It’s great when you have kids and “happen” to relish the books you read them. You leave those books then return to them after a long time (as if you missed something). An example is Jame’s Marshall’s George and Martha “picture books,” to use Maurice Sendak’s term from the forward to Haughton Mifflin’s collected works, in which he writes, “The picture book is a peculiar art form that thrives on genius, intuition, daring, and a meticulous attention to its history and its various and complex components.” I agree with all gusto (especially given our fondness for the complexity of Harold and the Purple Crayon).

Marshall’s picture books are about two hippos, George and Martha, and their andventures as friends are ripe with connections between writing and art. In addition, Marshall has a particular way with the “text” that uses all of its properties. White space, framing, page against page and page to page reading, visual composition, dialogue, and the structure of the linear book. There are times, of course, when you wished you had a scanner.

In a story called “The Clock,” George gives Martha a cuckoo clock and the adventure ensues. Each scene is rendered in his books “in facing,” that is text is given on one page, while the facing page (the page that closes over the left page) renders the accompanying art, one providing context for the other. Here’s the initial writing for “The Clock”

George gave Martha a present for her birthday. “It’s a cuckoo clock,” said George. “So I see,” said Martha. “It’s nice and loud,” said George. “So I hear,” said Martha. “Do you like it?” asked George.

In this brief but incredible example, all the elements of story are at play, a small sense of tension, character development, and a rendering of closure with the question that George asks, an element of suspended relief. Judging from the words, the reader, typically a child, wouldn’t know where the action is taking place, what a cuckoo clock looks and sounds like, but there are some things that we can “infer,” drawing from the history of noise clocks (the adult’s response) as typical annoyances and from inspecting the dialogue with care. The accompanying illustration, however, answers none of these questions, but I’ll get to that a little later.

The first sentence goes, “George gave Martha a present for her birthday.” The next goes, “‘It’s a cuckoo clock,’ said George.” We can guess from what George says that Martha is a little stunned at the gift; there “has been” hesitation between the giving and George’s response. You give someone a gift for their birthday. They stare at it; there’s that odd pause. They either love it or are trying to come up with something nice to say. You “tell them what it is.” Not good. This calls up an image that doesn’t get painted or drawn. The reader may or may not visualize Martha the hippo accepting the clock with a “oh no, a cuckoo clock” look on her face. She responds, “So I see.” George continues with, “‘It’s nice and loud.'” Loud and nice: exactly! She says, “‘So I hear.'” The prior discomfort is sustained all the way through. The dialogue (which could be happening over a long stretch of time, between other moments, and scene are brief but the question at the end raises the temperature, answer or no answer. The writing provides a piece of the puzzle. What isn’t said is critical. White space follows.

Now to the accompanying image. One the facing page, Martha, drawn in ink and watery gray, is seated on a chair, reading a book. She looks annoyed. The clock is on the wall, the hour hand at 3:00. The coop doors are sprung and the cuckoo’s spring neck is at full stretch. The illustration doesn’t answer George’s question, but it does “dispose” of it in an unexpected way. On its own, the illustration gives the time and presents a situation. We don’t know what Martha’s reading, the day, nor the reason for her annoyed expression; there’s no reason necessarily to conclude that it’s the clock that’s bugging her. We have a piece of the puzzle.

Read and viewed in context, the writing and the drawn image nurture a compact and complex sequence of events, reaction, and arc. On one page, Marshall “closes” the question without “stating” the answer directly. The image and the writing are interwoven with delicate care. Taken together, a sequence is put together. Martha is seated after the gift has been presented. Her initial reasons for surprised hesitancy at the presentation of the gift has seen fruition. The ironical “‘Nice and loud'” echoes and washes over both pages, as does George’s “‘Do you like it?'”

Every page of Marshall’s story displays this incredible nuance of play between what is read and seen in whatever order. The art and the writing are nuanced and complex on their own, but they are companions; they could be taken on their own, but without the image, the writing is incomplete, and vice versa. Later, on the final page, at 10:40, George can be seen seated at a chair, reading a book. He has a contended, oddly unknowing look on his face, the neck of the cuckoo clock fully extended behind him.

Snug frame.

“Once upon a time, a maiden was drinking coffee on the bank of a river after a hard day’s work.”

AND

“Mmm. I love the smell of coffee.”

In class today, Contemporary Fiction, I called everyone a fiction. As soon as this happens, all kinds of crazy things can “pullulate.” Especially in the context of Borges.

But there’s a point to this. We know that hitting a chair with our knee hurts and thus the chair is “real” and so are we. “We” feel pain. Better, “I” feel pain. Part of the problem comes from the definition of “fiction” and its numerous meanins from Old English across to Latin. To feign, to shape, to invent, a thing invented via the imagination. In a way Borges deals with the notion of fiction in terms of identity: who is the “I” in I? As this quintessential, oft quoted bit from Borges and I illustrates: “It’s Borges, the other one, that things happen to. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause . . . news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary”; and another: “I shall endure in Borges, not in myself . . .”

In a way, there are multiple Borges’ because he’s in the network. The man and Borges’ work; his body is in the ground, but “Borges” continues to “pullulate.” It’s a valid question: who is Spinning? We read “Spinning” and shape the symbols there into an image that is imprecise. Spinning, like Borges, is a kind of fiction, then. Spinning isn’t the kind of fiction that is a short story though, which refers to a form of fiction.

In class we debate “readings.” One student will read Borges and interprete the text differently than I will: the question isn’t why, but how? This is a Barthian given. The “true” meaning of “The Garden of Forking Paths” can’t therefore be fixed (see also Plato, Cratylus), but the more logical and agreeable reading (text) can be argued into existence. In Other Inquisitions, Borges writes:

Shelley expressed the opinion that all the poems of the past, present and future were episodes or fragments of a single infinite poem, written by all the poets on earth.

In a way, such a crazy idea speaks to Barthes’ idea about plurality and connotation. Barthe’s writes:

This I’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts.

And more Borges on a similar tac in “Martin Fierro”:

. . . one man’s dream is part of all men’s memory.

I know what a car is thus when the writer speaks of a car I don’t need to pause and look it up: the car is in the network, as is the scroll bar. In the film “Tenth” the narrative fixes on 9/11 as a turning point, the video of the planes crashing into the Trade Center towers also in the network.

“I” is alphabetical, not a living body. “I” therefore is a fiction.

Porter Goss claims that he’ll give the administration “objective” intelligence. And I’m a Pug.

Susan Gibb is doing a great job on Spinning playing with a few of the ideas we’ve thrown out to the New Media Perspectives group. She dealing with a few of Manovich’s ideas, which we’re using to lay context and orientation, and she’s manipulating spatial concepts which can applied to analysis of digital space. Here’s a cut and paste from her observations in a backyard, which I would characterize as branching:

Lets start with one of my favorite spaces, my backyard. It is part of a larger space called Burlington and is included all the way up through various levels to being part of a galaxy and beyond. But lets keep it small, to within my visual range (bordered by sight). This space also includes on one side, a small portion of my neighbors backyard, otherwise it is bounded by my house to my back, and by trees to my right and facing me. Thus, my neighbors space becomes part of my visual space, so I would assume that spaces can overlap. Birds fly into my space, as do airplanes in the upper portion that is considered as extending into the infinity of sky.

This is starting to get complicated. Im going to stop here for now, because Im either onto something, or its just simple common knowledge, or Im making no sense at all. I suspect the latter, or last of explanations. There’s also the question of how long this event took place, how long it took to write down, versus how long it will take to read, bringing the space of time into the question and the quest.

The only thing I would change here is the “I’m making no sense at all” part. I’m beginning to play with the idea that we have to get more of our students to engage an audience like this so that we can learn with them and hear them out.

More coming . . .

In dealing with Borges, Paz and Realism today in Contemporary Fiction we got to thinking about the things that happen to readers when they read. There’s something in Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” that without the author knowing it, points directly to me (my birth date). It could be any number of things, by the way. Because when I read I remember a lot of things: how to read, for example. What “the” means, is another. Reading is always a referencing act that happens “automatically,” as long as my awareness of the world is sound.

If the author mentions a green chair, this I can visualize to make sense of the text. If the author claims that Yu Tsun flees because he knows that Richard Madden is on his trail, then I understand and trust the cause and effect plotting of the story. When I read, therefore, I’m working with two texts or mutiple texts: the story or the photograph and the “experiences” that I’ve made in life. This is a smooth operation, typically.

This is why conventions are important. I read a story by turning pages is a technological convention. A newspaper is a technology, a physical innovation in how I gather info on Sudan. But the online newspaper or news site, such as BBC, operates differently. I don’t turn pages at the online Times: I click and I scroll. As a teacher, I have to think about these conventions as I write up a lecture for an online course, where a student must work with different and often confusing conventions.

But there are conventions that we can apply to a digital space: architectural ones, for example. The new media students are off mapping choice spaces (hopefully): malls, churches, and more. We want them to map a space and study it so that they connect the dots. I walk through the mall looking for shoes.

As I walk the path, something unexpected happens: I see a cool-looking “something” in another “space” within the larger “space” of the mall (Amazon or WebMD). But I don’t click on it, I enter, ask, then leave, and as I leave I try to remember what I’d come for. Then I smell that “chicken” and I’m off on another path, whose width should accommodate all those others doing the same. And the story goes on.

In architectonics, how does the purpose of a space guide the hand of the architect; how might the purpose make for innovation, licence, or an augmenting of experience by playing with convention, other ways of connecting the human senses to some collection of materials. (Built space is “memorial space.”)

This is the poet’s job too, though, the materials for her being “symbols.” And the story writer who constructs an “experience” that acts on the reader differently than the more immediate mall or church. A mall is a labyrinth, as is a poem and a short story. Or this.