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which in turn served as recipe books for creating literature. The Wife of Bath’s gapped teeth and red stockings, for example, were telltale signs of a lascivious nature—not invented merely for her memorable character but rather applied to signal her sexual nature by much broader and more pervasive convention. Of course, there is nothing inherent in dental features or hosiery that would unfailingly identify the Wife—or anyone else—as lascivious. The traditional meaning that accompanies these unsuspecting physical details is linked arbitrarily on the basis of usage, not on the basis of tAgora-type fact. To put it in the terms we’ve been thinking with, gapped teeth and red stockings are constructed signs. And Chaucer was hardly alone. Many medieval authors deployed such constructed facts to spin their stories fluently and idiomatically. Once again, the medium works precisely because these “facts” apply across multiple instances. They provide authors with a contingent language that comes alive in the oAgora experience of storytelling. Facts in the eAgora So how about facts on the web? We might be tempted to cite such bedrock items as dates, statistics, and static pages, and conclude that facts (as imagined in the tAgora) can and do exist in a virtual environment. But a moment’s reflection will reveal that even these supposedly immutable objects were mapped, calculated, and built by someone according to an arbitrary convention. In short, they too were constructed (Reading Backwards). Then there’s the network of potentials itself, each node linked in multiple ways to other nodes. Very little if any tAgora-type fact can be found in that powerfully morphing, interactive medium at any level. Indeed, the Internet’s function actively depends on the absence of fact as ideologically construed. And we can take things a step further. The very notion of absence already misrepresents the situation, using a tAgora distinction to mischaracterize the eAgora. It’s not absence or omission, but rather presence, plenitude, and contingency that enable the surfer to cocreate experience(s). Every individual surfer constructs a personal “factual” universe, a self-made cosmos, by navigating pathways and coconfiguring reality. Until ideas collapse into things, until virtual diminishes into brick-and-mortar , until textuality stops the heartbeat of OT and IT, reality remains in play (Reality Remains in Play). L Leapfrogging the Text Sometimes truth proves considerably stranger than fiction and serendipity more instructive than carefully wrought analysis. What follows is one of those cases: a real-life event that illustrates firsthand the close correspondence between oral 138 . Just the Facts tradition and the Internet, between the oAgora and the eAgora. In other words, it amounts to a parable on the confluence of OT and IT (Agora Correspondences) that, remarkably enough, really happened. The backstory: From performance to book Let’s start with the OT background. In late 2004 a book entitled The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey as Performed by Halil Bajgorić appeared as volume 283 in Folklore Fellows Communications, then the latest in a lengthy series of books that began about a century ago in 1910. As its title suggests, this brickand -mortar publication features a South Slavic oral epic performance by the bard (guslar) Halil Bajgorić, who despite not being able to read or write boasted a repertoire of some thirty oral epics. The performance in question was recorded on aluminum discs by Milman Parry and Albert Lord on June 13, 1935, in the small village of Dabrica in central Bosnia, and later converted to a digital audiotape by David Elmer in 2002. Notice the culturally sanctioned trajectory from performance to book, fully in accord with the dominant ideology of the text (Ideology of the Text). The audio “capture” of Bajgorić’s enactment modulates into a visual artifact, a voiceless cenotaph on the page. But of course there was a price: from oral tradition to aluminum records to digital tape to paper, the long journey into silence meant radical reduction at almost every stage. Presence gave way to echo, which in turn gave way to a documentary image of the echo. Culturally sanctioned or not, we’d have to admit that this trajectory traces a downward spiral of reality, with OT devolving from a living process to a static product (Museum of Verbal Art). Bajgorić’s performance moved from its origin in the oAgora to another kind of existence in the tAgora. Strategy 1: Reading aids My initial attempt at reversing this serial reduction involved providing the book-reader as...

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