, I think there is no
question about its creating a new audience. Whether or not that Web
audience will voice a demand for Web books is yet to be seen. I was
interested in reading and reviewing Lineland because I am interested
in Web publishing, having found there the opportunity to publish my
own and others' creative efforts without having to scale the daunting
walls that commercial publishers put up for unknown writers.
On the Web, readers are free to form their own opinions of what is
good writing, although for many good writing is maybe less important
than interesting content. Which brings me back to an assessment of
Lineland as literature. When printing presses were new technology,
nobody read novels because they hadn't been invented yet. But a
public literature evolved as more people became readers. There could
have been no Lineland before e-mail, and it is a fair representation of
what's going on out there on the Web, a drama that
computer-enabled and computer-less readers alike may enjoy. Its
success as literature comes from the vitality of its voices, the various
e-mail authors whose ideas and personalities are framed, momentarily,
by the pages of a book.
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