<TAG>! Maybe You're It

If experimental hypertexts generally suffer from syntagmatic discontinuity, a solution may have already arrived.

Remember that in German and in a few words in English, one can distinguish between subject and object by declension.Were one (like a native speaker of German or Latin) to consider the termination of these pronouns to be more important than their sequence in determining subject or object, the sequence in which one reads the sentence might make little difference.

"She saw him" could read "Him saw she."

Were narrative elements of generally less than 200 or so words to contain some kind of marker that might determine a sequence of narration itself, long syntagmatic units might become both accessible and determinative even without many kinds of linearity. Given a couple of columns of navigational elements, one might read through various lexia in almost any order, just as one may skip around in a book. But an absolute sequence of narration would remain in the event of any reading sequence -- as in a book. The events narrated might be in most any chronology -- again, as in a book. And yet the movement of language would remain inflected by its sequence, its causality, its inevitability.

A form exists that does all this, and it's called a blog.

One may well object that many blogs are poorly written, even by those who can spell, that they tend to be pathetic effusions of sentiment. But ultimately, isn't that what they most obviously have in common with novels?