Gifts for yourself, and for any of your friends who are still awake and thinking. All drawn from the sometimes boistrous, sometimes beautiful pages of Magellan's Log. Click here for more info about, among other things, the funniest book of the 21st century (so far).
Hold these two key words in mind and we'll try to explain what's going on here: Organic Magellan's Log is a work in progress. At the moment we're thinking of it like this: The old print media are linear. You buy a publication like the Times or Vanity Fair, and there it is in front of you, one page after another. And the old electronic media (radio, movies, TV) are also linear, with a beginning, middle, and an end. (Channel-surfing on TV was the first hint of what was to come on the Internet.) The web, by its very nature, is simulataneous. Click-click and you're anywhere. So what is Magellan's Log? Is it a magazine? No. . . Well, partly. Is it a newspaper? No. . . OK, in some ways. Is it a book? No. . . Uh, maybe sort of. The "front" page of each issue of Magellan's Log looks a little like a newspaper or the contents page of a magazine, but when you follow various of the links, you wind up in places where no newspaper or magazine can take you, places with pictures--some still and some moving--and sometimes with music. We can put links to dirty cartoons on the main pages, and then add music to the cartoons themselves to underline or alter or even (if we want) destroy the joke. We've got lots of "art" pages containing graphics we happen to like, and we've added music to many of those pages to heighten the effect. Which sounds a bit theatrical, doesn't it? So is Magellan's Log theater? At times. For example, "The Texas Zen Hymnbook," if you sit through it, reading every page with the music playing, can have a powerful emotional effect, much like a theater piece. Is Magellan's Log video? At times. Is it fiction? At times. But even when Magellan's Log is being fiction, as in the full-length novel, Tehuacana, or in the issue when we set the staff to writing short stories, it's not like any fiction you've ever held in your hands, because of its images and sounds and internal links and its secret, encrypted passages. Then there are other features which could only be done on the internet and which don't fit any of the traditional genres of art or entertainment. Such as frequent indulgence in wacky collections of photographs from around the Internet. So what is Magellan's Log? When we who put it together talk about it, we do so with a metaphor. If the internet is a landscape, a planet, a world, then Magellan's Log is a place on that landscape. A site, yes? A place for construction. A constructed place. A place in progress, in process, because we are adding to it all the time. And as we add to it, we don't "erase" what's come before, or consign the old parts to an "archive." We leave it all out in the open, because all the pages, old and new, are part of this large complex structure we are erecting. (As in an old castle, there are even a few secret panels and rooms in the form of unmarked links.) The design of the early issues we now find a little, um, embarrassing, but there they are, still, speaking out of (and to) the Internet's formative decade of the 1990s. Some parts you will like on one visit, and perhaps other parts you will like on another visit, and you may find nooks and crannies you like so much you'll enjoy going back to them repeatedly. The "rooms" and "additions" are undated because it's all simultaneous. Yes, we live in a culture of the New--"Gimme the latest CD's, the newest shoes, this week's movies." Call it "neosophy." the love of the new. But if you design and start building an interesting structure, you don't work on it one week and then forget it and start all over. You keep refining the design and adding to the work. What is Magellan's Log? A large,
growing piece of organic architecture that exists only in cyberspace.
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