Pranshu Arya's List: E-lit

• In conceptual writing the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the  work. When an author uses a conceptual form of writing, it means that all of the  planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory  affair.
• It is the objective of the author who is concerned with conceptual writing to  make her work mentally interesting to the reader, and therefore usually she  would want it to become emotionally dry.
• It is only the expectation of an emotional kick, to which one conditioned to  Romantic literature is accustomed, that would deter the reader from perceiving  this writing.
• Some ideas are logical in conception and illogical perceptually. The ideas need  not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple.
• If the author wishes to explore her idea thoroughly, then arbitrary or chance  decisions would be kept to a minimum, while caprice, taste and others whimsies  would be eliminated from the making of the text.
• Using a simple form repeatedly narrows the field of the work and concentrates  the intensity to the arrangement of the form. This arrangement becomes the end  while the form becomes the means.
• It doesn't really matter if the reader understands the concepts of the author by  reading the text.
• Those that show the thought process of the writer are sometimes more interesting  than the final product.
• It takes a good writer to use new materials and make them into a work of  literature. The danger is, I think, in making the physicality of the materials  so important that it becomes the idea of the work (another kind of Romanticism).
• Conceptual writing is made to engage the mind of the reader rather than her ear  or emotions.
• Anything that calls attention to and interests the reader in this physicality is  a deterrent to our understanding of the idea and is used as an expressive  device.
• Conceptual writing is good only when the idea is good.

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• If the last half of the 20th century fell under the spell of linguistics and  genetics, I suggest that the spatial understanding of both, "genome as book,"  must give way to an understanding that is inherently dynamic, inextricably  statistical, and informationally multimedial in its forms of analysis; an  understanding that is less about structure and more about resonance, about the  ongoing fitting of moving mind to moving world through moving medium ... My  thesis is that Web-specific art and literature is where this understanding is  being developed.
• In The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot, seventeen people are listed as  contributors to the work
• "When you compose in or into hypertext, the space literally opens up," she  says, referring to the shift from printed page to computer screen. "You live and  read differently in the space between print and online."
• "First we drew it out on paper and numbered every star," she says. At one point  they arranged to work together in a computer lab. "We moved from computer to  computer testing the work on different platforms and configurations."

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