On Monday night, a three-week series of readings called Web Writers in the Flesh kicks off at the Manhattan Internet Lounge in New York City. Readers in the series will include Sean Elder of The New Yorker, Ayelet Sela of NBC.com, Kim Ficera, creator of the Web soap opera "Gays of Our Lives," Audrey Steinhauer, author of an academic study of hypertext fiction, and Victoria Ludwin of Riotgrrl.
By featuring authors who have made their names writing for or about the new medium, series director Xander Mellish says she hopes to demonstrate that the Web is "where the new generation of writers is going to come from." As an extravagant proclamation that the age of dead-tree lit is over, Mellish plans to set fire to either Norman Mailer or George Plimpton -- in effigy.
Although the readings will take place offline, they will retain their multimedia clout, with 3-foot-square screens and a speaker system so the performers can juice up their ASCII with visual projections and sound. Mellish, a former municipal-bond columnist for The Wall Street Journal, says there are only two rules for the readers: "They have to do something audio, visual, or interactive, and after 10 minutes, they get the hook."
That "something," according to Mellish, can be either high-tech or low-tech: everything from HTML slide shows, to soundtracks, to sporting a disguise.
Leslie Harpold, publisher of Smug, is planning to read her answer to Nike's "I Can" campaign. She says online writers and journalists need more events like this to "put flesh and blood behind the bylines. There's no Web writer bar where everyone goes to drink like in the old newspaper days."
Net writing that takes advantage of the special capabilities of the medium is rare, observes Sean Elder, whose Web site-review column, "Only Connect," appears in The New Yorker.
"Salon is a better site than most, but almost all of those pieces could run in a magazine," Elder says.
Elder, who will be taking a post as the editor in chief of Citysearch NY next week, says he's disappointed that so many of the younger writers he works with "want to write classic 1,000-word Village Voice critic essays. I feel like saying, 'Guys, it's a different medium!'"
One of his own ideas for a site is a layout of a crime scene, where information like coroner's reports and witness testimony are linked off the visual overview.
Mellish compares the state of online writing to that of movies in the early part of the century.
"Theater actors were ashamed to say that they were working in the 'flickers,' which is what movies were called," Mellish says. "Then D.W. Griffith came along and showed us what film could do that no other medium could. We're waiting for our Birth of a Nation."
