A point made by Hayles and others this semester, that other people in the class seem to have a better handle on than I do, was brought up briefly today: that of how hypertexts change and become something new when they are released to the world.

This has suddenly become a very real concern to me in designing my final project. One of the major components of my project is a blog which I set up on a public forum. I didn't really think about comments when I set it up, assuming that the chances were low that a random person would stumble on it and really take time with it before it was done, but today I got my first comment, and it was extremely disturbing. This reader took my fictional characters and the fictional situations I put them in to be real, and commented accordingly. Expressing hope for their future and wishing a character luck in a specific venture. He also made the point of how much he had come to enjoy the main character through reading his blog.

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.

I admit that I am one of the people who has been annoyed by the lack of closure in many of the hypertexts we have been reading. While the lack of closure sometimes works, and the idea of a "perpetually unfinished textuality" intrigued me, I often grew frustrated with reading experiences that seemed to leave me wandering in circles. I can't say that I have exactly changed my mind about any of these things, but I have gained a great deal of sympathy for hypertext writers while working on my own final project. How (or if) I am going to write a conclusion or conclusions to this thing I do not know.

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."

<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