For the next week or so, I’ll be posting selected missives from two email novels, both written in 2002: Rob Wittig’s Blue Company and my own Kind of Blue.
Blue Company is a novel composed of email messages from Berto, a lovesick copywriter transferred to 14th Century Italy who addressed letters to his romantic correspondent in the 21st Century. People were able to subscribe to Blue Company and received email messages from Berto for a month. The novel was performed twice: once in Spring 2001 and again in Spring 2002.
Kind of Blue is a serial email novel that was written and initially distributed to a group of eight writers during the summer of 2002. I started this project on a whim. Earlier in the summer, I had been a subscriber to Rob Wittig’s Blue Company. The email messages of which that novel was composed—from Berto, the lovesick copywriter transferred to 14th Century Italy, and addressed to his romantic interest/correspondent in the 21st Century—had been a great comfort (distraction) to me as I worked (slowly) on my dissertation and various other projects. When the Blue Company messages stopped coming, I found myself missing its characters, and thought to myself “What if Berto wasn’t actually ever sent back to the 14th Century? What if Berto was in fact simply a mad sojourner trying to escape from the ruins of the 21st Century’s earliest days?”
As a kind of joke or homage (I’m not sure which), I wrote an email message on the basis of that premise, intending to write only that one message to a few friends who had also been Blue readers—William Gillespie, Rob Wittig, Joellyn Rock, Shelley Jackson and Nick Montfort. But the voices kept coming, and I spent the remainder of my summer writing Kind of Blue, sending off each message the moment I finished writing it, and setting each scene in the moment of its composition. When the writing got going, I added a few more friends to the list—Bobby Arellano, Dirk Stratton, and Larry McCaffery. Rob Wittig and I wrote the final scene of the novel together, and its drawings are in his (and Berto’s) hand.
It was a peculiar experience, writing to an audience I knew well, writing a novel loosely based on a novel written by one of my best friends. As I wrote, I was able to think of my audience in a very specific way, and that specificity affected the writing. The writing style of one character, for instance, was informed by the style of Larry McCaffery’s emails. There are some in-jokes here for which I do not apologize. In particular messages, I may have been trying to amuse Nick or William, or have imagined how Shelley might respond to a certain kind of note. Among other things, this work is a kind of valentine to friends, a farewell to my hometown, a means of catharsis, an avoidance mechanism, and a way for me to rediscover what I love about writing, and about the network as a writing medium.
Kind of Blue was published as a web archive in 2003 on the frAme Journal of Art and Technology.
Constraints:
- Every scene was written as a direct-address email message between characters.
- Each scene was originally published immediately after it was written.
- The time frame of publication was equivalent to the time frame of unfolding events within the novel.
Narrative Experiments:
- Interest in “email styles” of writing.
- Interest in Internet detritus—information chaos as narrative material. Not all of the words in this novel are strictly mine—from time to time you will find fragments and remixes of material written by others.
- Interest in utilizing aspects of the email writing styles of the original audience members.
- Utilization of ongoing world events on a synchronous basis.
- Aleatory and arbitrary time constraints.