The following text is an introduction to Web Works, a special issue of Triple Canopy organized and introduced by Rivka Galchen, author of the novel Atmospheric Disturbances. Web Works was developed in conjunction with Triple Canopy, Light Industry, and The Public School’s July 2011 Kickstarter campaign to fund 155 Freeman, a shared venue and office in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The issue consists of a collection of previously published articles (listed at the bottom of the essay).
I began assembling this issue while away, in what we who are too proud about not having iPhones tend to refer to in Elysian language: a mountain home with spotty satellite-based Internet, no cell-phone reception, and a pretty bad collection of films on DVD. Five deer came and fed near the front porch every evening. Unparalleled powers of concentration visited less regularly. Without distraction, it was easy to worry. With worry, it became difficult to find words. I had a dream in which I was on a game show with Steve Martin but couldn’t remember his last name—this cost me thousands in losses. I had a real live conversation in which I couldn’t remember the name Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, though I had read a biography on him a month earlier. So it was heavenly, but also not. I did read more; I did nap more; I was even probably a little more happy a little more often. I also longed for the scrim and scrum and nattering of other voices, of cities, of other people’s preoccupations.
And so:
“Only Connect” is a 2008 interview of novelist Ed Park by Rachel Aviv. Ed Park knows more about, and about more, interesting and obscure writings and phenomena than nearly anyone. Here he discusses the madly mathematical mystery writer Harry
Stephen Keeler, Julian Jaynes, Anthony Powell, and, and, and. Also the Web. In “You Have 33 Friends,” Sam Frank talks to the artist Jon Kessler about getting into, and out of, a MySpace extension of a project he calls Global Village Idiot. Roberto Bolaño is at one of his associative apogees—that’s part of what’s strange about Bolaño, he has apogees rather than just an apogee—in his 1999 speech accepting the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, which first appeared fully translated into English in Triple Canopy’s second issue.
The next three pieces—“The Matter of Past-Loving London,” by Ben Street and the International Necronautical Society, “Mightiest in the Land,” by Patrick Corcoran, and “Index or Constructed Way of Experiment,” by José León Cerrillo—are all, in one way or another, about cities and citizens, and all feel like they might have been imagined by Bolaño himself; in fact Bolaño’s short story “Gomez Palacios” is about a Mexican boxer from that small and “godforsaken” town.
“Prussian Blue,” by Joshua Cohen, follows a scattering of appearances of the serendipitously discovered color through space and time. Sam Frank’s piece, “The Document,” has the feel of immaculately sustained concentration, even as it jumps around; Joshua Cohen makes a brief cameo in the piece. “The Document” is difficult to describe, reads sort of like a mystery, is haunted by a number of dead men, and is really, really great.
Included articles:
- "Only Connect," by Ed Park with Rachel Aviv
- "The Document," by Sam Frank
- "The Caracas Speech," by Roberto Bolaño (translated by David Noriega)
- "Index or Constructed by Way of Experiment," by José Léon Cerrillo
- "The Matter of Past-Loving London," by Ben Street & The International Necronautical Society
- "Notes in Time," by Nancy Spero with Christopher Lyon
- "Mightiest in the Land," by Patrick Corcoran
- "Receivers, 2003," by Moyra Davey with Matthew Porter
- "Thirty-Six Shades of Prussian Blue," by Joshua Cohen
- "You Have 33 Friends," by Jon Kessler with Sam Frank