Author Archives: Steve

To Guard or Not to Guard

Susan Gibb writes

One of the reasons that I have taken advantage of the guard fields is the way the narrative is laid out in four main paths. Once a link is made onto another path, if the reader should follow that path through, he’d not only be dropped into a different environment (an entirely new space that both combines and defies simultaneous existence), but he may be dropped somewhere in the middle of a story without at least some clue of what’s going on. I suppose I should allow this, but because the main characters are involved in each of the stories, I’m thinking it might be confusing until the gist of the narrative–choice been concurrent in time–be realized.

This is an interesting creative quandary. Is this about providing freedom to the reader? Providing the possibility for multiple narrative experiences within a contained world? I don’t think its about either even though I may be tipping into the pool of cliche. But the work itself should dictate.

In Paths, I felt compelled to live by the rules of the hypertext, meeting the guard and complying. Mark Bernstein provides interesting suggestions about how hypertexts can behave in given instances of narrative, but living hypertext examples should play major roles, studied as hypertexts, studied as their embodied wholes as poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. The creator has to consider the whole as well as the part and how these two massive notions can be altered by creative decisions. What has troubled me in my own writing is that each hypertext should attempt to redefine hypertext itself. What makes a hypertext a hypertext from the point of view of the author?

If Anne is linked to Jeremy, Jeremy linked to Joyce, then how is Joyce linked to Anne? I don’t like the idea of providing freedom to the reader, even though exploration may matter. I like the idea of allowing the work to decide its possible internal modifications and adjustments. It’s a massive struggle. Add that to the demands of the writing itself and you have wonderfully whopping possibilities. The link itself is an aspect of the tale, a force in the telling and reading, no matter what that link may be doing in its little space. Therefore, every hypertext, as with every poem or story, should be an opportunity to play with opportunities afforded by the link.

Items to Keep

This is an important post by Mark Bernstein on what people have covered at the most recent Tinderbox weekend. I know people who want the tool and examples are critical.

I use Tinderbox to track what I need to cover in British Literature and am noting structures and arguments for things that need to change relevant to the college’s committee and governance structure. Everyone loves the maps because they can “see” how complex even a small college’s workaday is.

He writes:

Now, we’re munching warm bagels and preparing to hear Matt Griffin’s account of using Tinderbox in screenwriting — including a feature film in Sicily where he was using Tinderbox each night to rewrite scripts for the next day’s shooting.

Link Structure

Susan’s link structure is interesting. In the following grab of the hypertext, “Sunday” and the two women of concern–Joyce and Anne–anchor the link, but Sunday Morning is guarded and thus untraversable until another space is hit, although I don’t know which and really don’t want to know, although I would like to continue because of the suggested relationship between Anne and her husband.

The link that joins the spaces is “mornings.” In Paths, mornings could form a bridge from character to character, plot point to plot point, if this were an aspect of the link structure concept.

Another element that binds the spaces here is the previously-mentioned relationship issue. Jeremy and Joyce, the husband and Anne. Jeremy’s stomach is in a pretty good spot but nevertheless he “hates” the life, while Anne may indeed be in a position much the same, but will the paths connect? I think the energy and this tension is made possible by the structure, the choice through which the author makes closure work for the reader who must be thinking: what’s up with Anne, what’s up with Jeremy?

I Would Have Told You

Susan Gibb has let me in on Paths.

I’m starting with “I Would Have Told You.” In this “path,” the reader begins with a speaker whose voice is reflective.

We have:

How the years race once the mysteries of life transition to the common and known. Taste is tasted only once, yet the memory would have us believe it better.

Impossible. The most evil of all masqueraders is memory.

“Taste” is interesting and so is “memory” because of the prior box. It goes like this:

I’ve lain here for the past hour, maybe two, thinking about the last few years with Joyce. Did I stop loving her before then? Had I ever loved her, really, with the passion and unquestioned needs of youth? The way I’d loved Anne?

Reflections on Luella play with ghosts and time. At the moment of reflection, the hands clench as they had clenched.

She took my hands and placed one on each. My palms grow warm with the feel of them still, my fingers curl with the memory of touch. The conflict of soft yielding and hard resistance. The smell of musk.

Susan builds the tension between the speaker and his reflectiveness not by moving to past and present but by interjoining its experience. Memory can be thought of as different moment of the present. Ugliness and Ugliness 2 bring back in the voices and provide a rhythm of the narrative. In Ugliness, we get a peek at a discussion with Anne:

“You slept with her, didn’t you!”

“Yes, but it wasn’t love, Anne. It wasn’t like it is with you and me.”

“How could you?”

“I thought we were free. I thought our love was above all the sins of jealousy and the conventions of monogamy.”

“But why do you need her?’

“Not her. It’s nothing to do with her beyond a moment of sharing and fulfilling a need for another human being that touched me within that moment. You’re free as well, Anne. If you slept with someone else it would not diminish what we have together.”

Anne has obviously learned something about freedom here. Sex does not diminish love. Spring will become Summer in Ugliness 2 as Anne takes Jeremy’s advice. I wonder about the speaker; what’s happened to the women and his life with them. How does he weigh love, as in weighing the scales. “It isn’t like it is with you and me,” he claims. (And so I avoid moving too deeply into another aspect, the aspect of Chloe rocking and use the “loop.”)

I get the sense from the text that Jeremy, the narrator, sees life in Anne and “deadness” in Joyce, which is a wonderful irony.

Finally a new hypertext to read.

Screen Grabbing

I grabbed the Screen Grab widget for the Dashboard and it meets a need. Do other widgets? Anyway, this one serves a nice purpose because it will hone in on sections of the screen and on windows, making it perfect for swift captures of Storyspace text spaces.

Crazy for Beverly Cleary Clearly

Maybe you remember Beverly Cleary books from the ’60s. I don’t. I read comics, Hardy Boys, and other things I can’t remember in the early ’70s. My son has gone positively ape over Ralph S. Mouse and Henry and Ribsy, partially due to the quality of the storytelling and to the way Cleary writes for performance reading. She has an amazing ear for the oral quality of storytelling. Cleary refines the art of closing at energetic plot points that makes for the wonderful explosion of screams for more and “What’s going to happen to Ralph?”

Even better is the agreement she makes with the reader, young and old: mice are cute, but good storytelling demands edge. In Ralph’s world, the tension is palpable, the danger and dramatic challenges aggressive and unexpected.

Wonderful stuff and refreshing in a time of cute and bland fluff that generally treats children as brainless and provides them no basis for evaluating excellence from mediocrity.

Housekeeping

Time to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress and to initiate some minor housekeeping, such as developing a custom theme for the courses and new media weblogs, hopefully with lots of professional help.

Over the next few days there might be some holes here. But hopefully everything will go smoothly.