ELO and the Electric Light Orchestra: Electronic Literature Lessons from Prog Rock

Authors

  • Matthew Kirschenbaum University of Maryland

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_6-2_2

Keywords:

Electronic Literature Organization, Electric Light Orchestra, electronic literature, progressive rock

Abstract

Roughly a decade after having cycled off the board of the Electronic Literature Organization, Kirschenbaum returned to deliver, at the 2017 ELO meeting in Oporto, an eerily accurate juxtaposition of the Organization’s affinities with the short-lived era of progressive rock. The result is an imaginative excess whose only precursor (in print scholarship) might be Mark Weingarten’s and Tyson Correl’s Yes in the Answer (2013), featuring acclaimed novelists of the 1980s such as Rick Moody and Joe Meno, musicians such as Nathan Larson, and Peter Case, and the music historian, Jim DeRogatis, cited here. This text is a lightly revised transcript of the talk. Not reproducible, in print, is the solid wall of sound that accompanied Kirschenbaum’s presentation.

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Author Biography

Matthew Kirschenbaum, University of Maryland

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Professor of English and Digital Studies at the University of Maryland, and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the College of Information Studies at Maryland, and a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. He served previously as an Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) for over a decade. He has been a Guggenheim and NEH Fellow.

His most recent book, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, was published by Harvard University Press’s Belknap Press in 2016; with Pat Harrigan, he also co-edited the collection Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming from the MIT Press (2016). His public-facing writing has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, LA Review of Books, Paris Review Daily, War on the Rocks, The Conversation, and Public Books. His research has been covered by the New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Guardian, National Public Radio, Boing Boing, and WIRED, among many other outlets. In 2016 he delivered the A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography, a written version of which are under contract to the University of Pennsylvania Press as Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage.

Kirschenbaum’s current interests include the history of writing and authorship, textual and bibliographical studies, serious games, and military media and technologies. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008) won multiple prizes, including the 16th annual Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association. He was also the lead author on the Council on Library and Information Resources report Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content for Cultural Heritage Collections (2010), recognized with a commendation from the Society of American Archivists. See mkirschenbaum.net or follow him on Twitter as @mkirschenbaum for more.

References

AARSETH, Espen (1998). Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

BERUBE, Michael (1992). Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

CICCORICCO, Dave (2003). “The Contour of a Contour.” Electronic Book Review. 13 June 2003. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/tropical

“Dhani Harrison Inducts ELO Jeff Lynne into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame 2017.” Video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkRa3CcjmgA

“Electric Light Orchestra.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Light_Orchestra

GEYH,‎ Paula, Fred G. Leebron,‎ Andrew Levy, eds. (1997). Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. New York: W. W. Norton.

HARBACH, Chad (2015). “MFA vs NYC,” MFA vs NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction. Ed. Chad Harbach. New York: n+1. 9-28.

MARTIN Jr., Bill (1998). Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock, 1968-1978. Chicago, IL: Open Court Press.

McGURL, Mark (2009). The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

MIRAPAUL, Matthew (1997). “Hypertext Fiction on the Web: Unbound from Convention.” The New York Times, June 26, 1997.

RALEY, Rita (2018). “Machine Writing: Translation, Generation, Automation.” Keynote talk at ELO 2017. Video recording: https://www.youtube.com/embed/XOFOYVK_NfY.

RUSSELL, Andrew, and Lee Vinsel (2016). “Hail the maintainers.” April 7, 2016. https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more

TENEN, Dennis (2017). The Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

The Genesis Museum. Website. http://www.genesismuseum.com/features/songbook77.htm.

VAN DER KISTE, John (2015). Jeff Lynne: Electric Light Orchestra: Before and After. Stroud, Gloucesteshire: Fonthill Media.

WEIGEL, David (2017). The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock. New York: W. W. Norton.

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Published

2018-08-10

How to Cite

Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2018. “ELO and the Electric Light Orchestra: Electronic Literature Lessons from Prog Rock”. MATLIT: Materialities of Literature 6 (2):27-36. https://doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_6-2_2.

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 2 (2018): Electronic Literature: Communities

Section

Secção Temática | Thematic Section

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