Tears and Longing in Hypertext

Mark Bernstein provides examples of emotional power in Hypertext. There are so many more, too:

From Douglas’ I have said nothing

—he’s not going to pieces: he’s trying to make a joke. But Luke can’t see it.

That’s because when Jake looks at Luke, he sees his daughter’s boyfriend looking hollow-eyed, slumped over in the visitor’s chair, the kind of morose, hang-dog type nearly always in need of a bit of cheering up.

He can’t even begin to imagine what Luke sees when he looks across at him. When Luke looks at Jake, he doesn’t see someone who will never walk again. What he sees is a man who hasn’t yet realized that the two daughters he saw on Christmas day are now two tidy piles of ashes lying in two gold foil boxes, stowed in a rented house somewhere in North Hollywood.

And just a shorty from Completing the Circle,

We have nailed ourselves to eternity.

Brimmer and Death in Tweebox

Here’s a brief sample from a beginning code form of Brimmer and Death in Chris Klimas’ Tweebox.

:: Single passage mode [script]
History.prototype.originalDisplay = History.prototype.display;

History.prototype.display = function (title, link, render)
{
if ((render != ‘quietly’) && (render != ‘offscreen’))
removeChildren($(‘passages’));

this.originalDisplay.apply(this, arguments);
};

:: StoryTitle
Brimmer and Death

:: Start
On the first evening of a two-day hike through the desert, Brimmer pushed through a stand of bushes and saw Dee seated on a flat-topped stone.

She said, “Hey. The moon’s just coming up.”

Brimmer said, “The sky’s still blue, Dee, but the land’s in shade. Beautiful, right? Time’s face.”

“You’re still a big mystery to me, Brimmer,” she said, hopping off the stone. She wore a black bandanna on her head. Silver rivets the size of nickels studded her belt, and she waved the heat away with a bone-handled fan.

She wrapped Brimmer in a wrestler’s hug and touched him lightly on the cheek with her lips. She set a small tape deck down and clicked play. She said, “A little ditty to take away your troubles.” Then she showed Brimmer [[an ancient dance|Loss]]. She circled him, fluttered her long white fingers. She took his hand and spun him in the sand. The moon’s white edge rose like a scythe blade over the hills.

:: Loss
“It’s been close to a century,” Brimmer said, as he crossed wood for a fire. “I’ve missed the look of you.”

“Has it been as long as that, Brimmer?” Dee said.

Brimmer smiled. He went to his rucksack for a cigarette. He offered one to Dee. She took it and went to puffing on it cold.

“They’re very rare these days,” Brimmer said. “I’ll get my hands on a pack every once in a while.”

“I hear your old country lost its government,” Dee said, crossing her legs. Her paleness blushed pink in the brightening fire.

“No one knows what they’re missing,” Brimmer said. “Democracy took to much muscle and nuance.”

After a few more text spaces, things are really going to get complicated, with two major splits in the narrative. It’s interesting to note that a set of html pages is an arbitrary collections of files, while a growing list of paragraphs in a text file can be a real bother. Now that I think of it, I haven’t written a full document in a standard word processor for a very long time. Unless exams and templated docs count.

Editors

Why is it that the spaces I pay attention to are filled with hypertext and the tools, such as Gimcrack’d (could someone check the iphone on this one? Um, Jesse?), Hypertextopia, and now the wall outside my office at work? This is a good thing.

Thanks Susan for the links.

One genius of Storyspace is its editor, however. Hopefully this framework will come back into people’s thinking as software like Hypertextopia and Literatronic become more popular. It’s a good thing, genius, to have the editing space linked coherently to the reading space. This is just sound epistemology.

Doninger, Free Speech, and Borders

Reportage from the Second Curcuit Court of Appeals is coming in on the Avery Doninger case, an item often in the post space here. This case is about relationships. These relationships should not be overcomplicated.

It calls for a rethinking by school administrators of their role in public discourse. It’s not about whether a student can or cannot call their school principles names on a weblog. If a student does call their teacher or principle an asshole, then this provides an opportunity for the teacher or the principle to engage: “Why are you calling me an asshole?” That’s a starting point. On Twitter, I asked a question about Facebook semiotics. This was a serious question. On Facebook, I have students in my course who have added me as a friend, a term that has numerous meanings. These students have made the choice to add me to their lists. I typically accept their call. But this is potentially dangerous for them. Soon, they may want to retract because part of my role as instructor is to evaluate their performance.

But the student may also evaluate mine. Is it proper for a student on Facebook or in their own weblog to call me an asshole? Sure. Would my feelings be hurt? Sure. Honestly, who “wants” to be called an asshole without compensation? But it would provide me an opportunity. “Why are you calling me an asshole when I basically performed my function: which was to evaluate your performance? This is a function the student has agreed to in their role as someone who’s basically asked and paid for it. The opportunity comes with the response: “Why did you claim that I used too many generalizations or did not back up my conclusions about Romanticism with evidence from the texts” or “I thought I had supplied sufficient logic yet you claimed that paragraph 3 needed development.” These questions I can deal with, in private or in public.

People generally know that what they say on Facebook is public within the Facebook context. Same goes for the weblog.

The Doninger case is a waste of litigation space: can we not engage each other in real disputation? Again, I make a call. Administrators should not be out to enforce boundaries. They should have engaged the student in her comment space. They should have made their case in public using their own fingers. That’s what keyboards are for. For practicing classical speech! This is what I mean:

The school officials’ attorney, Thomas R. Gerarde, argued that the Internet has fundamentally changed students’ ability to communicate, allowing them to reach hundreds of people at a time. If a student leader makes offensive comments about the school on the Internet, the school should have the right to act, said Gerarde, who represents Mills Principal Karissa Niehoff and former Region 10 Superintendent Paula Schwartz. “We shouldn’t be required to just swallow it,” he said.

I disagree that the internet “has fundamentally changed students’ ability to communicate.” The same cause and effect relationship could have resulted from a slip of paper passed around in the cafeteria. Should the school have the right to act? Please: why is this not fallacious in that Gerarde’s assertion assumed a narrow definition of “act.” It did have the right to act in all kinds of ways. Officials have the right to comment on a student’s weblog now, at this moment, to ask simple questions: “Yes, we did make the decision to ‘Cancel’ (record correction provided by Andy Thibault [thanks, Andy]) Jamfest. Why does this make us douchbags?

P.S.: Correction added.

Hypertext is Boring?

I find this post by Ben Vershbow at if:book on hypertext strange and worrisome. It starts with comment on Jeremy Ashkenas’ web tool Hypertextopia and then dips into generalization and the condemnation of a class of objects.

He writes:

The site [Hypertextopia] is gorgeously done, applying a fresh coat of Web 2.0 paint to the creaky concepts of classical hypertext.

What are the “creaky concepts of hypertext”? Map views, charts, links, and titles? The concepts aren’t all that complicated.

Ben then moves to the viability question:

Lovely as it all is though, it doesn’t convince me that hypertext is any more viable a literary form now, on the Web, than it was back in the heyday of Eastgate and Storyspace. Outside its inner circle of devotees, hypertext has always been more interesting in concept than in practice. A necessary thought experiment on narrative’s deconstruction in a post-book future, but not the sort of thing you’d want to read for pleasure.

I can actually understand the “thought experiment” issue. It can be fun to think about the possibilities. But there are hypertexts to consider as artifacts and as works that demand more than just a squash. Is hypertext “more interesting in concept than in practice” is a question that leads no where. In New Media we just went through several hypertexts to wonderful response and the students are finding the building of a hypertext quite interesting. In Contemporary Fiction, we read Jackson and the students came away stunned at the content and the “viability” question licked. The “narrative deconstruction” issue is for me an old concept, but the question of a theory pose shouldn’t turn writers away from writing interesting stories in the form.

Maybe it’s because I enjoy Borges as a writer that I disagree with Ben on the conflation of Borges and hypertext. The forking path meme has consequence to physical paths, but this isn’t the only metaphor that matters and can, indeed, lead to inaccuracy and incongruence, nor does the metaphor need apply when we think about the enormity of possible aesthetic devices that links, spaces, and syntax may provide in the form. I have no idea what Ben means by the literality of Borges’ tales. He writes, “Tales like “Forking Paths,” Funes the Memorious and The Library of Babel are ideas taken to a frightening extreme, certainly not things we would wish to come true.” Hypertext does not realize the ideas in the tales. It is, however, an expressive form.

Ben writes:

There are days when the Internet does indeed feel a bit like the Library of Babel, a place where an infinity of information has led to the death of meaning. But those are the days I wish we could put the net back in the box and forget it ever happened. I get a bit of that feeling with literary hypertext — insofar as it reifies the theoretical notion of the death of the author, it is not necessarily doing the reader any favors.

I have no fear of the Library of Babel issue, since people bring meaning to the net in all kinds of ways. Nor does hypertext need to assist in any deaths, be they metaphorical or theoretical. There are, however, interesting relations that can be “authored” into the environment if the writer keeps the reader in mind.

But here’s the main problem. Ben writes, “Hypertext’s main offense is that it is boring, in the same way that Choose Your Own Adventure stories are fundamentally boring.” This is just puzzling. Hypertext is a container of expression. Books, as a container of expression, can be put aside, only if a specific book is found uninteresting. It is not, however, the book that is boring, but the reader who is unimpressed by it or finds its content uninspired or repetitious. Yes, I’ve read hypertexts that were better hypertexts than stories. But I’ve also read works that have stayed with me. If the argument is that hypertext tends to poor prose, then what explains poor prose in books?

For me, as a reader and writer of hypertext, I find that the form presents all kinds of possibility for storytelling and that the forms needs further exploration.