M.D. Coverley
I just received the last work of M.D. Coverley’s work, Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day. I first read about this work in Kate Hayles’s My Mother Was a Computer and it sounded quite interesting. So I went to Coverley’s Portal to see if the work was there. Sure enough, she had already put it on her site, but the only thing she says in her Web site is to contact her for a personalized copy of it.
I remember when I first contacted her about a question on Califia (I was presenting about Califia at MIT), she had mentioned that she was working on a new text. She also asked me if I would like to be in the work, I said sure, to be a character in a fiction sounds exciting enough… But I never followed up on it. But when I read that this work was out and she was preparing personalized copies, I e-mailed her and asked her if I could get one copy. She said she would send one as soon as she can.
And it arrived yesterday. How exciting, to have my own copy of the Book of Dead! But more importantly, when I opened the envelope, i realized that it was a burnt copy of the text, not some "mass published" cd or book that you purchase online. She wrote the name of the work and the copy number on the cd with her hand writing. It is the first edition! Wow. Just by that first touch I knew it was the electronic version of the artist’s book… As I started reading it in my computer, I realized that it was an artist’s book… Needless to say, I was even more excited to have this handmade cd prepared just for me.
I think I will include this text in my second chapter…
Better understanding of electronic textuality
Involves:
- Materiality
- Textual Criticism
- Theories of reading (performative type of reading-Michel de Certeau)
So I should make that clear in the beginning… (mental note)
Second Life, Agrippa, Travis…
Ahhh, I am a miserable newbie… As i said in my very first post, I started this Weblog only as my personal dissertation support group. I already have several other dissertation support groups (can’t have too many to pull throught this thing), but this blog is to help me clear my own mind, get my thoughts straight, and such. I never thought that anyone in their right mind would take the time to read my bs, let alone post a comment on it. Mypage accounts on Steel alude search engines too, so I got nothing to worry about.
Obviously, I was mistaken. Travis (who judging by his own blog share similar interests and likes to ramble as much as I do on important things in life such as SL and WoW) proved me wrong. So here I am trying to figure out a way to post a comment on the comment that he posted on my site and I miserably failed. So I am opening a new post and dedicating it to him.
His comment on how he found it, tells me that he works at IT Training and got the traiter email (LOL) that I sent out either this Saturday or the Saturday before when I was teaching our beloved Dreamweaver workshops.
First off, Agrippa… Yes, he is totally right in his comment. My comment on the mutation of Agrippa came from Michel de Certeau’s idea of textual poachers. These poachers (or readers as I will characterize them as) inhabit the text and subvert it in unexpected ways, meaning, they undermine the authorial intention. Anyone familiar with what digital age brought about, knows how authorial intention has been an issue that’s been debated for awhile now (I see that our friend Travis is pretty fluent in the ways of WoW, which I have yet to play for fear, so I can see how he caught onto that).
Let me recap Agrippa for those of us who don’t know what kind of a text it is. With Agrippa, otherwise known as the Book of the Dead,the author created a self-effacing text, meaning as soon as the reader started reading it, the text would start disappearing. It was published with a companion art book, which did exactly the same thing. It was produced with a special ink that would disappear once it contacted light. Neat, huh? Yes. But then textual poachers hacked the code to the digital copy and published the complete, "unabridged" so-to-speak, text all over the Internet. So the authorial intention was subverted, because the author never intended to be read that way. But the kicker is, that although this happened, the author himself notes that none of these copies are the correct or compete ones. There’s always something missing, something awry, something mispublished. It is this part that interests me most, that’s going to make it interesting in terms of my project.
Second Life… No brainer in two ways… First of all, users create their own stories, role playing games, earn hell of a lot of money, have lot’s of cybersex, and freely (as much as technology and Insight permits) navigate within the textual space. So the users are literally reading the text through navigating it. I will again use Michel de Certeau’s distinction between space/place to make my point. However, this is practically how Linden Lab (the author(s)) wanted it to be used. Yeah, the users are appropriating the text in some sense, but that’s the original intention anyway.
Here’s the kicker then… Users also subvert the authorial intention of Linden Lab by releasing viruses in SL and shutting down entire grid areas, they are coming up with ways to steal other avatars’ rightfully created textures, they are writing scripts that can make other avatars do stuff they don’t want to do (such as relocate them against their will). Case in point, the Mafia boss, Marcellus, who came to SL from SIMS online, blew up a casino in SL because the dude owed him money. Of course there was a string of blogs on the newspaper claiming that this can’t happen, that one need to have authoring rights to an object to blow it up and so forth. Then Marcellus said that this wasn’t a set up. Other avies verbally attack him calling him names and such… In the blog of course not in SL. Now if this isn’t subvertion and appropriation, what is?
This is why I said that bringing these out in SL is a no brainer, my friend. If you’re working in IT Training, I hope we’re assigned to the same workshop so we can talk about WoW. Maybe you can get me into it (LOL). Cheers.
Jerome McGann
Isn’t that interesting… As I read Textual Condition I begin to hear more and more of Hayles’s arguments in the background. Of course, McGann wrote his book in 1991, much earlier that Hayles. She mainly talks about his later book, Radiant Textuality. I think she is more influenced by him that she makes it appear to be.
First off, McGann begins his book in a very interesting way: he connects textuality with sexuality… What striking way to make a case for the materiality/embodiment than talking about sex???
Then after having made the case for taking into account the physical aspects of the text (you know, font face, print, binding, etc…), he talks about the thickness of the imaginative texts. Meaning, the text does not just convey meaning, but is so thick that it is put on display. Good old McLuhan??? When he mentions that, he is primarily referring to poetic texts, but they might as well apply to novels too. I think this would be a great segway to Hayles’s notion of technotexts… Stay tuned.
