Write your song, excitable boy

Something that has disturbed me about Writing Machines this entire semester has now clarified to the point where I can at least try to enunciate it: never before have I taken a class in which form and theory so far outstrip content. Our discussions have been lively and insightful, I've learned a great deal and been exposed to a world I didn't even know existed, but if you asked me to name a single character from a text we've read this semester and describe them to you, I'd be hard pressed to do it. Or, to put it another way, when a friend, after I've finished describing our class and all the exciting things we talk about, asks what hypertext she should check out I really don't know what to tell her. I stammer and stutter and end up saying something like, "Well, the idea behind this one is pretty cool."

Some of the pieces we've looked at had great writing (Kind of Blue,) some used the form well (Disappearing Rain,) some demonstrated a powerful intellect at work behind the scenes (Lexia Perplexia, Afternoon,) but none caused me to say, "Wow, that is a really good hypertext. Now I have a feeling for what can be accomplished in this format."

I see this as a very exciting complaint. The hypertext world is wide-open. Still waiting to be defined. Super intelligent theorists wait in the wings. Legions of computer users scour link sites like metafilter looking for the next best thing. There is the demand, but the genre has no standard. This has partly to do with the fact that the form has so many media that can be tied in and used in so many different ways, and I don't mean to suggest that it will ever truly, ultimately be defined. Nor should it be.

As an english major my classwork has been characterized by looking back: reading great works and tearing them apart (I'm aware that this phrasing is a bit strong and is not the stated goal of our department's curriculum, but it's really how I feel. I can't look at a text in the same way after I've taken a college class about it. It has been laid open and its innards are strewn about my mind) to try and figure out just what it was that made them so maddeningly, scarily, wonderfully great. In Writing Machines we have been looking forward, and I suppose that perhaps the disturbance I spoke of at the beginning of this post was actually excitement. We talk about possibilities and read about experiments that are more important for what they were trying to do than for what they actually accomplish.

In closing, I'd like to bring up a wonderful post of magoo's that has stayed with me all semester: when sound recording technology first became available, the first things they recorded were readings of great poetry because it was assumed poetry was the best combination of human sound and language. But music became something very different. I think that the relationship between novels and hypertexts will evolve in a similar way. The two are related, but fundamentally different, and very different things will make a hypertext work than make a novel work. And maybe we get to figure out what they are!