Editor's Note


Sound plays a dominant role in both Bill Marsh’s “Tools Built by Anonymous Ancestors” and Lewis LaCook’s “Light Has No Tongue,” the two new pieces posted in this edition of The New River. Bill Marsh is an interesting figure in the ever-expanding world of digital writing. A West Coast writer not to my knowledge connected in any way with the early Eastgate Systems hypertext theorists and writers, he’s part of a new group of authors taking hypertext in new directions––and the use of sound as an integral element in digital writing is clearly one of those directions. In “Tools . . .” Marsh composes a series of “poems” by building a site that allows readers to play with a range of visual and aural images derived from web searches using only the words “tools built by anonymous ancestors.” Lewis LaCook, a musician, calls “Light Has No Tongue,” “a hyperpoem with generative music,” and he thinks of it as a “kind of haiku” with music that “composes itself based on Western functional tonality.” Like Marsh, he has published widely in the growing numbers of online venues while creating works that explores the creative possibilities of digital media.

We’ve made a couple of small changes in this edition of The New River. On the splash page, we’ve added the names of the new authors under their pictures; and we’ve retitled our “Archives” as “Contents,” which we hope will encourage readers to explore all of the works posted in The New River over the past several years.

Ed Falco
May, 2004