Posted by on Jul 23, 2010 in

This web project recounts a rude and astonishing road trip taken with German writers Tina Uebel, Dierk Hagedorn & Folko Huelsebusch during the course of their wild and legendary 1998 official literary visit that produced the cunning, bilingual book Rude Trip.

Here is the full website of El Dorado.

Tina and Dierk had located a Hamburg, Illinois lurking in the smallest print on the state map and insisted that we make a pilgrimage there. In a rental car in hot summer we set out . . . and the rest is hystery.

I’m a great fan of scolling on the web, and especially the oft-forgot horizontal scroll. The endless horizon line on the page recalls the endless, flat horizon of Illinois which so boggled my European guests. This website was subsequently converted into a marginal cartoon that runs the entire length of the book Rude Trip. Twice in fact, once in German, once in English.