Thanks, Julie.
Thanks, everyone else, for coming.
So this is going to be a sort of talk for a little while,
with probably a great number of geeky side tracks.
We like the geeky side tracks, partially
because I'm an essayist as well as a poet,
and so the sidetrack is one of the things
that I do to be paid cash money.
I get paid a lot of cash money.
Actually every side track I take, it goes, cha-ching.
It's kind of nice.
And we're talking a little about the Labyrinth.
We're going to talk a little while,
and then you guys are going to do some writing.
So I hope you brought things to write with.
This is literally a generative workshop,
so you'll need at least a pen, that'll be good.
Or you can get a pencil, you can borrow something from someone,
and then we can do a little bit of brainstorming.
So about the Labyrinth, you'll see a lot of Labyrinth.
The Labyrinth has been on my brain
for the last couple of years, probably
my whole life, actually.
I mean, I think it's easily the central idea
of almost everything that I do, twisty little passages,
whether of the brain, or whether of the mind,
or whether the dungeon, or whether, or whether,
or whether.
So we'll talk a little bit about the Labyrinth.
This is an actual labyrinth that was
built by Michael Ayrton, who's a really interesting polymath
writer who died the year that I was born.
So I'm a fan of, obviously, looking at work online,
and of writing work online.
I've got a really elaborate website,
which is otherelectricities.com, which you can check out.
And it is certainly labyrinthine in many of its own ways.
In fact, I mean, I kind of lose track of some things,
and connect all my books into like authors, another kind
of container for the self, and an avatar,
which we'll be talking a little bit
about in the panel after this.
So if we do believe in the web as something that's
really worth doing for poets, for writers--
I run a magazine called Diagram, I believe in it.
So if we do, if we believe that writing for the screen,
or publishing online, offers something that is substantially
and significantly different than the printed page, which
I think some of us do, to various degrees,
and I think I do.
But I also love the old school.
I don't know if you can read the little text or not.
This is a weird setup, so people in the back, maybe not.
I'm also a devotee of the regular page too.
A lot of my labyrinth thinking, which I might go through
a little bit here on the way to some of [?
my--these little guerrilla ?] writing, and web writing,
comes from this guy Michael Ayrton, who I mentioned before.
And he was a British polymath, he was a BBC broadcaster.
He's best known as a painter and as a sculptor.
He did a lot of bronzes, and then also, while he was at it,
he wrote a couple of novels, one of which
is called The Maze Maker, and it's about Daedalus.
And it's a really interesting novel, came out, I think,
maybe 1967 or 68.
And then this is a piece that he wrote sort of before that,
"The Testament of Daedalus," which is a novella, oftentimes
in verse, again, in the voice of Daedalus
talking about Icarus, the whole Labyrinth thing, Minotaur,
flying too high to the sun, et cetera, et cetera.
So if we believe in the web, and we
believe in the idea of the online medium,
then I think we believe in the Labyrinth.
And this is a Michael Ayrton image.
I have a lot of Michael Ayrton images just sitting around,
because I'm really interested in him, as a writer,
and as a designer, and as an essayist,
and all these other things.
And this is an image sort of exploring
one reason why we like the Labyrinth,
because it's like the body, right?
I mean, it's this maze of intestines,
twisty little passages.