April 1, 2008
Moby Disk 1.1.1
Call me method. Through a Commodore VIC-20 of recirculation I wet the bed early for a long time. Motherboard died today. A screaming comes across this guy – the guy above the port who was the color of television, tuned. It was a nice and stormy dork. As Feature awoke one morning from disquieting dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant insect. It was a pleasure to burn, even at only 4x speed. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting the disk to satisfy misses in the L2 cache which also could not be found in RAM. Dr. Seuss says I shud rite down what I think and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. The random access device (for so it will be convenient to speak of it) was expounding a recondite matter to us. Once upon a time the disk was round and you could go on it around and around. It was in those days that I wandered about hungry, encrypted. I would seek – seek unto death with that long agony; and when they at last unmounted me, and I was permitted to park, I felt that my sectors were leaving me. Night of my knife, fur of my lions. Every happy file system is alike. First post. You are about to begin executing Nick Montfort’s new novel, Moby Disk, or the Worm. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone vibrating three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end saying “forty one.” The station wagons arrived at noon. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. If you’re going to, read this. It was the best of rhymes, it was repetition.
April 1st, 2008 at 4:07 am
An opening of punning, literary play — high (and popular) literature relocated into the sphere of cyberspace. It’s an opneing which works best (and perhaps only?) in cyberspace — which tolerates and encourages the soundbite; which allows the curious reader to quickly hyuper-link their way to the solution to the question “Now what is that opening line from?”; which reflexively recognises the self-awareness of an opening blog post which refigures in the language of cyberspace famous first words. Literature 2.0.
As cyber-literary play, it’s an opening and an opening only. It’s merit as more than a aphorism, soundbite, once-read long-forgotten blog-post will be determined by what follows. Because it doesn’t tell us anything new (the content of the refiguring is determined by its form; once we’ve got the joke, there’s nothing more to get in only one paragraph), and because it is overarchingly funny, it threatens to be a punchline, which as an opening disastrously closes and forecloses a 550-section, 18-month blog-novel. Laughter traditionally resolves tension, but this laughter creates it: I wait tensely for what is to come. The final question is: Will it be worth it?
April 1st, 2008 at 6:11 am
Nick, I’m glad to see that you are finally getting around to some real literary work on this blog. I would correct the typos but I can tell that you are using them for the purposes of literary style. As for the coy references to many of the great works of the the twentieth century and others, all I can say is that I hope you are also composing a sort of schema, a skeleton key if you will, through which we eager critics might begin the process of unraveling the complex tapestry you have only just begun to lay at the feet of our humble blog. Human, technological, and yet also deeply introspective, this novel has already begun to sing a song to my soul. Bon voyage!
April 1st, 2008 at 7:39 pm
I’m obliged to report that my project of posting Moby Disk has drawn to a premature close. The Melville Society has offered me a grant to stop posting and working on this material, and I’ve accepted their offer. Actually, I’m not sure that “grant” is the right word for it; that suggests a carrot and I was motivated to conclude things by something that must really be characterized as more of a stick. Anyway, I hope there were some of you who enjoyed this one fragment that I was allowed to post, and that everyone had a great April 1.
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:33 am
*giggles*
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:06 am
how meta!
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:12 am
Thanks, Nick, for so generously sharing and then taking away! So far, I count: Melville, Proust, Pynchon, Wm Gibson, Kafka, Faulkner, T.Geisel, Nabokov, Tolstoy, DeLillo, and Dickens. Who else counts others?
April 6th, 2008 at 6:11 am
I see Calvino too. This is a great idea; I look forward to more!
April 6th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Who else counts others?
Melville, Joyce, Camus, Pynchon, Bulwer-Lytton, Kafka, ?, ?, Keyes, ?, Stein, ?, Nabokov, Tolstoy, ?, ?, ?, ?, Orwell, ?, Dickens.
I had to look up who wrote “Flowers for Algernon”, though. One or two of the others looks familiar, but I can’t place them off the top of my head. Do I pass the English GRE?
May 9th, 2008 at 4:29 am
[…] the relationships between technology, narrative, poetry and art. Some of it is incredibly geeky and retro, but at times it offers insights into how technology can fundamentally shift the way we […]