ELO and the Electric Light Orchestra: Electronic Literature Lessons from Prog Rock

Roughly a decade after having cycled off the board of the Electronic Literature Organization, Kirschenbaum returned to deliver, at the 2017 ELO meeting in Oporto, an eerily accurate juxtaposition of the Organization’s affinities with the short-lived era of progressive rock. The result is an imaginative excess whose only precursor (in print scholarship) might be Mark Weingarten’s and Tyson Correl’s Yes in the Answer (2013), featuring acclaimed novelists of the 1980s such as Rick Moody and Joe Meno, musicians such as Nathan Larson, and Peter Case, and the music historian, Jim DeRogatis, cited here. This text is a lightly revised transcript of the talk. Not reproducible, in print, is the solid wall of sound that accompanied Kirschenbaum’s presentation.