Author: bpierso2

The assignment over the weekend was to create links from our Calvino incipits that either had meaning, didn’t have meaning, enhanced or didn’t enhance your story.  For the most part, it seemed like most people had links that were just playing off the words they chose.  It did seem apparent that everyone had at least one or two links that were very enhancing to their story.  In particular were the words that were linked to another persons’ incipit.  An example is Ann’s story and how she linked it to mine.  At the end of her story, you sense that one of the characters was being chased by the law, only to get away at the last minute.  She linked the last sentence in her story to my incipit.  My story was about being in complete isolation in prison.  The link here may be subtle but I thought that her story was a segway in to mine, and it was a great choice of her to link it so. 

When reading these "choose your own adventure" stories, I was trying to think how there is a link between them and the hypertexts we made.  I guess you can say that we as the author of the hypertext choose where you go via the links.  In a way, the author of the short stories chooses your path as well, only I think the reader has a little more of a choice when it comes to the short stories.  I think that the short stories are a little more guided than the hypertexts.  The different paths in a "choose your own adventure" book also are all connected with one another and are both enhansive to the text as well as coherent.  The links to our hypertexts were at most times random and had little to do with the story itself. 

"Traversing Through the Winding Road," by Ann Luu, had a few links that were linked to pages with what I felt to have meaning behind them.  It also seemed like a few of the links were linked to pages or images that had to do with the word itself, or had at least the word in it.  An example is the word "suffocate" which she used to in her text to describe the intense heat the character was experiencing.  The link was to an article about children suffocating due to plastic bags.  Another of example of how she did this was with the word "daisy."  I liked this example because it linked straight to a page with meanings of every flower you can think of.  This didn’t add to the story at all, but it did divert my attention away for a few seconds.  With this being said, I think that it took away from the coherency, and the meaning.  However, it is quite clever and a good example of thinking outside the box.  Overall, I’d say that all the link-destinations were representative to the words they were linking from.

Philip Miller’s incipit entitled, "Across the Dark Expanse," used links that had the word in the linked-destination.  For example, the word "captain" was linked to the official web site for Captain Morgan’s rum.  The word "icebreakers" was linked to Hershey.com.  Hershey is apparently the maker of Icebreakers Liquid Ice breath fresheners.  Other links were a little more involved such as the word "Knights."  It was linked to the Maryland Renaissance Festival.  Knights can be found at a renaissance festival.  Overall, I didn’t feel like it took away or contributed to the story.  It was still coherent to me as well.  It is pretty much the same thing I did for my own incipit.

When turning my Calvino incipit into a hypertextual medium, for the most part I found a word in my piece and decided to google it.  When I came up with something I didn’t like or lost interest in it, I went to a different word.  Once I found something I did like, I stuck with it.  Only a few times did I try to put meaning into the word I was creating a link to.  Other times I tried to play off the words that I used, for example picking a picture or site that had an opposite meaning to the word. 

An example of this is when I chose to link the word "sliced" to a picture of sliced bread.  The meaning of the word in the context of the story had a very different meaning than the picture I linked it with.  Another example of playing off words and presenting another meaning to them is when I chose to link the word "sentence" to a web site on how to form sentences in Hungarian.  In the context of the story, "sentence" was referring to a jail-term.  My link to a picture of Cain and Abel is meant to reflect what the story was pretty much about — one brother killing another for his own personal gain.  (I think that’s what Cain and Abel was about).  I linked the name of the main characters’ brother — Cimbrian — with an artists’ rendering of Cain and Abel. 

For the Cain and Abel example, I feel as if I were successfully able to convey the message behind the story and what I was trying to get across.  It really is the only serious link I have in my piece — other than the two I linked to other’s incipits.  I tried to have those links have some meaning as well.  For example, I chose to link the word "sheild" to Jennifer Parker’s incipit entitled, "Cowering in the Darkest Chasms."  A character in the story was trying to hide from the Gorin gang, sheilding himself if you will from them and uncertain death.  I’m not sure if this would come across as clearly as maybe the Cain and Abel link, but it is what I was trying to convey. 

It is quite humorous that the “main” character in Calvino’s novel is having a difficult time tracking down all the ends or “connections” to stories that he is reading. He keeps reading stories that just end on him and it is very frustrating for him. This definitely parallels with us as the readers not being able to finish any of the stories that Calvino has written for us to read in this novel. I feel like this was purposely written with this sense of irony because it makes us as the readers really jump into the characters’ shoes — the character being the “I” or the “you” that the novel refers to here and again. I tried to keep this in mind while writing my own Calvino-esque story. I was trying to jump into the story in what would seem to be the middle of it. I felt that it was hard to do this, however; mainly because if you were really to jump into the middle of a novel or movie, you likely wouldn’t be able to get the background information that you missed at the beginning. I found it difficult to not present some background information though in my piece. Also like this novel, I inserted a hybrid of the names given by Calvino by presenting a character named “Cimbrian Marana.” While it was a fun excersize and homework assignment, I did find it sort of difficult because I didn’t want it to sound too off the wall. I think I was afraid of it not sound very legit, so I took it slowly to make sure I cover most questionable issues. Also, I haven’t written a story since probably 4th grade so it was different getting back into that story-telling frame of mind. I enjoyed the challenge though and felt that what I produced was pretty good.

After reading the first 90 pages of Italo Calvino’s, “If On A Winter Night’s A Traveler,” I came to the understanding that the novel was about a bunch of smaller stories packed into it. During our class discussion on Tuesday, we talked about this and how Calvino is affectively using different types of writing-styles to engage and keep us intrigued and interested. At the beginning of every chapter and story, he started off with something different that eventually lead us — the reader — to understand that we were reading about new characters. At the start of page 91, however, we the readers, quickly realize that we are talking about characters who we’ve already met. It is at this point that I realized all the short stories we were reading — If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, Outside the Town of Malbork, Leaning from the Steep Slope etc. — were part of the novels that the narrator and Ludmilla were reading and missing the endings to their stories. Maybe I was the only one to pick up on this so late in the book, but I found it to be another effective way to lure us into the novel.