Walking Mornings, Version 2.0

As I re-read Walking Mornings for this afternoon's class, I realized that, ironically, my own relationship to this text has been similar to my relationships with hypertexts. It's ironic because in this essay, Joyce is trying to distance himself from the new technologies, like hypertexts, that he has been so involved in.

Now that I look back on it, reading this essay for the first time felt somewhat hypertextual, largely because of the recursive nature of the text, which hovers around and returns repeatedly to the sentence "I walk mornings" in exploring the different meanings encapsulated by those three words. It is, as Joyce says, a meditation, and in its lack of a clear linear progression, it resembles hypertext narratives.

Reading the essay for the second time made me think harder about something that Joyce wrote somewhere else, and quotes in Walking Mornings on page 12: "A decade ago, in what I think is the only explicit statement I have written about attention, 'in response to others who claim that the so-called MTV generation has no attention span" I noted that "in an age like ours which privileges polyvocality, multiplicity, and constellated knowledge, a sustained attention span may be less useful than successive attendings.'" So I've enacted the multiple attendings that Joyce talks about-- but not only in hypertexts, but also in his own recursive, not-entirely-linear essay.

What this makes me wonder, then, is how multiple attendings are different when they take place in electronic writing and when they take place in books. One characteristic that comes to mind is the extent of one's understanding of the text. In, say, a hypertext, multiple attendings are probably necessary in order for us to actually see all the lexia. In contrast, it is possible (and expected) to view every page of an essay on one's first reading of it. But do the differences go deeper than this? And what about forms of electronic writing that aren't hypertexts, like blogs? (I guess blogs require multiple attendings because new posts are always being added to them-- they are perpetually works-in-progress. But I feel like I'm just scratching the surface here.)