Words In The Air

Two Essays I'm posting these here so I can remember them myself. My short term memory has altogether dissapeared following my latest invention.

1. Forms of Future, by Michael Joyce. This man is a visionary and one more feather in the Joyce tradition.
2. HTC, Grammatron, Hypertextual Consciousness:

I wonder why they never thought of what I just did for two days. It's...so simple. Joyce did foresee it - why did he never invent it?

This healing-over traces a circle like that of the zen paradox, the circle whose center is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere. In writing some years ago about the emergence of a city of text I cited Wim Wenders angelic vision of the great Berlin film, Wings of Desire, in which angels walk among the stacks of a library, listening to the musical language which forms the thoughts of individual readers. Into this scene, shuffling slowly up the stairs, comes an old man, who the credits identify as Homer. "Tell me, muse, of the story-teller who was thrust to the end of the world, childlike ancient...With time," he thinks, "my listeners became my readers. They no longer sit in a circle, instead they sit apart and no one knows anything about the other..."

The new electronic literature will restore the circle as it always was and, paradoxically, as it never was before.