October has ripened with its crisp air, its shimmering light, and its colored leaves like shards of golden glass refracting the hues of harvest and reflection. Autumn is a time to pause, to pay attention, and to take account, as our daytime dims and becomes shorter. I hope you have found your own moments to enjoy these rhythmic shifts in the natural world, because they are a bounty that we all should celebrate and share. Nothing lasts forever, but it is beautiful to behold that one thing passes into another. Nature reminds us of this regularly, especially with the shift in seasons.

It was wonderful to spend time thinking about two new pieces thanks to the smart walkthroughs presented by both Jason & Jen last evening. I am so glad to have read Yardley, PA and also Avenue S with all of you on the same night. Thank you to Jason & Jen for taking us through the unique contributions of these two “story worlds”. Perhaps the common thread in these two pieces is the idea of ephemerality, and also erasure.

Yardley, PA

When thinking about Yardley, PA together, we talked about nature, and what is fleeting and human. Thanks Jason for guiding us to think about this piece in the context of collective auditory/visual performance. I think this special elit piece brings us new “kinetic awareness” by asking us to think about how pressing the keys feels— mechanical, musical, embodied? It fosters a kind of mindfulness that Jason spoke about. The title “Yardley, PA” is a small, historic town along the Delaware River just north of Philadelphia and not too far from our own surroundings. It’s a quiet, tree-lined, nostalgic sense of hometown USA. By naming the piece after a real, mundane place, Anderson immediately grounds his abstract digital experiment in geography and memory. He creates a new way to capture a “sense of place”. Anderson & Libertino have constructed a terrain of language, sound, and performance and a place reimagined through digital mediation. Yardley, PA is an experience of place, a digital “place” that you navigate through touch and rhythm (rather than through streets or coordinates). The reader doesn’t read about Yardley so much as move through it sonically and gesturally, with poetic verses leading your way like the traces of one’s own broken memories. This new orientation harnesses a new kind of ephemeral “story magic” that I believe can be emblematic of some electronic literature.

Avenue S

In a different sense, Avenue S also becomes a meditation on “sense of place”. This web-based expansion of Jody Zellen’s long-running Ghost City project is a “poetic meditation” on isolation during the pandemic using topics such as walking, nature, empty public spaces, politics, and protest. I am glad that Jen chose this piece because it pulled on her own graphic-artist “heart strings”. The work functions both as personal journal (an artist’s response to the lockdown experience) and as public net art. Avenue S is a sprawling network of small pages and tiles, experienced by clicking and wandering. The “text” (mostly visual rather than lexical) is distributed across images, animated GIFs, labels, and micro-texts that accumulate as the reader moves through the site. This produces a collage or patchwork reading experience rather than a fixed narrative. The hypertextual navigation style (there is no singular or set way to “read” this piece) is one procedural hallmark of electronic literature. The overall effect is that the work archives and aestheticizes the distinct emptiness of COVID-19 memories, while inviting users to emotionally inhabit this specific place in time. And I think many of us felt this revisitation when “reading” it. For me, this piece reminds me of what I mostly choose to forget. And I think that Jen’s “gift” to us all (the “pandemic mask”) was a thoughtful gesture. Indeed this specific object brings us right back to the recent shared memory of the pandemic. It is a tangible trace of something we have tried to leave behind. As I touched the mask last night, I was remembering the struggle through such a challenging and painful time. Avenue S is like that. It brings us right back through its mediated interactive story-scape.

Closing thoughts on ephemerality

While Yardley, PA performs ephemerality as live, sonic immediacy, Avenue S curates it as an “archival drift”. Yardley, PA produces transient moments of text and tone that vanish as quickly as they appear, dissolving in the moment of interaction. The reader’s path in Avenue S is temporary and idiosyncratic, evoking the impermanent rhythms of city life during the pandemic. This piece dissolves in the endless sprawl of networked time. Both works ultimately treat the digital as a medium where language, sound, and image flicker into being only to fade, making the experience of disappearance itself electronic literature’s subject.

Class slides & agenda

Your to-do list:

Read Ava’s selection: Ask Me about the Moon  

Read Emily’s selection: The Vine & the Fish 

Blog due: Blog about your reading experience and understanding of Ask Me about the Moon & The Vine & the Fish 

**Please remember, elit class will be ONLINE in our ZOOM room next week. I will send you an email sharing the link.

Enjoy this beautiful October week!