. Spinning .

With an opening that speaks of photons and neurons and borders and lives, I’m lost in the ideas, feeling inadequate and uninformed and completely in over my head.  But there are words here and there, a phrase, something that drives me on beside stubborness or loyalty, and I realize it’s the very lostness that I’m experiencing that makes me want to cut deeper into this hypertext novel.

And I am rewarded by Ersinghaus’ wondrous way with words:

(Ham on walls)

I tried to penetrate fences with my shoulder, had tried before.  My mother would watch me dig, rake, build, shoot in the back yard from the kitchen window, resting her elbows on the sill, slashes of pottery clay on her cheeks like another kind of alphabet.  Her eyes mad with memory holes.

She remembered.  "If you do that again, I’m driving you into the woods and leaving you there.  Just like that.  Don’t test me."  For I’m fate.  An amazing thing to say, but I was preoccupied with escape.

The first person narrative of Ham Sandoval starts out with a conversation, a discussion–as I said–which is something I struggled through, picking up pieces that made sense and saving them in a little bag with a drawstring.  Here, he returns to a scenario that is so typical of mothers and children and yet in a twist that plays on the reader more deeply because of fears that we thought we outgrew, the threat is carried out. 

And I wonder, in this ordered world of planned science and sense: can a mother do that?   

This hypertext novel by Steve Ersinghaus won the Best of the Reading Room at the Hypertext ’07 convention in Manchester, England a few weeks ago.  I’ve had access to The Life of Geronimo Sandoval for a month now and have stuck my nose here and there into it, just trying to accept the format.  My natural instinct to something new is often stubborn resistance and though I’ve had some experience with the hypertext novel, I’m still torn about reading them–though I’m excited to the point of agitation sometimes in loving the idea of them and wanting to write in its orderly tangle of format.

From the opening:

Without a birth certificate and competent parents, how would a person verify their age or place of birth? If Ham Sandoval, the hero of The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, remembered a brother but couldn’t prove his existence, how could he rely on any memory of his past? Ham, as a boy, remembers his mentally ill mother returning to their home in Mesilla, New Mexico absent his brother, Geronimo. She vaguely remembers misplacing him.

Ersinghaus obviously knows the way to draw in his reader.  How can one resist?