Last night I fell down a weird internet rabbit hole.



The wikipedia article for magic realism contains a subheading about “New media”, where two examples are listed. The first is Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story, a legendary piece of hypertext fiction, written in 1987. The second example is Pamela Sacred’s La Voie de l’Ange, “a continuation of The Diary of Anne Frank written in French by a fictional character from her Venetian Cell hypertext saga.” If you’ve never heard of this second story, that’s because it might not exist… I think.

A google search of “Pamela Sacred” returns absolutely nothing about electronic literature or Anne Frank. The mysterious author doesn’t even appear to have a googlegänger, since I can’t find a single person with that name. The closest results are the internet presences of some women named Pamela with connections to things with “Sacred” in the title. Like Pamela Zagarenski, who runs the etsy store Sacred Bee; or Pamela Buck, associate professor at Sacred Heart University. The top result for “Venetian Cell” appears to be a flickr group of the same name, with 1 member and 0 photos, but not much else. “La voie de l’ange” is the name of an actual book, but it’s not written by a fictional character within a hypertext story, it’s by two real-world men named Hugues Paindestre and Frédéric Pirnay.

The only things on the internet I could find relating to Pamela Sacred and her work are pages that word for word quote the wikipedia article for magic realism. Of course, the original article contains no citation.

The inclusion of Sacred’s work in the article in the first place came in 2012, by a user with a Chinese IP address. The user has made a handful of other edits to wikipedia articles over the years, including also adding Pamela Sacred and La Voie de l’Ange to the French language article for magic realism. That edit was removed by another editor only a couple hours later, but the one on English wikipedia has stayed there, for almost five years now.

In confusion, I posted to the article’s Talk page, asking if anyone knew about this. But, given that there’s only been 5 other posts there in the past 2.5 years, I’m not really holding my breath for a quick answer.

This is the part of the story where I might be expected to find a trail leading me to the answer, but that has not happened, at least not yet. Obviously, there are places of the internet I haven’t searched thoroughly yet, and I really do believe that something is out there. Hey, maybe I’m just terrible at googling, and this entire thing is stupid. In any case, until I find what I’m looking for, I figured I would put this little mystery here on my shitty blog with an audience of none, just to get it out into the world. If you know anything about this, please get in touch with me. <3

