[Newspoetry] newspoems revised and assignments

[gillespie william k]

In response to our beloved whip-cracking, cigar-chomping,
have-it-in-my-inbox-first-thing-in-the-morning-ing editor Joe's
hypertextual maze assignment, and his very kind announcement of the
posting of my revisions, I wanted to explain the navigation of one
of the hypertextual poems, in the hope that this explanation might inspire
other ideas for hypertext structures.

The poem (actually a story) is "Dow and Union Carbide to Merge"
(serialized on multiple dates in a drastic newspoetry conservation
measure during the news drought of 1999)

http://www.newspoetry.com/1999/werd/index.html

On this page there is an unintuitive navigation widget containing links to
all 18 pages of the hypertext. Each triangle represents a page. Each of
the 6 colors represents one of the characters.

Red - Jerome the burnout
Orange - Werd, Johnny, temp worker
Yellow - Annabel the Administrator
Green - Simon the Secretary
Blue - The Terrorist
Purple - Bartender

Each triangle has two letters. The first letter indicates the character
(making the widget accessible for the color-blind), the second indicates
the sequence (A, B, C) of that character's scenes.

On the widget, time passes to the right and also down, which creates
distortion. The effects of this distortion were in fact what interested me
the most about this structure, though it really seems to affect only
Simon, who has to spend a tedious eight-hour shift moving backwards in
time.

You pass from one scene to another by moving either down or to the right
across the border between triangles. The triangles are set in a grid of
nine squares. Two triangles in the same square usually indicates that
the two characters are in the same scene - the same time and place - and
the scene is narrated from two points of view.

Whereever you start (the actual beginning is JA), you will follow links
whose path ends at the lower right of the widget: BC, the bartender's
monologue. And, wherever you start, you will not pass through all the
scenes without extensive use of your browser's back button. The hope was
that the story might tell itself differently depending on which path you
follow.

Backchanneled feedback is welcome. This is one of those stories that I
wish seemed passe, but no such luck: there is even a reference to Osama
Bin Laden.

Happy hypertext writing!
William