The Unknown
The Unknown is a collaborative hypertext novel written during the turn of the millennium and principally concerning a book tour that takes on the excesses of a rock tour. Notorious for breaking the "comedy barrier" in electronic literature, The Unknown replaces the pretentious modernism and self-conciousness of previous hypertext works with a pretentious postmodernism and self-absorption that is more satirical in nature. It is an encyclopedic work and a unique record of a particular period in American history, the moment of irrational exuberance that preceded the dawn of the age of terror. With respect to design, The Unknown privileges old-fashioned writing more than fancy graphics, interface doodads, or sophisticated programming of any kind. By including several "lines" of content from a sickeningly decadent hypertext novel, documentary material, metafictional bullshit, correspondence, art projects, documentation of live readings, and a press kit, The Unknown attempts to destroy the contemporary literary culture by making institutions such as publishing houses, publicists, book reviews, and literary critics completely obsolete.
(Source: Authors' description at the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2)
So now it was the three of us driving to Seattle. Our book tour. We had seen an opportunity and we had made it ours. We had built a literature, crammed it into a van, and we were heading for the Rockies. Laptop in lap, writing our third Unknown anthology—our anthology of travel memoirs, written on the tour of the first two books: The Unknown: An Anthology, and Criticism of The Unknown, a book of essays written by us about our first book. Technological advances had cut out the middleman between writer and readers—in effect eliminating the whole publishing industry. We were a celebration of that.
Here’s the unknown, the real unknown. I smell it, I taste it. It’s dribbling from my tongue. The sweat that this city is giving off, the shit and the piss on the streets and the wine and the pheasants dripping blood in the marketplace and the bread which I tear in hunks and dip in the grease and let run down my chin and the bars I get kicked out of and the smell of her gorgeous blue panties laid out on yellow silk sheets, or hers in my teeth, or hers in the boulangerie. I’m fucking the unknown, boys, fucking it crazy.
But how can we explore the spaces between understandings of things?
How can we know the totality of what we do not think?
There is a problem of scale. To discuss U.S. foreign policy is to avoid discussion of the fact that we are sitting at a table.
We were ashamed, and not just because we had shot the television set the night before, which was immature. We were ashamed because collectively we were a decadent waste of talent, the right train on the wrong track, heading nowhere. We couldn’t even come up with decent metaphors any more.
“Dirk isn’t cut from the same cloth as us,” Scott says sadly. “I mean he’s a poet, an authentic poet. He can go for weeks without eating or writing. Me, if I’m hungry, I’ll charge the shit on my overextended credit cards. And write a story about it.”
A recent MLA study, when cleverly reinterpreted for subtextual codings by expert deconstructionists, revealed that there are no longer, nor for the conceivable future will there be, tenure-track jobs in anything involving language (in English). A committee has been formed to study the potential effects of these findings, and will report at the next Association meeting this December. Ever again. Was.
There was no Yoko to blame, no war that would separate, no employment situation which could pull apart this intrepid band. But the road had taken its toll.
We could feel the madness surge through the tiny room like we were immersed in a rapid flood of adrenaline.
