In the Boston Globe, Sven Birkerts reviews the online novel-to-date by Walter Kim that is being published by Slate.

Birkerts is not persuaded that the novel will live up to its promise of somehow delivering real-time art, i.e., to be a novel and at the same time to “respond to events as they happen.”

I believe that real time and the time of art, the consciousness that makes art, are contradictory concepts-“real-time art” is an oxymoron . . . The traditional aim of art, in response to deeply planted human needs, has from the first been fundamentally contemplative. The work offers a deliberate distancing from the chaos and turbulence of the immediate and allows the reader or viewer to process its tensions through the recognition of underlying patterns.

I suppose so. But that’s pretty, um, abstruse. lol.

He goes on a bit more in this vein, then writes:

And yet, if Kim can successfully deploy some of the energies and capabilities of this extraordinary technology, if he can intensify the participatory dynamic of reading-real-time interaction with real-time output-and win a readership, others will quickly follow.

This gets a bit closer to the crux of the matter. People don’t go to Borders or click on Amazon.com because they decide they need the “prophylactic” benefit of “artistic distance” to keep their sanity “in the face of the boggling complexity of living.”

They — we — buy books because they transport us and affirm what we know ourselves to be.

If writers figure out how to harness the Internet in a way that engages and excites people, and that enables readers to connect emotionally with an online fictional world, it will work.

It’s really pretty simple, in the end. Although not necessarily easy . . .