Night Owl's recent piece on Hayles and pattern raises some interesting points. Hayles' dichotomy between pattern and noise seems fundamental to our neurology. I recall reading in some piece of pop science about an experiment with rabbits.

(Maybe someone with some neurological or cogsci background could extend this or improve it)

The experimenter would draw a carrot before the bunny's nose. When the bunny didn't inhale, the pattern in said bunny's olfactory lobe was stochaic. (For stochaic, think something like snow on a TV set or "white noise" on the radio; it's not technically random, but that's the way we generally take it). When the bunny inhaled, the increased input stimulated a set of waves that crossed back and forth through the olfactory lobe. A different stimulus produced a different pattern.

Critics have suggested that eliterature will be rhizomatic. Maybe I'm the only one who wasn't getting this or appreciating the significance of it, but a rhizome is made of lines. Examining the botanical image will make for an analogous point with regard to text:

• If one examines the root system of a fungal mat, those lines seem pretty chaotic individually, though some higher order seems to exist. (I can't find an adequate picture online, believe it or not, so I'll present this skyview of Paris as being slightly too regular and quadratic.

Wow. Everytime I get back here, something's new.

Marmelade's recent comment on Dandelife has me rethinking my ideas about coherence in text.

Did anyone else visit Dandelife and immediately feel confident that the metatext or megatext produced would be somehow coherent? I suspect that the insistence on dated entries somehow establishes this. For instance, Marmelade seems to have gone back and found things that happened on a birthday. My thought would have run something like "Gee, look at all these things that happened on that given day that seem totally unrelated." And the very difference, discreteness, of the events makes the metanarrative itself extremely coherent just because they are connected in our thought by their historical moments. And that connection is not at all arbitrary.

The Foucault-Borges quote (see Oz's comment to my previous entry, Mutatis Mutandi) probably can't tell us the breed of Jackson' MuTT, but I'm thrilled to see it again without trying to do a Vulcan mind-meld on my library. Thank you, Oz. Thank you thank you thank you!

The quote does seem to fold into the subject somehow (if an analogy involving cake batter may be applied liberally -- with my perhaps too-broad spatula). It relates recursively, I mean.

The (prime?) difficulty with Borges' supposed Chinese categories is that they don't follow a single principle of classification (so that, for example, a suckling pig may belong to the emperor, thereby hybridizing categories and making the whole system of classification in some ways unworkable).

Jackson's MuTT bit me.

Is this a narrative or a game or a _____ ?

I tried going back and putting in what I thought were valid answers for various people I knew (without their knowledge or consent, of course). The test results came out different, and even had some resonance with my own unauthorized opinions.

I went back and tried to refine my own responses, making different choices that still seemed valid for myself. I did this three times, and the results were always identical. Clearly, I am just too much of a 3-eyed disopropic parapagus to realize it, whatever that means, and Ms. Jackson is working with some kind of system, whatever that may be.

<LOOKATME!>I</LOOKATME!>

Some see blogs as poor substitute for novels because they so often seem too personal to be taken for art. One could object that the intrusive I, traditionally typical of immature or unpracticed authors, is symptomatic of the flood of amateurs who blog. But I doubt this will hold empirically. Plenty of blogs deal impersonally with external subjects. (I like to read Noam Chomsky's blog occasionally, for example). But these blogs not only seem unbloggy (debloggé?), they resemble exposition, not narrative.

Apparently, if the author or narrator doesn't get in and throw a few low punches, no one else does either.

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

We need a hypertext form that provides strong sequentiality and nuanced visuality. Whatever key may be found to enarrative will include this, although it goes against not only virtually all hypertext theory, but virtually all successful practice with electronic text.

Let me begin by qualifying the statement several ways.

What constitutes nonlinear text? We build letters of lines. We arrange words in lines (mostly). Eyes flick across a page or (though irregularly) a screen in lines. Spoken words evanesce across a room into what we call past, and we model that idea time with a line. In a sense everyone reads in a line

In another sense no one does.

Hypertext authors understand that they problematize readers' sequence, of course, but