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Comment
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Jeff
Unregistered User
(5/15/01 8:56:28 am)
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Coover's Briar Rose
Apologies if this has been posted here before, but I came across
this site and thought that some of you might be interested in it.
It's a hypertext version of Coover's Briar Rose that allows
comments. There's been a bit of debate about it on a mailing list
I'm on. Anyway, for those interested:
www.bedfordstmartins.com/...BRhome.htm
Jeff
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Kate
Unregistered User
(5/15/01 10:37:23 am)
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BR
Jeff,
I'll check that site out. I just read Briar Rose (gave a reading at Brown this spring, so I got everything by everyone teaching there). Coover teaches hypertext media now, as you probably know.
I'm curious, first, to know what the "debate" is on your mailing list. Can you summarize it?
Kate
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Midori
Unregistered User
(5/15/01 1:55:21 pm)
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hypertext
Kate and Jeff,
Would either of you mind horribly explaining a bit about the hypertext media? It looks really intriguing. I know early semiological work of Scholes, but am uncertain as to what is being done here with Coover's manuscript? Thanks.
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Kate
Unregistered User
(5/15/01 2:32:11 pm)
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Coover
Midori,
I don't work in hypertext, though I've had work of mine put into hypertext form by publications. So I'm probably not the one to give a great, detailed, intellectual answer to your question. But I take the site pretty much at face value--it appears to be intended as a pedagogical tool and simply as a hypertext version of Coover's novella. Do you have other ideas? I didn't have time to look at much of the site, which appears to be fairly new, and I am not a big fan of reading online--I would like to peruse the images posted, though, at some point.
I'm starting to organize some hypertext tools for my classes in the fall (hoping to make a discussion board like this one for my folklore class). This is making me think that we could start--at the appropriate time closer to the fall semester!--a string about using such devices in the classroom, and perhaps we can also gather a 'bibliography' of hypertext projects related to folklore.
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Jeff
Unregistered User
(5/16/01 6:45:02 pm)
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hypertext, cyberspace...hyperspace?
The debate on the mailing list was a little odd, actually. I'm not sure that English was the first language of the person who started it all. She was, at times, a little incomprehensible. The thrust of it seemed to be two-fold, that, A, putting literature into HTML restricts it somehow and B, that having comments to read as you go ruins the text--she compared it to two lovers kissing, the rest of the world falling away, and then the woman stops kissing halfway through and analyzes the kiss.
Personally, I didn't quite get the first part. Like many, I don't care to read long pieces online, though I have. I didn't understand the point about restricting art, though...something about forcing literature into a few square inches on the screen. I don't get that. Is the medium the message? Is a sonnet by Shakespeare garbage if it appears on the back of a cereal box? I guess the question is, do words have status so that they can be cheapened? I dunno.
I understand the objection to the comments in each section, but not in the way it was presented, which was highly romantic, in both metaphor and substance. I think that it could be a useful thing, but I'd hate for anyone to read it that way first, rather than straight through. But then, Cliff made a grand living off of his notes, eh?
Midori,
You certainly know how to intimidate a boy. Scholes? Ummm, er, *blush* what's that then? I could drone on for a bit, but I won't. I believe that Kate is right, it's a teaching tool. I seem to recall that the site owner is going to use it for a class.
Of course, I think that the Net might be providing a n3w l4ngu4g3
4 ppl, but I'm not sure. Dontcha all just love the l33t kulture?
Hmmm, wasn't Jane Yolen (wow, Jane Yolen!) asking about dialects?
I know nothing of linguistics (the only linguist I read is Chomsky,
and only the political stuff), so I don't know was constitutes a
dialect, but these hax0r kiddies have an interesting language. But
now I believe that this wonderful wine is talking, so I go.
11010001001000101,
Jeff
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Midori
Unregistered User
(5/17/01 6:14:52 am)
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Scholes
Jeff,
When I checked into the Coover site I read that it was Robert Scholes who prepared the hypertext edition and was particularly interested in having the comments forwarded to him. Scholes is one of those guys whose been around for ages...a standard in English criticism and curriculum. Not exactly a cocktail party buzz word (like Levi Strauss or Foucault...or any of those madly creative Frenchmen) but if you teach English at any level, sooner or later you bark your shins on his work. Very readable, interesting and useful. Now Noam Chomsky...ah not for the feint of heart! It is my turn to be intimated.
This hypertext thingy on the web is sort of interesting...the ability of readers to forward comments. It reminds me vaguely of the desire of audiences to return some measure of agency to the performance aspect of story telling. Audiences in traditional settings most certainly would comment on the narrative, the performers abilities and in certain cases like call and response, be involved in the production of the tale and the aesthetic moment as it is happening. So it strikes me as very amusing every time I encounter instances where audiences try and force the media to respond in a similar fashion. Look at Rocky Horror Picture show, hilarious and vocal urban audiences at a horror movie screaming out "do not go in there!", and now graffittied comments on Coover's story...plus the option to alter the arrangement of the sequence of the tale. The more things change...the more they insist on staying the same. Barthes argues that with printed text, the author is dead as the reader becomes the performer and the writer at the moment of reading...recreating the text to the unique specificities of the reader's life. I've been thinking about that as another instance of the audience once more demanding to be part of the creative equation. I am curious as to what Scholes makes of the comments...and to what use he finds them pedogalogically.
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Kate
Unregistered User
(5/17/01 10:36:54 am)
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Books
The best person to read on this subject, the question of hypertext, books, all, you know, THAT, is the absolute genius (in my opinion), Johanna Drucker. She recently wrote THE BOOK OF THE BOOK. That's the book that talks about 'what you said,' Jeff. You've probably already read her. I think you, Midori, would love her work.
If you're not familiar with her writing: Drucker heads up a new department at the University of Virginia that's all about hypertext media--and she also makes these exquisite handmade books in limited edition, with brilliant text. So she's a unique scholar-artist, adamant about the necessity of taking a serious historical glance at the "book" before even casually suggesting replacing it with e-text (which would never wholly happen anyway)--yet she is also extremely interested in hypertext as a different plane of writing.
I won't even try to paraphrase her here, but anything she writes forges new ground in the question of the book, the object of the book, the question of reading, the book/reading as fields of influence, as an object with influence on reading, as these questions are only just barely emerging today. She is an extremely lucid writer with terrific personality and a breadth of knowledge and originality of thought that simply floors me.
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Midori
Unregistered User
(5/17/01 11:34:39 am)
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Drucker
Kate,
Thanks so much for the recommendation on the Drucker book. I am really looking forward to reading it. Someone else had mentioned it to me and I am glad now to have an excuse to drop everything else and go read it! Amazing too that she is at U. of Virginia which has the most splendid Blake web site, a master of the Book if there ever was one. All of his illuminated books are on line and can be viewed (all the different editions) simultaneously and most wonderfully, sections can be enlarged so as to see the exquisite details.
Here's the address:
www.blakearchive.org
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Kate
Unregistered User
(5/17/01 12:40:55 pm)
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Drucker
I think that site was produced by the very center Drucker works with--and in her talk at the MLA this year, she expressed how little she likes such sites, such literary storehouses. In her super-smart, hilarious way, she expressed exaggerated hatred of them! Of course with completely compelling explanation why--and an acknowledgement of how much work goes into them. I think her exact words were "Who cares?!" But, of course, it was meant as a joke. She's not reactionary.
I'd love to hear what you think of Book of the Book--I'll read it this summer again too, so I can be up on it again.
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Karen
Unregistered User
(5/18/01 2:05:58 am)
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Art commodities
Kate,
I didn't know about Johanna Drucker either (thanks!). I found this page- if you follow the links you can view
samples of Drucker's work online, including the first chapter of her work on the artist's book:
www.lib.uiowa.edu/ref/boo...rucker.htm
I'm interested in the fascinating ideas Midori raises about the correlation between oral storytelling and the
hypertext. How might the way words are presented on a page or screen approach the way words are presented by a
narrator's voice, gestures and facial expressions? How similar or disparate are textual and physical space? Can you
achieve the same effects by manipulating each particular kind of space? And what of the word itself as art/ cultural
object? What about the work of someone like Barbara Krueger, which immerses the viewer in slogans? The physical
space has become the textual space- travelling along a highway lined with advertising billboards is almost like
speeding through the pages of a book or magazine...
You know, one of the nicest things about library books, I think, is the little debates people have with each other
around the margins. Those comments, no matter how irrelevant, are all part and parcel of the experience of reading
that particular "edition". I like the hypertext Coover page, but I do have a problem with the way readers' marginal
comments must be moderated by their "instructors" and the way the editors' comments are privledged. I think it
defeats the purpose somewhat- you don't really get to collaborate with the text because you're always one step
removed. There's always a middle person.
Last year, I was in San Francisco and there was an art exposition on, so I went down to have a look. I noticed that
there were a lot of limited edition illustrated books, many of them using the texts of American classics. One which
was kinda curious was an illustrated edition of Jean Toomer's Cane. It was more than a little surreal to see this
incredibly fleshy record of early twentieth century black experience transformed into a rarefied object, handled with
gloves by a very snooty upper class white man who made no attempt to disguise his distaste at having to politely
display "the object" to those who could clearly not afford to buy it. So we have something of a contradiction here.
The illustrated text may allow a story's presentation to more closely approach the experience of an oral performance,
but, at the same time, the markets producing these texts severly restrict the range of transmission- even the internet
text does this (You have to be a member of a particular educational institution, with an "instructor", in order to
particpate in the discussion). Coover's text becomes a textbook, not a vibrant, interactive, immersive experience. Toomer's text is
commodified by the gallery "masters", just as the bodies of his protagonists are commodified by white society.
Karen (out of steam now!)
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