Robert Coover

Chris Messenger reviews Tom LeClair’s first novel, Passing Off (1996).

Of the three major American team sports (Basketball, Baseball, Football), basketball is the only one that is wordless. Baseball is interpreted by language through an umpire’s balls and strikes, football sent into violent collision of bodies by a quarterback’s arcane jargon. Basketball, however, is the sport that at present remains a mystic’s communion, somewhere between a violent ballet and a transcendent praxis. Because of its silence, basketball has attracted only a fraction of the novelists (Updike in his Rabbit series the most prominent) who have memorialized baseball and football in the past few decades. That team roster is large and cuts across a popular and elite sampling of contemporary American fiction (Malamud, Roth, Coover, Charyn, Kinsella, DeLillo, Whitehead, Gent, Jenkins). Furthermore, basketball’s symbology and social relations have been almost totally appropriated by an African American standard of play, excellence, and cultural relevance, stipulating that white American authors must work out their own meaning now in a residual and somewhat tangential sense.

In the spirit of engaging Robert Coover's contributions to the electronic literature field (one of the conference aims) and simultaneously looking at the cutting edge of our field, this panel will discuss the groundbreaking Cave Writing project that Coover has initiated at Brown. It will feature the two primary faculty the project has had over the last eight years (Coover and Cayley), two of the students who have been involved in organizing the project and creating work (Wardrip-Fruin and Gorman), and one of the critics who has looked at this work most seriously (Raley). Topics will include the history of the literary work done in the Brown Cave, the unexpected power of two dimensional typography in three dimensional space, experiences of embodied interaction and spectatorship in combination and tension with literary reading, the role of non-textual images, animation, and sound in the Brown Cave experiments, and others.

Ideally, this panel discussion will articulate with two efforts. First, if possible, it would be ideal to collect the videos that have been used to share Brown's literary Cave work with those who have not visited the Cave, and perhaps shoot new video, then use it to construct a visual history of the work at Brown that can be shown at the panel, distributed, and archived. Second, again if possible, it would be good to combine this panel with some method for those attending the ELO AI conference to have tours of the Cave at which some of the standout works will be shown. Perhaps the only way this can avoid conflict with the main conference program (given the small size of Cave audiences) would be to schedule them as a series of reservation-requiring tours immediately before and/or after the main conference, encouraging interested people to take this into account when planning travel.

"The Archive as Historical Practice", a presented paper on the history/present state of "archival production of text", as examined through a critical perspective. This paper, engaging a number of scholars and practitioners in the field, touches on the work of Robert Coover.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

This paper makes observations about digital poetry through thematic connections derived from a 1969 short story by Robert Coover (“The Elevator”) and a poetics statement written forty years later by critic Janez Strehovec (“The Poetics of Elevator Pitch”). Strehovec’s essay addresses poetry in the age of short attention spans, and in which compositional designs are mosaics, hybrid. Contemporary works are unstable, precarious, and relations between textual components have evolved. Digital poetry is a textual, meta-textual, linguistic, and sometimes non-linguistic practice requiring new forms of perception. Because our observational skills have changed, Strehovec proclaims the importance of first impressions, getting viewers excited and immediately involved with language. He promotes the notion of an “elevator pitch” as a temporal ideal for digital poetry—the idea that the poem, “can be delivered in the time of an elevator ride (e.g., thirty seconds or 100-150 words)”, “which hooks the reader/user within a very short temporal unit”—an idea perhaps more relevant to authors of projected works than those who invite their audience to participate. Coover’s story, written as a series of mosaic passages, also points to the potential for instability in any moment but acknowledges unexpected possibilities that happen over time. Coover’s elevator reflects the awkward occurrences that gradually occur in a single place, how a familiar vehicle can bring someone to unfamiliar places, and how sometimes people are forced to solve problems caused by someone else’s statements. Through actions, in space, over time, social and communicative interaction is altered. The unknown, unexpected, and fantasy celebrated by Coover are the “space, time, motion, magnitude, class” of a given place. Yet, in the manner the life of the story’s protagonist Martin is spared we might conclude that walking—rather that riding quickly—through difficulties is a viable way to proceed. As authors strive for novel, complex, and sophisticated procedures, is it fair to use the elevator pitch as a model for engagement? Can an audience ably make conclusions in such a short amount of time? What can (and does) happen in the first 30 seconds of a digital poem? Examining works as diverse as John Cayley’s wotclock, Mary Flanagan’s [theHouse], geniwaite’s Concatenation, and others, this paper look at the possibilities held, and techniques used, by expert practitioners in the opening moments of their works. While certain works resist being quickly judged, others strive to be immediate. Artists working in the field often make a lot happen quickly but have not rejected depth—even if that, in Strehovec’s view, might be seen as self-defeating. If Strehovec’s digital vision trumps Coover’s analog speculations, projective authors can practice (and fine-tune) spectacle forever, but how will authors of participatory works employ language to keep audience engaged?

A plenary presentation for the biennial conference of the Electronic Literature Organization focused on the circumstances of the founding of the organization and on the work of novelist Robert Coover on the occasion of his retirement from teaching, delivered in a scripted and parodic style appropriate to the subject. Co-presented with Rob Wittig.