Touch Letters

I want to touch the letters.

I want to hold them in my hands. I want to feel the shape of each one. How relevant that, when a letter stops being an inkthing on a pagething and starts being ephemeral little pixels moving around on my screen, I feel like I touch them more. I touch the letters on this keyboard. I touch a letter link on a touch screen. We, as a world, touch more letters now than we ever did before the digital. I run my fingers along the screen now. I’m reaching out to you.

* * *

I spent most of yesterday in a casino. Is that why I am stuck on seven?

Mario Aquilina’s and Ivan Callus’s seventh way of looking at electronic literature sees e-lit as a limit case. Liminal, or else dancing on the edge of a precipice, the outskirts of a canon in chaos. The digital may “put[] literature in crisis.” It may “announce the end of literature.” Concrete turns kinetic. Belle-lettres become letters. They dance across the screen, respond to my fingers.

I am dancing, too. I get away with myself.

I try not to be utopian about the revolutionary potentials of the digital. I try to remember how much money it took to get me this laptop, this education to even know that this writing was happening somewhere. I try to remember how much money it keeps costing to allow me into the network, to keep me connected. I try to remember the bodies that made this hardware. I try to remember there is no software.

But I still cannot help but imagine digital literatures heralding an end to an age of Literariness with its cultural gatekeepers and institutional insignias. I can produce and publish. I can create and recreate. I read texts that invite me to alter them. I read texts that rewrite themselves constantly. I get my fingers into everything. I am my own publisher. My own editor. Sometimes, I am the book.

I try not to be utopian. In my dreams I see rappers recording albums in the Apple Store™ in the mall. I see feminists Xeroxing™ zines and posters and collages. I have to remind myself that a limit case is, by definition, not outside.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the words “digital” and “literary.” I spend a lot of time looking at the margins of printed books. I’ve written in the margins of every book I’ve read in the last ten years. I eat while I read to leave fingerprint stains on the pages, oranges and reds and oily browns that inch dangerously closer to the ink. Digital. Literature. Etymology reminds us so often how far away language lets us get from things. I want to touch the letters.

I try not to be utopian about connection. I like the ergodic, but I always wish there was a word for ergodic e-lit that privileges the touching inherent in that engagement. Users, not audiences. Connection. Touch. In the ergodic I reach out and touch the letters. In the ergodic, the work reaches out from the dark recesses of networks, pathways. E-lit is all margins.

The literary in ruins is the literary of solitude. I’m reaching out. We’re touching.