Soliloquy
Soliloquy is an unedited document of every word I spoke during the week of April 15-21, 1996, from the moment I woke up Monday morning to the moment I went to sleep on Sunday night. To accomplish this, I wore a hidden voice-activated tape recorder. I transcribed Soliloquy during the summer of 1996 at the Chateau Bionnay in Lacenas, France, during a residency there. It took 8 weeks, working 8 hours a day. Soliloquy was first realized as a gallery exhibition at Bravin Post Lee in Soho during April of 1997. Subsequently, the gallery published the text in a limited edition of 50. In the fall of 2001, Granary Books published a trade edition of the text. The web version of Soliloquy contains the exact text from the 281-page original book version, but due to the architecture of the web, each chapter is sub-divided into 10 parts. And, of course, the textual treatment of the web version is indeed web-specific and perhaps more truly references the ephemerality of language as reflected by the book's epigraph: "If every word spoken in New York City daily / were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, / each day there would be a blizzard." In order to achieve this effect, the web version is available only to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape 6+. Unfortunately, none of the prior versions of Netscape support the CSS tag used here: "a { text-decoration: none }" ; to view the piece in web form without this function enabled would be to ruin the intended experience of this work.
(Source: Author description, ELC vol. 1)
What the fuck do I want that book for?
Well, we cant' do that until we straighten out your memory problem.
My mother has Band Aids, they're not a rare commodity.
If every word spoken in New York City daily / were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, / each day there would be a blizzard.
Look at all this is non digital technology. Pretty amazing, isn't it? Everybody's just tossing it.
Here's a woman who's really on the cutting edge of literature but she's not up on contemporary art criticism.
She was like well it's got new technology.
Instructions: Select a day by clicking on it. Move the mouse to reveal one sentence of the text at a time. Click on the links at the top to choose a different one of the ten sections for a day, or to choose a different day, or to search the text. Those reading this piece from CD will need an Internet connection to use "Search." Note that if you use the search function, the results will direct you off the Electronic Literature Collection site to the version of Soliloquy hosted at the Electronic Poetry Center.
Teaching Resource that references this work:
| Resource | Author | Teaching Resource Type | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| E-Lit Forums: Culture and Technology (Engl 214) | Brian Ganter | Exercise | 2008 |
Critical writing that references this work:
