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http://jollyroger.com: The WWW Renaissance
The Tragedy of Drakeraft.com
http://drakeraft.com 

CLASSIC NEW YEAR'S GREETINGS: http://classicgreetings.com

REVIEW: The First Novel of the WWW Renaissance. By Eileen M. 
Ciesla. From SpinTech Magazine, December 12th 1999.

	In the first novel of the WWW Renaissance, Elliot 
McGucken sets out to tell the tragic tale of what happens 
when politics pollutes literature. The story is rendered 
through the eyes and in the slacker vernacular, of two 
teenagers (Cliff and Timber), who aim to solve the 
mysterious death of Cliff's brother, Drake Raft, a Princeton 
senior and renegade sonneteer.  

	The novel reads with the speed and humor of a Twain 
odyssey, as the two teenage heroes, armed with a map and 
conviction to solve Drake's murder, catch a train from 
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, bound for Princeton. After 
arriving at Princeton, they encounter the empty-hearted and 
morally vacant college scene which is the basis of much of 
McGucken's humorous--sometimes  biting-- observations about 
the dismantling of the Western Canon and the stifling 
cynicism of students and professors alike.
 
EXCERPT:  (From Chapter 1) http://drakeraft.com

	Like I thought that everything would've made a pretty 
cool video, but Cliff said that the whole video industry 
thing sucks, and by the time they got anything of ours out 
on the air over MTV, our story will have evaporated, even if 
we laid down some cool riffs with it all.  It'd have to have 
a bunch of those swimsuit super models on fire, like the 
chick who graduated early from Chapel Hill High and scored 
herself a Porsche.  You probably caught her in Sports 
Illustrated--they put her in even though she has red hair. 
Or else the video would end up on VH1, and the old VJ's 
would throw in a flock of dolphins and environmental stuff 
to offset the sex and fire and death, all of which sounded 
pretty cool to me.  I pointed out that one proverb thing, 
that a picture's worth a thousand words, and Cliff said yeah 
sure, if the picture's of a face or barn or something, but 
when it comes down to pictures of the ungraspable phantom of 
life, words are priceless.  So Cliff figured we'd write a 
book and sell it off the website Drake had set up before 
he'd passed on--drakeraft.com.  Plus that way no one could 
mess with the true story, Cliff said, unless they read it 
wrong, and then it'd only be ruined in a private sort of 
way.   But there's not much danger of that--nobody I know 
reads. Now I won't be able to say everything exactly as it 
happened during our heart of darkness odyssey, but Cliff 
said that that's no big deal, and I shouldn't worry about 
it; it'll all be cool just as long as we get the story down 
before it escapes our heads, and then if there're any holes, 
we can fill them in with whatever we feel.  My verbal 
handling skills are about as good as Cliff's Randy Rhodes 
guitar solos, so you know Cliff should be the one recording 
all this in ink and stuff, knowing all the bigger words that 
he's always learning out of those thick banned books he's 
always reading, like the Bible.  But his dad shipped him off 
to some camp in California for the summer, where he's 
supposed to find God or somebody, even though Cliff escaped 
the first day he got there to go work for a startup in 
Silicon Valley, christiansword.com.  The startup's stock 
options were better than the summer camp's, Cliff said. You 
know how the whole book thing was his idea, but soon as he 
got out West, Cliff wigged out on me.  He sent me a postcard 
of the Rainbow saying how he's got no time for words, 'cause 
he's on to some combination unification thing of quantum 
mechanics and relativity, which he says came out of either 
side of Einstein's brain and have hated each-other ever 
since.  He's putting it all in our physics appendix at 
drakeraft.com, if you're in to science fiction.  Plus he 
says he's been too much afflicted by Drake's poems to write 
straight, except for to write out all the speech things we 
heard during our weekend Princeton adventure--he keeps 
rhyming by mistake.  

	Cliff kept telling me to put a lot of cynicism and 
irony in the story, as that's the kind of literary brand 
that's selling these days, and his nagging got to the point 
where I told him to go ahead and write the book.  But by 
then he'd switched over to telling me to take all the 
cynicism and irony out, as that would be pretty ironic--but 
I have no idea what the big deal about irony and cynicism is 
these days--I mean I'm just telling the story like it is, 
and if they show up, then so be it.  And besides, they're 
nothing new: Jesus came down here to speak the moral truth 
and save us, and they crucified him, and then they made a religion out of all the things he said and did--now that's pretty ironic, and if you think about it long enough, and nothing else, you'll probably get a bit cynical, but like it's not like we invented irony or anything--it was born with us.  Cliff said that even if he did write the book, he'd need me to dumb it down for the editorial elite people, so I might as well just dumb it down the first time through.  He said he trusted my talents and abilities, but that's mostly because he doesn't want to do it himself--usually when Cliff trusts your abilities, it's because he doesn't feel like doing it.  
	
	But I have to admit that this time he might really be 
tied up, because on top of everything else, his dad's 
forcing him to take some classes that're going to make him 
ace his SATs so he can get into the college of his dad's 
choice for real, even though we just got into Princeton this 
past April, as these phony people.  We sent away for 
application things, and we made up some fake love-child 
names like River and Cloudy Summers, and we filled the forms 
out saying how we were two orphaned brothers who'd been 
adopted by some charitable Aerosmith roadies.  In the spaces 
provided for events which changed our lives, we told about 
how we'd traveled the world and been cultured by our roady 
family, having seen the Mardis Gras in the French Quarter, 
up in France, and Liverpool too, where Ozzy was born.  We 
said we'd watched Bloody Scully sell out the Tokyo Dome four 
nights in a row down in South Europe as a cultural diversity 
exchange program, and we'd even seen the historical sites 
where Pink Floyd had rocked down the Wall in Berlin and 
kicked face-ism's ass for good and cured AIDS too, for Kurt 
Cobain's benefit, 'cause he's like dead.

http://drakeraft.com

http://jollyroger.com: The WWW Renaissance
The Tragedy of Drakeraft.com
http://drakeraft.com


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