Selected Letters from Readers
| September 21, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 08, Number 2, January 1998 |
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The following responses were submitted by PMC readers using regular e-mail or the PMC Reader’s Report form. Not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited.
Reader’s Report on Michael Joyce’s “Twelve Blue” (PMC 7.3):
“Twelve Blue” reminded me of this excerpt from from Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories:
...the Water Genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Streams of Story, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have a magic effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each of a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and the [Water Genie] explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each colored strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become other stories...
These comments are from: Caroline Honig
Michael Joyce replies:
Dear Caroline Honig,
PMC has passed along your reader’s report and I am grateful for your reminder of Rushdie’s strands and streams which, while not explicitly on my mind when I literally drew out the strands for “Twelve Blue,” cannot have been out of mind either.
In his essay “In the Ocean of Streams of Story” (Millenium Film Journal No. 28 [Spring]: Interactivities, 15-30: http://www.sva.edu/MFJ/GWOCEAN.HTML), the interactive cinema artist Grahame Weinbren asks:
Can we imagine the Ocean as a source primarily for readers rather than writers? Could there be a "story space"... like the Ocean, in which a reader might take a dip, encountering stories and story-segments as he or she flipped and dived? In these waters, turbulences created by the swimmer's own motion might cause an intermingling of the Streams of Story where the very attempt to examine a particular story-stream transforms it. What a goal to create such an Ocean! And how suitable an ideal for an interactive fiction!
The hypertext novelist Carolyn Guyer, whose Mother Millennia project (http://mothermillennia.org) imagines its own sea of “2000 stories of mother by the year 2000” came to hypertext after imagining artist’s books where the connections among characters, themes, images, etc., would literally be threaded through the leaves of the book into cat’s-cradle-like webs of shifting forms.
My own favorite memory of story strands is from a session at an educational conference where I asked people in the audience of the final luncheon to create a human hypertext (what else is there?). As they took part in the discussion I asked successive speakers to toss balls of colored yarn across the room to others in the audience with whose ideas they felt a connection. It did not take long before the audience was strewn with trails of brightly colored yarn marking the weave of shared ideas.
Your note struck me as one such strand. Thank you.
Richard Crew and Arkady Plotnitsky, Exchange on Plotnitsky’s essay, “‘But It Is Above All Not True'” Derrida, Relativity and the ‘Science Wars,'” Postmodern Culture 7.2