Lennie writes:

what I am most interested in about hypertext is the way in which it changes the relationship and role of the writer and reader.

It's rare I read a book (other than a novel) straight through from beginning to end. I dip in and out, drift, closely read-and-re-read stuff I'm really interested in, stuff that's useful to my current work, and skip or half-read other sections. I usually have four or five books "operative" at any given time. That's not a new phenomenon with me.

But the way I write (or try to) has certainly changed. I hate to write long first/second/third sorts of symphonc things any more (Lennie's "guided tour" metaphor). I'm much more interested in small things, cataloguing them together, if necessary, into larger things. And sampling stuff I haven't written into my work. I know Johndan's talked about this--we are both such heavy citational samplers. I think of Duchamp's Green Box as metaphor, and Joe Janangelo has drawn on Cornell boxes as a hypertext analogy. Those kind of container concepts seem persuasive to me now as a writer in a way they never did before.

Geoff