November 25, 2007
            Good morning! Two eggs sunnyside up in a crepe pan, divvied up and layered over two pieces of wheat toast at 45 calories apiece, all of it washed down with no-pulp OJ and stale coffee from Sumatra…            Why bother with the novel? I look at it this way: rather than thinking it’s dead, I’m convinced it’s about to come to life through audio, video, photography, text—you name it. In fact, over the last fifteen years, I’ve become more convinced than ever.

To give you a clue as to my confidence, consider this bit about the writer John Dos Passos from a piece published October 31, 2005, by George Packer in The New Yorker.

Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.,” Packer opines, “which tells an alternative, submerged history of the first three decades of the American century, has become one of the great neglected achievements of literary modernism, with its nervy, jarring formal juxtapositions—newspaper headlines, popular songs, autobiographical fragments, short biographies of the famous—punctuating deceptively flat sagas of ordinary fictional types on the margins of great events, driven by the blind force of history across blighted human landscapes.”

Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.,” Packer opines, “which tells an alternative, submerged history of the first three decades of the American century, has become one of the great neglected achievements of literary modernism, with its nervy, jarring formal juxtapositions—newspaper headlines, popular songs, autobiographical fragments, short biographies of the famous—punctuating deceptively flat sagas of ordinary fictional types on the margins of great events, driven by the blind force of history across blighted human landscapes.”            In “U.S.A.,” Dos Passos was experimenting with the forms of realism, fiction, and nonfiction, decades before anyone really knew what he was doing. The point here is that the novel has always been able to encompass any and all forms within its accommodating envelope. It can go anywhere, do anything, and still retain the DNA of the novel, of storytelling, at the cost (heretofore) of a pencil. The problem has been that aside from the pages of the book there has really been no way to do what I envision and nowhere to put it. Pages are print, after all, and won’t ever be anything but.

I remember in 1985 or so when Microsoft sponsored a conference in Seattle called “The New Papyrus.” I was there. Don’t fall off your chair if I tell you the conference was about CD-ROM, a technology that was superceded so fast you could barely see it. At the conference, another technology was announced—CD-I or Compact Disc-Interactive, by Phillips, a type of CD-ROM supposed to do CD-ROM one better. (It flopped, but not before I cashed a paycheck as the Managing Editor of CD-I News, paid for by Philips. Thank ye you O Gods of New Media!)

The idea of massive storage and multimedia toys was encompassed by “The New Papyrus” and then, famously, by the Web ten years later (just ten years ago). In the early 1990s, when I started playing with the idea of THE BOOK OF O’KELLS as a Supernovel (nee “cybernovel”), the only papyrus I was looking at was a PC software program that allowed for hyperlinking, an idea whose time was about to come with an absolute vengeance online just a year or so later. (Where were you when you learned the Mosaic browser would henceforth be free?)

With the Web, we’ve got all the paper and papyrus we need. Now we just have to figure out what to put on it.