Goldsmith's practice of conceptual writing reaches online as easily as it does into print, but it begins with Goldsmith imagining provocative writing challenges — and it follows through when he actually executes the project he has thought up. "The most boring writer that has ever lived" (as Goldsmith has called himself) has retyped a day's New York Times (Day) and typed up a year's worth of weather reports (The Weather). In the digital Soliloquy, he plunders his own words, offering a web version of a book edition of a gallery installation of a week's worth of his spoken language.
Author description: Soliloquy is an unedited document of every word I spoke during the week of April 15-21, 1996, from the moment I woke up Monday morning to the moment I went to sleep on Sunday night. To accomplish this, I wore a hidden voice-activated tape recorder. I transcribed Soliloquy during the summer of 1996 at the Chateau Bionnay in Lacenas, France, during a residency there. It took 8 weeks, working 8 hours a day. Soliloquy was first realized as a gallery exhibition at Bravin Post Lee in Soho during April of 1997. Subsequently, the gallery published the text in a limited edition of 50. In the fall of 2001, Granary Books published a trade edition of the text. The web version of Soliloquy contains the exact text from the 281-page original book version, but due to the architecture of the web, each chapter is sub-divided into 10 parts. And, of course, the textual treatment of the web version is indeed web-specific and perhaps more truly references the ephemerality of language as reflected by the book's epigraph: "If every word spoken in New York City daily / were somehow to materialize as a snowflake, / each day there would be a blizzard." In order to achieve this effect, the web version is available only to users of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape 6+. Unfortunately, none of the prior versions of Netscape support the CSS tag used here: "a { text-decoration: none }" ; to view the piece in web form without this function enabled would be to ruin the intended experience of this work.
Instructions: Select a day by clicking on it. Move the mouse to reveal one sentence of the text at a time. Click on the links at the top to choose a different one of the ten sections for a day, or to choose a different day, or to search the text. Those reading this piece from CD will need an Internet connection to use "Search."
Previous publication: The web version of Soliloquy was published on the State University of New York at Buffalo's Electronic Poetry Center in 2002, http://www.epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/soliloquy/.
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