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METAFORIX MAIL Volume 1, Issue 37 April 17, 2001 Sites and
insights for the Information Age CONTENTS AT A GLANCE: ON
MY MIND: Small Cyberworld ON MY MIND [From the Editor] Small Cyberworld, Short Story In her most recent Quick Online Marketing Tip, my friend Ilise Benun featured a link to a site where she has recently become a featured columnist, 2young2retire.com. Aimed at people aged 45 and up, 2young2 retire bills itself as "your source for ideas, inspiration and tools to plan your next life."While touring the site, I browsed the "Reinventing Retirement" archives. In the issue welcoming Ilise was a list of other columnists who will soon debut on the site. There among them was another colleague and friend, Dr. Allan Hershfield, former president of the Fashion Institute of Technology. Allan will soon begin contributing articles on adult education and distance learning. Six degrees of separation? These days, I think it's closer to two.
Cordially, Lois C.
Ambash, Editor
MEDIA Comix Hit Their Stride In 1992, Art Spiegelman was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for Maus, his two-volume "comic book narrative" of the Holocaust. When Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History was published in 1986, many were shocked by Spiegelman's audacious choices. He portrayed the characters as animals (Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs, French as frogs). He intercut scenes of his father's Holocaust memories with more contemporary images: his own childhood recollections, his parents' postwar experiences, and the painful creative process that led to his book.When the second volume, Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began, made its appearance in 1991, it climbed quickly to the top of the New York Times best seller list. The editors' decision to categorize Maus as a work of fiction occasioned a famous letter from Spiegelman. Acknowledging the "problem of taxonomy" he had created by when he chose to render his carefully researched sotry in such an unusual form, Spiegelman concluded his letter with a request. Could the Times create a special "nonfiction/mice" category to accommodate his work? As a result of the letter, Maus was transferred to the nonfiction side of the ledger. In the ensuing years, "graphic literature" has become an increasingly respected (and salable) literary form, with authors such as Lynda Barry, Chris Ware, and Ben Katchor occupying an increasingly mainstream niche. Their works tend just to the other side of the fiction/non-fiction line from Spiegelman's and are often called "graphic novels" or "alternative comics." As novelist/reviewer Dave Eggers observes, neither term is entirely satisfactory. "Comic" tends to trivialize the work; "graphic" suggests violent or lurid content. Eggers is stymied when it comes to a label for "the practitioners of this longer, more literary form." Are they "artist-writers?" "Novelist-illustrators?" "Illustrated novelists?" Or -- my personal favorite of the moment -- "Graphic-Americans?" In any event, says Eggers, they toil in the shadow of Maus, a daunting and inspiring territory indeed. Artists who work in this medium frequently eschew the term "comics" in favor of "comix," a word that connotes a counterculture, social-critic stance. Spiegelman likes "comix" because it emphasizes the commingling of narrative and visual forms. As Eggers observes, Maus and its younger relations are works in which "art and words are conceived together and inextricably interwoven." They demand to be viewed "not as literary fiction's half-wit cousin" but as "the mutant sister who can often do everything fiction can," and more. I'm intimately familiar with Maus, having devoted a long section of my doctoral dissertation to it. It was one of the early books released on CD-ROM, offering what was then an uncommon opportunity: totally non-linear access to a printed and illustrated text, along with copious multimedia background materials. Maus, from my point of view, has a fundamentally feminist sensibility. It integrates rational analysis and presentation of information with the inferential, gut-level, right-brained process of coming to terms with highly emotional memories and experiences. In part, this accounts for the power Spiegelman's work gained in the translation from print to CD-ROM. I'm less familiar with Maus's descendants, but it seems to me that they, too, are enhanced by the personally created contexts made possible by electronic media. Judging from sites like Fantagraphics.com, Katchor.com, and the Lynda Barry archives at Salon.com, the Web is a superb showcase for this new literary form. If your experience of graphic literature thus far has been limited to Classic Comics, you're in for a treat. For a brief starter, you can view a slide show that introduces the work of several "Graphic-Americans." You'll find it at this link: http://www.nytimes.com/library/photos/20001126graphic-books.1.html
Access previous issues of Metaforix Mail by date by visiting our archives. Or use the search box on any page of the Metaforix site (www.metaforix.com) to search by keywords. INFORMATICON Trust
in the Future "Think of it this way: A trademark plays defense. It's the way that you protect what you've already built up. It's your copyright, your patents, your table stakes. But a trustmark plays offense. It's the emotional connection that lets you go out and conquer the world!" -- Kevin Roberts, advertising executive CEO, Saatchi & Saatchi
CYBERSPEAK French on the Net Maintaining the purity of the French language is a never-ending task -- and the Internet hasn't made things any easier for the venerable Académie française or for its Canadian counterpart, l'Office de la langue française du Québec. In a valiant effort to stem linguistic cybercreep, both institutions have issued lists of approved French equivalents for English infoterminology.Not that these two branches of the language police always agree on le mot juste. If you're surfing from Québec, le Web is fine; from Paris, it's la toile. When you reach the site de la toile, site Web, or site you're looking for in Paris, the first thing you'll see is la page d'accueil. In Québec, you're more likely to land on la page d'ouverture. If you're worried about security on either side of the pond, you may want to refuse les témoins. But whatever you do, don't call them cookies. As Kevin McLaughlin pointed out last fall in a column on Business2.com, Francophone Web content is a lot scarcer than, say, content for speakers of Japanese or German. And, McLaughlin reports, the explanations are more cultural than technological. The French are not only slow to embrace change, but they also are suspicious of the entrepreneurial bent embodied by les pointcoms. In Québec, French-language content originated in France might likely be rejected as a form of colonialism. Just a couple of those speed bumps on the Information Superhighway. C'est la vie!
Business Insights from a Top Business School Knowledge@Wharton is a bi-weekly e-letter produced by the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Mixing original content with a variety of online sources, Knowledge@Wharton presents "layers" of information on fourteen separate business topics, ranging from finance to ethics to technology.The "layering" approach allows readers to move from brief summaries to plain-English articles to academic papers to related material on other web sites. The newsletter content is archived in an easy-to-use, fully searchable database on the site. Managers and executives are the primary audience for Knowledge@Wharton. But much of the material is accessible and useful to others seeking to enrich their understanding of issues that especially interest them. For example, the "Business Ethics" channel recommends a short story collection as an important tool for exploring ethical conflicts in business. Registration is required both to access the site and to receive the newsletter. However, you may choose to provide only your name and e-mail address. The privacy policy is unusually readable and clear. Follow this link to register with the site and to subscribe for the Knowledge@Wharton e-letter: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/sign_up.cfm
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Volume 1, Issue 36 April 10, 2001 |
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