16 December2002
Yesterday morning, half an hour before we had to leave for church, I had a brainstorm about not only appearance but how the Connection Muse could be implemented. Experiment in progress can be observed in <WMframe.html>. Here's the short version of the basice idea(s):
Reading L to R, top to bottom:
There are also two areas with potential, but I haven't decided quite how to leverage it (hence the gray lines):
In this model, each POEM would require its own FRAMESET.
Navigation would work like this:
The PROGRESS "bar" could use a tree whose (26 -- one for each piece?) leaves gradually fall off (Deb's suggestion --and she said she'd even draw it for me!). It would only appear, however, at the end of each poem(?).
Stray notes:
25 April 2002
[Copied from WD X, 148-50] Last weekend (20-21 April) I recorded the writings in Wyrmes Mete @ DrDann's upstate facility in Woodstock NY. The studio's in the new house he & Lisa bought earlier in the year (late last year?), where the garage was. 3-4 acres, wooded lot backing on acres & acres of more woods... 'twill be a wondrous retreat for us urban types if we can get it together to visit once in awhile.
The studio part is under heavy construction, and the control room is still pretty bare bones, but we had all we needed for spoken-word recording, except -- a vocal booth. Mark rigged up the little powder room attached to the guest bedroom with a huge boom & Naumann, then draped blankets from the guest bed over the cross arm & a peg in the wall to deaden the reverb, affixing them to knobs and counterweights with rubber bands. We also lacked a music stand, and had to use a 5-foot stepladder, which pretty much filled up the tiny room before I got in there, and had to be placed right in front of the door, so once I was in, I pretty much had to stay there.
Which was good, because it more or less made me read the thing straight through, something I'd never done before, an experience whose effects I'm still processing.
Mark rarely comments on content, & will seriously evade questions about how he likes something, so it was with some surprise that I heard him remark, after the third or fourth poem on death, "Cheery." I took it as encouragement, and plowed ahead.
He also laughed once during the edit session, I think at the end of the "matter a damn" litany in "He Still Thinks."
It took maybe four hours, including two brief breaks for me to clear my head and a couple hiati to deal with the technology, to record 28 "songs" totalling 66 minutes 29 seconds. Not bad, considering the much more attenuated ratio for music.
For the edit session, first he set me to listening to see if anything needed to be done over, but after ten minutes or so I determined that we might as well go straight to editing, which we did, finishing half a dozen titles before dinner. Mostly what we did was take out pauses where I'd had to swallow or shift pages, and in one instance we relocated a poem in the sequence in which I read them -- "Say Goodbye" moved from after "My Father Behind Me" to after "Take Her", a decision I reversed in the end & put it back where it was.
After dinner we continued tightening, & got as far as [the end of] "Impatience" before I pooped out, going to bed preety much right thereafter.
I had such convoluted and engrossing dreams that I slept in until 8.30, 2 hrs past my usual rising time, despite hitting the hay not long after 10 the night before. The house was quiet, so I read for a bit in [William Least Heat Moon's] Blue Highways & played one of Mark's superb Martin acoustics, which I'd displaced from its bed along with 6 others so I could sleep.
We started back up about 10.30, & finished by 2 or so. After a quick pass through the early stuff we'd done before establishing a routine, it was time to put it to tape -- er, CD. And here we hit a major snag, because in the CD burning program, the sound was horribly distorted, which turned out to be a software conflict, not a flaw in the recording itself -- whew!
Mark had a rehearsal @ 4, & I wanted to get back to SI for dinner, so we finished just in time.
25 April 2002
In the past month, a lot of little things have been done on the print version (now WyrmesMete.cwk in the Sites/wyrmesmete folder), most too piddling to warrant an entry in this saga. But now I see that a noticeable part of the mountain has been moved:
20 March 2002
Over the past week, I
I pasted these pix in as "floaters", because I don't want to worry too much about page layout at this stage, especially if I decide to go whole hog and do that in Quark -- not an operation I'm anxious to explore, but I'd like to keep it as an option.
14 March 2002
Replaced the Szimborska epigraph with Lady Everyman's lament, by changing the on--> link in poogie.html so that it goes to wyrmesmete2.html, which then goes on--> to about.html.
Today, however, the plan is to begin work on a paper version of WM for the family (what's left of it) -- April 15 will be the 10th anniversary of Mom's death. Copies for Lynn, Ann, Lynn Bennett, Nell, El Boyo, me. An artist's book or extremely limited edition.
At VSC I exported Wyrmes Mete 1.1d->web (Storyspace 1.5) to text so that my buddies could read the poems without struggling with the as yet unfinished interface of the HTML.
Now I'm importing that into AppleWorks to update the text and plunk in the pix, then if necessary take the whole thing into Quark for printing. Preliminary idea is for landscape orientation, bound with plastic comb binding. Haven't decided about one- or two-sided -- let's just get it to look like something today.
9 March 2002
As sketched in my blog earlier this week, there's been a setback or two to contend with, and as I continue work here and on other pages, I realize that the pernicious filesynch bug (what's the opposite of "synchronization" -- the "chaos" to its "order"?) has affected everything else on the workbench, including of course a couple entries in this here chronicle. Bummer.
Following last weekend's debacle, I hitched up my sagging shorts and redid everything I could recall doing at Wellspring House, reconstructing where I couldn't remember. That took a couple days early this week.
Before that, the main changes I made were to the Goodbye sequence, creating duplicate TOCs and stanzas in order to effect a looping but logical path through all those poems: the goodbyeTOC now exists in four copies, "Say Goodbye" in three, motherdiedTOC in two. It still doesn't work quite right, but it was a washed out bridge before; now it sort of works. (Helpful hint: Storyspace does this a *whole* lot easier...)
Today, after copying the Connection Toolkit into the Dreamweaver4 Objects folder, I inserted the JavaScript code to the header on each page. (If you're curious, check the source for this page.) That was easy for pages using templates, but tracking down the others wasn't hard, since I hadn't made any other changes to the piece, so I just opened each one that hadn't been modified before today. Interesting anomaly: seems that some pages were made with a template that no longer exists, but the source still shows the template code -- I guess that makes sense, but it means more junk to clean up later.
I'm beginning to wonder how much futzing this pore thang's gonna put up with...
31 January 2002
I've been too much in the throes to do a day-by-day update of work on Wyrmes Mete here at the VSC, but now, on the morning of Clean-up Day, I'm going to take the time to summarize and discuss.
Long story short: a complete draft is now up! I probably should give it a version number, like I did with the original Storyspace instantiation -- how about 2.0, since it is a Whole New Piece, almost from the ground up.
In the interest of conserving electrons, this entry will describe the piece as it's presently constructed, summarize what's yet to be done, and discuss issues I'm going to have to deal with sooner or later.
At present, only the chapbook (poet) path has been implemented (see about.html). This path presents an essentially linear reading, the writings being arranged as if by a poet for a printed chapbook.
From the (clean but boring) title page, the reader persistently clicking the "on" link (--->) goes first to the dedication (poogie.html), then the epigraph (epigraph.html), and finally to the Golden Anniversary TOC (goldenTOC.html), after which the writings actually start with "The Button" (button.html). There's a trivial fork in the path after "She's Still Mad" to permit the reader to choose between "1935" and "If He Came Home"; the default (---> "on") serves up one then the other, which is part of what makes the acteme trivial. However, removing the fork makes the "A story, momma" trivial -- the poet doesn't say, "Two stories, momma".
Thereafter, the reader arrives the Say Goodbye TOC, and from thence through all the Father Died poems, via a slightly streamlined approach to the nesting TOCs -- i.e., I've junked the idea of doing three versions of "Mortality, Thy Name Is Daddy", leaning for the moment towards Rob's "pick the best one" suggestion rather than Julianne's "love to watch you work" sensibility. After perambulating through the resequenced FatherDied poems, the path goes straight to "Say Goodbye", where it dead ends, as it did in v1.x. To continue, the reader needs to click the "up" link (^^^), which goes to the goodbyeTOC, from whence the reader can descend into the Mother Died poems.
One major addition to v2.0 is the journal entries from October 1991 to May 1992, abridged to spare the reader extraneous material (well, most of it), and also to balance off, in a way, the much larger number of poems in the Father Died set. However, I feel a little iffy about it (it's pretty long), and so have set it off the default path -- i.e., you can only get to it from the Mother Died TOC directly. The default goes through "This House", "Brain Scan", and "Take Her" to "Say Goodbye" again; this means that to get back to the journal you'd have to click "up" (^^^) from the last stanza, then the Mother Died link on the Say GoodbyeTOC, and finally the Fragments from a journal link -- maybe this is too coy.
At this point, I now realize that the default path has a bridge washed out: the only way to get from the end of "Say Goodbye" to the He Still Thinks poems is to click "up" (^^^) twice to go all the way up to Contents, then scroll down at least one screen so you can click on the He Still Thinks heading in the left-hand (chap-poet) column. That's really stoopit.
The He Still Thinks lobe is the simplest, the default path going directly from one poem to the next. Here's where I'll probably try the Connection Muse operations first, once I get the bug fixed (see below). Right now, the last poem in the lobe also goes to "Say Goodbye", which ends at a brick wall, as indicated.
Hmmm. At the end of the Golden Anniversary sequence (presently the last stanza of "If He Came Home"), the default path goes directly to the Say Goodbye TOC. Two potential patterns here, and at least one's gotta go.
Either way, there's no real ending. That needs to be addressed.
Here's the list:
Another list:
13 January 2002
Here at Vermont Studio Center, by way of trying to get all wheels back on the road, I've opened the old Storyspace version (pre AdvHTPoFic) in Storyspace 2, and turned out this treemap view:
2 March 2001
Mysteriously, the Connection System started to work this morning -- not all the time, and when it didn't work I could never figure out why -- so I decided to test it in a separate directory (I won't link from here, but it's in Sites/CSanomalies/CSthinks).
I copied in the config.js fileI downloaded from the word circuits WM directory, as well as the old whole-poem versions of the HeStillThinks array, then added a MultiLink at the end of each poem, leading to the first unvisited node in the array. It seemed to work fine, once I eliminated all human error. But another try with stanza-nodes (the two for The Button and the eight for Golden Anniversary) came up empty, just like before -- no link, no linked text.
I remain in the dark.
1 March 2001
Created stanza_frame.html and branchpage.html to test out various framing possibilities. Still not sure what I'm doing -- HTML-wise I'm OK, but how to use frames in this piece: so many variables, especially once the Connection System is factored in...
28 February 2001
Created colophon.html. Needs tightening, fleshing out, and fact-checking, but it's there at least.
Created notes.html for notes, and performed the following operations:
27 February 2001
After starting a contents page (see below in ToDo List) in BBEdit, when I went to save it, I discovered that such a page already exists (contents.html, natch!), and with considerable work already done. (Damn! I hate this affliction, you know, the one where you can't remember things -- what's it called...? Old-Timer's Disease? No! -- CRAFT: Can't Remember A Fuckin Thing!)
But it was also a mess, and I needed an excuse to hone my new HTML chops, and so started again, to better effect, I think (contents2.html). Considerable fiddling was required to get it to display at all, and it still looks crude-o, but I went ahead and made all the links anyway, just in case.
Then I uploaded everything that I've been working on in the last few weeks. This will make for some awkwardnesses -- in particular, the new stanzas in the erstwhile Say Goodbye lobe don't have no links at all, so if you get there from one of the new TOCs, you won't get much further. However, the other two lobes have some linking, lame as it is.
26 February 2001
Scanned in a photo of the 1959 Peters Twp School Board, when Dad was chair, I think, judging from the pose in the pic (59schbd400.jpg). The 400 is for resolution (400 dpi) -- because of the textured paper in the yearbook (Ember 1959), it was hard to get faces to resolve. Debated including caption, but decided against it -- the poems are the captions in this piece.
Interesting anomaly here -- these dev notes don't have the <html>..</html> tags in the source code. Is that because I started them in a text message to the AdvHTPoFic class, and forgot 'em? Doesn't seem to matter, but I'll fix it when I get the chance.
Also notice that BBEdit on the iBook shows little squares at the beginning of each line, though the G3 doesn't. I think that's because I set the HTML Format in Dreamweaver to CR LF Windows on both machines, but only checked LF translation in BBEdit on the G3. In any event, I'm going back to the CR Macintosh setting -- thought it might have something to do with the Connection System anomalies (see below and below that), but don't think so any more.
Still getting the BBEdit error -1708 if it's open whenever I open or save a file in Dreamweaver. Annoying, but not tragic -- so far.
At the end of the day, scrawled a ToDo List that mainly contains just some administrative pages that need yet to be made. Here's the whole thing, sans diagrams:
WM ToDo to date:
24 February 2001
Fiddled with title.html, cleaning up the HTML in BBEdit and changing a few links. It's beginning to look like something...
Realized there were three kinds of notes to be kept for this piece, and so organized that development apparatus:
Now: on to tables & frames -- REALLY! -->
-->DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now I can say in good conscience that I don't suck at HTML. Do I look different?
23 February 2001
This morning, against all expectation (on account of all the online errands I had to run) I got a great deal accomplished.
First, found and inserted a background for the title page (whitelinen.gif), created a few more samples and figured out how to turn the background transparent on the title graphic (wm72dkblu.gif). Still needs seerious editing, as does all the apparatus, but at least now it looks like something!
Then I updated the about page -- still not right, but closer, I can feel it! -- and the wyrmesmete page, the latter by inserting a thumbnail of the title graphic. Likewise, still not quite it, but getting there.
Finally, copied BlyTreeSm.jpg into the images folder, inserted it into the bio page, then updated some of the copy. As with everything else that ain't a poem, got more work to do there, but we're crawling towards something worth looking at.
22 February 2001
Yesterday, I finished basting together the Golden Anniversary sequence from the chapbook-poet arrangement, using the branch template for every stanza.
This morning, I took care of the pics in the title poem, creating new files. You'll note from the icons that I did them in BBEdit rather than Dreamweaver, in part to see if I could, but also to clean up the incredible amount of redundant code that appeared there originally. Considerable diddling was required, but it was a lot easier to see what was happening once I cleared out the underbrush. Each of the first four can now serve as templates for stanzas with pix: 1) pic left-stanza right (picgoldenann1.html and picgoldenann4.html); 2) pic up-stanza down (picgoldenann2.html) and picgoldenann8.html); and 3) pic down-stanza up (picgoldenann3.html). Pic right- stanza left will only work with a narrow graphic and short lines, something "Golden Anniversary" is a little short on.
I then shunted the branch-path through these five pages, and tidied up the rest link-wise. If there's time, I'll post this new sequence to the web site. It's a genuine bit o' progress, seems to me.
21 February 2001
The damn deadline's been extended until 11.59pm tomorrow night, but there's no way this can be ready, even in a simplified version. Another cruel irony. WILL IT EVER STOP!!!!!
But I'm back in Allentown today and tomorrow to make what progress I can.
Woke up this morning with an idea or two for framing the stanzas -- a branch graphic. So went into AppleWorks and sketched one -- it doesn't suck! (branchup.gif), and I drew it left-handed! -- and it works OK as the left margin of the stanza. Next I'm trying to work up a template, using 1935 and If He Came Home as the guinea pigs this time. Here's its present state --> (branchstanza.dwt)
[11am] Not too bad on the branch template stuff. Stitched the sequence 1935 --> If He Came Home (start here) and it works OK. But the <-- back | on --> links are problematic, natch:
I think this is manageable, using the branch template. Here's an idea:
20 February 2001
Correspondence with Rob during the past week seems to be closing in on the config.js & connect.js files as being at least part of the problem: when downloaded, the Mac doesn't even recognize them as ASCII text files, so when I double-click, it presents the dialog with possible translators, all of them weird.
Note to self: Self, collect the correspondence as well as the messages in AdvHTPoFic, just to keep this artifactual hypertextual!
Further fugitive thoughts, arising whilst in transit:
16 February 2001
Last night, a last look before bed made me think it's still way too apparatusy.
15 February 2001
Woke up this morning from a dream of writing the preface, and so started with that, renaming it about (aboutWM.html). Pretty pleased with the result, which updates some of the things proposed in the notes in the entry below. Sketched out the skeletal structure for the highest level of the apparatus: title (down to) about (down to) contents, which may or may not break out into separate TOCs.
Tried to supply some descriptive text for each of the three readings (chapbook, chronology, characters), with middling results. Also, can't decide whether to have an all-in-one, or separates (as in the previous parentheses), or both.
Went to google.com & searched on "danse macabre" to see what illustrations might appear. Pulled down a .zip file which turned out to include the usual suspects, which all say something I'm not saying. More research is in order...
Then opened up AppleWorks and made a few attempts at a logo -- the ones that looked the best I made into .gifs: WM48dkgrn.GIF and WM72cyan.GIF. They'll do for placeholders.
There may be some progress on the CS front: it seems that Dreamweaver adds CRs to the JavaScript code, making it useless. I've changed the pref in DWs HTML Format to CR LF (Windows) to see what happens. Rob's submitted the problem to the Connection List -- he reports that he remembers having a similar problem with Rob Swigart and his Mac.
14 February 2001
I'd originally planned to start stitching the Say Goodbye poems together, but got caught up in CS problems and other things related to making the mistake of reading my e-mail. WHEN WILL I LEARN?!?!?!?!
However, did make adjustments to the brightness of the darker photos, and cropped most of them to fit better on the page.
CS woes remain unresolved, so have to give it up for this Imp., though Rob and I continue to go back & forth, narrowing down the possibilities. He made a directory for me on Word Circuits and put the rectified files there -- and they display just fine on the Web. Once I download them, however, and try to view them locally, the elements disappear again. At least we've located the problem to local files on the Mac, though why there's a problem with them is impossible to figure out (so far).
So: a prettymuch fucked up day -- until the last hour or so, when I tried explaining the structure to an imaginary audience. Suddenly, many things fell into place, as transcribed from my freehand notes page:
All elements separable:
- Stanza: 1st, interior, last
- Image: on/off; altered?
- Sound: Music for TOCs, vox poetae for stanzas
- AUTOPLAY: Don't wanna hear it? Turn off sound.
- Title = only meaningful as anakrousis? not always...
- Nav (frame? must be fixed, under pointer )
- --> must be dead easy (as per Gav)
Conditional display [of above elements]: first visit diff from later visit(s)
COLORS - code for what? Component, path, trail
ACCESS & EGRESS - Complex down to simple: by the time you get down to the stanza, that's all there is (almost)
Just Start Scenario: Click on just start on Title Page, --> button1.html = (silent) Default Path
likewise, diff defaults from diff jumping-off points:Title: WyrmesMete --> wm.html --> Title
Preface --> TOC
WORK THIS OUT!!
CONTENTS level (=TOCs): lets you choose yer itinerary, i.e., -- Poet (default)/Historian/Novelist
13 February 2001
Installed & configured everything that seemed to be needed to get started with the Connection System, then hit a snag: trying to put a CS element (MultiLink) into thinksTOC.html, everything seemed to go according to the User Guide, except that in a browser there was nothing to click, and Exploder gave me a JavaScript error until I manually located the source as "config.js" in the property inspector, which at least fixed the error (Netscape gave no error), but still didn't provide either text or some kind of clickable object.
Thought it might be related to layers, and so did a save-as & converted layers to a table (thinksTOCtable.html), still no luck. E-mailed Rob Kendall, and we're going back and forth; as of 3pm, no resolution yet, so I'm going for a walk to figure out what to do instead...
While strolling, remembered that 15 Feb 2001, the deadline for the ELO contest, will be Mom & Dad's 60th wedding anniversary. This brought me nearly trotting back, but so far all I've managed is to do is reconvert the Golden Anniversary sequence from tables back to layers. Still don't have a good idea for navigational visuals (at present, using the Storyspace .jpgs, and what I did in the Thinks lobe isn't satisfactory), and don't want to go further until that's settled -- but I've lost the feel of all that structural work I did last week. You could say I'm discouraged....
12 February 2001
Added nav text to template stanza.dwt -- on, back, up, out -- just so's I can stitch the stanzas of each poem together. Even if I end up ripping these out, I gotta start somewhere!
Because it's the simplest structurally, I began with what used to be the Thinks lobe, rather than go through all 26 poems and then have that much more work to do over(!)
Spent the whole day fiddling with templates: created a new one thinkstanzaL.dwt, especially for this lobe, in preparation for making a text component tomorrow with the Connection System.
11 February 2001
Talked with Stephanie Strickland today about "gesture" in the behavior of a hypertext. Here are the notes:
Stehanie asked if the ‰tone was elegaic or more like recovered history (there can be other registers)
- Elegaic
- image: ship sailing off toward the horizon, dwindling then gone
- gesture: hand waving in the air, e.g.
- Recovered history
- "I never owned this while they were alive, but now I realize..."
- image/gesture: digging in the ground, opening up treasure boxes
Image of dwindling:
I said Dad took up a lot of psychic space in a room, in the relationship. When he started to decline, she became a "more complicated person" -- as his space diminished and hers grew(?)
Dad's act of devotion in putting together the album
Cut up old photos to paste in
- His attitude (and his generation's) "Oh, this old stuff..." His devotion destructive?
- Mine = "Reverence!"
This is good stuff for thinking about after the major armature(s) are in place, and can be implemented by the Connection System without disruption, I think. For the moment, however, got quite a bit of heavy construction to do...
8 February 2001
Reread Toward an Organic Hypertext, by Rob Kendall & Jean-Hugues Réty, from HT00 Proceedings.
Refined the structural concept a couple tads: thinking of ways to incorporate smaller components -- "gestures" (<Stephanie Strickland) -- that adumbrate leitmotifs in the work, such as drinking, military, courtship, and so on. Nothing conclusive, but I plan to pick Stephanie's brain on the subject.
Sketched a layout for stanzas plus generic navigation elements on a second sheet, then dummied up a template for it (stanza.dwt) in Dreamweaver.
Updated these notes.
7 February 2001
Reread AdvHTPoFic comments, [I'll try to provide a link to these, but later...] with an eye to rethinking structure. Rob's response to my mobile proposal was most fruitful, especially the suggestion to consider the piece from the bottom up rather than the top down.
Using post-its, second sheets, and multicolored markers, I re-organized structure into three large components: Chapbook, Chronology, and Characters -- the first an arrangement of the poems as a Poet might do, the second as if by an Historian, the third as if by a Novelist. This large-scale structure is mapped outline style in components.html, which can serve as the site map of the whole piece (for the nonce).
The Chapbook arrangement pretty much re-presents the original WM three-lobe structure, but can also represent, via a default path, the sequence a poet would choose for a print version, should the reader like to follow that. As such, poems [remaining text lost...]
There are still some problems placing poems in the Chronology, but I can work that out later. As it stands, however, the sequence represents when things happened in the story each poem tells -- NOT when the story was told, nor when the poem was composed, except for the last few -- i.e., To Bring Rain, Lenten Meditation, This Is Where, He Still Thinks, and Say Goodbye, which aren't datable by nature -- and which therefore may not belong in the sequence.
The Characters arrangement is unordered, and there's lots of overlap, since many poems concern two or all of the characters.
I then copy-pasted to separate pages for each component: chap-poet.html, chrono-hist.html, charac-novel.html. These will serve as TOCs for each component, which I vaguely conceive as being accessible from every page, perhaps through buttons on a left navbar(?).
27 January 2001
After reading through all the AdvHTPoFic comments, it seems best to stanza-ize the existing pages, what I worked so hard to create before exporting from Storyspace, without going back -- too complicated, too much to keep track of.
Finished this process this morning with the {He Still Thinks} lobe. Lacks default navigation from stanza to stanza, but I think I can leave that until I think about the whole navigation issue some more. Connection System may be of use here.
Ditto this afternoon with {Golden Anniversary} lobe, then the {Say Goodbye} lobe, which still needs work, to wit:
In addition, I'm getting vaguely familiar with Dreamweaver, and believe I can soon make templates that the stanzas can have applied to them.
26 January 2001
Here's the plan -- let's see how we do:
Worked through the Dreamweaver tutorial again; think I understand templates enough to use them -- but need to create a layout that'll work first.
Made a couple more test pages, both with text over photo, one with the photo offset right, the other to the left.
20 January 2001
Worked through Dreamweaver tutorial, after which created a test page for stanzas.
Redid Golden Anniversary as stanzas with pix on the page, using those goofy Storyspace jpgs for navigation.
19 January 2001
Finally, a chance to get back to work. This weekend and next I plan to dedicate to the project -- unclear how things will turn out after that.
Got the scanner working, scanned in Poogie, Mary Jane & Billy Jr, wedding portrait, 80s portrait, and Bill & Jane at home.
I have a new idea for the structural metaphor ("lobe" never really communicated anything, except for maybe lobes in the brain -- Julianne thought of lung -- or a cauliflower). How about (wait for it...): a mobile?
Stay with me here. At some point in my adolescence or early adult years (who remembers?), I made one o' them things out of sticks I found lying around in the woods by the house. I stripped off the bark, whittled and sanded them smooth, then screwed in tiny brass eye-screws through which to tie the threads that would hold them together, and finally dunked them in varnish (before or after assembling the thing? sorry, those blocks got overwritten a long time ago) to make it look like a work of art and not a rare but naturally occurring assemblage. As I recall, these sticks were the only objects in the mobile -- no baubles or bangles -- apart from the apparati of thread and eye-screws.
Now I can't draw worth a damn in two dimensions, let alone three, and though the computer's been able to help me out a lot in this department, I don't think I have (or can afford to buy) the software that can render what I'm seeing in my mind. (I am scribbling on a giant newsprint pad with different colored markers -- results are inconclusive, so far.) Fortunately, text can do really well in this department, and costs practically nothing as far as bandwidth's concerned. So here's a stab at describing this new concept for the -- well, armature is sort of what I mean, but more exactly a kind of mobile frame that the poems literally (does this word have any meaning any more?) depend from.
Inventory: the nodes are the sticks, the threads the links, the eye-screws the anchors and targets. The biggest stick (a limb, really) has three prongs, and would correspond to the present TOC. From it would depend (on cables rather than threads, for the weight) three only slightly smaller branches, the present TOCs for the whilom "lobes" Golden Anniversary, He Still Thinks, and Say Goodbye. From each of these would depend by ropes the title pages (now we're down to sticks) of the poems -- e.g., thinksTOC would have seven anchors along its length, one each for Elegy, To Bring Rain, Lenten Meditation, At the AIDS Concert, This Is Where, The Fish, and He Still Thinks. And the poems themselves would be strings of stanzas (inscribed twigs, I guess) hanging from the title-page stick.
The present miscellaneous matter consisting of the title, dedication, epigraph, bio, acknowledgements and so on would dangle from the TOC just beneath the juncture where the three limbs join, like a little upside-down tiara (I'm beginning to think I missed my calling....)
At this point, the metaphor starts breaking down, because each twig also has links to other twigs, sometimes quite far away -- the text-link cross-references. (Deena Larsen once had a model-train type versions of Marble Springs, with the poems jammed into or written on miniature houses, and for links she used embroidery thread or dental floss. At this point she realized that the physical-world representation of her idea for lives connected by poems had reached the limits of its powers. Fortunately, someone introduced her to Hypercard just about then....)
But I think it's served its purpose, in two ways: it gives me a way to visualize structural elements, and it may provide a way to graphically represent the structure, possibly by way of image maps or other graphical objects (like buttons?) to navigate by. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Lots to think about.
9 December 2000
(Based on a message to my AdvHTPoFic class
at the New School Online University)
OK, here goes the first draft of the HTML version of
Wyrmes Mete. The following caveats are in order:
It's extremely crude.
Structural work still needs to be done.
I've color-coded my editorial marks
I hope the shortcomings of this offering aren't too obnoxious, but I wanted to get something up so I could turn my attention to Julianne's MOW before the term gets completely away from us!
Thanks in advance for any reactions you want to share with me. And please let me know if anything doesn't work the way it's supposed to (as best you can make out!).
