While Bible might be
delivering good news for some parts of population, in our house - it's Focus magazine. Today's issue alone is going to take a few bubble-baths of
reading. So what's the good news of today?
↓ reading
First of all, Einstein's collected papers
are available online through Princeton university - a very clearly
structured interface for accessing some of the most extraordinary pieces
of writing of the 20th century. For example, one can now dip into a
delightfully lyrical world of Einsteinian letter-writing, such as this one he sent to Mrs Curie in 1913.
"A
few days have passed since the wonderful profusion of things rushed
past me. The fibrils of my brain must still be in terrible disarray from
all of that...."
If
science can be poetic - Einstein has certainly nailed it - of course,
among a few other facts that he had nailed rather well too. Such a
pleasure to read! I only wish the texts were complemented by the scans
of the originals.
↓ imagining
The
second bit of great news is that... everything is in the head. It's
official. Apparently, carrying out five sessions of imaginary exercise
per week had positive effects on developing grip-strength in volunteers
at Ohio University. No sweaty armpits, no chlorine soaked hair, no shin splints - only five imaginary sessions which, I could perform from a hammock under linden trees.
↓ picturing
Third - not entirely everything is in the head, as page 81 suggests. Why do we get a mental picture when reading? Or - why don't we?
Visual
and auditory areas of your brain are at work when you read, as you
subvocalise the words when one of the characters is speaking... All of
this contributes to what we think of as pictures in our head - yet in
reality our brains probably contain no such thing. Indeed, recent
theories treat vision more like an activity or interaction with the
world rather than a picture-making process. Oddly enough, more detailed
written descriptions may not result in richer or more satisfying mental
imagery. Sometimes, the simplest descriptions allow you to create your
own imagined world with far more detail and emotional involvement.
Less
is more, they suggest. It is more emotionally satisfying to be involved
in creating a personalised mental imagery. This satisfaction is
probably what explains the allure of haiku poems and artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto and Indrė Šerpytytė.
Indrė Šerpytytė is one of the artists currently showing as part of Conflict Time Photography exhibition at Tate Modern. In one of the rooms (towards the end) she is showing wooden carvings of KGB interrogation houses
and their studio "portraits". Refreshingly, her take on Lithuanian
history is a non-judgemental, non-sentimental commentary with plenty of
gaps and empty spaces for the viewer to fill in. My favorite works,
however, are those from Forest Brothers series: dense treescapes,
suspended between the world of Hansel-and-Gretel-fairy-tale fear of the
dark forest and an honest link with factual landscape of the post-war
Lithuanian resistance fighters. Less is more.
↓ procrastinating
The final good news is called WIKIGALAXY.
Computer science MA(!) student Owen Cornec put together this
galaxy-style visualisation of tens of thousands of Wikipaedia pages to
help you get lost down even more rabbit holes of useless but fascinating
information. While drifting aimlessly among his 3D paths linking
various concepts, I did wonder if this could be called a binding. If the
metaphor of book can extend into the digital reading media, could we
not extend the notion of binding too, to denote the ways that keep
separate pages of digital information together?
↓↓↓
I like reading straightforward linear texts in straightforward
linear books page by page in a non-confusing arrangement of thoughts
where one idea follows another. Unfortunately, as I look around myself
at this very moment I can see two open books to the left, a small pile
of photocopied pages to the right, an iPad, a laptop and my notes all
annotated, cross-referenced and collated to accompany my re-reading of
Katherine’s Hayle’s Writing Machines.
My reading, in fact, is an act of multilayered and multicursal pathway
of linking, reading, connecting, proceeding. How very appropriate, I
suppose.
How cybertextual!
The term cybertext was coined by Espen Aarseth in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997).
Regardless of what it sound like, cybertext is not a type of text, it
is not a type of link or hypertex (even though hypertext can be present
in cybertext) - cybertext is an approach to investigating
"communicational strategies of dynamic texts". The term itself is
confusing in many ways (no clear definition, broad area of application),
one thing is certain, though - it is not media, period or genre
specific. It is about communication, interaction, performance within the
text and with the text - it is not about literary or visual style.
The
concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organisation of the
text, by positing the intricacies of a medium as an integral part of
literary exchange. However, it also centers attention on the consumer,
or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure then even reader-responce theorists would claim.
...cybertext
is used here to describe a broad textual media category". It is not in
itself a literaty genre of any kind Cybertexts share a principle of
calculated production, but beyond that there is no obvious unity of
aesthetics, thematics, literary history, or even material technology.
Cybertext is a perspective I use to describe and explore the
communicational strategies of dynamic texts.(Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature)
↓↓↓
One of the examples of cybertext, that Aarseth gives himself is i-Ching (The Book of Changes)
- an ancient Chinese divination book. Six yarrow stalks or tossed coins
are used to determine the pattern of broken and unbroken lines in the
hexagram. The pattern is then looked up in the book and the prophesy is
read out for interpretation. The book does not form a linear narrative,
but a multitude of possibilities and paths to navigate through.
Here is one of the online i-Ching reading sites 易經.
↓↓↓
Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is another work that Aarseth mentions as a cybertext. Pale Fire consists of a 999-line
poem, written by the fictional John Shade, with a foreword and lengthy
line-by-line commentary by a neighbor and academic colleague of the
poet, Charles Kinbote. Aarseth suggests, that a reader can choose
between a linear or non-linear reading of the work, i.e. to read the
poem first and then notes as one sequential story; or to keep jumping
between the annotations and the poem.
↓↓↓
Nightingale’s Playground is a piece digital fiction by Andy
Campbell and Judi Alston. It is an extraordinary interlinked work in
four parts: a browser based read/walk-through, an e-book text, a virtual
exercise book, a downloadable 3D immersive experience of Alex's house.
The reader discovers the story himself through exploration of those four
spaces.
↓↓↓
This is one more beautifully produced piece of digital art! Hollowbound Book by Erik Loyer is an interactive response to N. Katherine Hayles’ book Writing Machines,
in which a newly liberated book binding testifies to its liberation at
the hands of Hayles’ theories. It is not a cybertext (for what I
understood about cybertexts). However, it can be considered part of
cybertext that N. Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines is - a book that exists as an elegantly designed 3D object (also available as a PDF for a less elegant DIY binding) and an extension of the book Web Supplement, which includes the lexicon linkmap, notes,
index, bibliography, errata, and source material. The reader/user can
explore alternative mappings of the book's conceptual terrain with additional
functionalities unavailable in print, then print insert pages to customize
the book itself.
↓↓↓
Children's
books - like artist's books - often allow themselves the sort of
ingenuity that adult books do not. A few blogposts behind I mentioned Myriorama or tableau polyoptique
- a form of cards entertainment that became especially popular in the
19th century: a child was able to arrange and re-arrange the cards into any order to
build visual narratives. My own children in their own time could not have enough of Mixed-Up Fairy Tales
- a lighthearted contemporary split page book, where a child can make
up their own stories using starting lines, names, events from well known
fairy tales. It is the book that provided me with hours of piece on the
plane - cybertext or not.
↓↓↓
Aarseth's cybertext is a multicursal text, that allows
readers to navigate their own labyrinth of reading, such as those cards with a
possibility of physical rearrangement of narrative modules.
Some of those objects above are books while others are games or
"whatever they are" (my very very favorite quote by Johanna Drucker). As
cybertexts, they are a form of text - a text, which is a big
metaphorical leap away from it's definition in linguistics. As
reader-led narratives, they are a form of story-telling tradition.
A note that had no space in the text above:
At the
start of the book Aarseth cites Penelope Reed Doobs discussion on
physical and metaphorical labyrinths of classical antiqity and Middle
Ages. She distinguishes two types of labyrinth paths: "unicursal, where
there is only one path, winding and turning, usually toward a center;
and the multicursal, where the maze wanderer faces a series of critical
choices". The two ideas of labyrinth have co-existed until Renaissance,
when the concept was "reduced to the multicursal paradigm that we recognise
today". As a result we have since grown to regard linear and labyrinth and incompatible ideas.
