Saturday, August 18, 2001

Remora
- I'm dissatisfied with the fusee category, because I can't put an accent over the e. I'm changing it to remora - a remora is a sucker fish, which once upon a time was believed to have the power of stopping ships by attaching itself to their hulls.

I'm rather sad that the Industry Standard threw in its cards yesterday. Sad, disgusted -- the Net hype and hope, while it lasted, was fun to throw stones at, but anybody who wants to make a living writing has to grieve as the casualty lists come in. My god, who is going to hire us? More on that at some other time.

One of the always underrated aspects of the Net is the way people, spontaneously, do such incredibly wonderful things - like the Nietzsche Channel This site not only includes Nietzsche's texts in German and English, but includes the Nachlass - all those fragments that Nietzsche's evil sister gathered into The Will To Power, a book that as we all know, does not really exist. The Anti-Christ's anti-book, poor deranged sod. A crime against philology. It wasn't until the seventies, with the Coli-Molinari edition of the works, that we knew what a great notebook writer Nietzsche was - like Emerson and Kierkegaard. I could make a long and winding argument that hypertext is not going to be the Net contribution to literature - it will be, rather, weblogs like this one, transforming the uncertain genre of the private daybook into an odd, multifariously referential, public log - with the implication of voyage, sitings, and a weird sense of crew.

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