<=Magoo's Project(s)=>

The theoretical reflections relevant to Fallouts, Mole's log, are mostly in "On Lines." I assume you got more of my personal relation to etext in last summer's emails than anyone should rightly have to stomach. So I'll try to respond directly to the assignments themselves.

Blog Fiction | Hypertext Essay | Wiki Fiction | Class Blog | Readings | Top

Bill Crandall

wrcrandall@cox.net
crandalw@cgu.edu
wcrandall@mtsac.edu

Fallouts -

The text you're getting leaves the story about 45 % done, if I've projected correctly.

I loved writing fiction again after a decade or so of verse. Since In Tongues, the piece that was published by Jahbone Press, I have completed three book-sized projects, all of which started attempting to incorporate a story in one sense or another, all of which wound up reading like long poems. I love long poems, but I'm thrilled to do something which more people may find accessible.

The writing feels very natural. For the moment, at least, this form feels very natural as a vehicle for narrative -- something which I must say rather astonishes me.

The obstacles that have arisen fall into two areas.

1) I lack a firm feel for the network and system of gestures in blogspace. I suspect I can avoid doing something so stupid as to begin foreshadowing events Mole can't be aware of, but more subtle things must obtain.

2) I'm still nervous about the whole question of fictionality in the medium, particularly as it involves this piece. Fallouts is fictional because the narrator and his life is stylized and bent from my experience, not because I'm portraying the industry differently than I knew it, insofar as I did know it. I need the story to be incompletely fictional so that the readers don't need to take Mole's world for a lot of things, because I need him to be opinionated and nutsy and didactic and unreliable and expansive. But I can't let it be altogether nonfictional because a nonfictional piece would have to be vastly different.

I decided to place a fictional Mole in a fairly nonfictional industry.

Blog Fiction | Hypertext Essay | Wiki Fiction | Class Blog | Readings | Top

On Lines -

This theory needs way more space to document properly, and I'm conscious of having left a lot hanging, but I couldn't resist taking a shot at it when I have a reader who can actually respond to it.

Most of the formal aspects I used were familiar when I started, but this is the first time I've used them to render something that I had really first mapped as an extended essay. (Not many ideas present themselves to me as essays).

What do you think of this as a formula for presenting relative linear arguments? :

• Write the arguments in abstract, giving the main deductive paths of the argument, but leaving aside documentation and experiential grounding.
• Make the grounding available by links.

I'm happy with the rough lines of the form. I can't say linked text as a field for essays attracts me, but that may have more to do with my feelings about essays. I think linked text handles nonfiction well enough that I needn't generally drag printforms into it.

I suspect the bibliography's the best reading, but I suppose that's alright.

 

I'm impressed with wikis as a nonfiction device and a social device. I eventually want to get MtSAC or wherever I might be to institute a wiki as a way to handle the basic information our students mill through in the long train of composition courses that constitute English for most of our students.

Our students are broke; our communities don't want to fund us, but out students are paying upwards of 20% of student loans towards print objects, many as high as 33%. I can't think of a good excuse for that.

This fiction is driving me nuts. Nothing I write fits, and my heart goes out to the students who've gone so far as to coordinate it into an alien story.

On the other hand, for people who've never written a hypertext fiction, I strongly suspect it was a great crash course in just what the problems are.

As nearly as I can imagine, a successful wiki fiction should involve a story whose main elements are previously known to everyone. I know this sounds like a terrible damper, but there is one antecedent for distributed storytelling that was very successful, and that's oral legend. In such cultures, the creativity comes in the interpretation or inflection of the performance of quite nearly the same words. Had I my druthers, I'd have run the wiki the same way - tell the Passion or Little Red Riding Hood or 911/ground zero or something.

Fun fun fun -- I will get my classes blogging.

I have nothing intelligent to say about it though - just all that about interactivity and active learning that you clearly don't need to hear me parrot.

What a wonderful class, though!

Choosing readings for other people makes me crazy. My only temptation is to suggest looking at some poetry in terms of the materiality of the text. Any time this issue comes up, I myself fall back on my readings of poets and poetics. I think it's a pretty good grounding because many poems are short enough to hold in mind almost entirely and because their shape, at least that aspect of their materiality, is obvious on the page, and because such conservative and august folks have recognized the materiality of poetry in so many ways even while they deny it in others. After all, how can one say the visuality of a poem is arbitrary and then insist on line breaks?