============ FUGUE # 13, Spring/Summer 1996 R. E. Alatee
Five Minutes in the Hypertext Hotel with Lance Olsen Lance Olsen, cyberpoetprophetphile, Idaho's current WriterIn-Residence, prognosticator of four novels, five books of criticism, garbage trucks-full of articles, and a collection of poetry, ventured into Brown University's Hypertext Hotel (via the World Wide Web), a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) where cannibals, thieves, and English professors gather to exploit art, anxiety, and, ultimately, themselves. I found him toying with an on-line version of Jane Eyre (boredom also reigns free here) before pulling him into chat ... R. E. ALATEE: Lancelot! Good to see you made it back from the grip of your satellite dish ... what's on tonight?
LANCE OLSEN: There're 250 channels, R. E., and everything's on. That's what makes this moment so interesting as we careen toward the millennium. We've moved at every level-televisual, literary, theoretical, you name it-from a this-ism or that-ism toward an any-ism, an all-ism, a kaleidoscopic hypertext hotel, a high-tech garden of forking paths. Down one you might find gay fiction, down another neohumanist or regionalist or metafictionist or feminist or politically incorrect or Asian American or, better yet, all of them at some web-work once. Diversity, whether subatomic or cultural, may well be old news from an old front from an old war. We're moving toward a Unified Field Theory of culture, a gesture that open-armedly INCLUDES, gobbles up, termites along, without ever homogenizing. It's a multimedia moment, and really exciting to be a part of unless, I imagine, your name's Pat Buchanan, whose speeches always did sound better in the original German. AL: Diversity(™) through Unity(Š)? Are we really that close 79