Re: Judy Malloy's _Love One_

Todd Andrew Pontius (tap6u@faraday.clas.virginia.edu)
Thu, 14 Nov 1996 16:28:18 -0500 (EST)

Hello All-

I haven't been responding to these things as much as I should
have, so I decided to go for the brownie points here and make
the effort to offer my two red pennies on Judy Malloy's _Love
One_... my comments will probably go unnoticed because of all
the other messages floating out there...

Actually, I was thinking about this today and everyone will
probably laugh at me but I'm actually going to be pretty sad
when this class ends... no more MOOs with Paola... no more email
that I don't understand... There's going to be a *sob* big hole in my
heart when I check email and there's only a few messages in my
mailbox. Really. I'm serious.

Anyway, re: Love One. I actually kind of like this onw. And I
think that the interface works pretty well for the story - it's
supposed to be a series of diaries, but I looked at it as an
experiment in associations... kind of a semiological
process that wandered around the story of someone wandering
around Germany with sexy Kraut geeks (okay, some of the plot
was pretty dorky, but I'm sentimental! Kill me.).

One of the things that I noticed about some of the images in
the 'text were kinda interesting. Did you notice all the
references to outmoded froms of technology, and the images that
result from seeing all these junked computers and modems?
Intially, there's this sense of loss - old computers are like
toys that have never been played with. Then there's this
feeling of nostalgia that's interesting about for technology
that's so new. Where do all the 9800 modems go when they die?
Do they really get picked up by candybar fetished Germans?
Then there's the way that the author ties in art with these old
hunks of silicon and diode... made me think of Terry Gilliam's
vision of an archaic future - everything is really advanced
and really mechanized, but also old, breaking down, almost
steam-powered in a way, hearkening back to old outmoded
technologies from the turn of the century.

This is just a spew, a brain fart, an abberration on a dreary
Sunday, but I thought it was time that someone looked at these
'texts as Texts with a capital T (especially the fiction 'texts)

See you Fri

Todd P.