Steve Ersinghaus

Whenever I need a poetry boost, I take up Frank Stanford. His language forces the brain into interesting tilts. He teaches the eyes to swim faster.

For example, from Their Names Are Spoken:

We dream on
Now night a cool moss
On the undersides of the cold ground
Keeps growing on the stones

This is amazing. To position night like this is to take a common element and make it live again. Stanford makes you want to run and write poetry. One measure: if it makes you want to write, it’s a keeper. The writer’s writer makes you want to write.

Soon it will be time to do some trimming around here. The lists are getting long and some in the link lists have gone on to other endeavors.

Jesse Abbot is getting into the game.

A nice set of courses on hypertext by Deena Larsen. It’s a backbone syllabus!

The relationship between today’s paper Courant and the digital version is interesting. The digital version pretends that the paper doesn’t exist and the paper is full of stories about Tribune Co cuts that will see 25% cuts in staff and a trimming of an already spare version.

The corporate news model never worked. It’s too loaded with items that have nothing directly to do with content. It would seem that value added is not a good idea for an institution that should have intrinsic value, kind of like charging the government for congressional participation in the culture.

But the new media model is more significant and interesting. TPM is a current workable model. It may be the only viable future, in fact, for large distribution news, unless the corporation gives away its profits to the news engine, which is unlikely.

Alas, we will be canceling our subscription to the Courant as we have no need for a trimmed down version given that the current paper is just barely readable, despite what Barbara Roessner writes regarding the “new” paper.

When Obama gets into office I hope he scraps this kind of crazy idea. The Feds can confiscate “information”? While interesting, I find the basis for the reversal opinion garbled behind weird and complex analogies.

The basic question holds: what constitutes reasonable search at the airport?

Surface will be a very nice reading environment for hypertext and other hypermedia works. Soon the link will be an issue of touch, bringing a few more interesting affordance elements to the “surface” of units of meaning.

My buddy John has two new members of the family.

We’ve talking a lot about narrative distance this week (and last week). August Wilson has a neat example of this in his play, Fences. Here’s a chain:

1. Troy and Cory clash at the end of the play after building tension between them.
2. While not immediately linked to the above, but critical to it, Troy makes a contract with Cory. Cory “sort of” agrees to work at the A&P to earn his football play.
3. Troy learns that Cory has broken this contract.
4. Troy convinces the coach not to let Cory play at the recruiter’s game at the end of Act I. 1 is at quite a distance from 2, 3, and 4 but is a consequence of the plotted chain of events. This is narrative distance as an event model not as a path model.

A story can indeed be conceived as a set of points or several related points organized and determined by user choice in the context of story. The hypertext can also be drawn as a confluence model, a single events or set of them studied from multiple angles.

It’s time for me to get back to writing about hypertext, too.

Ah, Sandoval, you are Southwestern and its confluence, Mexican American, Science, and love.

Not much logging to do here at the moment because we’re steeped in the arts. My nose is buried in the 100 Images Project. But I also have some ideas going about hypertext, processing, and the ghostly arguments about hypertext that have been traversing the journals for the last few years.

I heard someone talking about Miles Davis today and the challenge of having to reinvent his sound as a means of pushing the boundaries and doing so in the face of other competing sounds. It’s a never-ending struggle. All artists have the same problem. Hypertext and hypermedia should be a big country. Creative systems are important. We should use and control them well. Let’s talk about why. Let’s not forget the works.

We should push our systems to their limits. Pushing the system to the limit. Now there’s a battle cry.

Lots of interesting conversation and work at Hypertext 08. It’s going to take a few days to recover from the travel and the amount of ideas passed about.

Here’s to my daughter, Kendra.

Congratulations on being a wonderful human being!

And here’s to the next phase.

To me it’s an interesting process. Prior to Carianne uploading her image, I take lots of time in the morning writing extensions to existing poetry, playing with new ideas, and worrying about the people who are emerging in a narrative working between the images, such as a cave woman who sits in a city street making things in the streets.

Typically, this work is preparation for the art to come, mental exercise, study. However, the voices reverberating through this world often don’t immediately correspond with the image Carianne has created. But the study is important for tone and language play. A wonderful frame for the working day. And two more variation tanka (brief 10th century Japanese style) forms to go.

Now, here’s to writing poetry in Pittsburgh.

A couple of shots of Carianne in her studio and I in mine.

Where the 100 Images Project is being made.

The Tunxis Summer Mash-Up is a two-week intensive program designed for high school students interested in combining their creative talents with contemporary technology to explore the world of digital storytelling.

Students will produce three short films: a self-portrait, a documentary, and a work of fiction. Each of these projects will be mentored by faculty members who have real-world experiences in the various genres.

Students will have access to cameras, scanners, computers, video-editing software, and script-writing software to produce their short films.

Tuition also includes lunch each day and a 2Gb flash drive for everyone.

For more information, contact John Timmons at this email address or visit our web site at http://www.tunxis.commnet.edu/mashup