New Friends

Theater Of The Imagination

The Moonlit Road is a site that cunningly combines text, image and sound to transport readers/listeners to a seat by a flickering hearthfire in the Deep South. Spooky things go bump in the virtual night here. Great for Halloween, or any time you find yourself in the mood for some excellent homegrown storytelling. Highly recommended; well worth downloading the RealPlayer plug-in required to hear the teller tell the tale.

Muckraking: It's A Good Thing

In the summer of '99, TW3 inaugurated a co-publishing agreement with Blue Ear: Global Writing Worth Reading by simultaneously publishing with that website a provocative Jules Siegel essay on the controversy swirling about the author Joyce Maynard's memoirs and her sale of love letters written to her by the reclusive American literary icon J. D. Salinger. This new trans-Atlantic publishing enterprise -- editor Ethan Casey is based in London while publisher Steve Lanier works out of Washington DC -- asks a lot of good questions, as it should, including this one of itself: "What if a media company defined its success as more than the maximization of profit?" We like that and we like Blue Ear.

    Related Interest: Joyce Maynard Homepage

    Also: Review: If You Really Want To Hear About It, by Jules Siegel

If Possible, Say Some Reasonable Thing

"It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious," Alfred North Whitehead once said of his fellow philosophers. T. S. Eliot, on the other hand, defined philosophy as "the purple bullfinch in the lilac tree," which is not at all obvious. Whichever way you lean, you're apt to find something of interest at Philosophy News Service. Of special interest, given this update's emphasis on turning talent into the wherewithal for financing pilgrimages to the Faubourg Saint-Germain and for drinking wines that are not swill, is the jobs for philosophers section (even philosophers get hungry). Rounding out the site's offering are news from both the academy and today's headlines, forums on policy and ethical issues, and a surprising number of links to like-minded sites.

Hot Damn!

We're excited here at TW3 about Arts & Letters Daily, a site that collects reviews, comment, articles and essays from all over the English-speaking world of books, literature and ideas and links to them. The concept is both good and simple, but few have managed to do it well. That's where ALDaily shines. Its editors' choices are intelligent, its digest of headlines and summary paragraphs is well written, the design is uncluttered, and the text is easy to read. You can bet we've bookmarked this boon to the literary-minded web surfer and will return often.

Old Friends

Feed Your Head Daily

Yes, FEED has gone daily, but if that were all this veteran online magazine had to offer we'd hardly be bringing it to your attention. FEED also has swell retro graphics executed in a palette of colors correctly calculated to make you feel right at home and ready to kick off your shoes and stay a while. And while we at TW3 will confess to a spot of envy at the way FEED has pulled off this psycho-sensory seduction, nifty images would not sway us to a new -- and still glowing -- review, either. The reason we like FEED is the same reason we like Salon and dislike Slate (no; don't bother looking for a link): the editors invest their energies not in glitz and/or hype but in stylish, well-informed, well-written content. My, my: an online magazine with wit and a pretty face, too. What will they think of next?

The Hypertext Fiction Homepage, more properly named Hyperizons, jumped into our consciousness on a recent journey through a few of the literary links offered at a site named Voice of the Shuttle. We know some small something about hyperfiction, but not as much, it turns out, as Michael Shumate at Duke, whose page this is. One of the links we followed led us to Fiction by Individual Authors, which led us somehow to a sublink to Alt-X. The name has an air of the forbidden about it, and so we went. Sure enough, there was something called "dirty desires," our dish of tea (we thought) at that perplexing juncture. It was, too, as were "nomo promo" and "hyper-x." We wallowed in the outré. We did be as bad as we could be (online), ably assisted by an avatar named gashgirl and others of her tribe. We'd have misbehaved further if we hadn't been wasted and our browser's disk cache had had some room.

Weary we headed home, where we shucked our street shoes, put on our old slippers, and padded over to The Virtual Fridge. At this "underappreciated appliance" we found a variety of word hoards to plunder for the makings of impromptu poems of our own. (How normal this seemed after where we'd been.) The idea is that the words we conjure on our screen are like the magnet-backed words in the Magnetic Poetry Kit available in meat space: you pick from what you have and arrange the pieces to suit -- or amaze -- yourself. We were plumb tuckered but we gave it a try:

suburban we ignite teenage American clothes

glib we resonate our cool blisters

plenteous we mouth Ur balm earth

Update: Word Goes Game Boy; Salon Still Rules

Unlike the shamelessly hyped Slate and the highly touted Word, which (while very snappy in a video arcade game sort of way) often is way too cute for its own good, Salon delivers the goods. What's to like? The writing, for starters -- and there is no better place to start. From smart interviews to entertaining political comment to breaking news with an edge, Salon pays attention to the only thing that justifies a magazine's existence: content. What's more, its editors update that content daily and its designers purvey it in stylishly uncluttered digital pages. Best of all, the Salonistas obviously are having a lovely time dishing up just the right mix of behind-the-fan innuendo and intellectual fiber. We like to start our day with a brimming bowlful and a mug of deep black joe.

Tasty side dishes on our breakfast menu regularly include the bacon-and-eggs satisfactions of Utne Lens, the digital extension of the analog Utne Reader, and beignet-sweet morsels hot from the grease of the online edition of Harper's Index, which adds to the pleasures of the print staple an interactive feature that allows the rest of us to get into the act. If we're not already late for work, we like to mouse over to Book Zone, too, for a soupçon of web-savvy literary marketing to juice us up for the day's adventures in getting and spending.

Urban Desires, which styles itself "an interactive magazine of metropolitan passions," delivers on its promise, too. The writing generally is crisp and the pages are nicely illustrated without making untoward demands on bandwidth. Each issue is an appealing mix of comment, features, some fiction, reviews and departments, including art, tech-toys, sex and health, music, performance, food and style. Our favorite site embellishment is called Tunnel, a thoughtful service that allows readers to burrow through all archived content under a given heading from a single page of links. Tunnel isn't flashy; it just works, and we like that. Then there's Suck ("a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"): wise ass to the max, goofily illustrated (See "Filler"?) but ultraclean in design, and updated every weekday. The Sucksters aren't all attitude, either; they also deliver content, making this digital spitball an entertaining way to keep up with everything from the latest manifestation of tech mania to the machinations of corporate America to the passing of such cultural icons as the Pabst brewery in Milwaukee. All in all, reading Suck is kind of like having your teeth cleaned while inhaling nitrous oxide.

The Beat goes on at Levi Asher's Literary Kicks. Asher, who is not a critic but a fan, loves all that is Beat, from "the original Beatnik poet" Walt Whitman to latter-day echoes and incarnations like Terry Southern and Anne Waldman. His heart, however, clearly belongs to the seminal octad (listed in Asher's order): Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs (That's him here, isn't it, on a U.S. postage stamp?), Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and Michael McClure. Links abound: to Buddhism, bibliographies, bios of Beats major and minor, Beat connections in rock music, even the Beat news beat. Literary Kicks, while perhaps not entirely original (What is?), is quirky and personal; definitely worth falling by when all the java joints have closed for the night.

Where are you when, while reading a report on the Comdex digerati confab, a link from the phrase "I like to kill them" takes you to Section 4.04.410: Vicious Dogs of the Santa Monica Municipal Code? You could only be somewhere in the matrix of cyberpages that constitutes WWWench, purveyor of the madly free-associative, way new digital journalism of Jayne Loader. There's much more behind the hundreds of hyperlinks that Loader weaves, with calculated wit and sudden insight, into a tapestry portraying some tasty slice of our relentlessly hip lives and times. You might, for example, just as easily find yourself transported to a gray page containing the text of a Carl Sandburg poem, to the splash screen of an online fashion magazine, or to Loader's own Public Shelter website. Ms. Jayne is an accomplished wiseguy and her columns are a delicious read.

Update! Now hosted by The University of Pennsylvania's Digital Library, the indispensable On-Line Books Page continues to be a labor both of love and of scholarship. For openers, there's the site's index of more than 1800 on-line books, which is both searchable and browsable by either author or title. There also are hyperlinked listings of new on-line books and of books currently being digitized or scheduled for same, as well as links to English, other language, and specialty book repositories all over cyberspace. But one of the things that impresses us most about The On-Line Books Page is its commitment to free speech on the 'net and to freedom of expression everywhere. The site displays the ubiquitous "Free Speech Online" banner (Long may it wave.), but it also features a Banned Books On-Line exhibit, spotlighting such notorious trash as Voltaire's Candide , Chaucer's Canterbury Tales , and Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man . Perhaps we all should drop John Mark Ockerbloom a line to say, a la the splendid Molly Ivins, "Good on ya."

The grand old woman of no-holds-barred magazine journalism is Mother Jones. Both the WWW edition of the magazine and MoJo Wire, the larger site in which the feisty crown jewel is set, are exemplars of digital publishing. Content is updated scrupulously and presented with both style and great good humor (which is lucky for us readers, given the seriousness of the issues confronted head-on by the magazine's "smarty-pants writers"). There's plenty of opportunity for readers to vent their spleens, too, as well as the immediacy of hypertext chat. The site is searchable, as it should be, and is built on a solidly logical foundation, as too few sites are. Our favorite departments are the magazine itself and Hellraiser Central, where those who just can't convince themselves to get down off their hind legs and stop howling at the powers that be are celebrated.

The Annenberg/CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) Project's website is unusually rich and vivid, its online exhibits spanning time and topics with considerably more grace than is common in this new medium. A good entry point for readers is the Voices & Vision exhibit, in which the work of 13 modern American poets is explored in sound, images and text. Selecting Wallace Stevens from the index, for example, reveals a thumbnail biographical sketch, a picture of the Hartford poet, and a link to a 55-second (586k) QuickTime clip of "The Snowman" from an Annenberg/CPB Multimedia Collection video, followed by a thoughtfully selected and annotated list of links to other online resources: texts, audio of the poet reading, and more. Other exhibits, like Personality: What Makes Us Who We Are, take good advantage of the web's potential for interactive learning, including an online personality test (How Others See You) that delivers its results while you wait. You might not want to modify your self image based on the standard test's outcome, but you'll spend an engaging quarter hour exploring everybody's favorite subject.

    Also Of Interest: MoMA | online projects

>> More? Step this way, please. . .

Virtual Ink is Clearinghouse approved.

The Argus Clearinghouse is
a selective collection of topical online guides.