LINKS

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Interviewer: And so the experience is whatever you make it, in the way that your sense of control is greater as a page turner in a book, than it is in a movie theater.

Mark Bernstein: And in a novel, the expectation clearly is that you are going to read it all. The choice would be to skip something, read something twice.

In a hypertext, like "Victory Garden," you have chased some episodes or steered away from characters that don't interest you or that you just don't like. And so in a real sense you have worked to get here. And perhaps this scene is something that is just too tender, too awkward for you to want to see.

Now you can do this in film by various framing conventions, for example, you can establish that in fact you are seeing it through a window and the point of view character doesn't want to see it but has to look or looks and then runs away. And that, that's been done successfully a few times. But that is very difficult to pull off in film. It is impossible in print.

So the participation matters.

Interviewer: Yes. Suddenly I am reminded of prose poetry. Carolyn Forché is a poet I think of, who writes in a way that I know I have read her books like that. That I'll start the first couple of lines of a given poem because she almost writes in a prosey kind of way. And I say, no, I don't want to do that one. And then I skip ahead. But there is a kind of total meaning to many of her books. And I cannot, you now, I wouldn't say I've read her book in the way I'd read a novel, but she didn't offer it to me as a novel.

Now, I think that is more fragmentary than probably most of your hypertext authors imagine themselves. Meaning, I think they imagine probably a little bit more sense of multiple through lines, of multiple beginnings, middles and ends. But there is no argument but that you can gain pleasure from that sense of hopping from place to place, if in any given section there is insight. There are ways that the language expands your understanding of character or of place or of meaning. And that that would be satisfactory enough.

Mark Bernstein: In fact, one of the poets we publish, Robert Kendall, is a Forche disciple.

Interviewer: Oh, really.

Mark Bernstein: And follower and in some ways. I think writes in a similar vein. He is also quite interested in the sort of kinetic word play. Moving words on the screen. And changing words on the screen. Some French writers -- Jean-Pierre Balpe, Phillipe Bootz --
have done extremely interesting things with this approach. Unfortunately,
much of this work is written in languages other than English and so is,
perhaps, not as widely known as it would be if it were translated. But Kendall has a very interesting collection of poetry called "A Life Set for Two." A set of poems threaded together as notional menu entrees at the Cafe Passé. What he ate and what she ate. And they are eating their hearts out. And so you have this very strange imagery of a combination of eating as torment among people and eating as sustenance between people and food and relations and love and bodies. And that gets mixed up in a really interesting way.

Got one more anecdote for you.

The two we have talked about have been plotish. And I will be the first to confess that what we have published thus far has tended to be least interesting in terms of perfluent fiction. And similarly many of the people who we publish are interested in narrative effect or structure, rather than in character.

And just as different writers prefer to emphasize different things, these are perfectly reasonable choices. The fact that there is more than one sort of fiction than the another is partly just an accident of the times and the tastes of the very small number of people who edit and publish hypertext thus far.

But one of the quite experimental pieces was Mary Kim Arnold's "Lust." It has been formally important because it was the first very short hypertext to convince people that short hypertext fiction made any sense at all. In the early days, people would say, hypertext business cards and short stories wouldn't make much sense because what you do with the links. It is so short, you just put it down on a piece of paper and you are done.

One of the first times I read "Lust" was over the shoulder of Ted Nelson. At Hypertext 91, I believe. It might have been '93. And at this conference a number of very young writers had gotten together and volunteered to be student volunteers and camped out in our hotel rooms. And none of them actually had official demo space, but they were doing so much work for the conference, that people said, well, why don't we put together a booth and they can just share the booth and show people their hypertexts.

And so it is very late and, you know, people have stayed an hour or two past when the thing is supposed to close. And Nelson is reading "Lust" and on each page of "Lust" each screen has a few short sentences, most of them mention the man, the woman, the child and the knife. Sometimes one or more missing. Sometimes other people may appear or other things may appear. But, in general you can count on getting a cross section of the man, the woman, the child and the knife.

They are never identified. They don't have names. But each page, while short, is interesting and evocative and leads you to like try to find what is going to happen next. And so it draws you in in a very interesting and strange way. Trying to make you engage in what is happening and how this, this montage of the man, the woman, the child and the knife, can possibly end. And you feel that it is not, nor can it come to good, but after all how is it going to, what is going to happen? There is also the tendency to want to look for the good bits. And we are going and we are going and we are going and eventually Nelson asks in some vexation, "how do I get to the part where it happens?" Well, it doesn't. There is no part where it happens. And the name of the piece is "Lust."