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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
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Pif, LLC
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| PAST ZINE REVIEWS | MORE ZINES |
Evergreen Review
Reviewed by Tom Hartman
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A small but important print journal back in the late 1950s, The Evergreen Review has been revived as a Web-only publication by Editor Barney Rosset. |
Evergreen
Review Editor-in-Chief: Barney Rosset evergren@interport.net |
The current issue, Fall/Winter 99, is devoted to the controversy surrounding Lo's Diary, Italian author Pia Pera's recasting of Nabokov's Lolita (the publication in English of which sparked a furious debate in the book world over copyright issues and what does and does not constitute permissible literary "borrowing"). Are we to regard Pera's book (in which Lo plays seductress to Humbert's victim) as a sort of homage? Is it, as Martin Garbus suggested in The New York Times, an adaptation analogous to George Bernard Shaw's use of the Pygmalion myth? Or has Pera, by penning a work so dependent on Nabokov's original, violated Lolita's copyright? The Evergreen Review neatly presents both sides of the controversy, reprinting Garbus's article and a review from The Toronto Globe along with excerpts from the novel. Perhaps most significantly, ER also presents a formal statement on the matter from Nabokov's son and heir Dimitri Nabokov. It all makes for darn good reading (whether you have read Pera's book or not), and there's more than enough information for us to draw our own conclusion.
Perhaps even more impressive than the material he has culled for the current issue is the fact that Rosset has managed to land for ER Michael Joyce's latest hypertext, On the Birthday of the Stranger (now available in the archive). Joyce, whose afternoon, a story is perhaps to hypertext fiction what William Gibson's Neuromancer is to cyberfiction, is without question one of hypertext's leading scholar-practitioners. On the Birthday..., in the broadest sense, is a journey through an anonymous European city, possibly Paris, although we're never quite sure. Each page (or "lexia") features a black and white photograph and several paragraphs of text: one, in black, serves as a "primary" text; the second, in gray, turns out on mouse over to be made up entirely of links. Click a word – any word – and we're transported to a subsequent lexia. Additionally, parenthetical numbers in red (coordinates of sorts) located at various points on each page, when clicked, open a console map on which are marked significant points in "the stranger's" travels in advance of our own. Joyce has given us so many options for navigating his text, so many possible routes through it, that On the Birthday... takes on a sort of infinite quality.
As with afternoon, a story and Joyce's other published hypertexts, On the Birthday... is rooted fairly deeply in contemporary critical theory; therefore, if one's goal is to get to the bottom of it all (if that's even possible), it proves a fairly rigorous intellectual workout. But more casual readers needn't shy away: On the Birthday of a Stranger is both tantalizingly elaborate (more resolutely "puzzle-like" than the majority of hyperfictions) and honestly seductive – in both its text and its visuals. Joyce, along with designer Matthew Hanlon, has created a sparse but lovely virtual space. The black-and-white photos that accompany the text are consistently provocative – at once vaguely surrealistic, yet anchored in a somehow familiar, if fleeting, reality: Is that the roof of the Louvre we glimpse through a screen of foliage? And that avenue...?
Overall, On the Birthday... exemplifies the almost limitless possibilities hypertext presents for both writers and readers. Joyce's most impressive work to date, its inclusion here goes a long way toward (re)establishing Evergreen Review as both a vital forum for new writing and a leading venue for serious hypertext.
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A graduate of Columbia University and The University of Pennsylvania, life-long New Jerseyan and New York Mets fan, Tom Hartman now lives in Philadelphia where he's an Associate Poetry Editor at Painted Bride Quarterly. Over the years his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Photo Review, City Paper (Philadelphia), and Philadelphia Weekly. When he's not writing he spends far too much time hating the Atlanta Braves.