Thinking about the future of literature while reading posts on hypertexts, I was reminded of a passage from Helen Dewitt's novel The Last Samurai.

"It seemed to me...that the writers of the future would...approach the level of the other branches of the arts which are so much further developed. Perhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and how this would sound next to lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases or lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes" (63-64)

In her view words from languages are each like different colors of paint which could be mixed together and composed to create something more beautiful than anything written before. Clearly, reading/writing such a text would take a great deal of learning and isn't realistic for any kind of mass audience, but it's still a beautiful idea. I suppose I was reminded of it because of how these hypertext authors view literature as such a malleable thing, while I have always thought of it as novel, poetry, drama, etc--the written word, on paper, complete with some sort of narrative.

Still fascinated by the possibilities of the virtual gaming world, I have been scanning around message boards and whatnot when I came across the link to this Disturbing World of Warcraft Clip. A member of a guild (a unified horde of WOW players) died in real life. Her guild decided to give her a virtual funeral, out in the open, in a kill zone. They invited players from other guilds and stated that it would be a nonviolent event. Well, players from a less scrupulous guild raided the funeral and slaughtered all, and I mean ALL, of the attendees.

For those of you interested in further exploring hypertexts/interactive fiction, the twelfth annual Interactive Fiction Competition is going on right now. You can download and judge the entries. Interactive fictions of this sort present the reader with the beginning of the story. Then the reader types in actions for the characters to perform. The story responds by telling what happens as a result of these actions. Your decisions influence the outcome. It very much reminds me of a textual version of a video game like Myst. The reader is presented with an environment and must use their intelligence to navigate through it.

Fareed Zakaria discusses mediation and blogging in a fascinating way in the conclusion of his book The Future of Freedom (W W Norton and Company, 2003).

"The personal web site (blog) was hailed as the killer of the traditional media. In fact it has become something quite different. Far from replacing newspapers and magazines, the best blogs--and the best are very clever--have become guides to them, pointing out unusual sources and commenting on familiar ones. They have become new mediators for the informed public...the creators of blogs think of themselves as radical democrats, the are in fact a new Tocquevillean elite" (254).

My experience with Afternoon was similar to Bird's and thisismycheese's, although maybe a bit more extreme. I wanted to take this Joyce fellow by the collar and shake him until a cohesive story that I could read front to back came out. The bottom line of any literature, be it hypertext or a papyrus scroll, is: is the writing good? Joyce is a good writer, which is what makes Afternoon impossible to dismiss.

Reading contemporary fiction I often feel that the writers are so desperate to create something new and original that they allow their story to suffer by trying to fit it into a hip modern frame, rather than working to make the hip modern frame fit into their story--or work as a component that makes it better overall.

It was quite a bizarre revelation to find my major trepidation about blogs summed up in an article from 1945. Vandevar Bush worries that "truly significant attainments are being lost in the mass of the inconsequential" in a society in which "publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record." If Einstein came up with his theory of relativity in a forest and no one was around, did he really come up with it? If Johnny Quazar writes the next truly great work of fiction in his blog and the only people who read it are a few kids who link to it from his myspace page, did he really write it?

THIS is by far the most amazing site I've seen relating to blogs. A friend showed it to me and i was overwhelmed by the coolness. Literally. I had to close the window after a couple minutes and just sit there. Digesting.

The possibilities are so great. Every ten minutes the site refreshes, pulling thousands of sentences containing the word feel/feeling and one of over 5000 emotions from blogs across the world. Then it sorts them. You can see how the world is feeling. Or how women in Indonesia are feeling, or old men in Russia. If there are pictures on the site where the blog was posted it associates the picture with the text.

Like Bird, I was struck by a sense of wonder reading Ong. He made me reevaluate writing. I became fascinated by the possibilities of what blogs and the internet will do to language. He traces how symbols and pictures were simplified and turned into written languages. In some cases more than others. In 1716 Chinese had 40.545 characters (86)and "to become significantly learned in the Chinese writing system normally takes some 20 years" (86). Wow! How different this is from English.

So I asked a friend how Chinese computers work. He told me the keyboard keys represent sounds, you type the sound that the word you want begins with and a list of the most common words with that sound pop up onscreen. You choose the word you were looking for. This just seems like such a different experience of interacting with writing and a computer than what we English speakers have. I have trouble even conceptualizing it.

I'm feeling a bit lost regarding what we want this blog to be. The Writing Machines Blog. So far it seems to be of the fubu, for us by us, variety. Which is fine. We trade links we feel will pertain to the class and stimulate discussion. We probe and comment on the assigned readings. We reference one another.

I guess what I'm confused about is whether blogs owe something to the general public. They are open forums. On the remote chance that some random individual stumbles upon the Writing Machines blog is it our duty as bloggers to try to interest them in the content? To give them something that will make them want to read more, and maybe even link to us? I'm so used to public literature that does this. In every creative writing and journalism class I've taken the primary focus has been on engaging and holding the interest of the reader. There's a relationship between writer and reader. When you publish something you want your audience to read and enjoy it, so you try to make it readable and enjoyable. The blogs linked to(blogroll) on this page all do that. They have humor, or continuous narrative, or subject matter that appeals to either the general or a niche audience, or some hook to keep readers coming back for more.

As I was making my first forays into the blogoshpere (still hating all the made-up words) I stumbled upon a very controversial blog that I think raises interesting questions about the responsibilities of those who write and read blogs. Chinabounder is a white male living in Shanghai, supposedly an expat who teaches there, who documents his sexual encounters with the local women on his blog. This has caused a furor among the conservative Chinese population.