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www.temporalimage.com/beehive |
Capital S style and capital C content, full of puns and buzzing with arcHives of fiction and critical theory, beeHive is a recent ezine aiming to “advance hypertext media”. The 2nd issue features Queen Bees and the Hum of the Hive, an analysis of subversive feminist hypertext, and The Red Spider and Razorburn, two short stories lacking bite and edge, about the banality of everyday life with your lover. Fiction this short (under 1200 words) can’t afford to be lifeless; every word has to count. Volume 1 includes Steven Shapiro’s theoretical fiction Doom Patrols, an anticlockwise patience game of wounds, flesh and Kathy Acker. To play you need a java capable browser.
http://www.gangan.com
gangway online mag has poetry, short stories and “experimental prose” from Australia and Austria with a sprinkle of Germany and Scotland. Useful if you’re multilingual, which I’m not, so I probably missed the best bits. I couldn’t find anything that resembled experiment in the latest issue but it may have been hiding in German. I was more attracted to the fiction that I couldn’t read—1 manuskript and Destruktion (followed by greek alpha thingamyjig which I can’t find in my insert symbol menu) sound more gripping than A Little Knowledge… or Requiem. A Lucky Dip. There’s duds—watch out for poems about waves in Bondi ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS—but it only costs 25 cents and hopefully you’ll draw out Andrew Aitken:
Venus the Harlem tennis-babe smiled
at the interviewer on Sports Sunday.
‘My biggest weapon’s not
my serve, but Dad’s AK 47!’
http://www.ryman-novel.com/
253 or Tube Theatre. An internet novel set on the London underground. 7 carriages, 36 seats = 252 passengers plus one driver, hence the title. Number of words for each passenger = 253. The guy who created this site is either crazy or a Virgo. Every character on the journey is described: outward appearance, inward appearance, what they are doing/thinking. A ptg myself—public transport grrrl—I do this every day in my own imagination anyway. Meet Mr Donald Varda who is re-imagining the ending to An American Werewolf in London or Ms Sabrina Foster who advertises in the personal column as a black woman (she soon regrets it…because she isn’t one). Hypertext is used minimally but to good effect, co-workers linked, stories intertwined, the sense of order works well and sly humour, political barbs and intertextuality mean addiction for pop culture junkies. It’s also an inclusive project, an intermingling of cultures (you wouldn’t want a train carriage of Hansonites but then again…the train does crash in the end). Right behind, there’s another train coming, stalled, full of passengers just waiting for a persona…
RealTime issue #26 Aug-Sept 1998 pg. 21
© Kirsten Krauth; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]
