Response to Sample R

I strongly disagree with Sample R's response.  In this response the writer states that images do not need to occur subsequently, but writing does.  I feel as though both modes of communication must be specifically sequenced.  Images cannot be randomly placed in any order simply because then they will not successfully argue their point.  In fact, one must place images in a specific order or they will never prove their point.  Sample R states that "One doesn't have to look at image A to understand image B and so on and so forth."  I feel that this is not true and realistic.  Images must be placed in a specific order to made them understandable.  In many of the visual arguments shown in class, one picture was the "turning point" of the visual production.  This one image swayed the audience to believe and accept the creator's argument.  If that one image was placed randomly in the montage the argument would have not made sense.  Both visual arguments and written arguments need flawless organization to prove their point correctly.  The "big picture" or "big idea" of an argument is not nearly as strong as the specific yes or no argument.

"Writing Space" by Jay David Bolter Chapter One Response

This chapter, the Introduction, discusses the evolution from the printed words, like books, to electronic texts, like computers.  This chapter compares books versus electronic devices.  It discusses which "writing space" is better for the reader.  While I was reading this chapter all I could think about was how dated the text was!  It brought up the possibility of inventing a reader that would be like a small computer combined with a physical book.  This "device" is a Kindle!  Also, it talks about the probability of having a device on lecterns that one could write on lightly with a pen instead of typing.  This also exists!  Reading that these devices could be possibilities for the future was so funny and interesting.  The argument between whether printed or electronic text is better is very hard for me to not take a biased side on.  Since, I have grown up in a world that is so electronic I usually always side for the more technologically advanced side in these type of arguments.  I do respect and appreciate the printed word, but computer and Kindles can do more things that books will never be able to do.  Also, the world is moving in this direction so way not move with it?

Taylor Mali's Poem "Like You Know"

I first watched Mali perform his poem, then I saw the text version.  As I was watching the text, I found my mind drifting to Mali performing it.  Because I did this I know that I appreciate and relate to Mali's performance better than the text.  The text was helpful, but not enough for me.  Hearing a poem read ALWAYS helps me!  As a dancer, I need the gestures, the costume of the Scrabble t-shirt, the quirky voice and pregnant pauses.  Who else knows how to read a poem, then the poet him or herself?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCNIBV87wV4

http://www.taylormali.com/index.cfm?webid=9

"Stitch Bitch: the patchwork girl" by Shelley Jackson

I just want to start this by saying I was confused in every way with this reading.  I honestly couldn't exactly figure out what she was trying to say or prove because her writing was so backwards and unclear at times.  On that note, here's my attempt...

GAPS, LEAPS

You won't get where you think you're going.

A conventional novel is a safe ride. It is designed to catch you up, propell you down its track, and pop you out at the other end with possibly a few new catchphrases in your pocket and a pleasant though vague sense of the scenery rushing by. The mechanism of the chute is so effective, in fact, that it undoes the most worthy experiments; sentences that ought to stop you in your tracks are like spider webs across the chute. You rip through, they're gone.

Hypertext likes give and take, snares and grottos, nets and knots. It lacks thrust. It will always lack thrust; thrust is what linear narrative is good at. As far as I'm concerned, we can trust thrust to it. It means we'll need other reasons to keep readers reading--assuming that's what we want--than a compulsion to find out what happens next. There's no question that hypertext will lose or never acquire those readers for whom a fated slalom toward the finish line is the defining literary experience; hypertext's not built for that. Probably it is because linear text's so well-built for it that it has become the dominant narrative style in the novel. But there are other reasons to read. I can be caught in that slalom myself, but I emerge feeling damp, winded and slightly disgusted. It is a not entirely pleasant compulsion disguised as entertainment, like being forced to dance by a magic fiddle. It becomes harder and harder to imagine going anywhere but just where you're going, and words increasingly mean just what they say. (Common sense reality does the same thing: there is little opportunity for poetic ambiguity in the dealings of everyday life.) Plot chaperones understanding, cuts off errant interpretations. Reading a well-plotted novel I start by knowing less than I know about my own life, and being open to far more interpretations, which makes me feel inquisitive and alive. I finish by knowing more than I want to know, stuck on one meaning like a bug on a pin.

In a text like this, gaps are problematic. The mind becomes self-conscious, falters, forgets its way, might choose another way, might opt out of this text into another, might "lose the thread of the argument," might be unconvinced. Transitional phrases smooth over gaps, even huge logical gaps, suppress contradiction, whisk you past options. I noticed in school that I could argue anything. I might find myself delivering conclusions I disagreed with because I had built such an irresistable machine for persuasion. The trick was to allow the reader only one way to read it, and to make the going smooth. To seal the machine, keep out grit. Such a machine can only do two things: convince or break down. Thought is made of leaps, but rhetoric conducts you across the gaps by a cute cobbled path, full of grey phrases like "therefore," "extrapolating from," "as we have seen," giving you something to look at so you don't look at the nothing on the side of the path. Hypertext leaves you naked with yourself in every leap, it shows you the gamble thought is, and it invites criticism, refusal even. Books are designed to keep you reading the next thing until the end, but hypertext invites choice. Writing hypertext, you've got to accept the possibility your reader will just stop reading. Why not? The choice to go do something else might be the best outcome of a text. Who wants a numb reader/reader-by-numbers anyway? Go write your own text. Go paint a mural. You must change your life. I want piratical readers, plagiarists and opportunists, who take what they want from my ideas and knot it into their own arguments. Or even their own novels. From which, possibly, I'll steal it back.

Jackson is discussing how a novel is completely different from a hyperlink.  A hypertext is spontaneous and unpredictable.  Jackson describes a novel as being perfectly formulated the same every time.  The first paragraph of this section describes this.  I love how Jackson explains a novel.  Especially when she says "It is designed to catch you up, propell you down its track, and pop you out at the other end with possibly a few new catchphrases in your pocket and a pleasant though vague sense of the scenery rushing by."  This phrase reminds me of reading a novel by someone like Nicholas Sparks.  His books are all very similar, but so familiar in how they are formulated that it is a comfort for the devoted reader of his novels.  On the opposite end of the spectrum is hypertext.  It is not safe and predictable like novels, but different.  This different, as Jackson explains, is sometimes good although not what is most common in literature because novels are.

CONSTRAINTS & THE BOOK

It's not all you think it is.

I have no desire to demolish linear thought, but to make it one option among many. Likewise, I'd like to point out that the book is not the Natural Form it has become disguised as by its publicists. It is an odd machine for installing text in the reader's mind and it too was once an object of wonder. Turning the page, for example, has become an invisible action, because it has no meaning in most texts, the little pause it provides is as unreflective as breathing, but if we expected something different, or sought to interpret the gap, we might find ourselves as perplexed by that miniature black-out as by any intrusive authorial device we get exercised about in experimental literature or hypertext. Similarly, the linear form of the novel is not a natural evolutionary end, but a formal device, an oulipian constraint, albeit one with lots of elbow-room. Like all constraints, it generates its own kinds of beauty, from graceful accession to linearity to the most prickly resistance. My favorite texts loiter, dawdle, tease, pass notes, they resist the linear, they pervert it. It's the strain between the literal and the implied form that's so seductive, a swoon in strait laces that's possibly sexier than a free-for-all sprawl. Constraints do engender beauty, Oulipo and evolution prove that, but maybe we've shown well enough how gracefully we can heel-toe in a straight line. We can invent new constraints, multiple ones. I think we will: just because I advocate dispersal doesn't mean I'm as impressed by a pile of sawdust as I am by a tree, a ship, a book. But let us have books that squirm and change under our gaze, or tilt like a fun-house floor and spill us into other books, whose tangents and asides follow strict rules of transformation, like a crystal forming in a solution, or which consist entirely of links, like spider-webs with no corpses hanging in them. Language is the Great Unruly, and alphabetical order is a contradiction in terms.

Jackson is defending linear thought in this section which is odd because in the previous section I have quoted here she seems to claim that she enjoys hypertext more than linear thought.  Jackson's argument in this section, as well as in the previous one, about linear thought is that it is simply so "classic" that it is still helpful.  She describes how the thoughtless act of flipping a page while reading a book is so natural that if we stopped to think about it, we might become baffled why it is so natural.  As much as Jackson likes and supports hypertext, she still realizes how important linear thought is and always will be.  

So, I hope I did this right!  I tried to take apart each section, piece by piece, and interpret it!

Wordle.net (I Used My Blog URL)

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3272843/My_Blog

Four Letter Word Project: Fire

http://www.onetruemedia.com/otm_site/auth_preview?work_id=14189828&autoplay

Here is the link to my Four Letter Word Project.  I hope it works and you can view it.


I used onetruemedia.com to make this montage.  It was fairly easy to use once I explored it a little bit.  I also used Garageband on my Mac to overlap and cut the music.  I've never used Garage Band before and I found it kind of complicated.  I love music, but I've never been into creating or editing it, so it was hard to do.  All in all creating this project was pretty easy and very fun to do.  I hope you can view the link!

Shift of Idea- "The Problem of Describing Trees" by Rober Hass

In Hass's poem, "The Problem of Describing Trees" his original idea shifts at this point in the poem: "And the trees danced.  No.  The tree capitalized.  No.  There are limits to saying, In language, what the tree did."  The rest of the poem also discusses this change in proposition, but this portion of the poem is the best example of this.  The beginning of the poem discusses the leaves fluttering on the tree and the aspen, itself, glittering in the wind, etc. etc.  This part of the poem is ridiculously "poemy."  It is so descriptive and beautiful, just like most poems are.  After all, poets are usually writers who are creative and hate academic writing, like essays.  Hass even addresses this by saying in his poem, "It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.  Dance with me, dancer.  Oh, I will."  He is saying that poetry usually has an enchanting factor.  Also, this "dancer" Hass is referring to is the reader.  Hass is suggesting that poets often ask the reader to become enchanted by his or her poem.  Hass's switch in his poem is obvious because he says, "No."  At first he begins to describe the tree, and then he stops himself.  He says (in some many words) "Hello I can't describe this tree because there is no language for that I could use to describe it!"