I just happened upon this wonderful essay by Stephanie Strickland, "Poetry in the Electronic Environment." Ostensibly she is describing how she composed her hypertext poetry book, True North, using the "electronic environment" of hypertext, but she deals with other crucial matters as she goes.
She is (sorry, but it's true) poetic on the topic of the Web and the "great freedom" it affords us. She points to it as our best example of hypertext, the "almost biological" entity that is always "proliferating links." Only connect, as the Romantic Forster implored (and as two male financiers have quoted to me. Surprising me. Way off topic, but you never know where literature lurks, longing to link. With you.) As she writes,
And this, for perspective, is from a talk given in Minnesota in 1997. Even during these heady days, she is hardly fanatical. She wryly adds,
Ironically, just as I was moving (appropriating) (stealing) (sharing) this text, Safari locked down and, for two days, I lost this, her essay, and a dozen windows I'd opened to look and think about conceptual writing. As if to prove her true. (She is powerful.)
Considering hypertext, she connects with the "truly radical" method of Emily Dickinson, ever preserving alternative versions of her work. An inability to commit -- neurosis -- becomes a genius for keeping the world open, suspended, engagable -- write-able. She gifted us with a multi-dimensional space, and offers a hint at what is to come. Strickland urges us to explore
The author is dead, long live the author.
And here is the link to order True North Hypertext.
She is (sorry, but it's true) poetic on the topic of the Web and the "great freedom" it affords us. She points to it as our best example of hypertext, the "almost biological" entity that is always "proliferating links." Only connect, as the Romantic Forster implored (and as two male financiers have quoted to me. Surprising me. Way off topic, but you never know where literature lurks, longing to link. With you.) As she writes,
"[Cyberspace] is characterized as tidal sea, web, sky, and solid. Thus, people surf it, send out web-crawlers to explore it, gophers to tunnel through it, engines to mine data from it, and they fly through and above it in game simulations. They establish "home" pages in it, as though it were rooted, although at their own location distance has disappeared--New Zealand, New York, St. Paul, equally present, and equally speedily present."
And this, for perspective, is from a talk given in Minnesota in 1997. Even during these heady days, she is hardly fanatical. She wryly adds,
"All these metaphors suggest a great freedom of movement, but electronic space is also where you lock up, if the power goes down, if the network crashes, if your machine fails to harmonize with its software. Maybe space metaphors are not the right ones to choose; maybe time is more to the point, and you will think so as you wait for your host connection, or wait for sound to download, a graphic to paint."
Considering hypertext, she connects with the "truly radical" method of Emily Dickinson, ever preserving alternative versions of her work. An inability to commit -- neurosis -- becomes a genius for keeping the world open, suspended, engagable -- write-able. She gifted us with a multi-dimensional space, and offers a hint at what is to come. Strickland urges us to explore
"how to shape our intuitions about digitized data, how to learn to "read" meaning in geometries of representation, how to understand more fully the meaning of numbers, number-systems, and the modes of number-use which we are invoking to incarnate data, literally to construct virtual bodies."
The author is dead, long live the author.
And here is the link to order True North Hypertext.
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