I have two versions of this in mind, two audiences, two venues, two times, two modes of publication, lecture and essay, each of the latter two themselves already bifurcated, the lecture split because I enjoy how delivering talks from written texts gives me the space to find music in language, the essay because I am aware it is likely to appear in print and on the Net alike, seemingly simultaneously, although in fact these two modalities occupy different times and spaces for the reader who encounters them. The first version, the lecture, is intended as a talk in Prague and so is titled "Paris again or Prag: Who will save lit from com?" The second, this essay, once entitled "Where is Fiction?: Emergent Narrative Space" but now called simply "Ordinary Fiction" is intended for this spring 1999 issue of Paradoxa devoted to narrative in the new millennium. I am almost a year away from that spring now. Even so it is warm, the hottest summer on record in some regions. At this moment the lecture is veering off, you will not see it again, although it is likely that segments of prose may spark back and forth across the gap between the two texts. More than this, of course, and unverifiable for you within the time of this reading, the two versions will always share the intimate liquidity and longing for the Orphic egg which spawned them. In mind they reside as one undifferentiated substance as I begin to work on them in alternating spaces, metaphorically called windows, which define an edge between them which I can violate by merely dragging any segment of words from one to another (thus) as you cannot see but perhaps (in an electronic version and with the right operating system) can verify for yourself.
That the light spills from window to window. A question specific to this essay is whether the conditions of narrative already exist in what I have written, whether the person who gives a talk in Prague exists here with the complication and potential for closure (even what I have come to call transitory closure, the momentary emergences of settled form) which we have come to think of as narrative. As I write I know he will give the talk next November in a hall in Prague at the Softmodern conference, a sort of travelling electronic circus under the auspices of the Goethe Insititute there. I want to write that he will be doughty there but it turns out I might mean dapper or natty, though the unexpected appearance of that first word on mind and on screen introduces a note of anxiety (not surprising for a public lecture, especially in such an august setting) when I confirm its meaning. In Europe as if to mask his fears in bright banners he almost always wears a strikingly colored shirt, red linen or neon blue, against the ground of a black suit jacket and charcoal trousers.
In another time I might have (been) expected to have an experience, say giving a lecture, which I then dramatized, often by displacing its setting, shifting, say, the lecture to a sales conference or a soccer stadium, and likewise shifting the essentials of the character, let us call him Jules, for instance, though retaining the anxiety and a sense of his (and my) characteristic linguistic style.
He rides a black bicycle which he carefully washes and waxes every Saturday at a BP station at the intersection of Grindelalle and Grindelhof near the Universitaet in Hamburg, leaning it up against the yellow and green tile wall beside the stall where others wash their Kias and Opels.
I think I am going to shift windows for a bit and work on the lecture,which as you might expect is taking quite a different course of development. (I apologize for the inevitable echo of Borges here, just as the self-reflexive, albeit in this case accurate, authorial prose above evokes John Barth or Bob Coover, the latter given a familiar here as if to signal some relation-although I have notes in my possession, you will have to take this on my word, a word which in the form of electronic mail I could easily copy here, though how you would know I hadn't invented or counterfeited it isn't clear or is rather a matter of detection, encryption, bibliographic or other reference-from the former, signed Jack.)
(FIGURE ONE GOES HERE) Perhaps you expect nothing. Perhaps you are merely some Tom, Bob, or Jack just popped in here for a look at what passes for arty talk. Perhaps it is better to start outward, from the perspective of that reader, for this moment let us shift away from Ned or Jack and call her Gloriana, rather than the text and its modes or occasions. For it is she (no, not just any she, but Gloriana, who this moment chafes in the heat of her temporarily un-airconditioned apartment, waiting for the El Niño brown-out to ease and the power to resume, distracting herself, or attempting to, by pecking idly at the keys of her laptop, an oddly erotic gesture when viewed through the screen porch on a summer night, hoping against any real probability that the batteries hold out through the power failure) who encounters texts differently given her circumstance not the texts themselves (such as my notes from Jack Barth) which differ on account of occupying different mediums, which is to say times and spaces.
I start to think I should have said Shelley Jackson. Not the name for the reader, mind you, but Shelley rather than Jack, although for her I have no familiar term, no diminutive, to wield, though she is much moreso (familiar that is, not diminutive). Her face through the scrim of the screen porch bathed in the lavender light washing from the active matrix screen.
There is no figure one. For a good deal of the latter part of this century fiction was occupied with this stratagem, the infolding of surfaces for linear texts, which Mark Taylor in Hiding reminds us is really invagination in which, "since the organism as a whole is formed by a complex of dermal layers, the body is, in effect, nothing but a strata of skin in which interiority and exteriority are thoroughly convoluted" (12).
This he links, naturally enough, with Auster's City of Glass and (preliminarily) with hypertext, where "the story or stories fold more than unfold to create what amounts to a hypertext whose cards are stacked against the traditional detective. Never integrated, layers of the text are connected by "hot" images, words, and sounds .... The most telling point of intersection, however, is a strange "click" ... that returns repeatedly through all levels of the work .... Every time something clicks, a chain of associations is activated that allows the reader/viewer to shift between and among discontinuous textual strata..." (26).
I have left out all local reference in Taylor's ellipses (the subject under discussion, the object of discussion, the erasure of the elision, the body missing, is Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective). The singing detective (the lowercase character and the italicized title as well) is likewise the subject, or rather the occasion, for a deft and wide-ranging essay by the sociologist Nick Perry considering the "small fictional disturbance" which that series represents upon "the surface of television's hyperreal megatext" (35).
What's missing, in any story, is the disturbance which creates its form.
"In detective stories it is always a question of a body-usually a missing body. Where is it? Who dunit?" (27). Taylor likewise has all but left out all traces of the feminist criticism which was here before him, Irigaray on the essentially invaginated body for instance, or Erin Mouré, among others, regarding surface: "if there is a name surface, then what else is there? is what is 'different' from the surface depth or is it another surface?" (90).
What does it mean to leave out what came before? This is the nature of mystery, the inversion of suspense. What does it mean to include without explication or consequence? Nothing properly comes after a narrative, every narrative is its own aftermath, a patterned disturbance of retraceable behaviors and history.
Hiding is, I think, a novel, novel in the sense that ...
Because it is a potential line, it folds/unfolds the imagination in one move. It suggests action (fold here), a chance at change; it also acknowledges the viewer's freedom to do nothing but imagine.That was Shelley Jackson (in a screen called "Dotted Line" in her hyperfiction, Patchwork Girl). The first such novel, at least from my perspective, was Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, a work haunted throughout its five hundred and a half pages by a meeting where ...
Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring into a Chelsea street found and suffused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en promenade, exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things. (3)The tone of things, of course, signals a turn from narrative toward something.
The Chelsea street that afternoon however had stranger riches to offer than had 'society'. Movement, clatter of hooves, sputter of motors; light grazing housefronts, shadows moving; faces in the crowd, their apparition, two faces; Ezra Pound (quick jaunty rubicundity) with a lady. Eyes met; the couples halted; rituals were incumbent. (3)There is a problem of reference, a contextual ambiguity, in the phrase "the first such novel" above. Likewise in the question of "five hundred and a half pages," these create a disturbance of form. Likewise in Kenner the allusion toward Pound's famous imagistic haiku, of course, signals a turn from narrative toward something. In Prague I imagine the shift from screen to screen, the click, as if the more mechanical click of slides in a carousel.
Gloriana and I have settled on a warm November afternoon at a café by Charles Bridge. The trees are amber along the Vitava River. We stop at Café Nouveau for capuccino ("If there was ever any question who won the Second World War, the evidence of restaurants suggests it was Italy," I said to Rolf in a Hamburg trattoria, although the caramel tart is typically Czech.) It is also possible to have a glass of green absinthe here, outlawed elsewhere, Paris again or Prag. I have never been to the latter.
Never or not yet. The time is invaginated. I write before I will read there in Prag what I have not written yet these words that will not be read until after that.
I do nothing but imagine. It was all in a travel magazine, even a recipe for the carmel tart. Gloriana extends her arm across the table, the contour like the cleft of an apricot in the amber November sunlight. There is a nude woman with similar flesh in another magazine stacked on the plastic table below the glossy travel magazine, her breasts pressed softly against golden sand, concealed, and the pebbly surface of her bronze buttocks lightly goose-pimpled in the cool air of Indian Summer in Prague. The magazines press against each other like starlets, blinking in the sunlight outside a movie premiere.
Jules, the man in the red linen shirt, has all but left out all traces of the feminist criticism which was here before him, Heidi Tikki on inter-skin for instance:
An inter-skin has a great sensitivity and completion for receiving a variety of signals from the environment and capability of changing its state accordingly. It connects with other surfaces and conducts and circulates information in a network of similar surfaces. It changes identity, sometimes dissolving itself into another surface in a way that makes the identification between the two impossible. And, as an inherently diffuse surface, it refrains from the production of a fixed subjectivity. (http://www.uiah.fi/bookshop/isea_proc/nextgen/j/10.html)You followed her to a point, didn't you? Through clatter of hooves, sputter of motors, light grazing housefronts, shadows moving, faces in the crowd, you did, didn't you, at least until that last refrain of "refrains from the production of a fixed subjectivity." You know that kind of woman, don't you? Or so you think. You think her, if not humorless, a little too intense, though you've heard from others who know her that she can be quite compelling over wine, that she has a great smile, a gold tooth with a ruby inlay glinting deep within it. She chews a carmel tart, catching the gold chaff of falling pastry in her palm, licking off confectioners sugar from her fingers.
A small stain spreads in the shape of a celtic harp upon the paper napkin on the white plastic café table where she has set the spoon.
It seems that the ubiquity of networked consciousness has displaced our quotidian sense. The more available we are to each other as iconic presences, whether through "home pages," avatars in virtual worlds, meaningless lists of fellow habitués at network portal channels, software agent filters, or binary reflections in the mirrored sunglasses of editorial sensibilities and synergistic marketing demographics, the less we seem able to imprint ourselves in ways that invite settled consciousness, simultaneous experience, or retraceable behaviors and history, even those behaviors we know as literature.
Consider the following short short fiction, not unlike the sudden fictions of the Shapard and Thomas anthologies of years past:
A man in his 20s [is] riding in a boat on a river. He disembarks, asks directions, reaches the top of a mountain and pensively looks around. "My dad was here," he says. "He never talked about it much. He said we had to be there. Here I am."
The man is subsequently seen on a telephone, using a card to call his father. "Ty, you still in Singapore?" the father asks. The man replies: "No, I'm on leave. I'm in Vietnam."
There is a long pause. "Vietnam?" the father asks. The son answers, "Yeah." The father quietly says, "Let's talk, son," to which the son, choking up, responds, "Yeah."The language is spare, even bland. Still the fairy tale opening line, the mythic, if mildly comic, ascent to the mountain top, the evocation of the post-punchline cliché "You had to be there" (or its cousin phrase, "Wish you were here") establish a curiously evocative tone. The main character's first paragraph apostrophe is compellingly paired with the passive tense narration which begins the second paragraph. To be sure there is no narrative action, no plotted complication or closure after the initial exposition of the parallel journeys. The fiction here is at best projective, at worst merely anecdotal and ironical.
It does not do to charge the language against the current writer, in this case the New York Times reporter, Stuart Elliott, recasting the one minute narrative of a slightly controversial AT&T commercial for print. The actual screenwriter is not credited in the story, although it may be the spot's director, Joe Pytka, who is identified along with "the chairman and chief executive of Y&R Advertising," "the vice president for worldwide marketing communication at AT&T in Basking Ridge, N.J.," the "national president" of "Vietnam Veterans of America in Washington," (each of whom are named there, though not here, for ideological reasons) and most importantly "David Crosby who sings 'Long Time Gone' in the background" and whose putative fight to air it "more than a year after it was filmed on location in Vietnam by Young & Rubicam" is the subject of the (non-narrative?) story in the Times.
In a 1998 Artforum essay, Kate Hayles characterizes "the hybridity of media forms" in which we are "caught between the rippling after-shocks of print culture and the expanding implications of the digital domain."
The telling of Ty's story here is perhaps not at all a clear instance of hybrid form, although it is moreso fictional here in the contextual aggregate of this essay than it was in the newspaper. Whether it is, however, more or less fictional than the story perceived by a viewer of the commercial, let us say someone named Ed Vick, an ex navy officer and Vietnam vet now an ad exec who accompanies the film crew to the Mekong Delta to witness the filming (this really happened, Vick is the Y&R chair and CEO unnamed above).
Imagine him on a black bicycle then stopping later at a café for iced Vietnamese coffee, the gritty dark cloud of fine grounds stirred through the sweet, pale ivory syrup of evaporated milk and bits of ice.
"I have a great deal of respect for those who fought for this spot," another man says. "I was the person who was the most cautious about this to make sure it was absolutely right. And I think we accomplished that."
This one is elsewhere, in Basking Ridge, talking not about the café, the delta, the mountain top, but the commercial. He is speaking com-sprach to a reporter, who has asked a question which has not been recorded for us.
Or imagine someone, not a veteran, yet also named Ed, whose son has moved away long ago and yet who wishes he would call home so they could talk. He remembers the recorded voice of David Crosby from a summer afternoon in New York, now three decades ago. He is watching a football game on television and not surprisingly he is lonely.
In his essay "The Emporium of Signs," Nick Perry like Hayles accounts for the novelty of contemporary (global) forms in terms of their hybridity:
That novelty "stirs things up" is a tautology, but what remains contestable and contested is just how novel are such instances of content hybridity.... What I have been edging towards is an active promotion of this collusion and collision of cultural meanings so as to make for a construction or amplification of a critical space that is somewhere between seduction and reduction; a plausible counterfactuality which might permit a recognition of "fine power" [of culture] without necessarily submitting to it. It might also shift an understanding of the terrain on which hybridity is constructed away from content and towards processes. (94)The layers of these stories are neither inevitable nor unlikely. Whether upon the journalistic, the commercial, the metafictional, the dramatic, the psychological, or the rhetorical terrain, we may ask where the fiction occurs, whether knotted within the surface of language, the intention, imagination, the situation, context or convention. This is not a list of candidate spaces, of identifiers, but rather the play of simultaneously potential localities and occasions.
What happens in the locale of simultaneously potentiated localities and occasions is variously known as breakdown, crash, collision, cyborgization, blurring (the pomo phrase increasingly coming to stand as synecdoche for the range of Photoshop filters and operations), and so on. In this morning's e-mail before I get back to work at this essay (you will have to believe this, although it does not matter, belief here is mere occasion, contextualization being another name for simultaneous potentialities, collusion standing for collision, seduction for reduction or vice versa), my student Liz Crain writes:
>have you put a curse on me involving car crashes? i am caught in a web of
>devasting accidents-death, amputation, and closed head injury-three
>people i know in one summer. that sounds sickly like a joke and an
>accusation but is neither just confusing wrenching reality that i can't
>make much sense of. i should look at these happenings as ai part of all
>the death this summer and brushes with death. even still a head
>scratcher. it's been sunny but deadly.Sunny but deadly indeed in the summer after El Niño. (Perhaps it was Liz not Shelley or Gloriana squinting at her screen through the brownout). I reply thusly to Liz:
>the news of your friends' crashes is frightening, we are all careening so
>much that collisions of all kind seem inevitable. I long for a good
>movie, the stillness of moving images.The latter is less a (poetic) disjunction than it seems. Earlier in her message Liz has talked of Parker Posey and movies. In the essay "Paris Again or Prague," I wrote in dual time (moments ago and then):
The oneiric qualities of the photos are always important for the son of a photographer (as I am) but also more and more for all of us whose memories are formed and embodied by Kodacolor and Photoshop and whose dreams are influenced, even infused, by what we see on all sorts of screens.Alice Fulton sees screen as syntactic and dual: "the noun screen connotes an outer, visible layer, the verb to screen means to hide" (1996, 111). If there is something other than a (post) (high) modernist stratagem in force here, it likely is a naive result of the permeation of visible noun and hidden verb, story and non-story, e-mail and essay, person and character, body blurring and body missing. "To unravel these apparent contradictions," Stuart Moulthrop says of something not entirely else,
... we need once again to invoke the concept of breakdown S [an idea which] comes out of Winograd and Flores's encounter with phenomenology. "Following Heidegger," they write, "we prefer to talk about 'breakdowns.' By this we mean the interrupted moment of our habitual, standard, comfortable 'being-in-the-world.' Breakdowns serve an extremely important cognitive function, revealing to us the nature of our practices and equipment, making them 'present-to-hand' to us, perhaps for the first time. In this sense they function in a positive rather than a negative way." (Winograd and Flores, 77-78, qtd in Moulthrop)Drawing not just on phenomenology, but also on the biophysics of Humberto Maturana and the speech-act theory of John Searle, they argue for a deeply contextual view of the world in which structures of meaning spread in an indefinite web of associations-a model, we might note, that recurs in the poststructuralist concept of le texte, in De Landa's "machinic phylum," in Nelson's or Landow's descriptions of hypertext, in Joyce's notion of "a structure for what does not yet exist," and in the World Wide Web itself. The complexity of this network defies simple calculation; or to use the idiom of cognitive science, "decision space" has no precise boundaries. Therefore attempts to link cognition to the tools of technology must always encounter (or engender) breakdown. (1995, online unpaginated)
The quotations invaginate. Moulthrop cites Winograd and Flores following Heidegger, while Nick Perry follows Baudrillard, and the sons of Naphtali are Jahzeel, Guni, Jezer, and Shillem (Gen 46 24), and we watch the tail of a kite turn into Jacob's ladder, angels fluttering off like a spawn of yellow moths or peony blossoms. (That was me there on the screen just briefly among the angels in Moulthrop's listing, light grazing housefronts, shadows moving, faces in the crowd, quick doughty rubicundity.) Here is a sentence from the Prag lecture, itself already published in a new Web journal, Xenia: "There was a hope that refereed sites, filters, agents, not to mention new industries would borrow upon the spirit of the Web's formative donée and particular presence to create new forms and forums alike (the word 'content' perhaps floated by then but only as a dry leaf among sweating blossoms)." Citation has become a recessive gene, "I see your grandfather in your eyes, your aunt's smile, the softness of your mother." Where is the ordinary story?
What links the one-minute commercial docudrama, the music video, and the Web fiction if not the play of occasion? Can we imagine a fiction which honors the day-to-day complexity and shifting dramas of ordinary lives? A fiction which promises to close the gap between the fragmentary experiments of language and narrative which have characterized so-called literary or experimental fiction and the distinctly segmented consciousness of a larger audience who, from moment to moment, settle upon meanings for their lives in the intervals between successive accounts of their own or others' lives in several media.
That sentence itself fragmented, it nonetheless marks one of the promised sparks where the language leapt the gap from essay to lecture. Not merely a larger audience but, unholy hope, a mass audience awaits a narrative which can make sense of life as it is lived outside the regime of nextness. I first heard such a narrative called "the new realism" in a question from the audience, posed to the pomo hypertext critic and writer Jane Yellowlees Douglas by a writer and rock&roller named Josh Lechner (each of whom are named here for ideological and perhaps dramatic, reasons). He was limning the claim that hypertextuality somehow represents the ordinary mindedness (in another time we might have called this "the stream of consciousness," perhaps the Vitava, where a man on a black bicycle has stopped to watch Gloriana consider this question from Jules, or rather Heidi listen to Jack, and Shelley smile at David Crosby) of most people's lives. The regime of nextness is my own coinage (elsewhere, or more properly previously, I've called it a blizzard).
Even so it was a surprise to see first Michiko Kakutani and then Laura Miller rail against this characterization, i.e., the new realism, in New York Times magazine and book review essays respectively (though not respectfully) nearly a year apart. Kakutani's allusive championing of "the individual's attempt to find order in chaos, a pattern in the carpet" (do not look for her in the bibliography here, like the singing detective she has come up missing) seems strangely at odds with Miller's complaint that "Hypertext is sometimes said to mimic real life, with its myriad opportunities and surprising outcomes, but I already have a life, thank you very much, and it is hard enough putting that in order without the chore of organizing someone else's novel."
Putting aside the question of whether we are not always asked as readers to organize at least our experience if not the linguistic substance (or substrate) of someone else's novel (not to mention the fact, as Stuart Moulthrop noted in his letter to the NYTBR editors following the Miller piece, that "by choosing-or opting for no explicit choice-the reader [of a hypertext fiction] traverses a network of pathways arranged with some care"), the question would seem to be where one finds patterns and where one affirms or expresses them otherwise. In this wise we could wonder what the author of the unwritten essay "Where is Fiction?: Emergent Narrative Space" had in mind when he chanced upon or fashioned that title.
It isn't the fiction but the life we have (thank you) which we must consistently organize (not merely put in[to] order). Michel Serres inverts the commonplace understanding to suggest that ...
It is a river that flows and yet remains stable in the continual collapse of its banks and the irreversible erosion of the mountains around it. One always swims in the same river, one never sits down on the same bank. The fluvial basin is stable in its flux and ... passage ... as a system open to evaporation, rain, and clouds, it always-but stochastically-brings back the same water. What is slowly destroyed is the solid basin. The fluid is stable; the solid which wears away is unstable-Heraclitus and Parmenides were both right.The fiction flows true and constant, the banks of ordinary life are undercut by the current.
I have two versions of this in mind, two audiences, two venues, two times, two authors, two seers, two people at a café near a bridge, slowly disappearing into irreversible erosion of the mountains. There is a problem of reference, a contextual ambiguity, in the phrase "slowly disappearing" in the previous sentence; is it the persons or the mountains (or both) that are disappearing? A good deal of my critical writing is, almost tiresomely, occupied with this stratagem, the infolding of surfaces for linear texts, an attention to the recurrence of certain signature phrases of an argument not otherwise made except in these patterned repetitions.
The first wave of hypertext fictions was concerned with recontextualizations and emergent narratives which resulted from successive choices along what Moulthrop calls a "network of pathways arranged with some care." The emphasisis was upon choice and its consequences, including breakdown and collision, with some episodes literally disappearing or appearing from view in accord with readers' decisions. The author altered the potentials of the text in anticipation of the reader whose action could enact those potentials. With the advent of the Web the second wave of hypertext has momentarily displaced the first in favor of an exploration of the rhythm of text and image, Hayles' literature of hybridity. We can expect a third wave (the third here less the tired dialectic which smokes out false polarities than a figure for modulation- FM rather than AM, frequency rather than amplitude, being the totem of narrative). It is not possible to tell a story louder, only more often. Rather than merely (farewell 20th century limited) turning its surface to encrustation or invagination, it must move its cultures in increasing waves of persistence and permutation, the patterned disturbance of retraceable behaviors and history which shifts in Perry's terms "away from content and towards processes" (a longing which nonetheless seems quaintly retro to those of us who have taken part in the composition movement of American pedagogy).
The work of Christy Sheffield Sanford seems such an accumulation of processes (I often tell this story about the differences between art, habit and obsession: Almost everyone saves a fortune cookie fortune here or there, in purse or wallet, pasted on a mirror, scrawled or pasted in a journal, typed or scanned into a screensaver. Carolyn, however, once collected hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more, of these printed scraps in a Chinese ginger jar. Beneath the dome lid of the jar the fortunes lay like fallen peony blossoms.). What, short of thinking her the Joyce Carol Oates of hyperlinks, are we to make of the ginger jar table of contents in the following Sanfordian anthology:
MADAME DE LAFAYETTE BOOK OF HOURS
This is a collaborative project inspired by the
life, time and work of Madame de Lafayette.
La Comtesse de Tende: My translation of a
work by Madame de Lafayette.
PARIS<->DAKAR:
An Electro-Illuminated Collection of Genre Fusion.
"Safara in the Beginning," a Moving-Book
The H's: The Spasms of a Requiem
"Ocean Crossing: Nancy Cunard"
"Georgette's Revenge" (Macintosh Version,
Windows 95 forthcoming.)
RED MONA
This project site at Purplefrog contains over
forty French Flash Cards collaged with
images and text and accompanied by sound
files.
TALK-SHOWS
A Talk-Show at the Society of Literature and
Science Conference in Pittsburgh.
A Talk-Show at Pratt in Brooklyn with "au"
sound.
A Talk-Show at Pratt with "aif" sound.
A Talk-Show at the Despair and Desire
Conference in Atlanta.
A Mini-Lecture on Landscape, Scene and the
Web.
NEW FOR THE JAVA-ENABLED
Bodies of Water: Fountain Albertas CD soon
from The Little Magazine
"Moving Toward the Light: a Meditation on the
Solstice"
"Pre-Raphaelite Dreams of Violette Poole" at
Acorn Mush
"Snakes and Songs: Images that Illustrate Text
Versus Images that Flow in the Stream of
Order"
INDIVIDUAL WORKS OFF SITE
"Flower Fall: a Biceptual Poem" at the Light
and Dust Nichol Project
"Homage to Gianni Versace: Beauty, Texture
and the Uncontrollable" at Enterzone
"No Pink" linked by Oyster Boy
"Bigamy in the Desert" at Enterzone
"11 Missing Days in Istanbul" at George Jr.
"Ocean Movement Study" at Light and Dust
"Bivens Arm Nature Poem" at Snakeskin
"Beulah," Sound Byte, at Art Net
"Medusa" at The Little Magazine
"Plant at the Turn of the Century" at Zipzap
"I-75 Clouds" at Grist On-Line
"Boucher en Vogue" formerly at The Little
Magazine
"Spring" at Enterzone
"Blown" and "Ermine" at Oyster Boy
"Tapestry" at Hootenanny
"L'Amour Equinoxe" at Moreau's Expo
"Web Works" at Mississippi Review Web
"Great Lakes" at Carolyn Guyer's
"Mothermillennia"(http://gnv.fdt.net/~christys/) What forms besides a poem constitute an active list? Is genealogy history, the catalogue of ships a story of potential voyages? What do we eat from the table of contents? Communion perhaps. Sanford herself offers a double-axis:
Scrolling downward allows a world to unfold with less peripheral vision involved. Quite different experiences-the scenic versus the unfolding-and both have charms. One revealed, one hidden. Scrolling of any kind is a process of discovery. (http://gnv.fdt.net/~christys/land-web/landscape.html)Scrolling of any kind is a process of discovery. Forty French Flash Cards spread out upon the table. This is detective work, the missing body. Of "Madame de Lafayette's 'Book of Hours'" Kate Hayles suggests,
Acknowledging its roots in print forms, this web of stories also complicates the dynamics of print literature, for the very conflict-crisis-resolution pattern that Sanford foregrounds is made more complex and partly attenuated by the interweavings that make the crisis of one story the conflict of another and the resolution of still another.It is easy, in ordinary life at least, to slip from life to lie, to make history a plausible counterfactuality, even outside language. This is perhaps what Hayles means when she suggests that "hybridity surfaces in a different way in 'Solstice,'"
... a meditation on the play of light at precisely those points where it seems redundant, superfluous, excessive, "useless." With shimmering graphics that reflect and intensify the flickering nature of screen images, "Solstice" plays with the idea that light represents that which escapes verbal articulation-and yet it is the verbal articulations surrounding the images that make this idea clear.Many of the Sanford fictions seem to adopt a serial stratagem, working through a pre-determined (albeit processual) configuration or set of rules, not unlike the John Cage compositions whose rules, like Sanford's catalogue of works above, ironically become its "content." Rule solidifies network, a jar of obsessions becomes a work of art.
For instance in Sanford's environmental work, "I-75 Clouds," a wonderfully naive set of captioned cloud drawings (for instance "black tumor," "crab claw," "boot of Italy") is anchored by meta-captions, i.e.,
(http://www.thing.net/~grist/golpub/sanford/clouds1.htm) So too Sanford's hauntingly interesting prospectus for "Georgette's Revenge" both predetermines and eventually swallows the work itself (not by any means an unreasonable effect for a palimpsest, but nonetheless an ironic emergence of content as process) in a way I suppose a critic might suggest the Senegalese woman herself is swallowed up:
The computer played a significant role in the construction of "Georgette's Revenge." Repetition, although not exact, occurs throughout and was often derived from selectively deleted templates of previously typed pages. This might be described as an electronic palimpsest. Another important computer inspiration was linked frames, in which type flows from column to column. Large type appears as borders at the top and bottom of the page. In the interior in smaller type are linked frames-readable top and bottom, three columns across, or straight down and from bottom to top. The large type deals with problems and philosophical ideas that surround the story and affect the characters' lives. The frame, at a higher level of abstraction than the interior passages, provides a context for them. The non-linear story of one Senegalese woman's struggle for love, success and happiness in France is told in a mosaic of flashbacks with contemporaneous images and episodes. (http://gnv.fdt.net/~christys/geotitle.html)For all its eroticism (i.e., "from the bank, he digs up the roots of a hazelnut shrub. He rubs the cut roots over her naked body. The smell of cinnamon repels all insects. He spends the night on one side of a hill.") the text itself is busily frame-bound, dowdily designed, and explicitly hybrid, longing to become image and what image cannot be, i.e.,
(http://gnv.fdt.net/~christys/georg8.html) It is surprising to me how lately more and more likely others (and I) are to think that written narrative will slowly disappear, sinking, like the rilled fan of a scallop shell slung in lieu of a skipping stone, into souvenir significance. So be it. Ordinary significance is the passing moment, marked, settled, sunk and shining, the double-axis of the scenic and the unfolding, the simultaneous and the mortal.
Perhaps we may find "the true novelty" of what Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin speculate (pun intensional) in the very last sentences of their book Remediation (their coinage for the "formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms" 275), a novelty they suggest would reside in "a new medium that did not refer for its meaning to other media at all" (271). Though Bolter and Grusin suggest that "for our culture such mediation without remediation seems to be impossible," novelty, like any mirror, is less than it is cracked up to be.
Or so Jules thinks walking slowly home alone along the Vitava. There are peony blossoms strewn curiously out of season among the apricot cobble stones in the fading amber of November dusk, his neon shirt is a blue flag.
Works Cited Auster, Paul. City of Glass. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1985.
Bolter, Jay and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1998.
Elliott, Stuart. "AT&T Ad Filmed in Vietnam Was a Long Time Coming." New York Times, July 24, 1998.
Fulton, Alice. "Screens: An Alchemical Scrapbook." In Tolstoy's Dictaphone: Machines and the Muse at the Millennium, (Graywolf Forum I). Ed. Sven Birkerts. St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1996.
Hayles, N. Katherine. "Generation YX: Signs of Hybridity." ArtForum. September, 1998.
Jackson,Shelley. Patchwork Girl or A Modern Monster. Computer disk. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995.
Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univertsity of California Press, 1971.
Miller, Laura. "Bookend: www.claptrap.com." New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1998.
Moulthrop, Stuart. "Traveling in the Breakdown Lane: A Principle of Resistance for Hypertext." Mosaic 28/4, 1995, pp. 55-77; http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/essays/breakdown.html.
Moure, Erin. Furious. Concord, Ont.: Anansi, 1992.
Perry, Nick. Hyperreality and Global Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. BBC Television series, 1986.
Sanford, Christy Sheffield. "Index of works." http://gnv.fdt.net/~christys/, 1998.
Serres, Michel. "The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, & Thermodynamics." In Hermes; Literature, Science, Philosophy. Eds. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Taylor, Mark C. and Jack Miles. Hiding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Tikka, Heidi. "Vision and Dominance - A Critical Look Into Interactive System." ISEA '94: the 5th International Symposium on Electronic Art. Helsinki, Finland: August 20-25 1994;http://www.uiah.fi/bookshop/isea_proc/nextgen/j/10.html.
Winograd, Terry and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Addison Wesley, 1985.
Michael Joyce's hypertext fictions include the novels, afternoon and Twilight, A Symphony, and shorter fictions including "WOE," "Lucy's Sister" and the Web fiction "Twelve Blue." A linear novel, Going the Distance, is published on the Web by Pilgrim Press. A new collection of essays, Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture, will be published by the University of Michigan Press which also published Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (1995). He serves on the editorial boards for Works & Days, as well as the Computers and Composition journal, and is currently Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Electronic Learning and Teaching at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY.
