One of the things I like to do when I’m reading and I read lots–reading, as in experiencing and thinking–is to think about concrete and abstract space and how ceratin kinds of designed and natural spaces–constructs or natural topology–evoke meaning.

McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian is spatial in the sense that it’s on the table or in my hand as a book, yet the language also suggests space. I open the book, start to read, and something happens as my eyes move: thought. The writing evokes the landscapes of the southwest and northern Mexico and those landscapes become another character for the many “principles” in the tale. The sense grapple with vastness.

It’s a relationship, it seems to me. Evocations.

Here are two of my all time favorites: McCloud’s Zen Dating and Matanle and Ankersons Anywhere.

Something that may be interesting to some of you. Broken Saints, a graphic novel in Flash. Watch online or download the chapters.

John Timmons has expanded the IF section of his website for those who might want to research both reading and authoring issues, including mucho downloads. Follow this link to get there.

Maureen, in a comment, mentions Burns in the context of digital story telling. It’s a good mention, given that Burns so influenced what we call documentary, so much so that after his Civil War series, every one else started to copy the method, to the point of the laughable.

Anyway, his films reveal an understanding of the synthesis medium for narrative.

Kluba, Timmons, and I have been giving a lot of thought to things to do over the summer for students in new media. John is continually finding good things and I think the digital storytelling issue is a practice where new media issues–media synthesis–will really come together.

I’m going to be taking up some space here to write a little about what people write about games and game criticism or what is called game criticism because I think I’m ready to do it, or, rather, I’m just fed up enough to try.

I’ve been reading what people have been and are writing about games since the mid nineties and am waiting with patience for IF Theory. Here are a few of the authors that I’ve met: Espen Arseth, Jesper Juul, Marie-Laure Ryan, Janet Murray, Mary Flanagan, and others.

Considering games has led me from some hiatus back to narrative theory and David Herman, Vladimir Propp, Mikhail Bakhtin and others, with jumps back into rhetorical theory with Burke, Quintilian, and Perelman.

The hiatus prior to the writers on narrative concerned Human Geography studies and studies of memory (inner geography). And this reading continues with writers like Yi-Fu Tuan, David Harvey, Edward Casey , Mary Carruthers, Ivan Illich and others.

This list is made up of reading and study that I’ve either chanced upon, have been advised to read by friends, or that has followed from Medieval studies as a matter of course. The range of accessibility is broad. Carruther’s demands that you know your Aristotle and Aquinas, while Herman demands that you know your Greimas.

In a way, this has been the journey for a while, this reading, and it hasn’t always been fruitful. For Augustine reading was a difficult task. Disentangling the multi-layered meaning from the literal or intended text in exegesis is revelatory, difficult, and pleasurable. The difficult task of searching for meaning is rewarded with the pleasure of “finding.” Augustine writes,

“But why I view them with greater delight under that aspect than if no such figure were drawn from the sacred books, though the fact would remain the same and the knowledge the same, is another question, and one very difficult to answer. Nobody, however, has any doubt about the facts, both that it is pleasanter in some cases to have knowledge communicated through figures and that what is attended with difficulty in the seeking gives greater pleasure in the finding” (On Christian Doctrine II. 2.6).

The same idea comes before this from Diotima to Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. Reading becomes a journey through the vineyard of the text, as Hugh of St. Victor and Illich would have it in the Didascalicon.
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Susan Gibb wanted to pass this along to Tom: Creating Adventure Games on Your Computer. I’m unfamiliar with the contents, but Tom might find it useful.

I grabbed this quote by following a link from Dennis Jerz concerning the issue of ebooks:

David Steinberg, president of corporate strategy and international in New York with HarperCollins, said: “There was a format war. They compete and are not compatible. That creates resistance.”

“Three years ago, there was a huge amount of hype but we did not get caught up in it. We steered away from digitising all our works and dumping them into cyberspace,” he told Reuters.

He said e-books, still a tiny part of the overall business, have a “30 percent plus” annual growth rate with HarperCollins putting out the complete works of thriller writer Agatha Christie electronically.

But the reader’s love affair with the printed word is far from over because, as Chris Barnard, technology analyst at IDC consultancy, concluded, “One problem is that e-books are up against a very established technology, namely books. And most people are very happy with that technology.”

Writing has been around in digital form for many years: I’m reading a hypertext novel by Bill Bly at the moment. Scanning books into “book form” and selling them as ebooks misses the point, in my view. For example, I’m also studying Syberia, a work which allows for mutiple renderings of a single narrative event: a text telling, a cinematic telling, and a puppet-show telling. New media allows for this. Certainly a publisher can scan a book into digital form and distribute it for PDA. But is this an effective and affective use of technology? Books are not hypertexts and hypertexts are not books. Then: Christie scanned into digital space would therefore turn Death on the Nile into something else: is there even such thing as an electronic book? Isn’t this like claiming that a flight simulator is a plane?

Spinning has made its transition to the Typepad environment and things are looking pretty slick.