Category Archives: Fiction and Poetry

Topology and Abstraction

One of the most difficult elements of learning (and teaching) is abstraction. The real down and dirty knowledge stuff is typically abstract material, whether it be related to numbers or relations. I’ve noticed this in children. Ask five year olds to think back to the year 1976 and typically they wont know what you’re after because they haven’t yet objectified the notion of time, not to mention the idea of relating time to someone else in symbolic terms where time T is related to an already abstracted set of notions such as pi times the square root of string length L divided by gravity as represented by G.

Abstraction then. A map is an abstracted view of a complex set of relations. I’ve noticed that S (my son Sam) is much taken by the old Cole and Degan magic school bus books, where a bus takes children into a hurricane and other assorted tough messes for the sake of hands on learning. These are not easy books to read to children because of the numerous topological elements in the texts. There’s typically a brief narrative element that forms the core adventure story as well as a collection of lists, dialogue bubbles, illustrative graphics, and other sundries.

But what has helped my son to read magic school-bus like books–books with complex layouts and cognitive demands–is his experience fiddling with digital games whose topological elements demand some amount of abstract thinking and spatial analysis. For example, Kya, Dark Lineage provides the player with multiple way of figuring the space of the game: a 3-D environment, a one-dimensional map, and a two-dimensional representation of Kya’s world. In other words, to figure out where you are in the game, you can access the map. Reading the digital space serves to reinforce all kinds of neat skills in children.

On Solitude

From Susan Gibb on the idea and condition of solitude

So we are getting the feeling of the solitude, the aloneness each member of this odd family feels and surrounds himself with as what, protection? Or is it just a lack of social skill, a lack of understanding each other and thus, never developing a community with mankind, but standing outside of the touch-zone while walking daily within it for a lifetime.

. . . It is a state of mind well sought in a life filled with disappointments or traumatic and painful events that seem beyond our control, when one can no longer understand the workings of the mind and feels helpless to gain insight or benefit, yet is reluctant to accept. There develops a need to disassociate, an acknowledgement that true understanding could indeed threaten whatever balance the mind has managed to create for itself. It would just be too much; total loss of control appears inevitable. This bubble that must be built is drawn, as a wand from soapy water, as first an invisible illusion, exclusion, inclusion of space.

I see the building of the house of solitude as then formed with a framework of chickenwire.

Project Page

I’ve added a new page for collecting linked-to projects to the sidebar. The first is the Flash piece Stoning Field, a work of fiction planned in Storyspace and then realized in Flash. Stoning Field is a presentation with vexing loading and organizational problems, which I still don’t think I’ve solved. The loader elements between each destination space represent a compromize, a negociation in file size because of the incorporation of video, which I tried to trim to bare minimum without losing quality. In Stoning Field video used as an element of narrative time. Unfortunately, loading may trump the potential aesthetic of the read. But there you go.

The tools used for the project included: Eastgate Systems’ Storyspace, Macromedia Flash MX, Adobe Audition, Dominic Mazzoni’s Audacity, Adobe Premiere, and Microsoft Movie Maker.

The Meaning of History

Chris Coonce-Ewing asks a juicy question: what is history?

This is a test of many things: there are discipline answers, philosophical answers, political and phenomenological answers. There are kinds. There are characterizations. The Beowulf and Gawain poets provide answers in their own way, which has been a big subject in our examinations and interrogations of the these works. Both poets need the past. We do too.

The historian wouldn’t like this answer:

History is a sound in another room.
You call and either he, she,
it
goes mouse quiet

Writing out to in

Katherine Min’s story The Liberation of a Face begins like this:

One day I stopped looking in the mirror. I was tired of my face, tired of finding fault with it, of wishing it looked a different way or trying to make it look a certain way. It was always just my face. So I stopped looking. And an odd thing happened. My face went away. It disappeared. Or at least the reflection of my face went away, the only means I had of regarding it.

This first paragraph is a tight jerk, and it ends with a simple knot, although the nature of the diappearance is questionable. The story is tight throughout, one of those stories you’d like to see continue because of the control the author has over the language and the way this control generates a sense of expectation sentence to sentence.

But what’s the idea here: what would happen if a woman did as this protagonist does? How would the image of the self be affected by such an intimate friend as the mirror and such a powerful metaphor? Min explores the question. “Once my face became unavailable to me, two things happened:I cared more about it; and caring for it became more difficult.” It’s not just the makeup and washing that become a problem absent the mirror, but the habitual recognitions we make of ourselves “through” the body, which, we know, we “feel” in the space around us.

It was torturous not to be able to confirm a clean appearance, a tidiness of one’s own features like a room well-swept. I did not like the idea that other people could look at me while I could not; that I could see their faces but not my own. I realized that to recognize oneself each morning anew was a kind of exercise in existence. You get up and see yourself in the mirror and you think, “Here I am.” It was reassuring, this ritual, the familiarity of self, conjured and reconjured like an auto-hypnotic spell. Without my face, I felt off-balance, tentative. I became obsessed by what I could not see.

Without the mirror–the face as one facet of self–do we lose a sense of being “in place” or one means of self-definition? Do we lose anchor? Without reflected “image,” are we potentially lost “in place,” in other words, become “out of place.”

Gradually I stopped caring what I looked like. What did it matter, if I had no one to tell me? I didn’t wash for days. I threw my cosmetics out. I barely brushed my hair. On the occasions when I did go out, to run an errand or to buy food, I noticed people shying away from me. Their own faces looked startled by mine, as though they were looking at a ghost. I did not bother to smile or frown, or to evidence any facial expression at all. If I could not see, why should they?

In this way I began to reinhabit the world. I presented myself to it as I saw myself in it, a blank, a cipher, a nonentity. A faceless woman. I no longer expected any sort of reaction at all when people happened to look upon me; I began no longer to require one. And the strange thing was that I became happy. I saw the faces of others, their looks of suffering and boredom, of longing and displeasure. I saw also–mostly on children–looks of delight and curiosity, of sadness and rebellion. And I knew that their faces were my own, that I had access to all of these ways of looking by means of what I saw.

The story ends with the woman witnessing her image, which she’s carried “like a relic” in a shop window for the first time after many years and her “delusion” is, as she says, “shattered.”

Unfortunatly, this discontinuity breaks the story. How, in other words, after so many years of going about, does the woman avoid her image for so long? In the story, Min writes, “And then one day, as I was hurrying down the street, I passed a shop window and caught a glimpse of my reflection.” In the window, she sees a “ruin.” Nevertheless, this “revealing” doesn’t square with the control the writer displays throughout. Again, how is it possible that the woman hadn’t happened to see herself in any other shop window, in passing, just by turning her head? This isn’t a nitpick; the story has relies on a steady loss/gain structure–she loses herself, steadies, then loses herself again. But how does she maintain the “delusion” for so long, years, without some measure of near miss: did she approach the store with her eyes shut?

The question of the self is an important idea in fiction because character sustains this kind of story. I enjoy Min’s writing but I find this little break in her story disappointing. I leave the story not buying it, after I bought it nearly all the way through.

Cyborg experience

I just put Bill Sienkiewicz’ cyborgian Stray Toasters to bed. I think Sienkiewicz’ artwork is just fantastic (Bill Kluba would love it, I think) and that the graphic work, which combines all classes of media a la Rauschenberg, into the narrative, holds the story of ST together (but just barely). But I also thought that overall the work was psychologically overwrought: a little too much pathos. The novel ends, and when it did I felt a little disinterested in the resolution and in the characters. I’m wondering if others have experienced this work?

Stoning Field update almost final

Neha gives me too much credit for the “totally new” comment in her post over at Narratives. The overall work is really no big deal; the interesting thing for me has been the “making.” Nevertheless, the meat of Stoning Field is basically completed, all the media content in the right place, and now comes the online test on the server for media quality et cetera. The biggest headache I’ve had is with organizing lots of things into multiple files and worrying about size and how to load things up on the reader’s end. The files range in size from small to bigger, the biggest about 7 megs because of video but overall I’m averaging about 5 to 600 kb, which is no sweat for broadband. Most of the video is set for streaming but the files need to go up for test.

Then it’s off to figure what to do with the project once tested.

Overall, the only thing that really interest me about Flash is ActionScript. For example, the following code generates an interesting animation that came about through trail and error and luck. Note the formatting isn’t true in this example:

function gameani() {
this._y += this.speedy;
if(this._y > 100) {
games.g._rotation += 5;
games.g._xscale += 3;
games.g._height += 5;
}
if(this._y > 200) {
for(var i = 0; i < 5; i++) { games.duplicateMovieClip("games" + i, i); games._x = Math.random() * 500; games._y = Math.random() * 500; games._xscale = Math.random() * 100; games._yscale = Math.random() * 100; games._alpha = Math.random() * 100; } } updateAfterEvent(); } function warani() { this._y += this.speedy - 1; if(this._y > 100) {
war.w._rotation += 5;
war.a01._rotation -= 5;
war.a01._xscale += 2;
war.a01._height += 5;
war.r._rotation += 75;
war.r._height += 5;
}
if(this._y > 150) {
for(var k = 0; k < 6; k++) { war.duplicateMovieClip("war" + k, k); war._x = Math.random() * 500; war._y = Math.random() * 500; war._alpha = Math.random() * 100; war._xscale = Math.random() * 100; war._yscale = Math.random() * 100; } } updateAfterEvent(); } games.onEnterFrame = gameani; war.onEnterFrame = warani; games.speedy = 2; war.speedy = 2;

The effect moves then toys with two movie clips, games and war, “tweening” then breaking apart text for a random effect that would be impossible to duplicate on the Flash timeline using the design tools. After duplicating the clips, though, I didn’t necessarily know what exactly would happen. The important part here is working with clips within clips and teasing each nested letter by tracing its “path.” I “know” what the code is doing but I didn’t know what the code would look like on the stage when the animation kicked in. The functions are basic, but even with basic code interesting and unforseen things can happen. Like writing a story, therefore, the code behind the behavior can often lead to things unknown and unseen.

Experience and preparation

Drawing from the last post and its active comments, it would seem that the fundamental conflict in Antigone is important. We know what happens: Creon acts, Antigone acts, and bad things happen as a result, with no godly interference, no god to swoop down and pause the action and aide the poor mortals in their bad decisions and woe, no Theseus to provide answers. Hence we’re left with the idea of judgement in the hands of Creon and Antigone and they become our ears and eyes into the Sophoclean world.

But this “contained” world provides very little control, just as it does in Cortazar. Fate is strong. What’s going to happen to Oedipus is going to happen regardless of what he does or what we do. Same goes with Sir Gawain and in the Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever.” In SciFi, the question of time always matters. If we’re put in a position of changing the future by interrupting something in the past, a past which has always led to our present position, we may suffer oblivion. This calls attention to the “rightness” of what happens in time. Don’t go back and change the past because that interrupt the “natural” flow of time; therefore, we conclude, what happens “should” happen as it occured without human interference. Changing even the most minor bit or byte of things, could result in disaster. But didn’t we create disasters anyway? Are disasters natural within the natural arrow? And if human agented disaster is “natural,” then is going back into time and changing something to avert disaster, is that not immoral then? If an individual could prevent 9/11 by going back and changing an element in the chain of events, would it be immoral or moral (hypothetically) to do so? This, yet again, assumes that the time traveller will make the right choice and is outside Sophoclean boundaries (and subject to what law?). If we could manipulate time, isn’t the ability to do so also “within” the boundaries of time itself?

The logic, of course, becomes strained here. In the text, the narrative boundaries for even the most complex of hypertexts are limited. The hypertext must have physical boundaries however they may be defined, by “resolution” or computer memory. There’s always a boundary, a last word. For some the boundary is where “they” stop. For others it’s the last count. A hypertext isn’t “the” universe which at this point continues to inch outward, extruding space. A game should close at some point, but not the universe. One day should lead to the next not continue to loop. Hense the narrative is “spatial.” It has physical boundaries.

But we know all this I think. Do we leave Sophocles with a sense of doom, paranoia, or satisfaction knowing that we “can’t” control everything? Do we leave Sophocles with a greater sense that we need to do better with the givens? We know we can’t leave Antigone thinking, wow, that was really fun watching those nice kids get killed off. Do we leave with a greater appreciation of “responsibility”?

The future’s shape

One of the interesting qualities of story is the idea of change. Some action is taken or something happens and the result is inexorable. The audience can do nothing to “save” the principle character. All we can do is “read” about Connie’s removal from the home in “Where are you going.” We can’t interrupt the action of Antigone and inform Creon that he will lose his son and his wife because he failed to “know” the consequences of his actions. Shouldn’t King Lear have known better than to divide his kingdom up? Should we not have known that space travel kills people? Should Oedipus have simply ignored the answer?

The idea that we would want a character to display sophrosyne as a value in story is at odds with what we know about Creon, Oedipus, the gods, Antigone, and most characters in story. We know that Creon isn’t going to display coolheadedness or any sort of golden mean. We need Creon’s arrogrance, just as we need a confused Hamlet and a pridefilled Coriolanus. But this is just one element.

The other element is our reaction to the story that comes from the principles. Hopefully we won’t repond by laughing and leaving, but that something about the tragedy proves either true or captivating, yes, like watching a trainwreck. Do we “need” to see the children not just eat their way out of a cage but also step forth into the dark wood where “we know” the hungry antagonist waits.

This returns me to the story once again. Creon makes his edict and stands by it, thinking himself in the right as the “state” made manifest, the state on whose side Ares has smiled, the state that must take a “moral” stand against the actions of Polynices. But do his reactions to the sentry and to Antigone “reveal” him as a corrupted leader or a coward? Is his original intent corrupted?

Another example. In Suttree, now being covered by Susan Gibb, the principle has money sent to him by a relative. The reader knows what he’s going to do with it. I can’t remember how much but Suttree hides some of the money for safe-keeping prior to the night of waste, in a place where he will forget while drunk or keep hidden from theives. The rest of the money will be lost. We know that something horrible is going to happen. Still, as we read, we hope it won’t.