Hypercompendia

Got it.  Downloaded and registered and ready to go.  I check out the manual and am almost intimidated: 317 pages.  I don’t like anything that takes 317 pages to learn. 

But I’d already played in this and now I’m ready.  The manual’s just a look-see.  There in case I need it while the story’s getting laid. 

I am not me and nothing I have written to this time will ever be the same.  It brings out poetics.  It brings ideas.  It is a map that’s ready to be designed into a story.

(Duplicate posting from Spinning 10/25)

I want it I want it I want it.  I also want another thirty years to play with all my toys.

iModeller 3D Professional Edition that makes 3-D out of a series of photographs.

Stumbled onto a video via The Writers’ Group and just can’t come to terms with it. 

Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon and one of the main brains behind Alice, is dying of cancer.  Inspirational above and beyond the very depressing fact that this young man’s life is being cut short and that his wife and three young sons will not have his physical presence in their lives.

Every one of us is given life with the caveat of its inevitable end.  One life is no more valuable than another.  And yet, sometimes you just can’t help but feel the pain of loss.

So now here’s a visual via language (since my hands were busy with other equipment and couldn’t take a photo):

The pre-dawn kitchen lit by the old-fashioned fluorescent double rings.  The silence of an autumn morning when even chickadees still snuggle in the firs.  The woman dressed oddly like a giant hummingbird in brilliant green satin robe with raspberry collar and cuffs sets up the laptop on the kitchen table, wondering if she ought as well to trust the battery, a finicky resource that she, with all her mistrust of what she cannot control, uses seldom.  She stretches out the microphone–headband style as that is all she has–to close in on the soft billiping of the airlocks on the jugs of ruby, topaz, nearly amethyst colored wine.  She holds her breath, clicks on the start and watches as the little dot drives safely down the middle of the lit green line.  There, she’s gotten it, she thinks; the sounds of harvest to become part of a film.  Back in form, plugged in, she clicks on the player and, excited, listens.  Silence.

One’s pretty easy and I have a lot of the images and text (prose?) together just as a matter of fact entrys in Spinning; the subject of the harvest and the making of jellys, applesauce and wine.  (Reminder: Get the gurgling airlocks on audio file quickly before they stop).  I think I’ll even start on that by setting up a file for it called "Harvest." and copy & pasteing some of the text into a Word document to see if there’s a thread of story there that’s worth presenting.

The other is just a bit of prose, another entry in Spinning, on the 9/11 tragedy which was written quickly as a rememberance of the day through looking at the future and perhaps can be elaborated upon.  Not strictly bound by this one event, but in my mind, little boys everywhere fear something–and maybe I can discover their personal bogeyman.

Just to have it handy when the time is right, a link to a website called gabcast which seems to offer in audio what You-Tube does for video.

An example, where it can be used embedded in a weblog, is at The Writer’s Blog where Ruth reads her poem, Night Hunger.

An article by Julian Gough in today’s Guardian tackles the short story versus novel dilemma.  To me, the failure or success of one or the other appears traditionally to follow reading trends, i.e., what lifestyle the majority of readers lead that dictates spurts of quality reading time, need for escape, stress-inhibited AADD, TV and PC on the fritz, etc.  No doubt about it though that there is truth in the short story being more and more difficult to get published either in the remaining literary journals that seem to require additionally that the author be credentialed, hold an MFA or be a foreigner, teach CW or be a proven winner by publishing credit, or in an anthology without having several novels under your belt.

But there are ways to circumvent this phenomenon, swim upriver so to speak, buck the system–and I’m all for bucking the system–to turn this into opportunity.  Gough suggests that a number of stories tied into one novel by a theme or thread, (and Munro–whom I adore– is extremely successful at this, though she qualifies  to be published under any circumstances and no one’s likely to send out a rejection slip on any of her submissions) may be the novel of the future:

"What contemporary readers don’t seem to like are short stories that don’t connect to each other. Why? Perhaps because our lives feel fragmented enough already. Television too has almost abandoned the single, self-contained drama. People like art to make sense out of chaos but without denying the chaos. That demand is a tremendous opportunity for the natural short story writer, who merely needs to come up with an organising principle. It’s just another technical challenge. Story itself is infinitely flexible, and doesn’t much care how you tell it or what you call it. These stacks of stories, reinvented for the urban 21st century, could be called the multistory novel."

This bit of knowledge, together with more carried on the winds of time and technology are shouting whispers in my ear: Storyspace…Storyspace…Storyspace.

So very proud of friend and teacher Steve Ersinghaus for achieving the Reading Room Prize at Hypertext ’07 in Manchester, England for his novel The Life of Geronimo Sandoval.  Thanks to Mark Bernstein for the heads up and for his reporting of this major event in New Media Hypertext.

I’m just finding my way around this intricate novel and as usual, getting lost in its story and paths.  But I have been preparing to review this here and will begin as soon as I’m comfortable enough to know what I’m talking about. 

Storyspace is looking more and more like it’s in my future writing, though the transition as a focused one-track-mind and unplanner of plotting goes contrary to its more thought-out method of narrative.

Steve is one of the most forward-thinking people I’ve had the pleasure to know, with an odd mix of off-the-wall creative energy tempered by an abiding respect and knowledge of order. He’s a natural at hypertext as he manages to see all the various paths open from any given point and being accepting of all, can then manipulate the mapping to accomodate the "ifs" in story.

Great job, Steve.  Congratulations!

(Duplicate posting at Spinning)

Mark Bernstein’s great postings on his attendance at the Manchester, England’s Hypertext ’07 includes this tremendously interesting entry on a day’s hike through the hills, complete with photos and lotsa sheep who look like they thought they’d seen it all until Mark came along.

What I love best about this narrative of Mark’s travels, his choice of paths, his pretty much getting lost, is that Mark’s an engineer and designer at Eastgate, producer of Storyspace, a hyperlink mapping system that’s extremely  intricate and sophisticated.  So does this mean that despite the phenomenal capabilities of software, reality still poses a challenge?

Though I’m not a big fan of comic books now that I’m grown up (ooooow!) I do acknowledge them and the graphic novel as a fascinating medium of story.  In a New Media class, I read Scott McCloud’s book on Understanding Comics and learned an awful lot not just about the combination of text and images but much that would apply to text only in describing images.  I really have to get myself a copy of that book.

In wandering around the weblogs this morning I clicked on Scott McCloud’s site and from there, checked out his latest work in progress which is presented online The Right Number 1 (and 2), and in a new format of zooming in page to page.  This has certainly changed the image of traditional comic strip layout.  For one thing, one or at the most, two panels are available at a time, with the inset of the next panel embedded within it.  The method  of reading has not only changed from paper format of turning pages, but from one of the established online interactive ways of reading, that is, clicking on buttons or arrows to progress.  Now, the zooming effect is what McCloud has implemented, as the small "next" panel zooms in to cover the previous.  Clicking on the panel is only one method of going from frame to frame.  Another is a layout of numbered squares that correspond to page numbers.

On the visual end of things, the colors of this particular story are two shades of blue and white.  The theme is numbers, and the plot is one number gotten wrong–or right–changes relationships and lives.

While I’m not likely to start writing graphic narratives in the format of comic strip style, I just know I’m going to learn something from McCloud that’s valuable.