What Lapham saith in Harpers

Being two brief excerpts from an article by editor Lewis Lapham in Harper's Magazine, April 1997.

Lapham on Hesse's Glass Bead Game…

Much of the current dissatisfaction with the electronic media suggests that their prospective audiences are a good deal more perceptive than they are dreamed of in the marketing theory of Time Warner and Fox Television (cf. the diminished network ratings, the improved standing of C-SPAN, the ability of twelve-year-olds to simultaneously listen to Beck, watch Friends, and work problems in advanced algebra), and before too long I expect the editors at Wired to discover Hermann Hesse's novel The Glass Bead Game.

Lapham on HipBone's 6,000 words…

Hesse's bead game lends itself so obviously to the transcendent aspirations of the Internet that it's probably only a matter of months before Microsoft buys the rights to his name for one of its software programs. The company's marketing strategists might first want to consult Charles Cameron, reachable on the Internet at [email protected], the foremost of 263 correspondents concerned with the implications of Hesse's novel. Meaning to honor the author, not only with a computer game replicating Das Glasperlenspiel but also, in the best of all hypothetical worlds, with a digital notation for the music of ideas, Cameron last July posted 6,000 words of text that introduced as many motifs as might be needed for a choral symphony…

Lewis H. Lapham, “Notebook: The Spanish Armadillo”, Harper's Magazine, April 1997.