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A weblog from the editors of Linebreak

The regulars

Ash Bowen's poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, and Black Warrior Review, among other publications. He lives and works in Texarkana, AR.

Jennifer Jabaily's poetry has appeared in Mannequin Envy and Fickle Muses. She's a second-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Ashley Anna McHugh is a third-year MFA student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Measure, DIAGRAM and Memorious as well as other publications.

Johnathon Williams's poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2009, the Pebble Lake Review, and Unsplendid. He lives in Fayetteville, AR, with his wife and daughters.

The Web is a gun

By Johnathon Williams on Feb 20, 2009

I attended every Web-related panel at AWP this year, and one of the most insightful moments of any of them was the reading of an email exchange between Frederick Barthelme and Ralph Lombreglia. The exchange was originally published by The Atlantic in 1997, so its status as a highlight of the tech talk at a convention held 12 years later is interesting to say the least.

My favorite bit from Barthelme:

My sense is that the Web is a gun. It’s all potential, what we do with it; it’s a device, a system, a “site” in the linguistic sense, a prospect. How we use it over the next decade or two will define it. At the moment it’s politically and socially semi-neutral, uninflected, a tool for, in our case, the distribution of literary information.

Excerpts from the exchange were read at the Digi-Analog panel by Julia Johnson from the Mississippi Review, which Barthelme edits.

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