I’m not posting much here right now, but I’m doing some network writing elsewhere. Over at Jill’s there’s been a little discussion of web subscription and micropayment. On grandtextauto there’s a hopping conversation about fiction and recombinant text. Meanwhile, apartment woes continue to develop…

Back in the States, I’m feeling an odd kind of culture shock. Not “reverse culture shock” of the usual kind — the U.S. seemed pretty strange to me before I left. Rather, I’m feeling a certain shock at my personal culture, at the way I was living before I left on the trip. I see myself starting to do something, and I realize it’s because I used to do it all the time (small things, like patterns of web surfing I haven’t been able to indulge while sporadically connected), and then that behavior is suddenly defamiliarized by my act of observation.

As I’ve written here before, I care about local independent bookstores and support linking to Booksense rather than Amazon. Booksense is where I want to direct potential book purchasers. But as a book editor, I keep going back to Amazon’s site. Why? Because they update their mysteriously-calculated “sales rank” much more regularly than any other source of information I have about the book’s readership. I can even get Junglescan to plot a graph (such as the one here). So I end up wishing that people would buy through Booksense, but feeling cheered every time the book’s Amazon sales rank goes up. Ambivalence indeed.

I’m in Norway, currently staying with Jill, sharing an office with Hanne-Lovise Skartveit, and soon to be staying with Torill — giving five talks in four days. Last week I was at ACM Hypertext, where highlights included reading with some great artists and being part of Ted Nelson’s Hyperstructure workshop, which also included presentation of some of the Nelson-inspired work underway at the Jyu Hyperstructure Group. The same week I officially accepted a place on the board of Electronic Literature Organization and had my first phone meeting with that very sharp group of people. When not at Hypertext I’ve been staying with John Cayley and Laura L. Sullivan in London. This has to be one of the most stimulating and varied set of conversations about elit I could imagine. I should be blogging away furiously, but I seem to have found I’m not good at blogging (or answering email) while I’m on the road. However, as it turns out, I have to head back to the States early (missing Ars Electronica, and delaying my trip to Denmark) because my NYC landlord is indulging in the type of bad behavior that creates stereotypes of NYC landlords. This could bode well, or poorly, for blogging here.