SCOTT ROSENBERG'S HOME PAGE

Textuality

I'm left-handed, and my handwriting has always been pathetic. To this day I wind up with smudges on my pinkie and the side of my hand when I take notes.

My parents gave me a typewriter when I was 12 -- a beat-up old Olivetti portable which, though it was a hand-me-down from my older brother, still had some nice curves. I haven't stopped typing since -- though over time I graduated from the Olivetti to a Smith Corona to an IBM Selectric to an Epson QX-10 (what a mistake!) to a PC to a Mac...


Using a hand-cranked mimeograph in my basement in Queens, N.Y., with results like the above, I began publishing in 1974. With three collaborators, I created a postal Diplomacy 'zine called The Pocket Armenian -- after an informal nickname of my friend and co-editor Greg Costikyan, who now designs games and writes science fiction.

A year later we had 150 subscribers, and upgraded to an electric mimeo, which we dubbed "The Great God Gestetner." I published some other 'zines -- including a Dungeons and Dragons publication, The Cosmic Balance, and the International Diplomacy Association's journal -- before I got bitten by the newspaper bug.

I learned to write like a journalist at the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, N.Y., under the tutelage of a superb editor named Charlie Varon. Charlie has since flourished as a solo performer, with works such as "Honest Prophets" and "Rush Limbaugh in Night School" as well as his BBC News parodies and New Yorker humor pieces.

Then I went to college and lost myself for four years working on The Harvard Crimson. I came to love every aspect of our daily publishing cycle -- not just assigning stories and writing them, but also laying out pages and picking headline type and shooting half-tones and slicing galleys and pasting up pages and burning negatives and developing plates... Six times a week, we went from idea to wet ink.

At the Crimson, too, I fell in love with writing criticism. After graduation and a brief stint at Cambridge University, I started working as a freelance writer in New York for publications like the Village Voice, the American Lawyer and the Boston Phoenix. In 1983 I moved back to Cambridge (Mass.) to work full-time for the Phoenix, writing theater, movie and book reviews.

In 1986 I followed my friends and colleagues Mike Sragow and Glenda Hobbs to the San Francisco Examiner to become the daily's theater critic. Switched, in 1992, to movies when Mike moved on. Began writing, somewhere in there, about computer-based culture and art.

I was just getting involved in work on the Examiner's web site, the Electric Examiner, when the paper's unions walked off the job in November 1994. During the 12-day strike I got a crash course in webbery: I worked as part of the team that created the San Francisco Free Press, our spontaneous experiment in electronic publishing.

Now I'm publishing again, here.

And, oh yes, in there somewhere I wrote a science fiction novel, Geist in the Machine. (Here's the first chapter.)

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