Manitoba Gov't Announces New Program

For those of you who are hard up for fuel, I'd suggest considering Manitoba's new "Children for Charcoal" program. Yes, it means one of your kids will grow up as a lumberjack's apprentice, but think of it this way: not only do you get the fuel you need, your family's fuel needs will also decrease once you've been lightened by a member. (I, for one, have been running my iBrain off our stimulus payment for three months. And Timmy is probably doing much better with a life of hard labor in the north than he was spending all day on the beaches of Arizona.)

I guess in some ways it's just as well that people were slow to take advantage of the "Houses for Huts" bill back in 2034. Yes, they wasted a lot of energy. Yes, we've developed more efficient technologies and could run a city for a year of what they used to lose over the power lines every month on the way to the average oversized house.

But then again, if they'd had the foresight to cut back, I'd be stuck with Timmy.

Can you read this?

And by this, I mean that.

Confused? Me too.

So, I just went over to "My Life and Hard Times" to confront Drona...but he doesn't seem to be there anymore.

I'll do some looking around and see if I can find him or any clues tucked away in corners.

Let me know if you find anything by him today in some secret location.

Thanks!

Tea Party In Exile

We're having a tea party in exile! Lionofzion and dadeckr have already found me. I don't technically have tea, but I've extracted the filling from several pop tarts and am heating it up into a beverage. Mmm-mmm good. A pirate's life for me!

Please come find us. We'll set an extra place for you. And help us plan. I've considered turning to Google for help, although their recent track record undermining authoritarians isn't as strong as we'd all like. I've also considered finding some way to lure him out, but I have no idea what sorts of foods Drona likes. The public protest thing just seems to be making him angry so far, but maybe there's more to explore there. Perhaps I could turn to Mormon Midrashim and Caucajewmexdian for help, but what could they do?

Hmmm.....

2nd Counter-Manifesto: Why the Past?

Drona's "Manifesto on History" is worth some attention. I don't agree in any way with his conclusions, but I do think they are, in some respects, accurate descriptions of how we approach the past.

In 1850, Mormon settlers in Provo, Utah, where I work and used to live, killed a local Ute man they suspected of stealing a shirt, cuts his bowels open, and filled them with rocks so they could sink the corpse in the Provo River. When the Utes found they body, they were upset, and began shooting (or stealing?) Mormons' cattle. Local settlers sent representatives to Salt Lake City and, neglecting to mention the murder which had set off the conflict, secured an armed force and authorization to drive out or exterminate adult males in the local population.

My wife shares an article on this and other events in local history with her English class. I read the article a few weeks ago and just finished a set of poems about the surrounding events.

Why remember the painful past? While I was working on the poems, my five-year-old daughter asked what I was writing about. I told her I was writing about a very sad battle, where a woman got killed by a cannon shot. My daughter got upset and said "Cross it out!" Almost as if she believed that my silence would undo old suffering.

It can't. But my speaking of it, if I do so with an appropriate reverence and with the awareness that all people and societies are capable of making terrible mistakes, can help me have the "broken heart and contrite spirit" Jesus talks about.

We ought to remember painful history, I think, to learn humility. To get a sense of intertwined sacredness and vulnerability of life.

If we can learn to face terrible human tragedy without giving way entirely to denial or anger, I think we are on our way to more moral and intentional lives.

Will Write for Food

My situation in hiding has become truly desperate. I ran out of lemonade recently, and have had to resort to searching the floor for bugs in hope of a decent (broadly defined) meal. I miss Nicole's cooking. When I eat small creatures, I find myself thinking of cumin and garlic and all sorts of spices that make up the aroma of home. After that, dust mites just don't cut it.

So far, only lionofzion has found me, and though he brings lunch, you can guess who gets the lion's share.

And so I issue a plea to my erstwhile readers on my recently-hijacked blog--please find me! And when you do, please bring some food!

Suggestions on how to take my blog back would also be appreciated.

Top Secret Counter-Manifesto

I really can't compete with Drona's Manifesto stylistically--he may be a fascist, but what great prose!--but I feel obligated to counter it somehow ideologically, since that would piss him off.

Hmmm...what can I say about writing?

1) Myths matter. The stories we tell each other, the stories we tell ourselves: all myths. Did you know that someone who is born blind won't gain sight in adulthood even after restorative surgery? They tried it when the medical technology was first developed and learned the hard way that sight is more than just visual input from the eyes: your brain has to learn slowly, carefully, to organize shapes and colors into meanings. Without that ability, all those impulses coming through eyes to brain just give a person terrible headaches! Doctors know not to try it anymore.
Why was I telling you this? Oh yes. Because myths are something like that. If we don't tell ourselves stories, life is just one long terrible headache. With stories, we can give it some coherence, make sense of how things work and why, sketch out how to live and what we want. Ask questions. Very important, myths.
Good writing tends to myth, which, as it turns out, is a vast and sprawling garden.

2) Scientists. Basically specialize in myth. They squint down at atoms, make up stories to imagine them with (say, Niels Bohr's classic about how an atom is like a little solar system), then try come up with stories that will become tests to see if the old story needs work or not. The best scientists come up with stories that account for all the other stories better than the old myths have--the atom-as-solar-system myth is replaced with energy fields and quantum quarks and maybe if I didn't spend so much time watching reruns of Black maybe I would understand it all.
Stephen Jay Gould was a great scientist because he modified a particularly useful myth called the Theory of Evolution with a myth-within-a-myth called Punctuated Equilibrium. Great stuff.

3) Despite the abundance of good and useful myths, we get all kinds of wrong-headed and hurtful myths in our heads all the time! This is inevitable, I think, and part of being human. Writers are wrestlers, who try to tackle what they think are the bad myths in your head, or else get them in a headlock, or flip them over upside-down.
That's the core of the craft: all the rest is commentary.

What do you do in hiding?

Full disclosure: I went into hiding and allowed my blog to be taken over by communist totalitarians mostly because it seemed like a good way to get a break.

But when you're shut up in an attic all day, it's a little hard to enjoy the mandatory vacation. I tried sipping raspberry lemonade and basking beneath a lamp today, but somehow knowing that I'll be out of things to eat once the lemonade runs out took some of the joy out of that. It's also pretty depressing to spread out a beach towel when you have no safe and reliable access to a shower.

But who I am to complain of hardships? I have time off work, which rarely happens these days except for Europeans and the unemployed, neither of whom are in much of a position to enjoy the reprieve.

Hee hee

Stalin will never find me here.

Will you?

Welcome

...to this as-yet-(mostly)-nonexistent Choose Your Own Adventure blog.

Basically (as you have probably noticed), the author of www.goldbergish.blogspot.com is notoriously full of crap. He didn't actually read the work he describes. He made it up. (Or, more likely, someone else made the less demented half of it up and he stole and expanded upon their much more reasonable initial idea. He does that. A lot.)

Anyway, the Existential Choose Your Own Adventure does not exist (in a literal sense). Maybe it should. Maybe, someday, it will--right here! Or maybe, in a more important and less literal sense, it already does exist: here, here, and here.

Evidence of Following Links

So, I put the Save the Date post up as my facebook status, and within an hour, Myrna had commented on my months-old post on Kira's India and Matt had commented on the Harem of One post. This conclusively proves that at least some readers are following the links in posts and reading the other posts they get to.

Cort's pattern

Just watched Cort read Goldbergish for the first time. He looked at the pictures and read the captions first, then started reading at the bottom of the page and came up. He did not click on the hyperlinked words (except the registry list ones b/c I told him to). He laughed out loud a lot. He got distracted after five or so posts and went to do something else, planning to go back later.

When he came back, he followed a link from his email to the "Myth of Joseph Smith," read it, and then came back to browse in Goldbergish.

Subtitles

Noticed I'm getting a few hits from very distant places and wondered if they are from people simply stumbling across the blogs as opposed to people who heard about them first from someone, and decided to add short descriptions to each blog to make it slightly easier for people to get oriented to what each blog is.

I think I'll change the one on Goldbergish regularly, so it operates as a running joke as well as an orientation aid. The others I'll change to fine-tune and improve rather than to keep fresh.

The Politics of Easter Eggs

Over Christmas break, my younger brother Matt noticed that on Mormon Artist's html version of my story "Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg," someone had posted a comment as Lehi M. Sidhu, saying something like "My grandma used to tell me stories like these. Thanks for bringing back the good memories." As it turns out, that someone was me--a fact which my brother was not terribly surprised to discover.

The comment is funny for at least three reasons. First of all, "Tales of Teancum Singh Rosenberg" is set in a world in which Mormon, Sikh, and Jewish legends are simply one, where it's normal for the Golden Plates to be buried under the battlefield at Kurukshetra. No one's grandma tells them stories quite like that. Secondly, Lehi M. Sidhu is nearly as ridiculous a name as Teancum Singh Rosenberg. I am fairly confident that no one with the last name of Sidhu has the first name Lehi. It's cultural mixing of a particular form which is not terribly widespread as of yet. Third, only people who get into the world of the story will have a good chance of recognizing that the comment is not, in fact, a real person's comment, but rather an impromptu extension of the story. Getting to feel clever like that is funny to the one who feels clever specifically because that person happened to earn it, the way any good joke asks you to earn its punchline by connecting two ideas in an unusual way.

Matt told me that I'm becoming a master of the literary easter egg, by which he meant leaving little surprises that can be unlocked for a reader who looks carefully. I'm especially interested in surprises that point towards and/or reward those who leave the text to get extra-textual context.

Last month, as the communist takeover of Goldbergish was drawing to a close, I realized that there's a politics behind my interest in literary easter eggs. I like texts that invite active reading, that reward readers for careful attention, and that point towards a larger context largely because I believe that the most of the world's problems require that kind of attention, and that we suffer again and again when we solve the problems based on the way they present themselves to us rather than first looking for the pieces of the puzzle (so to speak) which are obscured, often by our habits, cultural frame of reference, education, or prejudice.

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....