Letting what's in the ivory express itself.


It's a well known story. Probably so well known that it's become hackneyed and banal. But we'll repeat it here anyway.

A man approaches an ivory carver and asks him to prepare him an elephant from a piece of ivory he presents him. They agree that the man will return in three weeks to pick up the finished carving. When the three weeks are up the man returns and is presented with an exquisitve ivory whale. The man is overwhelmed with its beauty, but reminds the carver that he asked for an elephant. The carver replies: I didn't know what was inside the ivory until I started carving.

So what's that got to do with us? Let's put it this way. We tried. There's supposed to be a print version. Everybody agrees that tradition and protocol demand that there be a print version. We've even resigned ourselves to doing the exhausting indexing necessary in order to prepare the print version. But if we really look long and hard into the material here, we have no choice but to realize that a print version isn't what's inside. Try as we may, the material demands to be presented hypertextually. So the presentation version of this project has become "multi-media".


Go to: Well, almost, but clicking on the page won't help, or
Go to: Web Essays - The evolution of a (personal?) medium