OCTOBER * NOVEMBER 1997
The ABCDE Minded in the
Electric Universe
Review of Web del Sol
Holly Yasui
Web del Sol (http://www.webdelsol.com) is an ambitious and stylish multimedia project. Announcing itself as "A Literary Arts Complex on the Web," its self-proclai med mission is to "bring the literary arts to a byte-cultured nation," with a wide variety of texts, a chat room, excellent graphics, amusing animations, high-quality music, and the spoken word.
A warning before extolling the delights
of this Arts Complex: many pages require Java and special plug-ins (for
audio and movies) and all pages are full of inline graphics, so you need
a capable browser and a fast connection to fully appreciate Web del Sol's
art and complexity. But even if you're surfing with an average browser and
an average modem, it's worth the wait to experience what you can Web del
Sol has in store for you.
Navigating the Web del Sol is a bit difficult
at first since it's not organized in a linear fashion. The dramatic opening
page, a black background with a single image (one of the most striking I've
seen on the Web) has one link that takes you to a homepage that contains
links to other pages in the Web del Sol site as well as to other sites,
such as Ctheory, OtiS, and Eunet, based in France. Philosophically, I like
the idea of external links -- it indicates a kind of non self-centeredness
and an affirmation of the democratic, non-centralized interweaving possible
on the web -- but on a practical level it's easy to get sidetracked and
sometimes hard to find your way back to your original path.
For a quick tour of Web del Sol site itself, click on Current Issue from the homepage. From here you can jump into Main Sol, the third button at the top, which contains prose, poetry, and essays. Pantheon is a list of Web del Sol authors with photos and biographies; Sol Best is a selection of pieces from previous issues. More Sol is a page of "links to die for" (according to Web del Sol) -- to a wide variety of alternative arts and literature sites.
Of the five buttons at the top of the
Current Issue page, News and Muse is, in my opinion, the most interesting
link. It contains links to news sources; to a "literary sourceplex"
-- search engines, resources, literature & contests; various links to
other sites, including film and jazz sites; and, at the bottom of the page,
webtoons -- cartoons by Matt Davies [syndicated in Gannett newspapers] Steve
Benson [NY Times, Time, Newsweek, etc.]. There are also links to
several literary webrings and to six newsgroups: news:alt.prose, news:rec.arts.prose,
news:misc.writing; news:alt.books.reviews; news:bit.listserv.literary; and
news:rec.arts.poems.
The Current Issue page also provides links
to magazines hosted by the Web del Sol server: The Literary Review, Zyzzva,
AGNI, North American Review, The Prose Poem and selected authors. The
Audio link requires an audio plug-in; it features aut hors reading their
works. Then there is, of course, the mandatory mail-to-the-editor link.
Overall, the Web del Sol site is very
beautiful, entertaining, and full of fascinating material. The complexity
of the pages and the links makes it both unique and at times, frustrating
... on some occasions, the wait-time seems interminable, pages hang, and
faulty links return error messages. As a site that attempts to fully utilize
the multimedia possibilities, Web del Sol pushes the technical limit s of
the medium -- sometimes, too far. But isn't that what experimentation is
all about?
© The Raven Chronicles 1997