. Spinning .

Some early morning thoughts, random, leftover from last night’s reading…

There is a psychological realism quality about this novel and in thinking about previous hypertext stories, I believe that for one thing, it invites the style because of its text box format.  I do not know (yet) how Storyspace affects the writer, but it would seem to me that a blank slate presented as a small box asks to be filled with an idea, a thought, an episode, but one that has sprouted from another box and that will surely connect to another and another.  Does it force a concise image?  I would think so since the box appears as a container, and small, versus a page whether in paper form or computer screen where visual knowledge of a continuous supply of blank pages is a given.

This lack of physical story–in other words, in a book, the unread being a mass in the right hand just as the knowledge, or known portion of the story (the read) is held in the left–may have something to do with the ethereal feeling of the story.  Once something is read, it becomes memory. Memory is not something that can be weighed or displayed, but is just as real as the couch I see across from me, for when I close my eyes, the couch becomes a memory.

Does this quality of writing hypertext inspire a different style of story then?  Would there need to be more grounding if this novel were in book form?

I’d read somewhere that hypertext is more like the natural process of thinking, of remembering, of plotting.  Ideas come in snatches of often unrecognizably related thoughts.  One idea may string itself out, then pinprick another into life. 

In the middle of Ham Sandoval’s trial in the woods–over now, as he is found and rescued–I discover him at work in an office building, and the woods are a memory.  Past and present and future are presented on a simultaneous concoction of three-dimensional planes.  Time differences that may occur in book form as chapters or even as simple white space, occurs here without warning.  A click, and you’re elsewhere in time and in space.

I would also say that with the benefit of some knowledge of acquaintance with the author here, there is a similarity in this chain of thinking style that may make certain writers more perfectly suited to the medium.  Here, this seems to be the case.

And another trait of the medium:  at 900+ text boxes (reading spaces) x 1000 links, not only are there 900,000 possible variations of the narrative structure of the store, there is the inevitability of never having read the story completely, missing text by not foregoing certain paths.  Will a reader/discusser of this book format ever be honestly "finished?"  

It strikes me that in this novel and probably others of the hypertext format are written (or read?) in a stream of consciousness manner.  Not only the randomness, the flow of the choice of the paths from one text box to another, but each text box itself seems to be a self-standing thought.

(Ham on arrows)

I stood on empty unprecedented ground.  On the journey here, I’d tried to mark my mother’s driving for landmarks, but signs were rare, vague.  I looked up, down.  There is only one direction: the one followed, spacetime’s direction, the one pointed at (to) by the tips of your shoes.  I could take ten steps, circle back, go the other way, but either case, that way is always ahead of me along the world line of time’s arrow.

I felt the enormity of space, the enormity of fear.  I learned then that absurdity (illogic) had size, a spatial quality.  I felt the earth and time clicking under my sneaker soles.  A distant crow’s call tunneled through space, becoming a thick and exotic projectile.  I had the urge to duck.

As part of the narrative structure (at least the story line I followed), these are Ham’s thoughts as he is left on his own in the woods, his mother having driven away.  But it is also a commentary on physical space, a question of our concepts of measuring space and time, and movements within it. This text box has then, two questions: 1) what does Ham do next, and 2) what is real, what is not, can we decipher it given the tools we know how to use. 

Of course there’s the nature of hypertext in that both questions are in reality, an and/or problem, as with the ability to backtrack we can take a path, change our minds or follow it to a point, go back, follow another, therefore, following both.

I’m reading for story (and damned glad I have a couple Faulkner’s under my belt) and yet the possibilities still whisper "me, me!" "no, me, take me!"

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?