I'm up far too early this morning, antsy with the work I need to do, so naturally, I'm reading and responding to email...

But a couple more things real quick, to build off of something that Collin said to Johndan:

While I normally agree with most of Michael's work, I would contest > the idea that a list of links is somehow "less" than content; > amazon.com is (to my mind), an *amazing* hypertext, possibly more > influential than the combined work of everyone doing more traditional > forms of hypertext.

I guess here I'd hesitate to conflate influential with amazing--I buy the former entirely. If we had to list the top ten or twenty hypertexts in terms of influence, my guess is that *maybe* afternoon or Victory Garden would register much lower than we would expect, and then as exceptions to the rule implicit in your comments here. But to say that this influence (and I'm trying hard here not to thumb my nose at capital) is thus hypertextual or is characteristic of hypertext strikes me as problematic. And although I may be misreading, my sense of NA was that you were trying to complicate the term itself by expanding our vocabulary with which to speak of them.

Maybe this is sacreligious or something, but I've never found *Afternoon* or any hypertext-based fiction/poetry I've read to be that "amazing." I tend to teach *Afternoon* since there's been a fair amount written about it and I have tried to look through it several times, but I never get far. Johndan describes this in an essay about the "Vertigo and Euphoria" that comes from reading hypertexts like *Afternoon,* and while I wouldn't say I have "vertigo" from reading *Afternoon*, I'm not euphoric about it either. One of my students last semester summed it up pretty good for me when he said that was a good idea that didn't quite come together in the end. I dunno, maybe this is the would-be novelist in me, who wants to write (and for that matter read) books that go from beginning to end, regardless of the drift that happens in narrative in-between.

Amazon.com (or Yahoo or lots of other things on the web) are more successful reading experiences for me, and they feel more "hypertextual" in that I really am the one making the connections between things. In *Afternoon* and other hypertextual fictions (and I'm thinking in particular of the few I've seen from Eastgate), the reader doesn't *create* options so much as take them. But when I read the web as a text, I can start out with a directed search for something I'm looking for (eg, it's a tool, like an encylopedia) or I can do a search for some word that pops into my head and see where it takes me. What kind of reading that is I don't know, but it's my favorite kind of hypertextual reading...

The other thing is-- and I don't want to be too cynical about this-- but I am a little suspcious of the motivations of Joyce and the folks at Eastgate regarding their poo-pooing of the Web as *not* being hypertext. Joyce has an article in this excellent collection by Illana Snyder called *Page to Screen* (Routledge, '98, I think) called "New stories for new readers: contour, coherence, and constructive hypertext" where his attack on the web for making hypertext too common, free and (maybe) unmarketable strikes me as a little selfish. I mean, to be blunt about it, people don't *buy* hyperfictions like *Afternoon,* and the web is free. So I wonder if the "freedom" allowed by the web versus disk-based hypertexts is a little too much for some of the pioneers of the form because of what they are losing out on with this form.

--Steve

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Steven D. Krause * Assistant Professor, English
614G Pray-Harrold Hall * Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, MI 48197 * http://www.online.emich.edu/~skrause