More about Blackbirds, and other items of interest
Since I completed my Flash reworking of the Wallace Stevens poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" ( http://edwardpicot.com/thirteenways/ ), it's been featured in a couple of other publications. There's an article about it by Marc Garrett on the Furtherfield website - http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=285 - which is one of the most important websites devoted to new media art in the UK; and Katie Haegele has featured it in the "Digitalit" column which she writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer ( http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/literature/8794227.html ). Also, largely as a result of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", my website has been listed by The Poetry Kit ( http://www.poetrykit.org/ ) and nominated for their Site of the Month award.
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird... is connected to so many different things that exist outside of the work itself. There are jokes, puns, and some darker moments but all presented in a playful light. The world is a backdrop yet at the same time it still manages to maintain a fresh and simple narrative that can be understood at many levels." (Marc Garrett)
Other items of interest -
Dim O'Gauble, by "Author X" ( www.dreamingmethods.com/uploads/dimogauble/ )- Another small masterpiece of design and composition from the Digital Fiction/Dreaming Methods stable. This time we are asked to find our way around a maze of enigmatic scribbles and drawings, picking up fragments and hints of text as we go, and gradually trying to piece them together into a narrative. As far as I can make out this narrative concerns a child given to a form of "automatic writing" which takes the form of doodles and diagrams - she seems to share this talent with her grandmother - and the two of them are either foretelling, or uncovering, some kind of nuclear disaster. There's a distincly Oriental feel to the design the accompanying music.
The Way North, by Joel Weishaus ( http://web.pdx.edu/~pdx00282/North/Intro.htm ) - Written using a technique of "intervagination" - which means that the main text is constantly interrupted and broken up by snippets from other sources - this takes a bit of getting used to, but it's a literate, poetic, learned and profound meditation on the meaning of North, global warming, and Man's relationship with Nature. Weishaus's own musings are mixed with Inuit folklore, extracts from scholarly works and accounts of polar expeditions in earlier centuries. Pictures of mountains, stones and masks decorate the pages. Mouse around, and bits of extra text will pop up here and there; sometimes individual words and phrases begin to move around in surprizing ways; and some of the pages have sound on them.