I’m embarrassed to point it out because it includes my own work in its focus, but Steve Ersinghaus has a wonderful series on Hypertext reading that’s so good it’s teaching me things about my own work as well as serving as a guide in reading all literary pieces but particularly those in the hypertext format.
(Interrupted here by a telecon with my dearest friend who really tried hard to read A Bottle of Beer but just is resistant to the hypertext format. Her complaint is the common one: doesn’t like the feeling of getting lost, moving away from the story, coming back in and losing the flow–which may be because A BoB is not good narrative flow or skillfully hypertexted, or the medium is just one she’ll never adjust her reading to accommodate. Now this friend is one who has literally thousands of books stashed on shelves and who is an avid reader of all types of literature, and graduated cum laude majoring in English. What to do?)
The thing is though that hypertext may be encouraging a closer reading of story than ever before. To my mind it simulates normal thought patterns which strive to be linear and yet branch out into all the cubicles of experience stored in the brain. For example, if the statement is made, "she went into the pantry," the reader will immediately image whatever a pantry means to him or her. Maybe shelves filled with canned fruit and pickles, maybe boxes of cereal, maybe platters and bowls that are only brought out on holidays. But the fork has been made; the path chosen.
I’ll write more on all this at Hypercompendia, but I did suggest that Nancy read Steve Ersinghaus’ weblog.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology