- Beowulf & Other English Poems
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Roland Barthes by Graham Allen
- With A Tangled Skein by Piers Anthony
- Collection of Aristophanes’ Plays
- The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
- Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
- Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes
- Incidents by Roland Barthes
- Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes
- The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
- Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
- High Druid of Shannara: Jarka Ruus by Terry Brooks
- High Druid of Shannara: Tanaquil by Terry Brooks
- The Path To The Nest of Spiders by Italo Calvino
- Six Memos For The Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
- Under The Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino
- The Cambridge Companion To Chaucer
- Spray Paint The Walls: The Story of Black Flag by Stevie Chick
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- Matched by Ally Condie
- Context-Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century by Cory Doctorow
- Makers by Cory Doctorow
- With A Little Help by Cory Doctorow
- Ten Plays by Euripides
- Discipline & Punish-The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
- H.P Lovecraft: Against The World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq
- Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: Invisible Presences by Molly Hoff
- The Odyssey by Homer (Butler translation)
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume
- Basrayatha: The Story Of A City by Muhammad Khudayyir
- New York Hardcore 1986-1991: A Time We’ll Remember by David Koenig
- Teaching Literature & Language Online (Edited by Ian Lancashire)
- Piers Plowman by William Langland
- The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard
- Italo Calvino: A Journey Toward Postmodernism by Constance Markey
- Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos by McAlinden
- Utopia by Sir Thomas More
- Plato-Euthyphro
- Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino
- Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott
- Civil Disobedience & Other Essays by Henry David Thoreau
- Look At The Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut
- Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
- The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf
War Prayer 025
The more Drew rejected sex and all of its mind numbing idiocy, the more it came to occupy his every waking thought. The roll of a pair of hips, the toned arms of another, the seductive, alluring, mind of a third. He became obsessed with his idealized concept of what love should be. But he continued to deny it had anything to do with sex. The more he denied, his imaginary world became more developed.
This denial became a game. He could excuse his fantasies by saying he would never act on them, never try to recreate them in the real world. At the end of the year, the tag for books read that year was rather sad and small on his weblog’s tag cloud. So much time wasted on sex that could have been spent on Barth or Sorrentino or hypertext fiction or adhering a sticker somewhere.
Drew and Theresa made love often during this period, trying to recreate that pair of hips and mashing it up with the third’s alluring mind. Sex became as meaningless for them as it was in real life.
The Guilty Parties
During the fall of 2004, the following are guilty as charged of offering inspiration for what you are reading.
- Scott Rettberg’s hypertext fiction The Meddlesome Passenger.
- Jorge Luis Borges’ collection Labyrinths, especially The Library Of Babel, The Immortal, and The Circular Ruins.
- The literary weblog Conversational Reading, which, beyond generally getting me excited about literature, introduced me to the work of Gilbert Sorrentino, referenced in the penultimate lexia.
- Jill/txt was a daily, still, source of inspiration. A conversation with Jill in real life inspired a lexia.
- Grand Text Auto in general.
- Shelley Jackson’s My Body a Wunderkammer, which made me cry more than once and pushed me to be brave enough to write about sexuality issues.
- Of course, The Unknown Collective’s The Unknown, which greatly influenced how I both read and write hypertext, and my aesthetic vision for hypertext fiction.
- Derik Badman’s, who I met on a Buffy The Vampire Slayer listserv, writing about constraints at the time I was writing War Prayers inspired me to try to write three hundred word, exact, entries.
- Although offline, Rettberg and Nick Montfort’s sticker novel Implementation was paradoxically what made me create a blog to document War Prayers. I had to get my words onto a screen somewhere. I even created a few summary stickers, one of which still is on a wall at The Richard Stockton College Of New Jersey underneath an Implementation sticker.
War Prayer 024
(Sorrentino) or (Jukebox). I link, you decide!
After three thousand murders and one dead best friend, it took the effort involved with driving a stake through one certain oracle who’d really outgrown his welcome last May to wake Drew up. The one who had all the answers, apparently, was now laying in a morgue, or hospital, somewhere. Who cares. The fog had been lifted and when he wiped his eyes, a lot of things became clearer.
Meaningless sex, as Theresa mocked him nearby, wasn’t just meaningless anymore. It was stupid. Sex in general is stupid. Drew began to wonder just how much of his welcome he had really worn out. The more quarters they slipped into Pizza Hut jukeboxes, the more suspicious and reluctant their hellos and nods became in the halls. It made Drew feel more alive than ever.
People seemed to be friendly only when others weren’t around. Was it all just some crap Theresa pumped into his head because of her special role in his life? No, their increasing hostility at his very presence was because he’d been smart enough to slay that fucking oracle.
Had it all been a dream? Sometimes he just wasn’t sure anymore who was writing this. The moment something goes awry or is uncomfortable most people scatter fast. Theresa screams at them, but they don’t hear her. She’d like to slay that other blond who stole her idea. They walk past a group of staked ideas sitting together and make their way to the back of the student center. No more wasting time; coffee was now reserved for Theresa.
They would hole themselves up this winter and plot and scheme and annihilate. More coffee would be consumed; Borges and Sorrentino would be discussed. Come second term, presidential and academic, things were going to be a lot different.
We can always carve a bigger stake.
Feral Hypertext : When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control
A new idea! Instead of a weekly update of what I am reading for my thesis and the project Toni and I are working on, how about I just blog my research daily as it goes on. Bear with me: I am bouncing between a number of sources so posts will go back and forth between them often. My goal is to upload one per day. In fact, if all goes well the focus of this blog will shift for the time being to my current, in progress, research and writing almost exclusively.
Oh, I will get back to War Prayers soon.
History Lesson
My first entry will be for Jill Walker-Rettberg’s Feral Hypertext : When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control. Dr. Walker’s paper offers a lot of useful information on two fronts. There is plenty of good historical information about hypertext and many useful arguments for what Toni and I are working towards in our project, which is moving towards a focus on how texts have been, and are, defined and how this effects electronic literature. Walker argues that hypertext before the World Wide Web is “domesticated…bred in captivity” (1). She continues by arguing that hypertext was, however, always intended for individual users. In 1974, Ted Nelson insists that ordinary people need to have access to personal computers. Thirty years before, in an essay for The Atlantic in 1945, Vannevar Bush also argues for this:
Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.
Continuing the historical look, Nelson creates the term “hypertext” in 1965. Two years later, Julia Kristeva does the same for Intertextuality. What becomes important here for my own thinking is, as Walker notes, the similarities between contemporary critical theory and hypertext have been pointed out numerous times, including, the work I am most familiar with, George Landow’s Hypertext 2.0 from 1997. Walker is quick to point out, as Landow is as well, that the “relationship between hypertext and critical theory is not that simple” (3).
Walker continues by offering a brief history of preweb hypertext systems like Hypercard and Storyspace:
Though the first personal computers became available in the late seventies, the first home hypertext systems weren’t available till the late eighties. Peter Brown’s GUIDE [8] was followed by HyperCard, a hypertext authoring system that was packaged with Macintosh computers. Soon afterwards, Eastgate’s Storyspace became available, first for the Macintosh and later for the PC. Tinderbox, released from Eastgate in 2001, is probably the tool that most closely follows in the footsteps of these systems, which were very much created in the spirit of Vannevar Bush and the desire for an intimate extension to memory. These hypertext authoring systems allow an individual to organise his or her personal notes and create his or her own self-contained hypertext which can be shared with others by copying it onto a diskette or CD or by emailing it as a single file. While Tinderbox and HyperCard were primarily intended as organisational tools, Storyspace was explicitly developed as a tool for fiction authors.
The Evolution Of The Writerly Text
Distribution of literary hypertext before the World Wide Web still shared many of the characteristics of the bounded text. Like a copy of Sorrentino’s Aberration of Starlight in paperback, a CD of Shelley Jackson’s Patch Work Girl still restricted readers to a “sustained reading of a self-contained work” (5). The rise of cheaper personal computers and the World Wide Web began to allow anyone with an Internet account to publish on the web, link, and be linked to. This led to what Walker refers to as “feral hypertext,” hypertext that is “no longer tame and domesticated” (1). For my own work, the most important point here is that hypertext on the World Wide Web in general cannot be tamed any longer. Hypertext is very unruly and rather disobedient!
As Walker points out, literary hypertext that has gone, in her words, “feral” demands of the reader “to accept structures that are neither predefined nor clearly boundaried” (2). Collaboratively written works like The Unknown and digital poetry like Megan Sapnar and Ingrid Ankerson’s Cruising defy the boundaries of the bounded text. An interactive memoir like Caitlin Fisher’s These Waves Of Girls is an unruly and rather untamed account of growing up told with audio and visual links. After making sure to note that Landow and others have pointed out the differences between critical theory and hypertext while pointing out their similarities, Walker expresses the idea, which I strongly agree with, that theorists involved with critical theory and intertextuality are already arguing that texts are unruly and extremely disobedient. Literary hypertext on the World Wide Web is an evolution of the writerly text. Hypertext that is feral is, as I see it, an interactive expression of the writing of the work on authorship of theorists like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes.
After hearing about Gilbert Sorrentino from a few other blogs over winter break I am going to check out Aberration of Starlight.
In a couple days maybe I will post a "best of" list for 2004 and what I am reading over winter break.