Category Archives: Hypertext

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.

On Commonplacing and Hyperext

Susan Gibb persists into the text and into the analysis:

The idea finally hit, in the middle of making chicken’n’dumplings for dinner tonight: The Writing Space that’s held me hostage has now officially given me two endings for story #1. As mentioned before, that involves the “special link” in Storyspace of ?(n) — in this case, (n) being 2, or every other time it’s read. I was going to leave a loop and text-link one of the endings, but hey, what’s better than a couple readers arguing about how it ended when only you know that they read two different things? Hee-hee.

What’s interesting here is the implication for Story 1 that it has two endings and not one. But how can this be so? And boy do we love the concept of guard fields.

Well, why not? We may think about endings as being something important to talk about and to “prove.” Consider Lear and its problematic ending. Which one?

A better question may be why multiple paths, not alternative endings (which assumes a primary and secondary set), may be called for a given story. In fiction, endings may be “the start.” Where the story begins assumes that the ending has already been drafted given diagesis. A good example of this is Carver’s Cathedral, where the story has already ended and thus can be told by “Bub.” But enough about that.

I can think of three “important endings.” The first is Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, the second, John Porcellino’s Perfect Example, and Alice Munro’s, Walker Brother’s Cowboy. Solitude‘s ending bangs everything home with a literal whirl of provocative energy. Porcellino’s is a closing that is the very reason why we need story to remember and live (No, I don’t want to explain what I mean by that: the proof is in the work). And Munro is about as true as it gets because the reader is left on the inside to lick the edges of her world.

For Susan, it’s “the writing space” that gives. I know what she means, and it’s in such a description that Storyspace becomes organic, a natural environment where characters take different shape. She writes: “The last text box is never automatically the last. And never necessarily remains where it is within the story.” Like a wonderfully balanced router, the tool fits a given tale. This is nothing that needs proving. The tale will bear it out somehow.

I’m reading through Paths at the moment. I also have the Word version. This is fun.

Hypertext and Thinking

At Hypercompendia, Susan Gibb describes an interesting process:

Just when you think you know these people you find something out and you click open a writing space and you tell everyone else about it. Its free association at its finest and Ill read and reread until I know all there is to know about what they’ve been hiding from me.

I’m not sure about “free association” (which may be a correct descriptor), but I do know that the tool is promoting thinking in different ways than the linear environment. In terms of writing character, Neil Gaiman has mentioned the knowledge character’s feed the writer, an idea that is difficult to convey outside of the influence of the muse. Numerous fiction writers have written about the phenomenon.

In another sense, “writing” as a descriptive action is a generalization. Thinking is a better generalizer. Good writing on many levels is good thinking. In this sense writing is simile.

Hypertext and Reading

Susan Gibb, via an old download from Hypertext 07, is having an interesting time with Ham Sandoval over at Spinning. She’s seeing things I could not and treats the form from the point of view of a serious reader.

In a few days I’ll have up a small review of a study on Hypertext and dialogue from Narrative that comes at the form in ways I find goofy.

Storyspace: Next Generation

Storyspace is, in my mind, the best conceived hypertext writing environment I know, and I know the system pretty well. As a connectivity metaphor, it’s brilliant and prescient. The numerous ways of building relations and seeing how they can be built and abstracted are the reasons I wanted to go to Manchester. I have a stake in the future of hypertext both as a writer and teacher. The weblog is okay as a means of delivering info to my students. But it’s really not all that I want.

I’d like to promote Storyspace’s next generation manifestation. Much of this thinking comes from playing around with Inform 7 (why, in my editor, can’t I just put [ ] around Inform 7 and create the link automatically in Firefox?), Mediawiki, Tinderbox, Hammer, Inspiration, WordPress, Spotlight, Spatterlight, video editing software, and Flash. It also comes from practical work problems that we’re beginning to solve, linking systems together not by binary but by ideas and necessity.

In a way, first and second gen code is like asphalt. I can drive from one state to the next as a matter of reality. Code and hardware take you places. Then again, it’s also not like asphalt. What follows is a list:

1. Storyspace as cross-platform tool. People love their computers. This is the txt file idea. If multi-platform persists, then so must a txt reader or other cross-plat file.

2. Storyspace as narrative browser. In one way of thinking, text spaces in SSP can be viewed as independent from the surface. I can take an html document and have any browser translate the code and I can rework the code in Dreamweaver, but I can’t share the translation of that code in Dreamweaver. Describing a work-flow might be interesting here. Let’s say I link a part of a narrative from an SSP text space to a wiki, where the narrative progresses, but, in doing so, never really leave the country of Storyspace, then I proceed to zblorb (Texas), type >open the casket at the command line, and then move to a bit of video contained in another SSP space. Let’s say I then click on the video surface and intertwingle with XanaduSpace, then I go back to SSP in some way, basically using Storyspace as a narrative browser/development tool.

In this conception, Storyspace doesn’t become a wiki; it maintains its identity as an environment that can reveal another narrative building block and so on and so forth, and, of course, vice versa. The notion here is not to publish a “manuscript” or CD, but to create routes from one performance space to the next. Inadvertently, in the discussion, John and I will ask: “but will it work with video” because sometimes video or background noise is called for. The question for the creator becomes when did I need this relation to perform in another way.

What if Someone reWrote King Lear in Hypertext?

In King Lear it’s important that Edmund tells us what he’s up to. He speaks this in scene 2:

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I 335
Stand in the plague of custom, and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well compact, 340
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With base? with baseness? bastardy? base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality 345
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to th’ creating a whole tribe of fops
Got ‘tween asleep and wake? Well then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund 350
As to th’ legitimate. Fine word- ‘legitimate’!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow; I prosper.
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

He tells us exactly what he’s planning. Gloucester, of course, has no idea what Edmund is up to. We know and that’s the trick. This employ of irony isn’t required in tragedy but sure pushes our buttons. It’s important to classical comedy. Herge was brilliant at using it in comics. Tintin rushes toward a bush. Muller is waiting with a gun behind it. In the same panel, Tintin says, “Gee, I wonder what I’ll find behind that bush.” I paraphrase but the point is pretty clear. Despite narrative devices, tragedy needs a special reaction from the audience. We know what’s going to happen: Lear will fall and everyone will forget Cordelia until it’s too late. But what happens and to whom and who knows about it is key. If we could warn Edgar, then Edmund would be tripped up from the start, or he might try to get us, and I wouldn’t want to be up against him. To intrude on Lear as Lear or Tintin as Tintin would be absurd.

Lear in hypertext might be a tightly controlled oval. It would reveal more about Cordelia than we know now, but the story would still end the same way. Cordelia would have all the wrong answers, as would Edgar. Lear is Lear, unless Lear is rewritten as Lear in the “garden,” and every decision he makes, or choice ones, become a new Lear to follow or a Lear who went on to become a burlap dealer in Santiago. Might’ve beens or whatifs are a powerful read. Perhaps some of these will lead to classical tragic falls, other not. This would also be an interesting IF experiment. But in this IF decisions are forks in the universe of paths. >Give Land to sisters >Keep authority will supply different meanings. This would be tons of work. >Let Lear stay or >Kick old fool out.

In the land of many stories . . .

Follow to Mark Bernstein and his conversation with Emily Short for more, and more insightful, comment on this issue.

Hypertext 07 and Bubble Worlds

I’m really bummed about my inability to make it to Hypertext 07. Manchester looks gand in September. Fortunately, my novel, The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, was able to make it in my stead, and I want to thank Jamie, Mark and others for its safe travel.

My first regret is that I can’t perform TLGS. My second is having not written and designed the work on a Mac. Unfortunately, it was built in Windows over the last five years and would take some effort to rebuild in the Mac version of Storyspace. However, I will soon be embarking on this, relocating images into my MBP. I made the switch to the Mac this summer and am only now beginning to realize how important it will be to provide two versions of the novel or, even better, to allow for new ideas to develop because of this other method of revising.

TLGS tested all my powers in spelling, semantics, organization, and rewriting. It takes time to understand that in Storyspace, editing is a non-linear process, where linking can take the place of idea moving. In Storyspace, the writer doesn’t move a paragraph, though this is possible to do, he or she simply relates it to something else via a link. In the flow of story development a link may proceed from the shape of a cloud, or a returning mood in memory, thus motioning the reader down a path based on image not necessarily by plot. This means one must unlearn the remediated spaces of the typewriter, on which I wrote my first novel back in 1986, and the word processor. I found editing in Storyspace a deep, rethinking process, one that is almost impossible to share or explain. In TLGS, there are many areas of the text the reader will never see because they are simply bypassed. They are a sort of idea-based archaeology, bits of broken pottery that over time, I found no use for in the paths of the novel, such as a stretch of action that appeared at one time to supply the answer to a quandary, but that become too burdensome to keep in the possible flow. Likewise, the end of the novel may prove another beginning or yet another plot point if I was successful at making things interesting enough to explore.

In hypertext, the novel can form a cluster of lives that, much like Heroes, can spin off into an ever expanding universe of possibility. One link could provoke an infinite cluster of new spaces and times: Jackie meets Ron. Ron remembers his grandmother. A new story begins at the next link 1,000 years in the future with Grandma’s extended relation Jose, secluded on some rock being towed toward another sun. For the writer, hypertext can contain bubble worlds.

I honestly cannot say whether The Life of Geronimo Sandoval is a decent work. But writing it was something I’ll never forget. One image by the Rio Grande started it all off. That image also ended my progress into it.