Notes from 253

Because these notes include lots of quotes and questions interweaved, I’ve formatted my own comments in blue to set them off from the credible stuff (which leads to tangential questions about authority in online publishing…see Wikipedia). So, now I'm published! You can comment, you can tell me I'm full of hogwash, you can link away after one comment and never come back...oh what fun!

As Sci-fi writer, Ryman is accustomed to dealing head-on with science. In 253, he uses form, rather than content, to engage with questions about how the digital world impacts us.
http://www.ryman-novel.com/home.htm

? One issue that arises as technology evolves is that we become less reliant on each other, and therefore more isolated from each other. Ryman engages in that issue by treating each character as an isolated case, but then linking them through common interests, relationships, etc. Lots of questions around technology’s role in breaking us apart into our own little dark rooms with blue screens, or travelers with ipods and cellphones. Also lots of questions regarding the role of online community (if you ever want to talk about the community issue, that’s the world I used to work in and comment on all the time) and user generated content. We are linked together through email, SMS, blogs, message boards, yet invisible and to varying degrees anonymous.

From Wendy Grossmain, Salon.com, 1997
http://archive.salon.com/march97/21st/london970320.html
“In "The Child Garden" (1989), which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1990, Ryman examines a world in which viruses are the primary force not just in medicine but in social engineering and education as well. Deliberate infection is carried out by the Consensus, a mass government formed from models of citizens' personalities, "read" when they reach the age of 10. In sub-tropical London, his lead character, part immune, fights the viruses chattering and whispering in her head to direct her behavior. You may forget details, but you hear the whispering viruses long afterwards.”

? The way 253 starts out it sounds like a creative writing assignment. Did you feel this was effective as a novel...or simply as an experimental work of art?

Grossmain “It also has a certain resonance: If it's difficult to make a character stand out in 253 words, it's equally difficult to make an individual life have impact in the 80 or so years most people get to do it in.”

Ryman from Grossmain “’253 with links is about what makes people the same, because you can follow through -- the grandparent theme, the people thinking about Thatcher. It's about the subliminal ways we're linked and alike. You just read it passenger by passenger, and it's about how different we all are. The links change the meaning of the novel. I think I'm going to like the print version more because it emphasizes more just how multi-various the cars are, but the linked version is fun.’

? In the case of 253, you never leave the domain, ie all the links link back to some other part of 253. One of the benefits of hypertext is that it opens up the boundaries of a document or story. One of the drawbacks is that you can leave the text never to return again, linking from one doc to another and another.

Where serialised publishing allowed Dickens to tweak his stories to accommodate the opinions of his readers, now, anyone could write the ending, or readers could be directed to their choice of ending…or choose from options in the plot which would render dozens or hundreds of variations of the same novel. They can leave comments on the page.

(What ever happened to Another One Along in a Minute?)

Translating Hypertext to print?
Reviewer Chris Mitchell, http://www.spikemagazine.com/0398_253.php,
“Where the electronic version seems alive and organic, the print version feels like an example of form obliterating content.”

Robert Kendall – „Hypertext: Foe to Print“
http://www.wordcircuits.com/comment/htlit_8.htm
Hypertext literature first emerged with more than a little saber rattling. In 1991 Bolter hailed it as a natural outcome of “the exhaustion of printed literature.” [1] A year later Landow claimed that writers of print literature “should feel threatened by hypertext, just as writers of romances and epics should have felt threatened by the novel and Venetian writers of Latin tragedy should have felt threatened by the Divine Comedy and its Italian text. Descendants, after all, offer continuity with the past but only at the cost of replacing it.” [2] That same year Coover gave us an article about hypertext literature provocatively entitled “The End of Books.” [3]

Kendall argues that as the medium evolves, writers will choose the appropriate medium for their message. Some poetry, stories will be better in traditional paper format, others will thrive in a more dynamic environment.

? Hypertext is like an evolution of footnotes and endnotes. What Landon calls “multi-sequentially read text.” But now, rather than leaving the text to look at the footnotes in the margins, we might actually be leaving the text to enter a whole new domain/text. See where the issue of the “text” lead directly into materialist and deconstructionist debates. Where the word became “code” in a linguistic/philosophical sense. Now the word becomes computer code…everything a series of 000s and 111s.

? Hypertext is compulsive, at the same time limitless and neverending. It can be distracting, shallow or expansive – disposable? If there are no boundaries, how do we define the “work”? Or do we need to look at the text as part of a network of texts?

Marx “Thought derives from the forces and modes of production”

? Does hypertext limit our reading of the text by forcing meanings into words/passages that we might read differently?

Landon – “a major implication of hypertext and hypermedia, intertextuality: such opening up, such freeing one to create and perceive interconnections.”

Landon – “Miller does point out, however that Derrida’s “Glas” and the personal computer appeared more or less at the same time. Both work self-consciously and deliberately to make obsolete the traditional codex linear book and to replace it with the new multi linear multimedia hypertext that is rapidly becoming the characteristic mode of ‘expression’ both in culture and in the study of cultural norms.”

Another example
http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/home.html


? How does electronic publishing affect the archive? On one hand we now save everything, on the other hand, are we losing the discipline to create a structured, directed (meaningful?) archive?

? Community publishing/blogs?


? Blurring of the lines between reader and writer (touched upon by Middleton in New Formations)

? Commercial issues, intellectual property issues: Free distribution of poetry and literature?

? Also see Morvern Callar assuming authorship of her boyfriend’s writing with just a few keystrokes


? When you take a poem out of a collection or an article out of a magazine it changes the context, like taking a song off an album changes the context of the song.

? Text on the screen can lose its context, even its magic when we hit the print icon. Hypertext is dead, fonts, colours and formatting are often lost or changed to fit on an A4 sheet of paper – or simply don’t fit.

?How does the proliferation of memory threaten our ability to remember? The archived personal history vs. the remembered personal history? For example, what we remember from pictures vs. what we remember from memory.

Wordsworth’s “Lines Written above Tintern Abbey”
The way some towns would change under a rain
in childhood
and how they no longer do, or are never quite
as blue as they were: the windows turning to dusk
in the seafront café (p45).

Albert Einstein once said, “Never memorize something that you can look up.” – But what happens when there’s nothing you can’t look up?


From Hayles – http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/yale_journal_of_criticism/v016/16.2hayles.html
Regarding the Blake archive
http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/

“The editors of the Blake Archive are meticulous in insisting that even small differences in materiality potentially affect meaning, so they have gone to a great deal of trouble to compile not only different works but extant copies of the same work. Yet these copies are visually rendered on screen using a technology that differs far more in its materiality from print than the print copies do from one another. The computer is able to simulate print documents accurately precisely because it is completely unlike print in its architecture and functioning. The simulation of visual accuracy, which has rendered an invaluable service in rescuing Blake from text-only editions that suppressed the crucial visual dimensions of his work, is nevertheless achieved at the cost of cybernetic difference. Consider for example the navigation functionalities, which allow the user to juxtapose many images on screen to compare different copies and versions of a work. To achieve a comparable (though not identical) effect with print—if it could be done at all—would require access to rare books rooms, a great deal of page turning, and the constant shifting of physical artifacts. A moment's thought suffices to show that changing the navigational apparatus of a work changes the work. Translating the words on a scroll into a codex book, for example, radically alters how a reader encounters the work; by changing how the work means, such a move alters what it means. One of the insights electronic textuality makes inescapably clear is that navigational functionalities are not merely ways to access the work but part of a work's signifying structure. An encyclopedia signifies differently from a realistic novel in part because its navigational functionalities anticipate and structure different reading patterns from the novel (a clash of conventions that Milorad Pavic has great fun in exploiting in Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel).”


“The issue goes to the heart of what we think a text is, and at the heart of the heart is the belief that work and text are immaterial constructions independent of the substrates in which they are instantiated. We urgently need to rethink this assumption, for as long as it remains [End Page 270] intact, efforts to account for the specificities of print and electronic media will be hamstrung. Without nuanced analyses of the differences and similarities of print and electronic media, we will fail to grasp the fuller significance of the momentous changes underway as the Age of Print draws to a close and print—as robust, versatile, and complex as ever—takes its place in the dynamic media ecology of the twenty-first century.”

When push comes to pixel, it is clear that McGann's primary allegiance is to print rather than electronic textuality. He repeatedly asserts that the resources of the electronic medium pale in comparison [End Page 272] to print. Speaking specifically of fiction, he argues "there is no comparison . . . between the complexity and richness of paper-based fictional works, on the one hand, and their digital counterparts—hypermedia fiction—on the other." 23 Although he is too astute a critic to make comparisons directly, by juxtaposing in the next sentence Stuart Moulthrop with Italo Calvino, he implies that Moulthrop, a contemporary pioneer in electronic hypertext, is not as good a writer as Calvino, or at any rate does not produce literature as good. Like many arguments McGann mounts to prove the superiority of print, the implied comparison here between print and electronic literature is seriously flawed. It is obviously inappropriate to compare a literary medium that has been in existence for fifteen years with print forms that have developed over half a millennium. A fairer comparison would be print literature produced between 1550-1565, when the conventions of print literature were still in their nascent stages, with the electronic literature produced between 1985-2000. I believe that anyone familiar with both canons would be forced to agree it is by no means obvious that the print canon demonstrates conclusively the superiority of print as a medium for literary creation and expression. Given five hundred years in which to develop—if we can possibly stretch our imaginations this far—electronic literature may indeed prove itself the equal or superior to print.”

“These changed senses of work, text, and document make it possible to see phenomena that are now obscured or made invisible by the reigning ideologies. For example, with the advent of the Web, communication pathways are established through which texts cycle in dynamic interaction with one another. This leads to what might be called Work as Assemblage, a cluster of related texts that quote, comment upon, amplify, and remediate one another. One form of such an assemblage is illustrated by Dark Lethe, a science fiction site at which collaborators contribute stories loosely related to one another. 32 Another example suggested by David Silver is the cluster of texts associated with Myst, which includes, in addition to the computer game and its companion game Riven, Web sites populated by devotees of the games, as well as the associated print novels that expand upon the narratives in the games and supply backstories and other plot details missing from the games. 33 “
Hayles – “One of the basic ways this can happen is via the logics of programming
itself: ‘the executable codes (algorithms) of computational devices have much
to tell us about the functioning structures of traditional textual devices’ (RT
p19), because the computer is able to manipulate and display the
interdependence of markers that guide reading and semantic layers. Such
work reveals that the page is a much more active generator of meaning
than is usually recognised: ‘For the truth is that all textualisations - but preeminently
imaginative textualities - are organised through concurrent
structures. Texts have bibliographical and linguistic structures, and those
are riven by other concurrencies: rhetorical structures, grammatical, metrical,
sonic, referential. The more complex the structure the more concurrencies
are set in play’ (RT p90). “