Last Week's Post This Week - Fun Stuff!

House of Leaves presents a puzzle for its readers. The layers of fictional characters give the book a “real” feel and left me trying to sort out what was what. Part of my experience had to do with the author’s use of editors, a fictional author, and a narrator who used footnotes extensively. The use of different typefaces added to the sense of credibility of the story. Even though I knew everything from the title page on was fiction, I found myself getting drawn into the story and started wondering about some of the external sources that were cited. The fact that some of publications mentioned are real, The New York Times for example, gave the story a sense of weight, made it real. I stopped reading on page 72 and flipped to Appendix II-E. Later, I noticed the checkmark in the bottom right corner of page 97, the signal that Johnny’s mother asked him to use if he gets her letters. This threw me because page 97 is from Zampano’s notes. Is Zampano Johnny?

After reading Hayles’ analysis of the book, I thought I might have enjoyed the rest of the book better if I hadn’t read it. At the same time, having read it after reading part of House of Leaves I had a better grasp of the nuances the book. More importantly, I gained a better grasp of the ideas that Hayles talks about in her writing. I find her writing has a little too much jargon for my taste. Even with Hayles analysis in hand, I found this text ergodic. The layers of characters and the length asides - what did Thumper have to do with this story? - drew me in and at the same time required my complete attention so I wouldn’t miss too many clues or signs or symbols.

This was a dense book, I need to add it to my re-read list.

House of Leaves: Unholy discourse

I have never read a novel with so many levels of discourse, nor such explicit narration. At its heart, we have the story of Navidson and his family, though our experience of those events is shaped by Navidson's film editing. Furthermore, we don't actually see this film, but are fed only excerpts from critical literature, which describe the scenes only as evidence for a certain reading of the text. All of this is assembled by Zampano--so much commentary on a film compiled by a blind man! But it has been organized from fragments by Truant, who also reveals up front that the entire Navidson video is a fabrication. Truant presents Zampano's work as nearly unchanged (except perhaps for the addition of the word "water" before "heater"). Yet, from his footnotes we see that Truant is practically a compulsive storyteller (aka, bullshit artist; ie, unreliable narrator). As frosting on the cake, we have the nagging question of how much change was affected by the anonymous "Editors".

Hayles does a nice job pointing out how each of these levels of narration have also affected a change in medium, from film, to scholarly article, to a box of notes, to a novel.

Also, we are constantly aware of the narration. (This book reminds me of The French Lieutenant's Woman, which is my only other major experience with this sort of thing.) Footnotes inherently break our reading of the text for the purpose of commenting on that text. (Though in House of Leaves, it's so easy to slide from the text into a footnote!) Each level of added narration comments on how the previous narrators were unreliable or biased, adding levels of their own experience to the mix. And the text wanders away from the story for pages at a time to make an abstract argument for a certain reading--such as the discussion of the mythological and symbolic nature of echo.

Certainly a very dense and somewhat unsettling read!

Creative Projects

I'm hoping you've all been thinking about what you'd like to accomplish with your creative projects for this class. We'll go around and hear from each of you in class tomorrow. I'd like to emphasize the importance of archiving your materials as you generate them, even early drafts/attempts/test-runs you don't especially like. You will be asked to account for your process at the end of the semester, and having a collections of previous versions and "cutting-room floor" sweepings will help you describe your trajectory and assess your final project in relation to your initial goals.

I'll refer you to Acid-Free Bits, an excellent resource for digital artists and writers that focuses especially on the problem of preservation. It's co-authored by Noah Wardrip Fruin, who is the editor of First Person, and Nick Monfort, a writer of interactive fiction and author of Twisty Little Passages, a critical book about IF.

I'll also invite you to take a look at one of my creative projects. Ask Me for the Moon is a combination of a poetry chapbook and a critical essay on Waikiki. It appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of The Iowa Review Web, but I'm giving you the direct link to my site to save you having to hunt through the IRW archive.

text wrap with external style sheets

Aloha!

I learned how to wrap text around images but still be able to use an external style sheet.

You can use an inline style. If you look at my home page, you can see the coding. Resize your browser and you'll see it works.

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~mesulliv/

Of course, if you have a lot of images, an internal css might be the way to go.

Also, if anyone wants to create a personalized/custom background for their page, I have photoshop. Let me know if you want to play!

Aloha,
michael

CSS Contextual Selectors and Colors

At the end of class yesterday a few of us were talking about ways to specify different styles for different parts of a web page. I put together a very simple (and very ugly) example page on "contextual selectors" in CSS. Compare the source code (which you can find by following any of the hyperlinks on the page) with the HTML source to see how various "class" assignments and nesting techniques can give you more flexibility with your styles. There are a few different approaches to this issue, each with its own problems depending upon the structure of the particular page. Experiment and find what works for you.

I've also added the contextual selector example to the Web Resources page for our class, along with a link to the Visibone Web Safe Color Table, a handy way to look up the hexidecimal (six-character) code for colors.

Examples of what not to do

][ad][dressed in a Skin C.ode repeatedly hung-up on my computer all weekend. As this it the first piece that I have had problems with, I'm guessing it has something to do with the way it was constructed or written. That being said, the little that I was able to see before Explorer stopped responding had too much code looking stuff for my taste. I disliked dealing with code in 1980 when I had a vic-20 and that hasn’t changed in 26 years. Like other forms of art, it’s not my bag so I’m tempted to skip trying to make some sense of this work on another machine.

I thought V: Vniverse was the most interesting of these three pieces. The star chart reminded me of Myst. At first I randomly selected a star but then I started entering the numbers and reading it in order. I noticed that some of the pages/paragraphs/sections could be read with the title and/or number included which gave an added dimension to the text. Other times, one or the other or both needed to be skipped because they made the sentence nonsensical. I didn’t recognize the stars (not that I have much knowledge about astronomy!) or the “constellations” that appeared when a star was selected. Nor was I able to notice any type of image that had anything to do with the written part. If I haven’t explored/read some of the essays that are linked to this piece, I’m not sure I would have grasped the link between the nomads reading the stars and my reading text by selecting a star. This one needs to be added to my places to explore page!

Errand was a rather annoying piece to me. The soundtrack was short and repetitious. The background images made the text hard to read. Thankfully, it was very short! Or maybe I intentionally overlooked some links that would have made it longer. The links I did follow looped back into each other quickly so getting lost wasn’t an issue. The text - both as objects and as words with meaning - and the images appeared to be working together - possibly there is a pseudo-subliminal eco-message in the piece. But the basic design flaws (intentional?) I noticed negated any interest I had in going through it more than twice - once in order and once using the links. Maybe it would be less annoying with the sound turned off.

Mez generates "code"

public class Mez extends CodePoet {

  protected Text generate(Text orig) {

    orig.insertInitial(this.getNextEmailHeader());

    while (orig.isCoherent()) {
      orig.insertRandom("][");
      orig.insertRandom(Dictionary.COMPSCI);
      orig.insertRandom(Dictionary.BIOLOGY);
      orig = this.obfuscate(orig);
    }

   return orig;
  }
}