b r e a t h i n g   r o o m



25 Nov 97

It's grocery shopping day. Usually, shopping on tuesday means I don't have to face manic crowds at my favorite grocery, the Berkeley Bowl (a bowling alley in a past life). But with Thanksgiving coming up quickly, I suspect I will have to deal with some crazed cooks waving canned pumpkin.

We're making a bunch of corn-bread stuffing. There are already so many pies lined up that we won't bring one this time. After Thanksgiving day itself, I have to spend the rest of the long weekend moving Enterzone into its new digs and putting together a retrospective.

x

I can't get over an irrational jealousy of Steven Johnson, one of the editors of Feed. It's silly, I know, but I keep running into his name or his face and it bugs me, though I wouldn't like to admitting having the ambition to be treated like a digerato-literati savant. Let's see, while in Chicago for a wedding a while back I bought the Sunday New York Times whose Magazine is doing a hype-y high tech Internet futurism issue and their token snapshot of new media folk or e-zine publishers or whatever are the brains behind Feed.

Feed's actually been good to us. The reading list from a seminal article published there in '95 about the state of hypertext fiction on the Web made mention of Martha Conway's Girl Birth Water Death from episode 2 as well as my own No Bird but an Invisible Thing. Enterzone links to Feed on our Other eZines We Like page. They do a good job. They're slick, commercial, hip. Yadda yadda yadda.

So I follow a link over from an article about death of the cool site of the day and find my way to a beautifully designed, taut e-zine called Smug, whose editor on her own page mentions having been selected as one of the 20 sexiest people on the net by The Net magazine. I can't resist following that link and thumb through the list to see if I recognize any of the other names (actually, I mostly recognize the old-time Usenet geeks they single out as unsexy, such as Joel Furr, Elf!!!, and Doctress Neutopia), and whom do I run across but my nemesis, Steven. (This reminds me when everywhere I looked I came across another rave review for the published fiction of former classmate Pinckney Benedict.)

Finally, I'm driving to work in a borrowed car flipping radio channels when I hit TechNation hosted by Moira Gunn. She does a great little interview with Terry Jones and the author of the Hitckhiker's Guide books (his name escapes me) about their new cd-rom/novel project, Starship Titanic, but she does a little spot for the upcoming segment in which they'll be interviewing no one other than Steven Johnson, who's naturally published a book and has lots to say about how the on-line medium is affecting creative expression (for, presumably, sexy people).


yester morrow
today


xian
Copyright © 1997