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.

The posts so far on Walking Mornings indicate that most people like the essay but some people don't follow all of his thoughts. I suppose I'm a part of both groups of readers, because I too enjoyed the piece, but I didn't understand some of his main points. Like Lulu, I think his Joyce is a good writer, and his skills came out a lot more in this essay for me than in "Afternoon", but that could have been that I was so fascinated with the hypertext form of "Afternoon" that I didn't stop to appreciate how he wrote. Anyway, some of the points in Walking Mornings that made me sit back and think "Wow, that was good writing" also made me think "Wow, I don't understand what he's talking about, but I feel like I should."

I agree with other people who've already posted here and there that Michael Joyce's "Walking Mornings" is a very beautiful piece. I actually liked that he wrote less about the electronic lit world and more about his personal journey as a writer and human being. I was glad that he brought in his experiences as a hypertext author into the piece because it gave me some context to understand his sense of "walking," but I'm also grateful that he didn't solely focus on the hypertext world.

I must begin by saying that I'm not sure I completely understand some of Joyce's ideas in "Walking Mornings," I was both confused and fascinated by his meditation. He gestures toward the confusion of his students and colleagues concerning his literal retreat from technology and electronic writing. Yet, as is often the case, I can understand why he needed to remove himself from that on which he needed to reflect. At any rate, I was at first troubled by how much he focused on his personal journey instead of concerns about the Internet.

It seems like he sees the Internet both as a space of possibility and also a place of chaotic, and often useless, repetition. He says: "covering the same ground again and again is human nature and the denial of its value...is nothing less than the denial of mortality, of the value of passing and of passing value...thus the monstrous claim for nextness...can be seen as a sin against nature." It seems, from reading Joyce, that we ought to take a breath and review the current state of affairs before running around in circles some more or demanding new material we don't know what to do with.

The title of Michael Joyce’s essay—“Nonce upon Some Times: Rereading Hypertext Fiction”—is misleading. Probably intentionally so. Because as much as it’s about reading and rereading, it also consistently reads like a handout a professor might give to his hypertext fiction workshop. And that’s probably Joyce’s point: “reading in hypertext means to re-create the writers experience of rereading in the process of composing printed works” (139). Earlier in this essay, Joyce explains his perception of the writer’s rereading/revision experience: “That is, writers imagine readers reading as they read when they reread and rewrite” (134).

In one of those “how the hell did I stumble on this page with this search string??” moments that happen so frequently with google, I was directed to the online course overview for one of the University of Iowa’s advanced fiction writing workshops.

I've posted a scanned copy of Michael Joyce's "Walking Mornings" on Sakai, for those of you who are interested; this is an essay based upon the talk he gave at Pomona a few years back, and a very interesting reflection on his later thoughts about hypertext...

It’s amazing how strong—and similar—many of the responses to Joyce’s “Afternoon” have been. Like shock and awe and many others from our class have mentioned, I was frustrated with the format of “Afternoon.” However, the hypertext was also incredibly intriguing, and it was definitely worth “reading” in order to get first-hand experience with hypertexts.

At first I went through “Afternoon” the same way I used to read the “choose-your-own-adventure” books that I read when I was little (and that Joyce references in his article, as well as Lulu on the blog). I soon realized how different the two are. You can’t completely reread, as I used to do with adventure books when I chose a certain path for the heroine but was immediately disappointed with my decision and eager to see option B. I found that with “Afternoon,” every time I chose “yes” then clicked back and chose “no”, I ended up with the same piece of story on the next screen. I assume that I hadn’t reached a part where I had the power to make the decision “yes” or “no” that actually mattered, but it was still interesting to see how active I actually could be as reader and semi-writer (which is, as both Joyce and Landow seem to say, one of the main purposes of the text).

As I read through Joyce's "Othermindedness" or rather the selection thereof, I'm intrigued by the connections that he makes between the filtration systems of the internet (Google, "metasites," etc.) and the filtrations that occur in the "print culture." He writes, "Almost invisibly in the past, for instance, most library patrons read much more of the online or card catalog entries, book spines, or tables of contents than they read from the volumes themselves. People have only so much time. They can't read everything and so they depend on others to link them to what they need or wish to read" (54). It seems then that according to Joyce, mediation has always been a factor in the way that we receive information, but this mediation has never been so overt as in the case of the internet.