I just read “Walking Mornings,” and I agree with Frabby that it is a lovely, if despondent, piece. It did help me understand Joyce’s wariness of the internet and the Information Age better than I did before. He is deeply worried about the fate of attention, choice, and possibility—things that are central to how we interact with the world, how we make sense of it, and how we make a meaningful place for ourselves within it.

He writes, in reference to ever-proliferating technologies, “never before have human beings been as surrounded as we are now by so much empty possibility. Never before has there been such potentiality harnessed only to displaying itself” (90). It may look like we are making informed choices and absorbing ever-increasing amounts of knowledge from technology, but Joyce thinks that most of the information and experiences that are available to us are actually hollow. This worries Joyce, because he thinks that most of the things that technology presents us with are either insignificant or actually harmful to our ability to be thinking, self- and other-aware individuals. (Although I would argue that hypertext fiction is an exceptional technology: the good stuff seems to be able to suggest new modes of reading and thinking to us—certainly a meaningful contribution.)

In "Othermindedness" Joyce brings up a colleague of his who asked him how he helped his students to make their hypertexts more coherent. He quotes her, "It is so seductive to write these lyric fragments and link them like music. Some of the most interesting hypertexts have a sort of senseless but shapeful beauty and play. I worry that my students will lose their ability to closely or to argue or to theorize, or at least that they won't be as willing to" (page 63). And then a little further down he talks about how he and this colleague decided that well, maybe this sensless beauty is a new way of making sense that we haven't recognized yet. I bring all this up because it got me thinking about the wiki. Does our wiki need to have "coherence" and how would we even define that coherence? Is our wiki going to be like a hypertext in the sense that the reader's choices make it what it is? Is the way we're building the wiki and how we're expressing things more important than what we're actually expressing? What are we even saying in this wiki and why would someone want to read it and what would they get out of it (and what do we get out of writing it)?

I’m still bothered by and intrigued with one of Joyce’s points in “Othermindedness.” He says of Vassar students studying hypertexts, “They each expected a reader reading for herself, a reader much less concerned with knowing than knowing about. Teaching and writing in the middle voice calls us to the realization that we have always been less geared toward knowing than knowing about” (65). He gives the example of poet who asks his students to “name ten master-pieces of literature that you haven’t read and know you will never read that nonetheless influence your life as a poet” (66).

I’ve been trying to think whether there’s some way to fulfill the enormous promise that Landow and Joyce think that hypertext possesses. The class seems to have come to some sort of consensus (although if there’s a silent majority otherwise, please speak up!) that Joyce promises a writerly text but doesn’t actually deliver on his promise. As marmalade vividly put it in her last post, in "Afternoon," readers end up being rats running around in Joyce's maze, rather than equal parties to the writing process, because Joyce “expands to fill the vacuum” created by the absence of traditional editors in this new literary medium.

Alright. So, I am sheepishly outing myself, tail between legs. I read "afternoon" after class. While I'm not trying to defend myself, it was interesting going into the story already having a preconceived notion of what it was about-ish.

I read a very different story, it feels like, the crash and the possible dead wife and son only popped up...once? Maybe twice?

I really like it. The indecisiveness, the lack of linerality, the inability to decipher whether there was one or multiple narrators, never quite exactly sure how any one character fit in with another, the fascinating interpersonal relationships that developed as a result. I very much saw myself reading my life, my blueprint of interactions with people, onto the story. The lack of coherency, I think, allows the reader to really pick and choose what fits where, how it fits, if it fits, what to disregard.

My experience with Afternoon was similar to Bird's and thisismycheese's, although maybe a bit more extreme. I wanted to take this Joyce fellow by the collar and shake him until a cohesive story that I could read front to back came out. The bottom line of any literature, be it hypertext or a papyrus scroll, is: is the writing good? Joyce is a good writer, which is what makes Afternoon impossible to dismiss.

Reading contemporary fiction I often feel that the writers are so desperate to create something new and original that they allow their story to suffer by trying to fit it into a hip modern frame, rather than working to make the hip modern frame fit into their story--or work as a component that makes it better overall.