Samizdat

In Russia and other eastern bloc countries, subversive writers used to circulate their publications quietly in self-published and subsequently self-copied editions among sympathetic readers. The term Samizdat (literally self-published) came to refer to any such contraband.

There's not really any formal censoring pressure (for anything but extremely distasteful content) in the U.S. today, but Matt wondered whether the form of Samizdat in some ways might be resonant with the blog form. Both spread according to social networks, both are probably unusually aware of their audience, both may lack some of the polish of more economically-motivated literary productions, but make up for it in immediacy.

Performance Studies

Met today with John and Gideon about my prospectus: both had a lot of helpful feedback.

Gideon was a little shocked at the sheer amount of different forms and ideas I'm playing with in the project and raised questions about how to keep it manageable. The end product of our discussion was a resolution to limit the critical introduction: instead of trying to explain everything I'm doing in the blogs, I'll focus specifically on performance theory and how the blogs are performative. Within that concept, there's room to discuss what it means to be in character in each blog, how the separate of the blogs is somewhat analogous to seeking out separate performance space, how revision has more to do with response to audience (and to an evolving sense of self) than with classical-model rewriting.

From now on, I'll try to frame my thoughts here in terms of performance theory, though I may take an occasional detour into whatever else I find interesting at the moment.

Article on Religion and Hyperlinks

Interesting thoughts in this article from '96 on the early days of the Internet and religion.

The author complains at one point about how hyperlinks interrupt ordinary texts and annoy hom, but may be appropriate to religious texts which ask for detailed study and not simply reading. Words in sacred texts, he observe, already have multiple layers of meaning and bring different things together "a text is considered sacred partly because it succeeds in creating connections, unifying experience."

While I agree with the creating connections aspect, I don't think hyperlinks can do anything like what sacred text can do yet. A hyperlink can only go one place. A single sacred word may go thousands of places.

I-Story

I remember reading in Monatoya's book The Strangeness of Beauty about an early twentieth-century Japanese form called the I-story, basically a wandering sort of diary/autobiography people would work on for years. I don't know much about it, but could it be a historical example of something resonant with today's blogs?

Prospectus Ideas

I'd like to get my three blogs approved as a thesis, and need a good prospectus to do so. Some thoughts on how to justify it:

1) Remind readers that new media needs our attention. What the department gets out of this is being able to say they really are trying to be current, plus a potentially valuable critical introduction to prove it.

2) Talk about specific possibilities of the genre (what are the implications of hypertext, for example? what does the segmentation into small pieces mean?). How will I be playing with and stretching the genre as I write?

3) Address concerns about revision by talking about it as a longitudinal process.

4) Discuss the cultural resonance of the form of the project I'm doing (theory on multiplicity of selves, post-modern structural experimentation, etc.)

Time Travel

Testing...testing...1, 2, 3....