From the house there is about 20 minutes of lazy walk to reach the old city centre where I like to hang out with friends in one of the bars – usually after a reading, exhibition or a concert. (As soon as the winter is gone people immediately populate this social network that occupies most of the streets there.)

There is about 270.000 inhabitants in Ljubljana which is actually a biggest city in Slovenia (witch holds a total population of about 2 million).  That’s it. An hour and a half car drive can take me to 3 neighbouring countries and an additional hour and a half to the forth one. Being bilingual (at least) seems to be a good choice for any writer around here and for a writer of computationally based poetry and narrative it’s about a must – if any audience/peers are to be reached at all (I guess I personally know about 67 % of the people in Slovenia which read any of my – usually bilingual, Slovene and English – e-literature works. I have no idea except some Google Analytics about the net bunch).

It’s this condition that exercises the biggest influence on my writing. Otherwise my table is made out of wood, the computer is a rarely moved laptop with Windows (a bad karma from pirating days – so far I’m too lazy to switch to Linux that I otherwise use on the server (for quite some time now kindly provided by Ljudmila). After Perl I now use PHP, PostgresSql/MySql and HTML5 (with a bunch of related technologies) as a medium. And there is an Android based mobile phone that recently keeps me awake at nights (nothing to show publicly so far). Beside that I’m quite a young dad and as it goes for me with electronic literature it seems that it will be made for the young ones.

To that I would like to show you a photo of a special place just next to Ljubljana (about an 18 minutes car drive and a bit of a walk from where I live). It’s a place that was a geological second ago a lake (a marsh in my life time). There is no direct relation to my writing and this place but if I newer walked there I doubt I would code/wrote my stories and poems the way I do. (Sorry about the backs on the photo – a bit of a privacy thing again …)

And as a side note: It got me thinking can such a work be considered as an example of e-literature? And what actually is e-literature? (This has been a concern of mine for about a year now as a collateral damage of my MA.) So – e-literature has something to do with electricity (mostly realised on the screen). It was popular to use this term (?) to make a difference from the print culture. But as today everything has to do something with the electricity (and even books are made digitally all the way to being print down) this just doesn’t seem to be describing anything specific. And literature seems to be just the same if spoken, written down or Twittered. (Yes, we might use those media differently – but I don’t see any specific internal quality that would be distinguishing for an e-literature – what ever that might be that is.)

So I got down to idea that e-literature (as a term) is at its best a fuzzy – and more ideological than theoretical – term describing a state of widely diverse literature affairs in a period of time (over by now to that). Still – I would be very interested to hear some opponents to this – a bit pessimistic, I admit – idea. Any thoughts on that?

In(ter)ventions will explore the edges of literature, where technology, innovation, and literary practice meet. There is also open call for papers (deadline Oct. 15, 2009).

Shouldn’t they be the cutting edge of the current internet affairs? Also form wise – as much the form is the content (or at least part of it)? Where is a dialog with the geek developers? Designers? Information architects? E-literature evangelists and PR people (have you seen one outside the closed e-literature circle)? And all those people?

Is it really all about the text in e-literature? Or it should be part of today’s alpha web development? I don’t think it is. Some authors and others involved might be – but in general? And to all those literature fans out there – are they (we) at least trying to reach them? Is this an author’s problem? Or is there a lack of promoters in e-literature? Not in university – out there where the cut-out-of-our-communications-readers are?

There was some mentioning of e-literature being dead. I could not disagree more but then – are we really talking to the people or just among ourselves?

Am I wrong about this – please let me know in the comments, I would love to read your take on this.

Landscape of Jaka Železnikar

I feel like an old virgin with a lot of experience. I had my first poetry book published in 1994 and I made my first (DIY) web page in 1996. And I hanged around in a Net Art Bar instead of Hypertext Bar back then in the early days (late 1990s). Later on I hated the Flash Poetry Bar because it was not open source. I did like many e-lit/poetry flash pieces later on in the Museum of the 1.5 Internet. Now in this wireless E-Literature [&sometimes]Poetry 2.0 Bar I find myself old but teen-alike. (And from a bit weird geo-location, I’m from Slovenia – raise hands all who know where that is without consulting the bartender of the Wikipedia or Google Maps Bar, see? No, no cheating with the Yahoo Bar, ok

I have no idea what e-literature is. Except that I have no other way to differentiate all this e-books/digital content from e-lit but to use the level of computational involvement in the text. So, just use the text editor = digital language expression (go digitalise something old if you wish). Had that cocktail back in 1995s I guess. Use software as crucial part of the message = e.lit/poetry. (+I like this new generation of people from Augmented Reality Bar, wow – nice content, great T-shirts & good idea drinks, fascinating – still waiting for the poetry mix though – anybody aware of the strong URLs spirits?)

[If you wish you can take a look at jaka.org for my past www, Firefox add-ons, Zemanta & Twitter poetry experiences - be gentle though, I’m still a virgin after all ]

+ in 2.0 Bar there is, even if closed days ago – Social Network Bar is now THE thingy, isn’t it? – well, some museum of all this 3rd generation of e-lit to be made.