Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture (review)

The painter and Dartmouth College art professor Hannes Beckmann (1909-1977) lamented that in Germany—a nation that revered the Expressionist painter Max Beckmann—his famous name made him feel as if he were named Jimmy Picasso. Michael Joyce probably suffers from incessant inquiries: "Like James Joyce?" Michael Joyce is the author of the hypertexts afternoon, a story and Twilight, a Symphony, and a preceding book of essays on pedagogy and poetics, Of Two Minds. This contemporary author, critic, academic and hypertextualist happily lists traits he shares with James Joyce, as well as pondering his fellow Irish bard's stylistic impact on the field of hypertext. Joyce also likes to name things, giving his essays proud titles, here discussed out of order. "One Story: Present Tense Spaces of the Heart" compares the software product he codesigned, Storyspace from Eastgate Systems, to the Aztec or Mexican codex form. "Nonce Upon Some Time: Rereading Hypertext Fiction" realizes that "hypertext is the conflation of the visual kinetic of rereading." The essay sometimes veers into sophistry with its assertion of the read as not-read; the piece twists and turns, contradicting itself until the next section begins with the command "Start again." Still, it takes chances, attempting a new kind of essay to critique a new kind of writing.

"(Re)Placing the Author" looks at the imagery of bombed libraries and other literary moments in Milosz's poem "A Book in the Ruins." He turns to a library shelf full of Eco, Deleuze and Guattari, Kwinter's essay on the sculptor Boccioni, Heraclitus and Derrida. Joyce laments that electronic text is ultimately as vaporous as the smoke from the concentration camp ovens. Elsewhere he compares ideas and intangibles to fog and a bumblebee. In a speech Joyce delivered to a futurists' conference of librarians, "The Lingering Errantness of Place," he praises the library as an arena to wander in and to err, and ponders its collectible objects and fugitive poems as sites of attention and organization.

Joyce scorns most multimedia as an extension of television and the marketplace, yet picks up clues to the state of literature from global pop technology and its interfaces. "On Boundfulness: The Space of Hypertext Bodies" praises Robin and Rand Miller's "Cosmic Osmo," a hypertext project constructed in Apple's HyperCard (preceding their more famous "Myst"), as a model for evoking space and locality, prefiguring works that might use GIS positioning systems. "Forms of the Future" sees Berlin as the "constant blizzard of the next," as wrapped in meaning as was its Reichstag in the hands of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. "Paris Again or Prague: Who Will Save Lit from Com?" enjoys President Havel's Prague as the republic of words, something beyond the U.S.A.'s commercial democracy and even the technocracy prevalent elsewhere in Europe. His argument situates Irish writer Deirdre Grimes's online journal of pregnancy and birth in the accelerated 5 years of World Wide Web history and hegemony at the time of his writing.

Several essays are peppered with insights from participation in the species of online game called a MOO (a text-created Multi-User Dungeon that is Object-Oriented), specifically the Hotel MOO built by participants at Brown University. "MOO or Mistakenness" contemplates the indeterminacy of textual virtual realities, this one in which novelist Robert Coover was an opinionated participant. "New Stories for New Readers" opens with his participation in a MOO class, his students in chairs or at various desks in Poughkeepsie, New York, while Herr Professor sat among conference participants in Germany. Joyce is in fine form as he critiques the prevalent forms of cyberspace, scorning designers' omnipresent assumptions that the screen must be like television, a box with control buttons.

"Beyond Next before You Once Again: Repossessing and Renewing Electronic Culture" and "Songs of My Selves' Persistence, Momentariness, Recurrence and the MOO" are both ultimately about mortality. Alluding to the poems of Walt Whitman and...