cool video

“Hypertext.” When I was a college student, I was obsessed with the idea that, some day, we would all be creating and consuming information— not just information, but literature—via portable devices like cell phones, when the hyperlink might become as central to reading and writing as the sentence. Since then, that day has come and gone. There are millions of people out there sporting an iPhone, an Android, a Kindle, an iPad, a netbook, a tablet, what-have-you. This year alone, there has been a doubling of the number of people who e-readers and tablet computers. Since then, nearly everyone I know can communicate with nearly everyone else I know, simply by pasting a hyperlink, sometimes without adding any additional information at all. By all accounts, this seems to be the moment I was waiting for.

On the other hand, I’ve just encountered two accounts that wonder about “why the book’s future never happened” and “the problem of how hypertext poems composed in the late 1990s have aged” by Paul Laforge and Benjamin Paloff, respectively.

What happened?

These two accounts differ in their approaches to that question, but they both agree pretty closely on the problem.

“hypertext fiction is in a tough place now. Born into a world that wasn’t quite ready for it, and encumbered with lousy technology and user-hostile interface design, it got a bad reputation, at least outside of specialized reading circles. At the same time, it’s impossibly hard to create, one of the only modes of fiction I know of which is more demanding than the novel. (And then add to that the need to create a user interface, and maybe a content-management system, and is it going to be an app? Suddenly your antidepressants aren’t nearly strong enough to get you out of bed.)”— Paul Laforge

“The paradox of this proliferation of online information is that, while by no means immune to decay, the information is quickly superseded by new dispatches, which in turn accelerates its aging. As we have seen, a book of poems published on acid-free paper in 1997 can easily look like a book published in 2011; in the United States, it is not uncommon for a book to go through multiple printings with little or no change in design. But a hypertext poem coded in 1997 shows its age almost immediately, whether because its design elements reflect earlier stages of a rapidly changing programming environment, or perhaps because the coding requires now-obsolete software.”— Benjamin Paloff

If the world doesn’t yet have a strong, ongoing body of hypertext literature, could it be because the idea was born before the widespread popularity of web standards? Are the early hypertexts akin to the early attempts at bookmaking, and so will hypertext literature require an element of conservation science in order to survive? Will it be transcribed or upgraded, the way the ancient writing was transcribed from scroll, to manuscript, to book, to database? (Would cloud-based bookstores prove to be the dawn of a new dark age once the power goes out?)

I’m asking many questions here. I don’t propose to answer any of them here, merely to invite conversation.

Is hypertext literature dead? I don’t think so, but I do think it is ready for its “web 2.0” moment, wherein it becomes something easier to do, something everyone can enjoy. I think it might also help to consider the idea broadly, because in many ways it has caught on, and it isn’t aging, if the idea is allowed to include: video games, blogs, net art… the socially-networked/narrated identities of millions of people. I suppose it is possible that the Web 2.0 moment IS the hypertext literature moment. If that’s the case, then there’s just one troubling thing, as Laforge points out:

“And then … nothing happened. The Wikipedia entry for hypertext fiction lists no works published after 2001, and although Wikipedia isn’t the final word on anything, you have to think, if someone had written a hypertext fiction, this is where they’d want to tell you about it. The form’s seeming demise is puzzling…”

(Update: as it turns out, the authors of hypertext fiction don’t seem to use Wikipedia “to tell you about it”. Instead, these authors use things like conferences of the Modern Language Association, a large and growing database of electronic literature sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a series of anthologies published by the Electronic Literature Organization at MIT. So, the work is out there, if you know where to look.)

Maybe it’s just that “hypertext fiction” is the wrong search query. Let’s try another one, which yields some very familiar-looking results. Let’s try “conceptual literature” instead:

“With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography. By that, I mean that writing has encountered a situation similar to that of painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do that, to survive, the field had to alter its course radically.” — Kenneth Goldsmith

The time might be right, after all. I agree with Laforge’s conclusion, “I believe that the promise of hypertext fiction is worth pursuing, even now, or maybe especially now.”

That pursuit: what should it look like, now that it is 2012?

The first sequence of chapters of Dreaming Methods’ latest digital fiction project is now online to experience – with future chapters to follow. Told through a series of semi-interactive scenes and video sequences where narrative fragments have to be “found” in order to progress through the story, Consensus Trance begins with a protagonist who has just returned from a school reunion where strangely none of his old friends remember the same things he does.

I came across an interesting distinction between “writing” and “word processing”.

Writing is getting the words right. Word processing is… processing. It’s taking what you’ve written and doing stuff with it. Either bolding this or italicizing that or centering the headline or inserting a table or tweaking the margins or changing the font and sizes or adding color or… That’s word processing or page layout. … The keyboard and the return key is all you need. That’s writing. Once you’ve got the words right you can take that text and process it in a word processor or page layout program later. … When you’re about to write that’s all you should be ready to do: write. Leave the rest for another day. There are words to get right.

I like this distinction between writing and processing.

What about emphasis? Sure, the italics, or whatever, that display that emphasis are “processed”, but the emphasis itself is written. How can I indicate emphasis — how can I write emphasis, when someone else has determined for me, in advance, that emphasis must “come later”. It doesn’t come later. Later, I might forget. Emphasis is not processed. It is written.

On a similar note, I wonder: what about links? Are they written, or are they processed?

Artkrush, the online arts magazine, published a new issue today, about digital art. I find myself asking… is this art? The magazine’s editorial tone seems painfully aware of that question:

While the phrase “digital art” used to evoke thoughts of cheesy Photoshopped dreamscapes and clunky animated GIF graphics, it now applies to an ever-expanding, sophisticated field of interactive web projects, mutated video games, and hacktivist interventions.

Confounding critics who have sounded the death knell throughout its development, Net art has continued to thrive as a conceptual medium for artists and arts organizations.

I decided to side with my personaly interest (bias?), to ignore these “confounded critics” and look for myself, to see whether I liked any of this art.

What do you think?

The work of Cory Archangel intrigued me. Admittedly, at first, I didn’t want it to. Cory Archangel makes a pastiche of images from early video games. Hacking as collage, interesting… The artist describes the project.

The projects working title is called “Mario Movie” it is a secret project by myself, Ben Jones, Jessica Ciocci, and Jacob Ciocci (Paper Rad). I’m doin the programming and paper rad is gonna do set design and screenplay!!!! (were gonna do it all over email, of course….) Also maybe there will be some special guest appearances by ???????. cool. it is a hacked 8bit Super Mario Brothers 1 cartridge. i will hack the game cartridge and totally reprogram it… so when you put in THIS cartridge, instead of the game, you are presented with a 15 minute movie using all original graphics from the game [without actually altering the original factory soldered grahics ROM]. This is similar to my cloud cartridge, but 40 times as awesome. The movie is gonna be about how Mario’s world is falling apart. Like mad max, but in 8bits. Picture title screens, messed up fantasy worlds, castles floating on rainbow colored 8bit clouds, waterfalls, underwater dungeon nightmare rave scapes, dance parties, floating / mushrooms level scenes, Mario alone on a cloud crying, fireball flicker patterns, and video synth knitted 60 frames per second seizure vidz. Each scene will also have music. & All being generated by this one 32k 1984 cartridge!!!!!!!!!!! basically it is mario brothers totally rearranged into this amazing impossible 8bit world….

The end result is an installation, where the central feature of the space is that movie.

Leonardo Digital published a review of a book of hypertext theory entitled, “Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Media” The book applies a method of close analysis to new media. The review describes the book.

The book is actually a collection of nine essays divided into three sections––Hypertext, Internet Text, and Cybertext––with each section containing three essays. And so, in the first section, one finds analyses of Strickland’sTrue North, Shelley Jackson’sPatchwork Girl, and M. D. Coverley’sCalifia. Section two offers essays on Geoff Ryman’s253 and Rick Pryll’sLies, Raymond Federman and Anne Burdick’sEating Books, and another on Ryman’s253. The final section focuses on Darren Aronofsky’s website for his film,Requiem for a Dream; the interface forebr (electronic book review); and the theoretical views underlyingGrammatron by its author Mark Amerika.

Leonardo is yet another wonderful publication by the MIT Press. Leonardo is a magazine about “work at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and technology”. That’s not all! These folks publish all kinds of stuff (all published by The MIT Press):

• the art, science and technology journal Leonardo;
• the Leonardo Music Journal;
• the Leonardo Book Series;
• the electronic journal,
• Leonardo Electronic Almanac;
• and our World Wide Web Site, Leonardo On-Line

From the New York Times Books Section’s article, Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry’s Rules:

“an experiment of how books might be in the future.” That is one of the hottest debates in the book world right now, as publishers, editors and writers grapple with the Web’s ability to connect readers and writers more quickly and intimately, new technologies that make it easier to search books electronically and the advent of digital devices that promise to do for books what the iPod has done for music: making them easily downloadable and completely portable.

Electronic Literature: Discourses, Communities, Traditions by Thomas Swiss, has interesting things to say about the role of collaborative creativity, and something he calls “hybridity”. Swiss emphasizes the act of writing, over the scholarly or public reaction to it: art over theory.

To hear the critics tell it, one problem with emergent digital literary and art forms is that they don’t yet have established stars. Where’s our Shakespeare of the Screen? Our Pixel Picasso? How long before we have a Digital DeMille? The assumption is that we’ll have them eventually — undisputed geniuses working in what is now generally called “New Media.” But behind this assumption is another assumption, one with a long, sometimes thorny history – that the “best” or “most important” art is created by an individual, a single pair of hands in the study or studio.

. . . make something, which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is . . . nonstable . . . . . . Make something indeterminate, which always looks different, the shape of which cannot be predicted precisely . . . . . . make something, which cannot "perform" without the assistance of its environment . . . . . . make something, which reacts to light and temperature changes, is subject to air currents and depends, in its functioning, on the forces of gravity . . . . . . make something, which the "spectator" handles, which he plays and thus animates it . . . . . . make something, which lives in time and make the spectator experience time . . . . . . articulate something natural . . .

Hans Haacke, 1966

I’ve finished a draft of my story. I call it “A House Without Walls“. It was submitted, in the typical last-minute way, for inclusion in the first annual Electronic Literature Collection, sponsored by The Electronic Literature Organization. If it is chosen, it will join other works in a volume that readers can download or borrow from a library. Cross your fingers for me?

If you read my last hypertext story, “To Win, Simply Play.”, you might recognize some of the same material, a small part of that older story. I hope my revision has improved the way the story flows.

Should I give you some long winded, writerly and obtuse introduction to it, its themes, and its reasons for being? Maybe, but only if you’re interested.

It is good to feel so finished with this story, after so long (even though I do have another version in mind, but that’s more of a technical representation than a rewriting).

I’ve spent the day rewriting my hypertext. Probably because of the amount of time I’ve already spent with it – it might also be that it has been a while and so I’m coming to the process with a fresh perspective and a renewed intentions – it seems easier this time around. I found a way to go about it. I thought I would post some notes about it, for others to see, and discuss.

From the beginning, I took down the things I wanted to say, from a previous draft, and wrote to fill in any gaps. When I felt I had expressed a complete idea, I stopped. I reread what I had written, looking for “words that yield“, or anything that suggests a next point in the story. I found a couple of options, marked them to become links, and returned to my previous draft. I found the parts of the text that suited me for the “next” idea. Right after the section I had just written, I took down the things I wanted to say, and wrote to fill in any gaps, and so on . . .

There’s nothing like adventure like a deadline, the delivery of that swift kick in the pants… sweet sweet motivation!

I’ve got just the deadline I need, too. Four days from now. At the end of January, submissions will close for The Electronic Literature Collection. What’s that, you ask?

an annual publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. The publication will be made available both online, where it will be available for download for free, and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution.

Its time to get around to it, and do something with the electronic novella I wrote. I’ll be much closer to my goals for it if I edit it, with an eye on the criteria for this colllection.

Literary quality will be the chief criterion for selection of works. Other aspects considered will include innovative use of electronic techniques, quality and navigability of interface, and adequate representation of the diverse forms of electronic literature in the collection as a whole.

The Institute for the Future of the Book announces the winners of their “Born Digital” competition.

The competition called for works that address the changing structure of the “page” and the manner in which text and illustration work together in the digital environment. We chose three winners: Anne Frances Wysocki for her poem “Leaved Life;” Juliet Davis for a game-based narrative called, “Pieces of Herself;” Kevin Henry and Rick Pawela for their design textbook, “Rapid Ideation Sketching.” Please read more about our winners below and visit their work online.

My bike-courier roomies are planning a bike race. The interesting thing, to me, about this bike race is that it is a “choose your own adventure” race. Racers will arrive at predetermined checkpoints, where they will discover a new chapter in the story of their adventure through baltimore. The object of the game is to stay alive!

Of course, the reason this is all so interesting to me, in addition to the fun factor, is my interest in non-linear narrative. Journaling this event might be an interesting challenge.

Check out the Shock Trauma Bike Race Event Page if you’d like to participate. Stay tuned for more details…

Every so often, some pundit tells the world that the death of print is on its way. Allusions to Gutenberg are all around. The relationship between technology is podered, etc. Robert McCrum adds to this discussion with a recent article in The Guardian entitled “E-read all about it” (source: Grumpy Old Bookman)

It’ll be ten years or more until a viable electronic book is produced? Why! Can’t they just tweak the iPod a bit?

Jakob Nielsen is a noted expert on the subject of internet usability, a subject commonly known as “user-friendliness”. Nielsen’s October 17th article, Weblog Usability, has been linked to and discussed all over the place.

I’ll go ahead and jump on that bandwagon, by taking issue with something in that article. The overall premise of the article is a good one, that web logs should be informative, easy to navigate, and that they should contain certain key elements: author biographies, main ideas, etc. Here is the part that bugs me: Issue Number 10.

10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn’t be taken too seriously.

Aside from the fact that this isn’t really a “usability issue”, it bothers me that this is true, and it is true. I’ll admit to personally looking down upon those MySpace blogs, because they’re so ugly, unfriendly, and lacking features, but is that fair? Is it appropriate to prejudice something published online, because its author chose to use a free service to publish it? Is it fair to presuppose that the blogs provided by blogger, or friendster, etc. are somehow lacking in the level of technological sophistication compared to other blog software. They are not any more or less sophisticated. Most of the free internet publishing systems out there are actually quite good. What’s especially good about them is that they are generally usable even if you are an AOL user, naïve when it comes to computers. They assume a certain level of inability with or disregard for maintaining those “usability issues”, on the part of their users, and so they take care of those things, only providing templates that work for example. Yes, the free services are limited, and many of them contain advertising, but I don’t see that as a valid reason to judge their content to be any less deserving of attention. You have to read more than the address bar to make a decision like that.

A.J. Liebling once said that “freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” Why shouldn’t everyone be able to have, and to use, a free press, free-of-charge?

It has always bothered me that I have a website called “No Categories” and yet its contents are still arranged categorically. It seems I’m not alone in this.

Michael Heilemann, the video game guru, has given a new structure to his beautiful website, Binary Bonsai. He explains…

In DC after the firewords today, I noticed an article in the Metro section of the Washington Post. Politicians Deal With Newcomer, The Blog: Va. Candidates Find Help, Lies on Web

First came this posting on the site virginia2005.blogspot.com: “David isn’t the only Englin with designs on public office. . . . There’s going to be an Englin running for Congress in 2006, but not the one you think. I know for a fact that Shayna has already been getting pledges for money for her race.”

Then a slightly more disturbing note appeared on the same Web site: “Driving home tonight, guess what I saw on the Englins’ front lawn??? Democrat Greg Werkheiser. I walked back to try to listen into the conversation but couldn’t hear much without being obvious.”

In addition to the writing about strong language mentioned in the previous post, incisive offers reviews of writing tools: software that helps writers. The list isn’t very long, but it’s a great idea. So far, only Macintosh software has been reviewed. Unfortunately, Tinderbox hasn’t made it on the list yet.

Not all the “writing tools” out there are software. ScribblingWoman provides a link to Writing Tools, little tips like this one:

“Good writers move up and down the ladder of abstraction. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wedding rings and baseball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like “freedom” and “literacy.”

There could be more writing tools out there. Some questions come to mind:

• What’s out there, other than Microsoft Word?
• Are there better spell/grammar/style checkers?
• Is there an html (standards?) friendly word processor?

A recent theme among the people who make websites seems to be that there is not enough emphasis on the content of a website. Their battle call is “Content is King” People who make websites seem preoccupied with visual presentation, and they do not seem to be concerned as much with the substance of the presentation.

Zeldman says, to communicate visually one must first have something to communicate about.

Recent discussion has produced a small handful of tools or strategies that emphasize content during the web-building process. Still, the vast majority of resources out there are centered around presentation more than content.

A list Apart, a respected web magazine for people who make websites, gives roughly half the number of articles about content as there are articles about design . Many of the “content” articles are about little bits of code, more than they are about content.

There are three very good articles about content.

• 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web, by Mark Bernstein will “help you keep the good words (and readers) coming.
• How to Write a Better Weblog, by Dennis A. Mahoney shares “tips to enhance the writing on your personal site, blog, journal, etc.”
• Reading Design is a good article for the design-minded to read in order to reconsider the reading experience.

for the ever-ongoing revision of “To Win, Simply Play” a friend of mine has helped me work out an xml schema. I don’t really write xml but basically it works like this: Each node can contain annotations in addition to links. The annotations are text that appears depending on whether the reader is interested in it or not. that appearance is determined, in part, according to what has been read previous to arrival at that node. There are also links, of course. the xml can spit its content into either a flash interface or a text interface.

My question is, how should I write/edit/arrange the copy so that I don’t go insane, and so that it can be easily input into the schema?

Ariana Geogriou is the new intern over at Eastgate this summer. She’ll be working with Tinderbox, in order to make tutorials for the software. Read all about it on Ariana’s Blog.

I’m not sure what Mr. J. Nathan Matias is up to right now, but I like it. It appears to be fiction, entitled, Balustrade. The story has definately got my interest.

It’s dim now.

Something about a girl, I think. Yes. It must have been. Something more? But I remember the other man’s eyes. They too, like the lanterns in the windows, were expectant. Why was he there? The glow moseyed over the rough floorboards, skipping over the cracks and shadows. The light vaguely slid through the porch railings and settled on

Oh.

His gun.

Read Balustra, by J. Nathan Matias…

Update: a lot has changed in the world of digital books, since I wrote this post in 2005.  Devices like the Kindle and the Nook and the iPad have changed the way we read digital books, and have fanned the fire for the debate about their format(s). Website applications, like the Google Books app, have introduced a new way to store and retrieve digital books, which keeps users from ever having an actual copy of the book on their devices, and thus prevents the transmission of those files. It seems that books are being digitized and consumed digitally, but that it isn’t exactly like the digitization of music.

Beatrice has recently discussed The New York Public Library’s addition of downloadable audiobooks to its online holdings. I noticed a complaint that I also have about my college’s online library.

Both types of files expire after three weeks, after which you can always check them out again if you weren’t finished yet, although I’ll admit I find this bit confusing: “If the desired eBook is not available, you may place a hold on the title.” Isn’t the whole point of making books downloadable that through the miracle of mechanical reproduction they’re always available

I’ve got a few thoughts about this sort of thing, about the format and availability of electronic books.

Format

First of all, I really don’t think we’re going to be able to fully reap the benefits of that “miracle of mechanical reproduction”, where electronic books are concerned, because all of it so confusing. There are so many different file formats! There are too many of these formats. When we read an electronic text, we might read it as a web page, as a .pdf file, as a .txt file, or as one of the innumerable, proprietary “ebook” formats. Microsoft makes one, Adobe holds the reigns to the .pdf files. I don’t think that the average user wants or needs to be savvy enough to deal with all these different formats. It isn’t practical to have so many.

All of this contrasts sharply with the digitization of another medium: music. While there is also a variety of formats to find your music in, somehow things have settled down for now so that nearly everyone uses the .mp3. All the different software, on all the different kinds of computers, and thus all the different people can use this single, ubiquitous format. So far as I know, nobody is holding the reigns on the .mp3. I can make an .mp3 file, you can make one, even my graddad can make one. Its simple and easy.

Ironically, there has been a ubiquitous file format for text (.txt) for years longer than there has been one for music, yet for one literature class I needed five different pieces of software to read the variously formatted electronic formats for the course’s books. I was the only one of the fifteen students who had the patience for all of this. My peers would prefer to spend all that money on the paper books, rather than stress over the electronic versions, even though I found them all for free.

I can’t wait for the day that I have a “media player” for my book library. Something that collects and displays my books the way iTunes or Winamp collects and displays my music. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were something as ridiculously easy to use as an iPod, something to read books on? I’ve looked at those electronic book readers out there. They don’t seem very good to me. Too expensive, too complicated…

Maybe its just that these things do not exist due to a lack of demand. Video games and music are more marketable than electronic books?

Availability

It makes absolutely no sense to me that a library would ask for you to “return” an electronic book. The only reason to return a paper book to a library would be so that somebody else could borrow that object. Can’t the library send me a duplicate copy? Of course, there are issues with royalties and copyright. Google has caught a bit of guff with regard to those issues. Google plans to digitize hundreds of books, in a searchable way. This is a wonderful thing, but it isn’t making any money for the authors and publishers of those books, is it?

Again, there is a parallel in the electronic music scene. The compromise seems to be that, for a dollar a song, you can “check out” any song you like from the various services out there, and in return for that dollar, you get to own the song. People seem to be willing to do this, even though it is generally preferable to get the files for free.

With books, its just as easy to get the files for free, provided that those books have entered the public domain. (I suppose I wouldn’t balk at the idea of large scale book piracy, like we’ve already seen with music, but I don’t think we’ll ever see it.) If a book isn’t in the public domain, it isn’t likely to be available online. Surely the publishers have electroic copies of their books, before they ever go to press. Don’t they want to sell those?

Perhaps this entire post is nothing more than an expression of my ignorance about electronic publishing, but I hope I’ve been able to express my hopes for where it might go: that it might become easier, more fun to collect electronic books the way so many people do with their music.

I have just discovered (via Mark Bernstein) an essay, in hypertext, by David Kolb called Hypertext as Subversive?. The essay introduces itself by saying:

Universities are said to be places of critical discussion and evaluation that train new cognitive explorers, make better maps, and also create new territories for exploration. We are all familiar with the internal walls that limit that creativity. These walls may may be implicit in the very ideal of a university. Could hypertext linking help resist and subvert those walls, and undo what is too often the university’s one-way meta-position?

This essay is self-referential: it works around a debate about whether media like itself are inevitably linked to processes of homogenization and oppression.

Its interesting to me that I never found this essay while working in an academic institution to create a hypertext.

I enjoyed the fact that the essay begins with an early link to how to read this essay. Ironic really, considering that one of the benefits of a hypertext is a variety of paths through it, that there would be a need for a users manual.

Google has just launched a new endeavor called Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.

Basically, the two steps to participating in Google Sitemaps are:

1. Generate a Sitemap in the correct format using Sitemap Generator.
2. Update your Sitemap when you make changes to your site.

As it turns out, there’s already a Google Sitemap plugin for WordPress to make the content management include a google sitemap.

I guess its serendipity. I spent part of Friday afternoon updating the links page to reflect a long list of literary websites, resources, and weblogs. I did this with the hope that NoCategories might become a more literary endevor.

Today, I recieved an email requesting that I write a book review, and an offer for a free review copy.

I know I complained earlier about all the “Buzz Balls & Hype” that can engulf a website that writes book reviews.

It seems as if the realm of the literary blog is already beginning to diverge. There are the so called “literary blogs” that discuss reading and writing, and then there are the ones that serve promotional purposes for a struggling writer, the so-called “author website”. Need I bother to mention that I prefer the former to the later?

Its not just something that happens to literary websites. I’ve noticed a recent proliferation of advertizing on the Gawker family of blogs. On one recent entry — it is a very funny article called “Lies I Have Told Verizon DSL Support Today” — the ads are so thick you can barely find the text of the article! Those blogs are starting to remind me of the mid-90′s websites, with all the clutter, etc. Blogging Pro put it well, with the headline: “Gizmodo Revamps RSS Feeds to Make More Money”

To the credit of the Gizomdo Blogs, Blogging Pro mentions:

Gizmodo seems to have developed a fair policy of delivering partial ad-free feeds or full feeds with advertising enclosed. Readers choice. The ads are placed every fifth entry so the reader is not bombarded with sales pitches.

It seems that Web Syndication is a viable way to avoid the kind of bombardment I’m complaining about.

To return to the topic at hand, I’m resolved not to let that kind bombardment happen in my little internet garden here. While I’m delighted to get a free book for review, and would be delighted to do so in the future, I’ll do my very best to be fair in my assesment of such a book.

Besides, any press is good press.

The Reading Experience mentions something in the very words I often find myself using for a “screenful” — that is, the electronic equivalent of a pageful.

I have received some Disinformation that

GOOGLE has plans that will dramatically improve the results of internet news searches, by ranking them according to quality rather than simply by their date and relevance to search terms.

Mark Bernstein responds to Jason Kottke’s recent, popular post about “A Whole New Internet“, where the main question seems to be what will happen now that the dot-com bust has busted itself. Money has come back into the vacuum. What will that do? Both Kottke and Bernstein seem to be cautionary about the future.

Kottke says:

Now that the money is back, the focus will necessarily shift even though, as Janice notes, we’ll be a little wiser about it this time around. There will be less innovation and activity from individuals because they’ll be snapped up by companies to work on their projects for their customers. The information flowing out of companies, even those that are pretty open, will be limited because of competitive and legal concerns. A person who — when she was unemployed 3 years ago — could spend a couple weeks in releasing a neat web app for anyone to use because she wanted to or could say what she wanted on her blog will now be putting all her coding energies into an application that serves a few customers & needs to be cash-flow positive and won’t have the time to post anything to her blog (and can’t say much about what she’s working on anyway unless all her readers want to sign NDAs). (Not saying this is bad…this is just what companies are for. But what’s good for companies, their shareholders, and their customers isn’t necessarily what’s good for environment those companies inhabit. On the other hand, everyone I know has more work than they know what to do with and that’s a good thing too.)

Bernstein adds:

We don’t want a static A-List where ten pioneer bloggers become the next Rupert Murdoch and everyone else is perpetually consigned to LiveJournal; we want variety and novelty and excitement and, yes, we want a blogosphere where you can grow to be Kottke if that’s what you want.

I’ve been pondering exactly what we can do to make sure the tail remains a good place to be, and to make sure that there isn’t a sign at the big end of the tail that reads “Sorry: we’re full.”

One step in the right direction, for those so called “tail end” bloggers, might be the kind of blogging that friendster, and similar sites like Blogger, provide. By offering state-of-the-art html output, quality designs, and syndication, these blogs offer more technological sophistication than the average user would ever have the patience to develop on their own — aside from that, it allows others, who may already have the ablity to build such things on their own, to go beyond those things. (Its easier to build on top of a blogger site than it is with others.) Most importantly, making good blogs readily available to anyone who wants one is very good for the flow of ideas. That flow of ideas is something Kottke dwelt on in his post, mentioning that much of the “new” internet came about as a result of the bust, where suddenly unemployed tech-types had time to play with things rather than requirements to work on them. Now that blogs exist, the easier they are to build, the more they leave room for that very important sandbox effect.

As for sites like LiveJournal and MySpace, there is the potential that these users might be left out, and end up publishing B-list content – content that looks like crap, doesn’t syndicate, and is difficult to navigate and link to, etc. I’ve already noticed that dozens and dozens of my friends have begun using MySpace, for example, to start their own forays into the blogging world, and I’m happy for them! I am also annoyed on their behalf that their blogs aren’t nearly as good as they would have been if they had chosen any number of the other options out there. I think they chose MySpace for its particular brand of social networking, which isn’t slow, like friendster, or empty like Orkut.

• I wonder if social networking is the “B-list” to CMS Blog’s “A-List”?
• Perhaps that relationship will reverse?
• I wonder if the more private aspect of these smaller networks might obstruct the flow of ideas, or at least limit the ideas to those in certain circles.
• I wish I had one single unified interface for interacting with all the blogs, the social networks, and the memes that I try to follow on a daily basis.
• In fact, I wish that all of it would arrive in my inbox everyday, like some sort of user-friendly newspaper.

What seemed promising in a post on 3quarksdaily, about the promise held by the internet for novellists, “Could cyberspace be the novel’s best friend?“, turned out to be more hype about the publicity-power of the internet.

The article in the Villiage Voice is calledBook Smart: Could cyberspace be the novel’s best friend? Litblogs take off—and grow up. sets out to give book blogging some of the journalistic attention that has lately been applied largely to political blogging. Unfortunately for this reader, most of that attention has to do with marketing. It is as if to say that the only thing that can come positively from blogging is money, or that the only way to support novellists is by advertising, as if thats all that book blogs are.

That wasn’t the whole topic of the article. There was an interesting comparison between today’s blogs and the earlier ezines.

An editor at feed.com back in the Internet boom days of the ’90s, Lipsyte believes the new wave has a very different agenda from the Web pioneers who founded content-heavy sites like Feed and Suck. “These bloggers are not so evangelistic about the medium,” he says. “For them, it’s not about using technology to create a new world. It’s about creating a space that isn’t available elsewhere to talk about the thing they care about—which happens to be books.”

Here’s hoping they don’t sell out too much.

It seems the social network and the blogsphere are coming together into a new thing. (again, with the buzzwords)

Could it be that a trend has begun? I noticed a while back that other social networks had blogs as part of them, MySpace being one of them. The advantage a Friendster blog has over a MySpace Blog is that Friendster offers a RSS feed for a blog. MySpace doesn’t. LiveJournal is one of the largest social networks out there. Its also basically a blogging site, more so than it is a social network really.

I’m frustrated with the variety of “social networks”, to be honest. As far as I am concerned, there is one internet, and I have one “social network” of my own. However, with different cliques of friends dispersed, some on this network, some on that one… It becomes more difficult to communicate easily. Technology is getting in my way here. A social network offers, what, a “profile” which is more limited than a “home page”, and a way to send, also more limited, but somehow glorified email “messages” to my friends. Oh, and don’t forget about the advertisements everywhere. I do prefer ads to fees, but they’re both party poopers.

Many of my friends don’t feel so down on this stuff, on the other hand. They’re gobbling up memberships to every social network that comes down the pike. They’re sharing pictures. They’re making blogs, forums, rants, raves, etc. And that’s great. I don’t feel so lonely on the internet anymore. They like it, because its easy, and its “new”, so its fun.

Cnet reports

The company that earned some notoriety for firing a blogger is now bringing bloggers into the fold–and hoping to collect fees in the process.

Friendster, a so-called social-networking site of linked personal profiles, launched a beta, or test version, of Friendster Blogs, a section of the site that lets people post and archive the daily musings known as blogs.

To my growing list of writings that are presented with flash animation I would like to add:

= = = THE MINOTAUR PROJECT = = =

The Minotaur Project is part of a hypermedia novel in verse which explores contemporary issues of identity using the framework of the classical myth. The Minotaur Project is a poem cluster taken from a hypermedia novel in verse (as yet untitled), which reimagines the classical myth of Kore.

The Minotaur Project draws from the premise of the classical myth, but re-imagines Minotaur as a combination of human and machine. A disembodied intelligence looping endlessly in the computer’s labyrinth, attempting to understand itself and others without that primary means of connection to the sensate world, the body.

You might be asking yourself, what, exactly is “a poem cluster taken from a hypermedia novel in verse “. Well, read it and find out! What interests me the most about the Minotaur Project are its classical allusions. I am interested in tinkering with these myself, partially because of having read T.S. Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent in college, but also because I like the myths.

John Battelle’s Searchblog posted a copy of the press release announcing the 1.0 upgrade of the increacingly interesting Google Desktop Search. Highlights include better features, the ability to use a search engine function on the contents of your own computer, etc.

But wait, there is more. The new GDS will also create a floating “search box” independent of any browser, which you can place anywhere you want on top of Windows. Hmmmm. This sounds very, er, post browser, very…Web 2.0. See my musings on how web-based apps are starting to do to Windows what Windows did to DOS here….and man, this sure feels a lot like a paving stone down that particular road.

This just in from brokentype.com …

Monster Island

the manhattan zombie apocalypse
an ipod zombie zovel

by David Wellington

There are different ways to read this novel

1. To read the novel online visit
   www.brokentype.com/monster
2. Download the novel
3. Read the novel on an iPod:
   • Download the file
   • unzip it
   • and
     copy it into your ipod’s notes folder.
     It works, try it.
   • To Read:
     Scroll to Extras > Notes > Island.

Write to the author at:
contactmonster at hot mail dot com.
© 2004-2005, David Wellington

The Institute for the Future of the Book has posted a review of a recent article in The Atlantic Monthly. The review compares this article to hypertext, by calling it “hyperlinks in print”

ifBook describes David Foster Wallace’s cover story about talk radio in the April issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

Wallace is well-known for his copious use of footnotes & endnotes, and this article is no exception. However, either Wallace or The Atlantic’s art director have decided to treat his digressions differently in this case: words or phrases in the main text that signal a jumping-off point have lightly colored boxes drawn around them, rather than a superscripted numeral after them. In the print edition, boxes in the margins – one immediately thinks of windows – with notes in them appear, color-coded to match the set-off phrases. Some of the notes have notes; they get more boxes of their own.

The review also makes an interesting note about the interface a reader encounters when using Adobe’s Acrobat PDF reader.

The Atlantic Monthly has often served as a haven for hypertext ideas in print. Vannevar Bush wrote the essay“As We May Think,” which was published in the July, 1945 edition ofThe Atlantic Monthly. Both call “for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our knowledge”.

Approaching the end of World War, when American Science had been devoted extensively toward developments for the war efforts. Vanevar Bush proposes that future progress depends upon, and should “implement the ways in which man produces, stores, and consults the record of the race”. He argues this based on the fact that the complete store of information is growing more complex and specialized. By the middle of the 20th century, specialized information was not necessarily accessible to the few specialists capable of understanding it. Further complicating the accessibility of information was that fact that all of it was in print, occupying so much physical space and so many different spaces. Bush urges developments toward changing that. In addition, Bush argues for a new structure for the information which is to be stored in new ways:

Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be done in only one place . . .. Having found one item, moreover, one has to emerge from the system and re-enter on a new path.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested to it by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. . . . Selection [of information] by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized.

“As We May Think” develops the subject of the mechanized indexing of information, arranged by association. Bush describes a postulated “device,” a “mechanized private file and library” which “may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility,” a kind of personal computer and research assistant. Vannevar Bush’s ideas were foundational to hypertext theory, so much so that it seems his article is describing the Internet. A description of a typical interaction with such a device, for which he coins the term “memex,” is a description of an associative path through the written record, from general to specific and down divergent paths along the way, each leading toward other specific points. This is a description of what has become a common experience. The process Bush defines, using technology very similar to what he describes: these are commonplace parts of the research process anymore. The path of these associative trains of thought is a familiar path now, and Bush says that it is because we think this way ourselves.

Here is a list of some of the current projects hosted by a very interesting website called Digital Fiction .

• Book of Waste
  Short experimental/interactive fiction imposed against a series of anonymous objects, buildings and animated landscapes. Compelling wasted tales with full motion video backgrounds.
• The Diary of Anne Sykes
  An unfinished, chaotic mix of sculpted paper scribblings, childhood memories and fragments of a poisoned relationship from imaginary author Anne Sykes.
• Inside: A Journal of Dreams
  Living alone and secluded, an elderly man keeps a surreal record of his dreams as he is slowly poisoned by his gas fire leaking carbon monoxide.

I’ve been challenged, by a friend of mine to think about interface. I had a drink at the pub with someone who thinks about interface for a living, working with video games and that sort of thing.

I told him that I’m going back to the drawing board with my hypertext, To Win, Simply Play, and complained that I’ve seen more of the cutting room than the drawing board.

He told me to snoop around, to look at things that seem more like games, and to look specifically at what’s going on with Flash Animation these days. There’s some cool stuff going on in that area, but it has its pros and cons. We have some ideas for ways to cheat around some fo the cons, too.

The results of my snooping are that I have a few new favorite websites. I’ll be posting about a few of those this week.

Digital Fiction

Digital Fiction projects are created as an exploration into accessible and engaging writing for the internet. These works are not ‘e-books’ or hypertext sites in the traditional sense, nor do they adhere to the usual styles and standards incorporated into ‘quality’ Flash sites. The aim of Digital Fiction is to use Flash to create interesting ways of telling ‘stories’; to offer a blend of challenging writing, user-entertainment and user-interaction.

Digital Fiction doesn’t claim to know what it is exactly. It tries to be appealing and entertaining, compulsive and, at least in some ways, literary. Above all, it tries to be a celebration of an evolving state of artistic affairs, an opportunity to imaginatively explore (sometimes its own) lack of identity, appeal, even meaning.

Digital Fiction as a reading experience offers a purposely, almost naturally, fragmented narrative; sentences, happenings, cut off as though erased, re-emerge elsewhere; complex text animations allow only random fleeting glimpses of what is or what might be going on; the choice is yours not only in which direction you click or scroll – but in which direction you allow the narrative to take you. Or, in which direction you wish to take the narrative.

If this sounds like a lot of “interactive multimedia” buzzword bullcrap to you, then you might be interested to know that each one of these fictions is legible in a text-only version as well. My hope, here, is that this kind of a production will lead to texts that fare well as texts, with or without the addition of hypertext/media elements to them.

One more than one occasion, I have spoken out in favor of Google. Google can be generally described, in words from a recent posting by web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman, as having been “a good corporate citizen and outstanding netizen for so long that one wants to give the company the benefit of the doubt.” What’s this about a doubt?

Somewhat suspect practices, that’s what. Zeldman describes a new feature of Google’s toolbar software, called Autolink:

For instance, if your company’s site includes a street address, a link to Google?s map service will magically sprout from your page. Likewise, a book’s ISBN number will trigger a link to an Amazon page selling that book. The BBC and CNET cite additional examples.

That sounds great to me, but I guess I’m one of those people they call an “early adopter” when it comes to new technology. I might be like a cowboy who will “push buttons first and ask questions later”, which is why I enjoy reading responsible media commentary by people like Zeldman, who observes:

Critics point out that with this technology Google is doing the very thing Microsoft tried to do in 2001. See Chris Kaminski’s “Much Ado About Smart Tags” (A List Apart 22 July 2001) if you missed that drama. Kaminski cited three problems with smart tags:

1. Per Walter Mossberg inThe Wall Street Journal, Smart Tags enabled Microsoft to “edit any page on the web without the author’s knowledge.”
2. They extended Microsoft’s monopoly power into new markets, giving the Redmond giant the power to decide which non-Operating System companies would live and which would die. (Companies Microsoft’s Smart Tags division partnered with would live; their competitors would eat worms.)
3. Not least, Smart Tags were “amenable to nefarious uses, such as covert user tracking” (Chris Kaminski in ALA, paraphrasing Dan Gillmor).

If you are concerned about this, and would liek to take matters into your own hands, Zeldman offers some solutions. For those, you should read his article, Protect your site from Google?s new toolbar

The Bloggies awards for the best blogs on the internet has added a new award to the list of awards: Best Writing of a Weblog. The award replaced “best weblog about music” which is a shame, I think, because the only reason I care at all about these bloggie awards is so that I can comb through the list of nominees looking for interesting things to read. If that’s what you care about too, you might be interested in reading the lists of winners from 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and The Webby Awards, which are similar awards for quality websites.

And the nominees for “Best Writing of a Weblog” are…

• Real E Fun: tales from a non-religious funeral celebrant
• Tequila Mockingbird: [ Totally Flattered]
• Londonmark : searching for intelligent life in camden town
• Dooce : Unleashing The Inner Monologue
• Greek Tragedy : Stories From My Life

I have yet to vote, how about you?

Elisabeth Eckleman just left home, and has a lot of difficult decisions ahead of her. Sarah Hepola follows Elisabeth’s life and lets you make the tough choices for both of them. In this installment, Elisabeth loses her high-school boyfriend and drives to college with her parents. You decide what happens next.

The “About The Author” is as much fun as the story.

source: The Morning News

As part of my quest to breathe new life into Nocategories.net, I have begun to collect a list of websites that seem more like magazines. This is because, as I mentioned earlier, I am getting bored with the “blog” way of giving people things to read online.

Some of the results of my search have proved to be a lot of fun to browse, and so I thought I would pass them along.

The Morning News feels like a symbiotic mix between The New Yorker’s crackling insight and NPR’s This American Life, which helps us laugh our way through what could be a frightening tenure on this unpredictable ball of rock. There seems to be room on TMN for anything worth publishing: interviews, profiles, fiction, humor pieces, investigative journalism, rants, music reviews, personal essays and, most recently, a roundtable on the MP3 Blog phenomenon. The common denominator of TMN’s content, however, remains mirthful intelligence.

Paste Magazine is one of the fastest growing independently published music magazines in the country. We pride ourselves in being the premier magazine for people who still enjoy discovering new music, prize substance and songcraft over fads and manufactured attitude, and appreciate quality music in whatever genre it might inhabit–indie rock, Triple-A, Americana, folk, blues, jazz, etc. What other magazine would dare run features on singer/songwriter Patty Griffin and rapper Gift of Gab (from Blackalicious) in the same issue?

The former appears to be an online publication, and the later a home page for a paper publication, but both do a fairly good job of reproducing the “feel” of a print matter on the screen. I’m on a break at the job, so I don’t have time for further comment, but check back later for more.

Undergraduate students are shelling out more and more money for textbooks these days, and since they are required to buy certain books, it is almost as if they are guaranteed to get ripped off. I propose a partial solution.

Don’t buy the books.

This doesn’t mean don’t read the books, and it doesn’t even mean that you can’t have your own copy on to underline, highlight, and doodle about romance in the margins.

Download the books.

If you’re taking a literature class, the odds are good that you are reading an old book, and after awhile old books enter the “public domain” so that their texts can be freely distributed. That’s why Project Gutenberg is such a wonderful thing.

The Project Gutenberg Philosophy

The Project Gutenberg Philosophy is to make information; books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search.

This has several ramifications: 1. The Project Gutenberg E-texts should cost so little that no one will really care how much they cost. They should be a general size that fits on the standard media of the time …

2. The Project Gutenberg E-texts should so easily used that no one should ever have to care about how to use, read, quote and search them …

While I’m on the subject of free information, I should also mention the indispensable Wikipedia. Basically, Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia, which describes itself this way:

In addition to typical encyclopedia entries, Wikipedia includes information more often associated with almanacs, gazetteers, and specialist magazines, as well as coverage of current events.
The open editing process had led to Wikipedia becoming the world’s largest encyclopedia in less than four years of operation, with 450,000 articles and 77 million words in the English edition, and over 1.3 million articles in all language editions combined (as of January 2005).

And best of all, its free. So you can add these two tools, along with Google Scholar, to your growing arsenal for research and study

Appropriative writing is another term for soemthing very like hypertext. An essay by Raphael Rubinstein entitledGathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing examines how there can be such a thing as “a poem largely composed of direct quotes” and “delves a little” into the history of such things.

While I am wondering what to do about the nocategories ghost town, I am recalling what it was that brought me to have anything to do with owning a website in the first place.

Well, of course it all has its roots in earlier things, when I was quite a bit younger and the Internet was as yet unborn in my little West Virginia mountain-town. Punk rock was alive and well, though, and so I learned all about zines. That was my lowbrow introduction to the idea of publishing, something that appealed to me, even as an adolescent, as part of a dream for my future.

I wasn’t as excited about music or politics as those punks with zines, but luckily, that meant that I was able to get an audience! Apocalypse Playground was surprisingly popular.

My highbrow introduction came to me from William Blake, who simply made his own books and distributed them. Every one of them was different, too. And so, with William Blake and the punks in mind, I took to the internet.

By the time I became very interested in writing for the internet, the weblog phenomena has already gone into full swing. I hopped on the bandwagon, or else you wouldn’t be reading it, but initially I had something else in mind.

What I like about the weblog way of doing things is that it’s easy to put things online that way. What I don’t like about it is the way the material gets presented. The material is not presented, its just there, in a big blog. Even the word blog suggests to me a big pile, an unmanageable pile, and a pile of… whatever, with the newest stuff thrown on top.

What I like about a zine is that it is printed, tangible, portable, etc. What I don’t like about a zine is that I had to shell out all the costs for printing, postage, and so on. Come to think of it though, the zine cost about the same amount of money, every year, as a web server costs now, but the zine made a profit, the website does not, probably will not.

It occurs to me that there is a good way to compromise. Instead of using the weblog model for writing online, there are other ways… Perhaps I could go back to making a zine, print as many as I like for my friends, and publish the thing as a PDF file online, so that anyone else can print and redistribute at will. I would rather do something a little bit more grown-up than a zine, call it a chapbook, an “artist’s book” in fact I could care less what you call it.

Another idea would be to fashion the website after a magazine. Online magazines do enjoy a limited popularity, but the ones I like most are the ones that don’t really call themselves magazines. Some examples, notable for their design are Apple Pro and Coudal Partners. Others, notable (only) for their content, include Jacket Magazine and Arts and Letters Daily. (the first of those was mentioned in a recent post on the changing status of literary magazines in the age of post-mechanical reproduction on silliman’s Blog For something more like a cross between a magazine and a weblog, something that falls a bit more on the side of a weblog than I would like to see, take a look at the very useful A List Apart.

I think that making the shift from a weblog to something more like a magazine will prove to be a good practice for making a hypertext that works like a book.

In an earlier post, I expressed a little bit of frustration with an emphasis on the nonlinear aspects of hypertext writing. That’s why”Postman’s Choice” caught my attention over on Grand Text Auto.

In 1965, French artist Ben Vautier devised the provocative piece of mail art called “Postman’s Choice.” It was a postcard with lines on both sides, made to be addressed to two different destinations and then stamped on both sides. With no return address included, the letter carrier gets to choose who gets the postcard. While the postman may ring twice, he only gets to choose once, in this case. Of course, the postman might be clever enough, or the person sending the card might be such an obvious mail experimenter, that the postal system can take the third option.

What is more important, I think, in a hypertext than a nonlinear quality is an element of choice. I would much rather talk about “choice” in hypertext than employ that tired old buzzword “interactivity”. Besides, choice implies something more significant than the simple robot-reflexes that are enough to call something “interactive” Choice suggests meaning.

The post on GTA suggested something else that is unique about electronic media, something that might be more productive to focus on than interactivity. Networking and interchange are easier to create with electronic media. Nonlinearity is all well and good, but it is only interesting, or worthwhile, if it leaves its reader with some sense of a network among the ideas.

I’m revising my own hypertext lately, and I’m noticing how weak that sense of network is in the text. The reader has a bit too much of a strain, to assemble everything. I keep thinking back to the pennies, which seem to be one of the strongest images in the story. Pennies change hands, often. There also happen to be poker games in the story, a prime chance for money to change hands. Perhaps part of the story can follow some money around…

This post is a response to Nathan Matias’ response… Screw it, it is part of an ongoing conversation.

Nathan used a colorful metaphor…

To use a warfare metaphor — we are much more willing to buy computer systems that are like pistols (simple — just pull the trigger) than something elegant, like a Katana. We go for the least amount of effort on our part. This is why I like Tinderbox, which is a piece of software that takes discipline and training to master, but which is much better suited for precision information handling than Saturday Night Specials like word processors.

I am imagining an old warrior, late in the game, whose family swords are no match for those new guns, and I sympathize with his frustrations. The sword itself is well crafted, so that it is a work of art, just as the use of the thing is an art as well. I think it be quite some time until all this new technology rises to the level of art… a time like that between the bronze age and the samurai? maybe less.

I’m on a tangent.

I think its a matter of existential dumpster diving. What I mean is, we live in a culture full of “quick and dirty” means to quick and dirty ends. Things that take discipline and training to use, unfortunately, also require discipline and training in order to appreciate, and that’s not very American, is it? How then am I supposed to communicate with Americans? Am I making any sense here?

They might be crude weapons, but they are the tools at hand. I’m tempted to pick them up and to use them. That is very American, isn’t it?

I tried to express an idea like this one in the second chapter of my academic thesis.

If thinkers like T.S. Eliot had made the point that we should have genuine expression and thought-provocation, while at the same time accepting our inevitable being-in-the-world, a world too colossal to stop and not all of it bad, perhaps we wouldn’t be in the predicament we are in now. Then, perhaps the cultural wasteland we are thrown into would not be as bad, if the nature of its mediums had been defined by something other than a creative power vacuum. We can fix the bad; we can even use most of it as tools. We can keep the good. There’s no need to ignore it all.

There’s more to it than the difference between a kitana and a shotgun. Nathan also said:

Some of his readers disliked feeling disoriented. But for me, that was key to the novella.

I wonder about that”key”, about non-linear narrative.

I recently came across Originality and the Younger Poet by Dana Levin. It address the issue in a way that I have come to agree with.

True innovation, of course, is impossible without experimentation–those usually intuitive operations that counter or skew prevailing methods of making. Yet the earmarks of today’s “experimental” styles–fragmented narrative, random jumps in space/time, multiple voices and points of view, disrupted syntax and abrupt shifts in diction, to name a few–are century-old gifts. Once truly new tools for Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and other Modernists, these methods often seem now to be appropriated as much for how they seem new (after fifty years of plain-style narratives) as for how they might aid poetic composition–assuaging authorial anxiety at the expense of accessing what makes a poem, in Wallace Stevens’s words, “say the little thing it says,//Below the prerogative jumble.”

For today’s emerging poets, Pound’s exhortation to “make it new” has become a kind of whip, with stylistic “originality” becoming the test of a poet’s mettle. Yet, ultimately, “new” and “experimental” tell us little about the quality and character of an emerging writer’s work and the context in which it is made.

I was initially drawn to hypertext writing as a way to make an interestingly fragmented narrative, as something “new”, “edgy” or “experimental” more than I was drawn to its qualities “for how they might aid poetic composition” — which they can! I want to focus on that in the revision, that’s all.

In a search for others who, like me, have published an undergraudate writing thesis online, I discovered this.

Wesley English of the punk of poetry has just completed adapting his undergraduate senior writing project to blogspot. He calls the collection and everything haley; it’s comprised of a critical introduction and 18 poems, all centered on a fictional character named, as the title suggests, haley.

source: Philosophical Poetry via waypath

A few years ago, I never would have thought that I would want to read a thing like Jill Walker’s thesis: Fiction and Interaction: How Clicking a Mouse Can Make You Part of a Fictional World. Dr. art. thesis, Dept of Humanistics, University of Bergen, 2003.

I’m not in school anymore. I’m trying to stay in shape.

Not one, but two people told me at a new years party that they have read my Novella, “To Win, Simply Play.” One person claims to have read the entire thing, and has some interesting comments. “If it were a book I would have put it down.” I noted that it wasn’t a book. This reader added “It wasn’t a book, and I didn’t put it down”

Of course, the reader feedback has yet to stray very far from the usual “it doesn’t follow that what follows, follows” In other words, readers get disoriented.

As if he has some creepy sense of when conversations like these are happening, J. Nathan Matias called me up tonight to talk shop about these kinds of things. He ran some interesting ideas by me for a new non-fictional hypertext. Then, he wanted to know what I’m working on, and I confessed, its still the same old thing. This reader response has made me want to go back to the drawing board.

If the point of the revision would be to throw the reader a lifeline, for making sense out of the whole thing, then its time to come up with some good way to do that.

Brainstorming with Nathan, we both recalled the “Griffin & Sabine” books, where a postcard is presented in each segment of the story, and with the postcard comes some new addition to the story.

Here, a new postcard equals more story, and “next” is only “next” insofar as what is next is associated with the next postcard. Readers can follow this, yet it is hypertextual in a sense.

I think that my hypertext can do more to show the reader how its parts are connected. Nathan and I brainstormed some images that are lying around in the story, waiting to be elaborated into metaphors that aid the links.

To start with, the one thing that each of the characters have in common is that they play poker. It might be possible to arrange the whole story according to the conversations, etc. that occur during one game, and then during the next, and so on.

Speaking of cards, the drawing cards metaphor might be interesting for a reader who is less dependant upon a linear presentation. Draw cards randomly, and see what is associated with each.

The pennies on the wall, each of those already has a story associated with it. It might be an interesting feature of the story to present the reader with a more detailed description of that wall, where the objects on that wall can be elaborated upon however the reader chooses.

Alright, fine, I give in, I’ll make it possible to read the story in some sort of chronological order.

Reading Anders Fagerjord’s blog I am reminded of a poorly articulated idea I had, that I called “levels of text.” As it turns out, the idea has been articulated elsewhere as “stretchtext. You know, a text that will be longer or shorter on demand, as suggested by Ted Nelson in 1967.”

Here’s what I’m thinking: I’ll have three, maybe four set lengths, what I call “levels.” The top level will be a longish abstract, about 200 words. The second level will be of short-paper length, and the third level will be as long as a full paper.

Food for thought…