Writing Machines is the course website for English 170L at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Having a mini temper tantrum...
Submitted by zoey on 2 November 2006 - 8:57pm.
I'm going to mention this because right now it's soooooo frustrating and I simply can't not talk about it...but I just wrote a whole long blog post and then accidentally deleted it!! And for about 30-45 seconds, I kind of lost it. I hate that everything has to be recorded or it doesn't count. I know what you're thinking, probably that that's a stupid comment. It is kinda stupid because that's how everything works I guess but just know that right now I am struggling ....I could almost feel a tear slowly building... but then it went away. Obviously I am bad at dealing with life when my attempts to do something productive are thwarted. It's just, you know, when you did something you're supposed to do you almost feel proud, but now that's been destroyed... because you get that feeling and then you just know that whatever you type now is only going to be a crappier version of what you originally had...sigh ok enough with that.
Some people have been talking about why they didn't really like PlanetJemma and Online Caroline, basically saying (and I am one of those people saying it) that the form can be annoying and that something about those sites makes them (me) not want to actually have to deal with them. I've been thinking about why Kind of Blue was much more engaging and interesting for some of us, and I've been trying to relate it to some of the things that Nick Montfort mentions in his essay that we read recently. A few things that stood out to me: "certain frustrations with IF are due to difficulty with or unwillingness to operate a machine in order to generate text, and certain pleasures of IF come from engaging in this text/machine operation, or from reading that takes place in the context of operation) (in the top left p. 316 in First Person) and "Dealing with explicit puzzles, however, involves a mode of thought alien to ordinary reading; progress through the text of a novel is not arrested when the reader comes up with the wrong answer" (top left p. 314).
Where I'm going with all of this...I guess I'm just interested in the forms of the interactive texts we've been reading. If the process of interacting is posing a challenge to me, and if the process is "an aesthetic end in itself" (qtd. by Montfort p.313), then shouldn't I be willing to go through the process to reach all of the text? If I'm not willing, then is the form/process of reading somehow failing the text, or am I just lazy, or both? Grumpymutt mentioned that Kind of Blue was different, refreshing, because it didn't make you jump through hoops, and I felt exactly the same why, not wanting to jump through hoops to get to an end result (perceiving/reading all the text would be the end result I guess) that I didn't think (correctly or incorrectly as the case may be) was that valuable...
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having just lost a lengthy email myself,
*hug*
*sympathy*
i'm trying to force myself into the habit of writing anything more than a few-line email in notebook, because i'm forever having things eaten. it's an aggrevating extra step, because dammit, the technology should *work* and if it's going to creepily send what i write off to a million different computers, then i should be able to see it, but it works a bit better in the long run, at least for me.
and the concept of the novel becoming a puzzle in various electronic formats kinda makes me think of a harpsicord, the way you have to kachunk to engage a new set of strings to change the volume of the instrument, it's kinda like the brain when we're in the mode or reading one sort of thing, and suddenly have to add a new layer to it, it's not always just a simple strike the key harder and the desired response comes, like a piano, there's a lot more effort, conscious effort and changing of mindset, and that can get irksome. if that made any sense at all.
Stupidity, My Own.
As someone who is stupid at regular intervals (with an extra f****p or two for weekends) I sympathize. I have both lost and rewritten entries for this blog for this reason and because I've forgotten to log in.
As someone who's been stupid longer (and more actively!) than most, I frequently write the entries in a text editor, then transfer them over.
Were I smarter, I might do it all the time. But I'm not doing it right now, come to think of it.