textual media

I think that sometimes we all forget that information can be presented in so many various and stimulating ways than the plain prose blocks most of us are used to looking at.  I found this to be such an interesting and fast read. I haven’t really read that many comics in my lifetime excluding the ones that come in the newspaper which I used to read regularly when my family had a subscription to the Washington Post while I was in high school. I’ve read some graphic novels, I guess they would be considered, and thumbed through a lot of them. I never really thought as it as some philosophical-type of art form. Though I can say that before reading this I did consider comics as art. Being somewhat artistically challenged I automatically lend merit to anyone who can draw anything to represent some sort of reality, because I can not. Like I said, I’ve dealt a lot with some sorts of comics in my life, but never really thought about what makes them tick and so successful.

I think what was most interesting to me was the comparison of the eastern and western styles of comics. It’s so cool to think that one idea was being developed simultaneously in two parts of the world and so recently! I don’t think it would be such a gripping concept if they were talking about some ancient form of something being developed in two different places at the same time a million years ago like stone tools or something. But for two different schools of thought to develop so many different ways of interpreting and presenting the same thing in much more recent time is totally cool (I’m using the word cool with all respects to the word. I feel like I could use interesting but I don’t know if that quite gets my intense appreciation and enthusiasm for it across). I have never really been into Anime or any kind of Japanese comics/cartoons/what-have-you but it kind of makes me want to take a look at it for the first time. I’ll play that off under the guise of investigation into what Scott McCloud is telling us to see if it does really involve a different kind of thought process than something that was produced in America by Americans.

This “fun” but really super informative reading really peaked my interest into comics. I really can’t wait to see where we go from here in class.!!!

I’m not sure how I feel about McCloud’s book. For awhile, it was difficult for me to wrap my head around. I’m no conossieur of comics or anything, but I’ve read a few and never really thought about them as anything more than just a cartoon on paper, as he states is the common perception in the beginning. I find that if I take my entertainment too seriously, it loses it’s, you know, entertaining qualities. If I have to think about it, it’s not going to be as much fun anymore.

Chapter 2 took awhile for me to wrap my head around. I almost felt like putting the book away after sitting through that painful Magritte exposition at the beginning. I eventually saw his point, but if felt like he was being difficult on purpose, and perhaps he was. After I got past his introduction, I found that the 2nd chapter was the most enjoyable of the parts we had to read. I get that just about anything we see is made up of icons to further connect with the audience on a basic level. If we see a reflection in ourselves in the images alone, it will be easier to connect with actual characters that remind us of ourselves or situations that we may have come across in our lives. At least, I think that was his point. That’s the concept I came away with at the very least.

I know I didn’t answer this question in class, but I think honestly that I enjoyed Afternoon so much more than I did Twelve Blue. Afternoon feels like it is so much more easy to navigate and to find different passages than Twelve Blue. I think that whatever story lines exist in Afternoon are much more identifiable and are more easily accessible than in Twelve Blue. I have played with Afternoon to the point that I can kind of anticipate where my actions are going to lead the story. I have found that with Twelve Blue it is easier to get stuck in some short cyclical pattern consisting of about maybe three screens. Afternoon also has its own cyclical parts, but they tend to be much longer with many opportunities for diversion. In Twelve Blue, I am only referring to this cyclical pattern in dealing with clicking on the in-text links and not with the graph on the side with the twelve opportunities for diversion.

The side panel in Twelve Blue I feel is completely open for diversions.  However, I do not feel like it is a complete story as compared to Afternoon (if you can even call it a complete story). I feel like somehow Michael Joyce got a little cocky with his unique way of storytelling and forgot some of the key things in a story. Like maybe a plot. I feel lost when I read Twelve Blue. There are so many story lines running parallel and bumping into each other and over lapping I feel so overwhelmed, but maybe that’s the point. There are so many aquatic themes running through the veins of the side story panel and I’m thinking that he is trying to make it comparable to being adrift in the ocean. Maybe I’m way off base here, but I think it is kind of an easy comparison.  Everything is written in blue. duh. I also think that the blue text on a blue background makes it hard to read at times especially in those huge blocks of prose that he is using, unlike Afternoon where the writing is minimal and seems to be pretty concise and contained on the page.

But it also could be that I enjoy afternoon more because I have spent more time with it.  Of course you’re going to like a book you have read ten times over than something you have only gotten half-way through. I think that’s something natural. But yes, I have found that I definitely find the complexities and obscurities in Afternoon a little more charming than the changing tides and currents of Twelve Blue.

Although I was eager to read something else from Michael Joyce, I was soon unmotivated to read through the entire story. The story line was difficult to follow and the characters were hard to distinguish. After reading for a while, I soon wondered when it would be over. Although both “Afternoon” and “Twelve Blue” are not my cup of tea, I would choose “Afternoon” as the better text.

I did, however, enjoy the language used in “Twelve Blue.” My favorite page was when Joyce wrote, “Everything can be read, every surface and silence, every breath and every vacancy, every eddy and current, every body and its absence, every darkness every light, each cloud and knife, each finger and tree, every backwater, every crevice and hollow, each nostril, tendril and crescent, every whisper, every whimper, each laugh and every blue feather, each stone, each nipple, every thread every color, each woman and her lover, every man and his mother, every river, each of the twelve blue oceans and the moon, every forlorn link, every hope and every ending, each coincidence, the distant call of a loon, light through the high branches of blue pines, the sigh of rain, every estuary, each gesture at parting, every kiss, each wasp’s wing, every foghorn and railway whistle, every shadow, every gasp, each glowing silver screen, every web, the smear of starlight, a fingertip, rose whorl, armpit, pearl, every delight and misgiving, every unadorned wish, every daughter, every death, each woven thing, each machine, every ever after” (p. sl8_11) Joyce made everyday things into something of significance. I found myself rereading this page to get a grasp on everything that was mentioned.

I was also pleased with the figurative language used in this text. “The trimmings she saved and cast out on the water like pollen, all the pretty colors. They would sink like barren nymphs for the fish to bump with fleshy lips, float for birds to pluck away and decorate the muddy basket of a nest.” (p. sl4) The similie and descriptive language makes me visualize the seen being described. Joyce continues, “Samantha played music in her room, so loud it floated down upon the water like settling fog. The marsh shone with rainbow feathers of oil. Already the water chestnuts were choking the channel.” (p. sl4) This page was my second favorite to read, as the scene was sad, it was also peaceful.

Until this class, I thought that Choose Your Own Adventure books were simple children’s stories, and I thought that comics/cartoons were the bottom rung of the graphic arts ladder.   Mapping our books convinced me of the complexity of ergodic texts, and reading Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics has convinced me that comics are multifarious.

McCloud gives relevant examples of the development of comics from the earliest forms, like the record keeping symbols of the Sumerians, and explains how these symbols evolved into language.  I didn’t realize that many common symbols actually originated in comics, like @#?!  (That one comes in handy on a bad day!), sounds – like ssss and zzzz, as well as commonly recognized representations of facial expressions and gestures.  The symbols of comics are an evolved and evolving language.  Further, it is significant that the language of comics is unique to the culture of the artist(s).  To demonstrate the differences, McCloud gives examples of Japanese comics.  He attributes the differences to the fact that Japanese comics developed in isolation from the West.  This fact is true of other art forms as well.  (Now, my recall of Art 101 is coming in handy!)  This same isolation is evident in the development of perspective.  While the West was developing techniques such as foreshortening and atmospheric perspective, Asia developed isometric perspective. Although not as realistic, this perspective is useful and still applied to video games.

I like McCloud’s discussion of the versatility of line.  This visual element is as significant to comics as any other art form.  Directional lines – implying movement, stabilizing horizontal lines, assertive vertical lines, dynamic diagonal lines, and implied lines are powerful tools in any artist’s hand.  As McCloud points out, line is so much more than visual.  Throughout time, line has evoked an emotional response.  McCloud’s examples of Expressionism (“the unseen world making itself visible”), such as Munch’s Scream and Van Gogh’s Portrait, demonstrate the power of line to evoke a strong emotional response.  According to McCloud, comics merge time and space, and unite the senses to evoke emotional and sensual responses.  This sounds like a powerful medium to me.  Then, I started thinking about comics in my life, my world.  Has any comic ever evoked an emotional response from me?   The answer is yes.  For years, my favorite comic strip was B.C.  I looked forward to reading it every Sunday in the Washington Post.  After so many years of enjoying Johnny Hart’s* creation, I was shocked when the Washington Post banned B.C. from the Sunday comic section.  The reason?  Johnny Hart’s use of Christian symbols on Palm Sunday, Easter Sunday, and Christmas.  So, McCloud’s assertion is correct.  Paper and ink, arranged in rectangular panels, with added symbols, splashed with a little color, evoked the ire of the editorial staff of the Washington Post. Comics are powerhouses, wrapped in the guise of simple ink drawings, word balloons, and symbols.  In reality, not so simple after all.

 *Johnny Hart died in April last year.

Focus on: Electronic Literature, pp. 59-70

The type of work Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, A Story represents is summarized on page 62, when the author notes, “like afternoon, they employ branching structures that create irreconcilable ambiguities centering on violent events.”  As I have chosen to read this text prior to reading Twelve Blue—on page 63, it is noted “playing is one of the central metaphors”—hopefully it will be more enjoyable than Afternoon, at least for myself.

A useful characteristic that is said to be found in Twelve Blue is revealed on the bottom of page 63, “Every screen contains at least one instance of the word blue.”

Michael Joyce, Twelve Blue

Initial comments for Twelve Blue—I appreciate the author description, I wonder if it will be more helpful than Joyce’s description in Afternoon.  Something else I think that is unique and should be mentioned—HyperCard was included in MacOS 6 in 1987—and the proprietary software he used to write Afternoon was also written around this timeframe.  In the late 1980s—hypercard peaked, evidence is shown in the HyperCard Wikipedia entry: ‘During HyperCard’s peak popularity in the late 1980s, a whole ecology of vendors offered thousands of these externals for everything from HyperTalk compilers to graphing systems, database access, internet connectivity, and animation.”  In Twelve Blue, even though HTML was created by CERN in the tail end of the 1980s and early 1990s, it really did not “take off” until the mid 1990s.  I find it interesting he chose the years of the most “explosive” growth for both HyperCard-like software and of the web to release his works of fiction—perhaps for these reasons alone is why we are reading about them today.  Overall, I found the reading from Electronic Literature much more comprehensible and I was better able to understand it than traversing Twelve Blue.

I found afternoon to be a little overwhelming. There is so much going on and the changes in point of view really set me off. A side from the frustration of trying to figure out what is happening, the story is rather interesting. Stories about love, sex, and death usually are. Sex is a prevalent theme throughout the story and I found it interesting that it was not just one type of sex but many types; from romantic sex, to adulterous sex, to, at times, lurid and graphic sex. The amount of sex in the story suggests many things such as repression, adultery, and exploitation. Its seems that every character in the story in extremely sexually charged and I’m not really sure why, maybe Michigan just gets people going. The role of sex in the story seems to be juxtaposed by the mechanical, lifelessness of datacom/dataquest, the thing that Peter, the least sexual charged character, is associated with. Dataquest/datacom are confusing and intriguing to me. If you click on datacom it brings you to a log in. For some reason this reminds me of the Hatch in Lost, in that if you figure it out there will be some revelation that tells something about the story but ultimately brings up more questions than answers. Has anyone cracked the thing? If so whats the password. It makes me wonder if there really is a password or if it is there to frustrate and provoke thought. Finally, I ran into two instances where movies about reanimation were referenced. The first was the referance to the Frankenstien spin, where the monster learns to love classical music and the second is the film featuring Peter O’Tool where he tries to bring his dead wife back to life. I think this has to do with Peter and the possible loss of his wife and some desire to bring her back the way she was when she was with him; although I could be wrong, its happened before.

I have very mixed emotions about afternoon. It’s almost like a love hate relationship if I must say. I went into Afternoon with a very open mind and no expectations. I started by reading the directions and was very intrigued about what the writer had to say. I liked the part especially when he said “the lack of clear signals isn’t an attempt to vex you rather an invitation to read either inquisitively or playfully and also at depth.” I liked these options going into the game. I felt like it was something I could enjoy at many levels and would get back from it the amount of work I put in. And so began the story…
The first thing I felt before I even started to read was, this is it? No color? No pictures? Boring! But then I began to read and realized you didn’t need any of those. Joyce writes beautifully, appealing to the readers senses. It was like reading poetry. There were descriptions about what you could see, what was heard. I could paint a visual image of the surroundings in my head. I then began to click words. I clicked words that sparked the most emotion to me while reading. I tried to pick words that I felt that particular page focused on the most. The words I choose usually lead me to a page that correlated to the words I choose. For example on the first go around I clicked the word secret and It lead me to a page asking if “I was sleeping with her” another time on a completely different page I clicked on the word jealous and it asked me the same question. This lead me to believe I was the right track and I had found a sort of pattern. But the more times I played the more I seemed to lose interest. I wanted there to be consistency. I wanted to know all of one part of the story before I was told about another. And this is where the hate came in.
I loved Joyce’s writing and the stories seemed interesting. I even liked the concept of clicking whatever words I liked. I just felt like there wasn’t enough consistency. I got frustrated when I had to start at the beginning again. It’s like we talked about in class I wanted closure and I never really felt like I got that. At the same time I think my frustration mirrors some of the emotions the character in the game feels and I think Joyce consciously did this. There’s one line in the game that made me think this and it said “I do know what you feel, you make some choices, you begin to see a pattern, and you want to give yourself into believing despite the machine.” I think this is how I felt. I thought I was getting somewhere, finding a pattern, and then it started all over again. And this brought me back to what Joyce said in the directions matching minds’. I felt like I had made a connection with something in the game that I had matched my mind and a specific emotion with the character. Maybe I was reading to inquisitively or at depth but that’s what I got from Afternoon. And I think that’s ok. I think Joyce invites to you to play this game and take what you want out of it. I think it’s an individual experience and everyone’s understanding will be different. Whatever you get out of it depends on you, either way it’s not a bad way to kill an afternoon.

On page 61 of Electronic Literature, Afternoon, a Story is described as “a work driven by a mystery that, once solved, gives the reader the satisfaction normally attained through a conventional Aristotelian plot structure.” The question that first came to mind was: “Is this supplement enough?”

 

It’s difficult to argue the importance of the three act structure because it works so well. But there is also the question of why it works so well. While Aristotle was the first to write it down, and analyze the begin-middle-end structure, it is reasonable to assume that it existed long before this. As Dwight Swain pointed out: we are born, we live, and we die—three acts seem natural. However, it could be the case that since we have generally been hit over the head with this structure from the day we are born—in stories, TV, Movies, etc—it only seems natural through process.  Whatever the case may be, the three act structure works because it satisfies.

 

The main problem is that Afternoon, a Story (which is over twenty years old) still seems so far ahead of its time. Afternoon is not just experiment with a new computer medium; it also experiments with plot, structure, and navigation. Without a clear introduction of an ultimate goal, a series of events, or a clear resolution there is no way for readers to know what is important. Navigating from page to page can produce a collage of non-sequiturs, which ultimately lead to my exhaustion.

 

In a game like The Baron, the goal of was presented at the beginning of the text. It was not clear what needed to be done in order to accomplish the ultimate goal, but it gave me a reason to continue reading/playing the text. I wanted to reach that final resolution. I got confused at times, but what kept me motivated was the anticipation of a conclusion.

 

The main problem that I experienced with Afternoon was that there were no stepping stones. While I can appreciate the artistic advances and experimentation, without any supplemental information it seems unlikely that I could read and enjoy this story simply on its own merit. As we are today, I feel like the gap between literary tradition and Afternoon, a Story is too wide to expect that it can easily be appreciated outside of an academic environment. (That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised to find these stepping stones, in a sense, retrofitted through a gradual adoption of different aspects of Afternoon into future new media works.)

So before I started reading Michael Joyce’s hypertext, afternoon, a story, I did some research to try and figure out what the story was about. I read that it’s supposedly about a man, Peter, who thinks he’s witnessed the death of his ex-wife and his son. “Intriguing” was the first thought that came through my mind. I popped the CD in and went on the hypertext journey. At first, I wasn’t sure who was speaking, as certain pages would refer to Peter in the third person, while other pages kept using “I”. I’m still not clear on who exactly is speaking. When the story says “I” does it want us to connect and relate to the story?

The page I ended up on, although still unsure what I clicked to get there, has one sentence, “I want to say I have seen my son die this morning.” After clicking on all the words, I found out that the word “die” brought me to a description of what he (Peter?) saw. As he described the accident’s scene, where his ex-wife and son would travel on if she were taking him to school, I couldn’t help but get pulled more into the story. I visualized the scene, with the body on the lawn and the “smaller body beyond”. I finally started to follow the story and wanted to find out more. I clicked Y hoping it would give me more information about the plot, or at least onto a page that will keep the story going; but I was disappointed to be directed to a page about him not being able to dream and the discovery of Wert being allergic to walnut pollen.

As I clicked around, I just got more and more frustrated because the pages didn’t make sense, nor did they even connect with the previous pages. The pages of the story seem to have two different stories going on at the same time. I’m not sure whether or not that was Joyce’s intention, but for me it just makes it hard to follow. It makes even more complicated that the story doesn’t really have a closure. With the randomness of the hypertext, it forces us, the reader, to interpret the story whichever way we want, or whatever way would make the most sense to us. Maybe that was Joyce’s true intentions?

As I read through Michael Joyce’s hypertext fiction entitled “Afternoon”, I came across one central motif in several of the pages: love. The story I read began with the narrator’s conversation with a younger, cynical friend named Wert. The initial series of pages revealed him as a callous husband, constantly admonishing his wife Lolly. With each belittling comment, Wert would watch to see if the narrator chuckled along with him. However, our protagonist appeared to disagree with Wert’s jealous nature, and refused to participate. Through their conversation, the story reveals that the narrator is/was romantically involved with Lolly’s friend, Nausicaa. Later, the story provides brief narratives that describe the inception of their relationship with one another. Each fragment of the narrative is tied to the rest in some shape or form. On one page the narrator identified the relationship between the quartet of characters as something that “was messy. When Nausicaa left her husband, Wert hired her. And so, on the one hand, he felt some mystical and lofty attachment to her, as if she were linked to him through Lolly. It was a loyalty almost like incest, flesh of his wife’s flesh. Although she was my age, nearly old enough to be Wert’s mother she said, I think sometimes he thought of her as his daughter.” This particular excerpt not only reveals the tension among the characters, but also speaks on the nature of love and the different emotional needs each character has. The narrator and Wert both express a certain longing to connect, though they express this in very different ways. Wert talks with distance, as if he is afraid to expose his vulnerability. The narrator is also somewhat guarded, but more in the way of a man who is either afraid of losing or has already lost something dear to him. The narrator continues to describe Wert’s subconscious relationship with Nausicaa: “On the other hand, [Wert] wanted [Nausicaa] for himself, as if in some dim way he and Lolly contended for her love. Thus when I began to see her, he was at the same time both jealous of us all and certain that we each knew secrets kept from him.” If one diagramed the relationship of the four characters, they would find that Nausicaa would be the central node. She is the narrator’s object of love, Lolly’s intimate and sensitive companion, and Wert’s object of desire (whether this be emotional or physical desire). It is in this mapping that one can assume Nausicaa to be at the center of “Afternoon, A Story.” She represents the dangers of love -from acting as a subtle temptation to our narrator during their first “afternoon meetings”, to acting as the heartbreaking woman whom the narrator cannot keep. The moment of realization of the failure of the relationship is expressed by our narrator in one page where he states, “I thought some idea of culture would keep her when I couldn’t any longer. [But lectures and orchestras couldn’t replace talk.] You see the flaw, of course. It was neither my task to keep her, nor to think she could grow by my wishing.” This statement alone illustrates the ambiguous relationship between free will and love. Ultimately, the narrator had to accept that Nausicaa could choose to leave the relationship just as she chose to enter it so long ago. 

Another piece of the narrative that struck me was the author’s own interjection through the voice of his protagonist. On one page he used the voice of his narrator to  write, “I’m not sure that I have a story. And, if I do, I’m not sure that everything isn’t my story, or that, whatever is my story, is anything more than pieces of other’s stories.” This statement captures the complexity of narrative, that it is a construction made up by multiple authors, in a way. Within “Afternoon”, the narrator is writing his own story. But the entirety of it is not just his story. Rather, it is also composed using the stories of others (such as Wert and Nausicaa). In some sort of abstract preface to this statement, Joyce also interjected his interpretation of a Tolstoy quote, ” There isn’t any story here. It’s as Tolstoy said, the genuine drama occurs on the upward or downward slopes, never at the apex.” The human drama in “Afternoon” is captured by the moments of struggle, promise, and downfall.  Because the interactive novel resists closure, there are no moments of victory or absolute failure that would risk stabilizing the “genuine drama” of the piece.

Although I think “Afternoon,” by Michael Joyce, is a good story, I find it difficult to read. When I began to read the story the first time, I used random words to follow the story line. This began confusing to me, so I hit “enter” repeatedly to better understand the story. It was more clear, but I still had a difficult time keeping track of the dialogue and characters.

I especially did not care for Werther. I think he is rude and inappropriate. He and the narrator must be really close for him to put up with his behavior. Wert first asks if he can sleep with his ex-wife and then makes derogatory comments to the waitress.

As I got deeper into the story, I was hoping for a good, solid ending. This never happened. The story would either end strangely or it would never end at all. This was disappointing to me, as I prefer texts to come to a good stopping point.