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Exploring Interactive Poetry: High Muck a Muck

I enjoyed exploring through the interactive poem, High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese. Compared to last week’s reading, it wasn’t quite as challenging, but it was still overwhelming. There was so much to click on and explore, and I kept wanting to make sure I didn’t miss anything. I also noticed that the words sometimes disappeared quickly. This made it tricky to keep up. In a way, it pushed me to slow down and I had to really focus on each moment.

That initial sense of disorientation ended up being one of the most powerful parts of the experience. The more I explored, the more I realized that maybe the site was designed this way on purpose. Immigration stories aren’t neat/linear narratives. They’re fragmented and layered. The overwhelming number of choices reflected that reality. Each click felt like a gamble, echoing the risks and uncertainties that shape immigrant lives.

As I clicked around, one of the pieces that stood out to me was the Vancouver section. It focused on the voices of Chinese immigrants. It captured both the energy and the exhaustion of daily life, the constant motion of a community striving to survive and belong. What struck me most was how it balanced hardship with resilience, showing that even in challenging circumstances, moments of connection and care still flourished. It reminded me that history isn’t only made in major events. It’s alive in the ordinary rhythms of life. It exists in the small gestures. It is in the shared routines. It’s also in the ways people carve out a sense of home midst uncertainty.

What makes High Muck a Muck so powerful is how it layers different multimodals elements. Some clicks reveal poetry, others play oral histories or video clips. With the sound on, the voices add another dimension. I found myself listening closely, noticing accents, pauses, hesitations, and laughter. Those voices felt like bridges, connecting me not just to information but to lived experiences.

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Interactive Poetry is Dope!

Hey Everyone!

Let’s talk about “High Muck a Muck” the interactive poem.

  • My first thought is that the navigation is overwhelming. There are so many things to click on and literal places to explore. Could this be a way of showing how overwhelming being an immigrant is? If I think about my experiences in America, I have lived in America my whole life so most American customs are familiar to me and I understand what types of people live in different states. If I were an immigrant, I would not know this. Everything would seem so new and different and I would not know where to go. So it seems that by giving the reader so many navigation choices, the poem is using navigation as a way to make the reader feel certain emotions that may have been felt by the Chinese immigrants in Canada.
  • This interactive poem has a beautiful style. The font of the poems looks like handwriting and the visuals of geography and places is in a hand drawn watercolor style. This accents the poems as it allows the reader to have a visualization to go along with the beautiful poetic language. I think this is important as we can see a crossover audience of people who like art as well as people who like poems. This could also be a thematic choice as if the author is saying how can the experiences of a group of people be confined to just words or just pictures? It’s only when the two are combined, along with audio that the full experience of a group of people can be truly understood.
  • When navigating between places, the screen fades in and then fades out. Everything disappears for a minute only to reappear again. Maybe this is a design by the creator so that it conserves resources on the backend. Even if so, it still fits the theme of this interactive poem. Everytime someone moves through spaces that take them further away from their homeland, how much of them disappears and how much reappears?
  • I love how navigation is left to the reader. It’s like being in a museum. It’s so interesting that you can tell most of what is clickable, but I had to hover over everything to be sure. I feel like this is how museums of the future will be with VR. You’ll wear a headset and look at the artwork and parts will be highlighted that tell you more about the piece.
  • This is the kind of piece where I would love a behind the scenes. This seems like it would take so much work and planning and imagination. I don’t know anything about coding, but I could imagine that for this piece specifically, the coding would be very extensive as there are many elements that need to work together to keep this piece functioning and able to run on most if not all browsers and machines.
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High Muck a Muck Reflection

For me each experience inside High Muck a Muck reached all my senses, engulfing me with each icon, symbol that I clicked that would trigger a voice, music, movement sometimes fading in and out or present until I decided to move on.  I was engaged throughout the entire time in front of my laptop, one hand on my mouse the other on the keyboard; my instruments of how I interacted waiting and expecting to either hear the music, someone’s voice, or an object moving across my screen. At times these all happened together or in separate that presented a different experience. emotion to the piece. “A lot of small pieces broken from a long stick promises “was one of many lines of poetry that stood out to me and sparked a curiosity in me of similarity. “That anger of not having language itself-never mind the words – was another powerful line to read.

It was smart to offer the option of a video tutorial to learn how to interact by clicking on the icons that represent a particular experience, place, person and the Pak Ah Pu lottery card. The map laid out across the body reminds me of a Chinese medicine map of energy meridians in the body, similar to an experience I had when I got a shiatsu massage. The wall had various posters of our energy levels, circuitry running though our meridians and what affected or interrupted them from having a open flow of freedom. The locations spread across the silhouette lines forming the anatomy of the body or certain extensions made me feel that each experience would be something permanent, personal that happened and all that remains is the story just like a tattoo that the graphics, print reminded me of a represented location or name of a person. This even more so with the arm and the Canadian Pacific Railway interest since I worked on the railroad in the past and could relate. I enjoyed the pleasant sounds from traditional Chinese instruments being played, the tinkling then a commentary interview comes on speaking that I didn’t expect. The pop-up/poem or explanation of text that faded in and out kept me engaged as well waiting to the next poetry or information to show related to the particular icon I clicked on and presented as an addition to the experience a narrated story that made me want to know more about what I was learning about.

The Pacific Rim was filled with electronic noises, tinks, and nautical sounds of the ocean and movement of a petrol cargo ship moving across the screen with small type print Made in China barely visible in the background representing the waves, current and ocean. This for some reason reminded me of the experiences when sitting and watching which I don’t do much the instrumental theme music of a Netflix original movie during introduction to gain your attention while they show brief clips while it is being played.  Words associated with trade such as cheap labor, global while music celebrating an event or I assume strong economy was ironic. The pains of their labors, the ones who don’t have a choice or voice due to economic struggles, insufficient dispersing of wealth, oppression, are for me realties not discussed in public or heard outside of their own surroundings. At least some of the narrative in various parts of this project provides that voice allowing me to realize its effects on the culture of the people there in China throughout history.

The idea behind the Pak Ah Pu lottery card is brilliant. While interacting with the Chinese lettering characters I enjoyed waiting to see where it brought me to. Being exposed to Hanzi lettering I research it some on my own as it seems to be part of a Logographic system where its difference compared to traditional alphabet letters I am used to using. Each character of Hanzi which is referred to as a logogram contains its own particular sound, shape, and meaning to it. This provided a better understanding of the importance and significance of the Chinese characters being used on the Pak Ah Pu lottery card in relation to the experience and what was being told, shown to you once I clicked on the stained dotted circle on the card. There is so much to take in and experience each time I go back to the screen and click on another symbol. I found that even though I visited a few over and over again I didn’t mind as the experience felt fresh and new each time.

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High Muck a Muck

Going into High Muck a Muck, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing. Though, once I started navigating the website, I sort of understood just from a few clicks in. My first click, along the pathway of the posterior view of the human body, was at topmost blue dot, or the neck. This brought me to a video of an older man which slowly zoomed in until his eye takes up most of the screen. Then, his eye transforms into a baby’s eye, which then zooms out. What I understand from this is that when you are older, the world seems to have come at you already, and you have a chance to reflect on what you have done while you await the end. When the video transforms to the baby’s eye and zooms out, I understood this to be the world is awaiting this new person, and there is so much at their feet already for them to explore. From here, I recognized transformation as a theme as I continued to navigate the website.

Staying with the topic of videos, I found the video containing the strips of “Made in ____” to be very intriguing and also emotional. Strips of tags with “Made in China”, “Made in Japan”, “Made in Indonesia”, and several others make their way across the screen in many ways. First, only a few strips trek from the left side to the right side. Then, these strips make shapes such as stars and circles, leading up to the wave of strips encompassing the whole page. At this point, two ships make their way against the grain of the strips, with one ship floating on top of the strips, and one making its way through the middle. Then, the strips fade into the background. The video ends with an image of people seemingly in an airport, with the window view being the earth. I thought this was a very intentional way of describing immigration, specifically from Asian countries. We constantly see these labels on products we use everyday, yet we never consider the process the product goes through to eventually find its way into our hands. The same idea applies to immigrants: they are constantly moving through a process and its ramifications that a native citizen does not grapple with. There are obstacles that overpower immigrants, and push them back, as the boats may represent. Even when the immigrant arrives in the new place, they still may feel they are othered, and from an otherwise otherworldly place that has soon become unfathomable, as possibly represented by the aerial view of Earth.

Another aspect of the literature I really enjoyed was “Canada”. Moving from the Pacific Rim section into this one, it allows the reader to consider the themes of Pacific Rim, leaving a place of comfortability, in a more urgent manner, as Canada brings in the idea of family. At the far-most right point, the text appears, “Like a family / Are these trees / Abundant, / dense.” By bringing family into the equation, the interactor (I didn’t want to say reader because I didn’t feel like a reader in this moment) can understand the movement across the screen, of the close proximity of the strips, to be members of a family: parts of a whole meant to stay planted together like a hoard of trees.

“Richmond” really brought these aspects together for me. Between the mentioning of immigrating to another country for the sake of family and future generations truly hits home for me as a First Generation American. The imagery of the people, whether it be a man with his children, two people holding tools, or even a plane in the sky, it shows the massively different purposes of people who choose to leave their home country for a perceived better life. As remarked in “Victoria” by the man in the lower left corner smoking, many immigrants must “fake it”, as we commonly know to “fake it till you make it”, to be somewhat successful in a land in which they know nothing of, and continuously have to learn about for the rest of their time there.

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Moving Through Time

When I first opened Michael Joyce’s Twelve Blue, the words “Follow me” pulled me in. I remember pausing over that phrase, realizing that I wasn’t just being invited to read, but to move, to let myself be carried somewhere unknown.  Those opening words became a promise that I would be taken on a journey, one that might unfold beyond my understanding, and that my navigation, the simple act of clicking, was already shaping the story I would receive.

Reading Twelve Blue felt like drifting in and out of moments, sometimes clear and vivid, sometimes strange and elusive. One thread brought me into September, with a girl in new blue Mary Janes repeating the rhyme, “September’s embers never ending.” The scenery shifted from winter to fall, and I felt as though I were traveling through both time and space. When the link asked, “As if the seasons were whose fault?” I laughed a little inside because, in that moment, it felt like I was the one responsible for where the story carried me. I was no longer just a reader, I was also complicit in the movement of its seasons.

Another passage led me to Samantha, who dreamed of hosting a tea party, her imagination blurring between memory and delirium. She saw the tin cups with blue flowers, the kind passed down from her mother. This part lingered with me. In my own culture, tea is the answer to everything, headaches, stomach aches, even heartbreak. Reading Samantha’s memory, I was struck by how the hypertext asked me to carry my own memories and associations into it. I wasn’t just following links; I was weaving my world into Joyce’s fragments, letting my own history seep into the story.

And then I arrived at a finale that felt more like a chorus than a conclusion: every surface, every silence, every river, every lover, every daughter, every death. A list that seemed to gather everything, objects, bodies, gestures, whispers, into a single woven tapestry. It was overwhelming and beautiful, a reminder that every detail carries a story, that nothing is too small to be part of the whole.

Reflecting on this experience, I think of Jessica Pressman’s ideas about navigation in electronic literature, how moving through hypertext is not just a way to read but a way to produce meaning. That felt true with Twelve Blue. Each click was a choice that opened one thread and closed off another, reminding me of all the paths I wasn’t taking. Sometimes I felt lost, uncertain if I was missing something important, but that disorientation became part of the story itself. The work isn’t meant to be held all at once, it’s meant to be drifted through, to remind us of the patterns that form when fragments come together.

For me, Twelve Blue was less about “understanding” and more about surrendering to the weave. It taught me that navigation is not just about moving through a story, it’s about noticing the ways our choices, our memories, and even our frustrations shape the experience of reading. And maybe that’s what makes electronic literature so powerful: it doesn’t just tell stories, it reminds us that stories live in every thread we choose to follow.

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Navigating Electronic Lit

Hey Everyone!

So just a few observations on Twelve Blue by Joyce based on the Navigating Electronic Literature article by Pressman:

  1. This piece has hyperlinks which are the mode of navigation. New windows that open up are called “lexias” as per Pressman’s article “Navigating Electronic Literature”
  2. The reader is “writing” the story as they go along.
  3. Is there a correct order to read this text? For example, did the author have a specific narrative order in mind? Is there a wrong way to read a text such as this?
  4. Does the author know all the possible paths that we can take through a carefully calculated behind the scenes method and therefore can control the narrative order in a subtle way? Such as the links we click offer different bits of the story, but we eventually get the same overall picture each time?

Next are my notes I jotted down regarding Twelve Blue as I was reading it:

I wonder if there is a difference in navigating with a mouse like I did or with your finger like you could on mobile? What would the mobile formatting look like compared to on a computer screen? This is one way electronic literature is different from print based materials is that we can use different devices to view them which may impact how we navigate and interact with the work. Think about playing a game on your phone vs playing it on your computer or video game console.

Not an easter egg per se but if you hover over the hyperlinks on the right hand side, the text that has the address of the link has a number at the end. The first link ends with a 2 and all the other links follow in numerical order. So is the “click here to begin” page #1 and all the other pages go in order from top to bottom? The hyper link text is purposely obscured by the writer, but the links reveal hidden info.

Also the 1st hyperlink at the top has an address that ends in “sl1” and once you click it the address of the links on the next page end is “sl…” with some being “sl5” “sl6” and some even being “sl7_4”. This is definitely something as the author used these address to help themselves stay organized and probably didn’t want the reader to see them? Or did them?

I’m gonna navigate the story by trying to go from “click here to begin page” and then follow the link address on the left to go in numerical order. Are the hyperlinks in the text and not on the right side red herrings? Maybe put there to be little sides quests so you don’t analyze the hyperlinks on the left so much?

Nevermind, can’t navigate the way I wanted. When I open up a new window and go to the “Begin” page now I am hovering over the hyperlinks and the address is some variation of “sl_…” like “sl_2” “sl_3” “sl_4” etc. So maybe randomness is at play? Or just the illusion of randomness.

OMG when I started on the begin page “follow me” in the story was hyperlinked. I closed the page and started again and now it’s not hyperlinked. Glitch or intention?

I think this piece might be less about the narrative of the story and more a meta meditation on how the reader navigates the electronic text. I feel like this could be a psychological experiment. And the content of the narrative is bizarre and strange so it seems like there is more than meets the eye here. What if there isn’t even a central narrative and this text is a bunch of stories put together, but because the reader has to navigate with no map, they are reading different parts of different stories?

I feel a certain discomfort reading this and it’s more pronounced knowing that my navigation is what is moving me through the text. I didn’t write the words in the text, but I can choose what happens next even if it is like stumbling blindly in the dark. About 20 mins in and I just want to get to a few pieces that make sense. I am no longer assuming there is a concrete narrative here which allows me to navigate in the style of “enjoy the journey, not the destination.”

I got back to the “Begin” page. I just realized that I began with that page because it told me to. Is this part of how navigation in an electronic text changes the way we engage with a text? I didn’t have to begin with that page just because it said so. Maybe I lost something important by starting with that page. After many clicks, I made it back to that page and I feel a sense of failure like when you are lost and end up back where you started.

If I didn’t start with that page and didn’t know it was the beginning, would I feel that same sense of failure. So in this case, navigation of the text had a direct effect on my sense of self. Very interesting.

There is so much different information regarding characters, actions, and settings that when I click on a hyperlink and it brings me to a picture, I almost feel a sense of relief. I can look at the picture and get a general understanding of what it is so I feel grounded. It’s kinda like stopping at a bench before going on. I click the hyperlinks in order to navigate to safety (the pictures) when I feel overwhelmed.

It seems the pictures can only be in the intext hyperlinks, but not the left hyperlinks. But the intext hyperlinks can also be more text so I never know if I’ll get a picture or not. This causes a sense of apprehension when clicking the intext links and also a sense of relief when I come to a picture.

Since I am the navigator so when I get to a picture it feels like I accomplished something significant. Putting me in the driver seat makes this text less overwhelming. If I wasn’t able to navigate this text on my own, I don’t think it would be fun or interesting to read.

I think in this case, this text could be seen as showing how navigation is a central feature of electronic literature and the act of navigating the text without fully understanding it is okay because each of us had a different experience navigating the text and how and why we navigated the way we did along with how it made us feel which can be an important topic of discussion and dissection that will remind us to always keep the idea of navigation in mind when interacting with electronic texts.

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Blog #2 I don’t get it

Jessica Pressman’s essay, Navigating Electronic Literature was a definitely needed for this attempting to read through Joyce’s Twelve Blue. Before going into Joyce’s confusing story, I want to bring up an interesting aspect of some of Pressman’ s essay. To start, I liked the way she explained the aspects of navigation. In addition to this, she also drew attention to how a readers interaction with navigation can affect the performance of a work. As someone who loves traditional books (physical books are one of my addictions) I find the act of navigation as second nature. The most interaction with a book is reading and turning a page; two things that do not have much impact on the narrative’s “performance”. Though within the context of graphic novels and comics, navigation does play a role. How a reader wades through the myriads of dialogue bubbles, text boxes, art and composition of the specific panels does force the reader to navigate the story to see the intended way to read. I see this as a bit of an unspoken agreement with the reader and writer. The writer paves the road of understanding for the reader to drive on. In electronic literature, there is not much of a guarantee. Instead of paving the way for the reader, and work of E lit gives the reader the tools to find their way through the narrative. This aspect of E lit is something I will have to get used to as the class continues.

Another thing worth bringing up in terms of the Pressman essay was the difference between hypertext and interactive fiction. While I initially though that I did not have much experience with E lit, this essay made me more aware of the types of things that might fit into both categories. In terms of interactive fiction, the work I chose for my presentation, Writers are not Stranger, fits into this genre of E lit. From my early interactions with Writers are not Stranger, I have to say that I really enjoy playing around with it. Being an active part of the story, based on predetermined choices made by the author is really gripping and placed more power in my hands as a reader that I am accustomed to. As the semester goes on, I will play with it much more, but my early thoughts are very positive in terms of the genre of interactive fiction. While I do have thoughts about hyperlink text, I want to share them when talking about Joyce’s story. Overall, Pressman’s article was a nice intro into understanding two genres within e-lit.

Micheal Joyce’s Twelve Blue was interesting to say the least. Before I get into the E lit aspect of the piece, I wanted to give Joyce his flowers a bit. One of my reactions to the work is how good writing can be in this context. Chopping a story up and relying on it into pieces is not new but it is effective. In terms of this story, it was great reading Joyce’s great prose. His writing made me want to continue on in uncovering how to make sense of it all. The repetition of the color blue and its uses throughout the story were a great motif to use.  The overall narrative was compelling despite the fact that I was lost for most of it. I can definitely say that the navigation aspect of the story did not take away how I felt.

 As a reader, I like “boring” stories or stories with normal structure. I find myself gravitating towards classical literature avoiding more contemporary literature because unorthodox stories can be. The idea of a reader having to navigate through a story compared to just turning a page is confusing and a bit dauting to me. Reading Joyce’s story was a struggle for me for the most part. As I said before, a narrative bouncing around is not a new thing, but a story moving rapidly while only giving the reader crumbs was new for me. I feel that the story and its composition were a match made in heaven. It forced me keep tabs on the information that has been presented (characters, setting and the “plot”). It also surprised me many times, as the story would shift in tone, and perspective at the click of your mouse.  One second, we are reading about Samantha and her dream, and the next someone’s father is buying a carnival ride. This narrative wipe lash was just not for me. As we continue through this semester, I hope I see the light in the hypertext genre.

One side note from the story I want to add was a part of the story that I felt got me. One of the parts that I read contained three separate hyperlinks that jumped into three distinct parts of the narrative. While I did struggle to piece the story and its element together, I did really like this little wrinkle. One question for all of you guys was what aspect of this story was better, the overall narrative or the act of uncovering the narrative through the hypertext?

While i may not see the greatness of hyperlinks as a genre, Joyce’s story at least has peaked my interest and has made me a bit more open and exited to see how the genre has changed and improved since the 90s.

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Discovering Electronic Literature

Pressman’s essay Navigating Electronic Literature was such an insightful read, especially in the way it unpacked just how expansive the world of electronic literature can be. What struck me most was her explanation of hypertext, one of the earliest and most influential forms of electronic literature.

Pressman explains:

“In a hypertext the reader navigates a non-linear, branching narrative by clicking on hyperlinks to access new lexias, or chunks of text. For example, clicking on the underlined, hyperlink words ‘the bodies,’ ‘police,’ or ‘window’ in the following screen triggers the appearance of new windows (or lexias) containing different narrative text and yielding new reading paths.”

What fascinates me is how much agency the reader has in navigating the story. The order of reading isn’t fixed; instead, it depends entirely on which links are clicked, which paths are followed, and which connections are made. Every journey through a hypertext feels unique, crafted by both the author’s design and the reader’s choices. Electronic literature like this reminds me that reading isn’t always passive. Sometimes, it’s an act of discovery.

Another idea that stood out in Pressman’s essay is her reference to critic Espen Aarseth, who argues that authors of hypertexts preprogram the paths readers can take, allowing only “trivial” rather than productive engagement. While I can see this point, my experience with Twelve Blue suggests that navigating a hypertext can still be deeply engaging and thought-provoking. Even within the paths the author designed, the act of choosing, pausing, and exploring made me reflect not only on my role as a reader but also on how literature itself can be structured and understood. The experience highlighted how reading can be an active process, one where meaning emerges through both the design of the text and the choices we make as we move through it.

Reading through Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce was fun but also challenging. I found myself clinging to each hypertext before moving on, only to discover that clicking opened yet another page with yet another link, and then another. It felt endless—like having too many tabs open at once or falling down one rabbit hole after another. The experience was equal parts overwhelming and compelling, drawing me into a world that resisted structure and certainty.

Joyce describes Twelve Blue as:

“A drowning, a murder, a friendship, three or four love affairs, a boy and a girl, two girls and their mothers, two mothers and their lovers, a daughter and her father, a father and his lover, seven women, three men, twelve months, twelve threads, eight hours, eight waves, one river, a quilt, a song, twelve interwoven stories, a thousand memories. Twelve Blue explores the way our lives—like the web itself or a year, a day, a memory, or a river—form patterns of interlocking, multiple, and recurrent surfaces.”

That description captures exactly how the reading experience feels: fragmented yet interconnected, chaotic yet carefully designed. It’s not about reaching a neat ending, but about embracing the patterns and overlaps that emerge through exploration. For someone like me, who thrives on structure in reading and writing, Twelve Blue initially felt challenging. It broke away from the predictable order I’m already used to relying on. Yet, as I navigated the nonlinear paths and followed link after link, I began to notice the beauty in learning through exploration. The experience reminded me that there is no single way to approach learning; knowledge and understanding can emerge from multiple paths and perspectives. In this sense, the challenge of the hypertext became part of the lesson, showing me that growth often happens when we step outside familiar patterns or comfort zone as we say.

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Reading Reflection BLOG

Michael Joyce: Twelve Blue & Jessica Pressman: Navigating Electronic Literature

The biggest take for me when reflecting on both electronic literatures introduced from Pressman article and Joyce is that those such as Blue Hyacinth, Façade the readers interaction and navigation contribute to their experience or story development differently for me than Twelver Blue. Even though by clicking on the hyperlink threads it changes my experience of the content that shows. Another similarity is that this type of electronic literature I find the reader, myself will not find an end point in either situation or reading. As long as I interact the story will change and depend on my involvement.

I really enjoy the idea that the hypertext story will be different for every reader, their experience depending on how they navigate the text and read. The openness of possible endless meanings, interactions with each hypertext story reading makes it unique and a form of electronic literature that I know would be beneficial to my short fiction and poetry. Being able to create an experience that will be personal to each individual keeps the story fresh, alive and not just to be discussed from one critic, or viewpoint that the reading has been analyzed according to. I also think experimenting with hypertext as seen in the Pressman reading and with Blue Hyacinth piece navigating is central to each reader’s experience keeping them engaged and interacting instead of just reading a linear line of the story waiting for something to happen in the plot. The reader is making it happen or not depending on their attention span or involvement. Functioning this way appeals to some but there will also be those who will be distracted or maybe even get frustrated with hypertext if they are a more traditional reading type and not familiar with this type of electronic lit digital technology but wanted to try it out.

 In order for a relationship to form from participation between the reader and hypertext content they will have to be open minded and wanting a new stimulating experience where they are the ones creating the story as they actively navigate using the mouse or whatever device is implored to promote action moving along the reader along and not become boring or looping to the same images, words, phrases already experienced. The navigational action that becomes necessary becomes a performance art in my eyes as participation leads to its own creation and will vary depending on the person who are looking for a new experience of digital stimulation through their interaction that the hypertext platform provides.

There are also flaws, anxiety it seems though with how to have such interactive technology where the reader can continue to navigate with no known ending in site. How would a standard be put in place so there was a certain amount of time that can only be spent on the hypertext link, or will there be a limited amount of page numbers to go through a story or even the reader becoming entertained at first and feeling involved but eventually becoming bored like any technology introduced and has exhausted its use or newness. It would be challenging to find a middle road with this type of technology because any kind of restrictions and rules may downplay the experience of the one navigating and creating the same time. This could be the issue present in the Façade character navigation process as the participant uses an avatar representing them and their involvement in the game. This reminds me of Actor Network Theory that I did an article on last semester and the student Brian who also developed an avatar which kept him involved with a certain interactive game. Lastly the virtual space we decide to interact with comes with a responsibility of acknowledging the fantasy we are creating and the world we are hoping to create away from our own. Also, the changes to how we are reading text, interacting with it can become challenging when a new genre of digital technology arises and everyone seems to be talking about it, playing it. It may not be for everyone and their experiences if they do choose to interact will be distinct from their own interaction. I guess that is one of the benefits to this type of experimental digital electronic literature.

Michale Joyce: Twelve Blue

After reading the brief synopsis on the initial page of what Twelve Blue is about I clicked Begin and followed the directions on the main page by spontaneously clicking on the colorful threads on the left of my screen, these resembled to me sound waves in their appearance. Frist thing I did notice was the difficulty of reading the light blue text on the dark blue background. I thought by clicking from top to bottom in a particular order the reading would follow some sort of progression, it just kept changing every time. I would read a few then click again curious and skeptical to see what the next page would have on it for the story. There was a relation and connection to what I discussed in my experience of Pressman’s article and the readers interaction with the story thus creating their own experience as they choose to participate and navigate. I did get annoyed though, but as a creative appreciated the changes as I navigated and clicked on each thread thinking it would build upon the previous line, I guess expectations of form as I tried to put a story together with each line I became uncomfortable and not accustomed to such changes in how we read as story and its structure.  Each one has a different angle to them, or flatness. Since this is my first experience of experimenting with hypertext using HTML frames and image maps to follow along the story I did not know what to expect or if I was doing it right. I did tend to refer back to Pressman reading again of the type of similar role of interaction needed to produce the necessary reaction similar to Blue Hyacinth, and Façade with being part of the story as I choose to interact with the content and add to it with my own navigation. But I let myself go and didn’t put too much thought into the process or pressure to understand what was happening, just enjoyed how each time I clicked on a thread the lines produced different part of the story not in any particular order and changed for me the story itself being aware of characters and the different incidents, plot points happening in each line.

I really had to pay attention to which thread I clicked on and see if it was a linear progression of the story or out of place leading to a whole new experience with the story as I read out of order. This made things interesting in a disoriented way with some of the descriptive text in each line kind of started to blur my experience of what I was reading. It no longer seemed to me a story but like I was there present wanting to know more about why things were the way they are. It seems to take me to different destinations, personal moments with conversations of the characters and what they are going through.

student blogs

I’m Starting to Get That Feeling…

Writing and posting this on Saturday preceding Wednesday’s class. There were some great things about this week and some not so great things. To start, I landed a tutoring job today! I will be morphing students into SAT and ACT-taking machines. The hours replace what I would have been doing at the dance studio, which I think will make me rediscover a bit of my purpose more. I will still be teaching in some degree, just not dance. Rather, how to answer questions asking you for a synonym for a word, but you have no idea what any of the words mean at all. Yay.

On the not so great side, I had to unfortunately get rid of my beautiful little rose bush. This week I noticed some kind of little bug infestation that was eating away at the plant. I’m no expert, as we know, so I showed my father who told me my best bet was to let the plant go. I’m sad about this because it was doing really well and I really liked having it around. But, I will try again with a new plant. I just didn’t think that plant would be gone so soon.

Moving onto my thesis, I completed my write-up for Remarkably Bright Creatures. I am so torn about whether it is postmodern or not because with this book, it really comes down to the technique in which the story is told and the content of the narrative. The technique is postmodern at its core, but the content is a wholesome, sincere story. So, is it postmodern or New Sincerity? I think it’s similar to that of Good Material, which I studied over the summer, and found that it was sincere with postmodern elements. I believe that whatever literary era we are in now, whatever we end up calling it, will unearth itself in this way: some new overarching developments with postmodern elements on the side. So, I don’t think we are done with postmodernism yet, and we may never be, but the state of things is changing.

I know that it may seem very easy to poke holes through the sheet that is New Sincerity, but two books kind of point this way. I know, two books sounds absolutely ridiculous, and they may even be the only two books that do this today and by chance I have picked them to study. But, I have been wondering if the separation we all feel from each other exacerbated by the current political and economic spheres we find ourselves in may actually be causing some kind of regression (if that is the correct word to use here). My thinking is leaning towards that we have been feeling disengaged from each other for so long that we find solace in connecting with characters from books who want their stories told, and this is why this research matters. Maybe, stories are finding their way to the top again after years of being fed artificial graphics.

I will be thinking more about this because I am totally not sure about any of that at all. In the meantime, I will be starting my next book soon. I have picked This Other Eden by Paul Harding to cover the historical fiction subgenre. In the summertime, I decided to stay away from historical fiction because I did not see usefulness in studying a retelling. Though, looking back at my literature review, none of the pieces of scholarship I read mentioned what postmodern historical fiction looks like and how it could change if we are out of postmodernism. Plus, I realized that I did include an article that studied a fantasy book with a post-postmodern lens, or something or other. So, I felt including fantasy within my scope would not be filling a gap. I love historical fiction so I am excited to see where this takes me.