Version 6.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Linux.

The absolute highlight of my time at MLA09 was the night panel on transmedia narratives. I finally got to meet my friend Christy Dena and also catch up with some other friends. Here are my notes:

Marc Ruppel

• The biggest shift in storytelling has been multiplatform narratives
• What are they? digital/analog, oral/audio, etc
• Examples of transmedia narratives: Lost, Buffy The Vampire Slayer series eight comic, etc
• Connectivity: Edges as transactional spaces
• Reading paths, instead of just left to right now…(It’s refreshing to hear this; I’ve been saying this for a long time!!!)

Migratory cues:

• Direct-URLs, books, phone numbers, business cards (the series Heroes was the example for some of these)
• Intermedial-Direct prescence of one site’s content in anothers
• Intersectional-One site reflects and approximates momentary events of another
• Often used in combination
• Visualize network as a whole

Christy Dena

• Presence of narrative and nonnarrative
• Jenkins transmedia storytelling definition
• Transmedia fiction definition: stories and games
• Distributed narratives, Jill Walker-Rettberg definition
• Jane McGonigal/Ubiquitous Gaming
• Jesper Juul/Definition of “game” (I wrote about that once)
• Fictional world is transmodel

After this, I just sat and listened to everything Christy was saying. Her work is fascinating and close to what I originally wanted to write about in my Master’s Thesis before sliding to something more “Englishy” (see about Distributed Narrative)

I also asked a question to Marc and Christy about the role of canon in fan culture. Specifically, I was curious how they regarded fan fiction and spinoff noncanonical media in regards to their examples of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who. The BTVS series eight comic is pretty established as canonical, but what about Doctor Who where there are numerous comics, Big Finish audios, and other things where their place in the canon is murky at best. Both Marc and Christy said that trying to decipher between all of that just wasn’t worth doing, so they regards everything in the same manner. I can certainly understand that.

Afterwards, while catching up with Christy, we also talked about the defining of new terms which she does in her work. While writing my Master’s Thesis, I had trouble enough with resistance to terms like ergodic, distributed narrative, hypertext, etc. Christy is creating new terms as she goes.

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(inspiration)

During the fall of 2004, the following are guilty as charged of offering inspiration for what you are reading.

• Scott Rettberg’s hypertext fiction The Meddlesome Passenger.
• Jorge Luis Borges’ collection Labyrinths, especially The Library Of Babel, The Immortal, and The Circular Ruins.
• The literary weblog Conversational Reading, which, beyond generally getting me excited about literature, introduced me to the work of Gilbert Sorrentino, referenced in the penultimate lexia.
• Jill/txt was a daily, still, source of inspiration.  A conversation with Jill in real life inspired a lexia.
• Grand Text Auto in general.
• Shelley Jackson’s My Body a Wunderkammer, which made me cry more than once and pushed me to be brave enough to write about sexuality issues.
• Of course, The Unknown Collective’s The Unknown, which greatly influenced how I both read and write hypertext, and my aesthetic vision for hypertext fiction.
• Derik Badman’s, who I met on a , writing about constraints at the time I was writing War Prayers inspired me to try to write three hundred word, exact, entries.
• Although offline, Rettberg and Nick Montfort’s sticker novel Implementation was paradoxically what made me create a blog to document War Prayers.  I had to get my words onto a screen somewhere.  I even created a few summary stickers, one of which still is on a wall at The Richard Stockton College Of New Jersey underneath an Implementation sticker.

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• The Institute For The Future Of The Book sums up my ill feelings about John Updike:

His death is, in a sense, another nail in the coffin of a kind of literary vanguard. I can understand why this blog’s readership might relish, openly or in private, the extinction of these writers, particularly given the old school’s knee-jerk aversion to new methodologies and shifting boundaries. By 2006, as the sensationally-titled “The End of Authorship” attests, it seemed that Updike opposed progress in the humanities more than he furthered it. The voguish sentiment, for better or worse, was disdain for his belletristic ways.

• This surreal story from Rolling Stone about the fallout of a sexual relationship between a student and teacher is equal parts surreal, disturbing in ways that get worse with each page, but also not surprising.
• on creating fan fiction with Twitter.  I am a lot more enthusiastic about it than he is, having been created for the excellent Mad Men series he mentions for awhile now.  This reminds me a lot of the, based in Livejournal, AIM accounts a number of fans created for Buffy The Vampire Slayer characters.  They were fun to interact with and stayed in character really well.  Twitter is a much more interesting medium for this sort of thing.
• The new issue of Game Studies is now out.
• Jane McGonigal on why she is not a game evangelist.

This week’s video is Black Flag from the same show the Saccharine Trust footage was taken from.  You’ll want to especially pay attention to Greg Ginn’s ridiculous guitar playing.

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• Thomas Pynchon’s A Journey Into The Mind Of Watts

• The New Yorker endorses Barack Obama in very strong terms.
• …and on Emily Dickinson.
• The interesting looking First Wall Rebate podcast interviewed Nick Montfort recently.
• Literary Kicks on John Ruskin.
• Welcome back, Michael Berube.

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• Factcheck.org rips apart Jerome Corsi’s “mishmash of unsupported conjecture, half-truths, logical fallacies and outright falsehoods,“ The Obama Nation.
• Weekly…viewing: After a bunch of years of rumors, the four minute pilot for the proposed Buffy The Vampire Slayer animated series (planned to take place early in the series) has finally leaked onto the internet:

I have to say, this looks pretty good.  The dialouge stays very true to the series and the animation reminds me a lot of the excellent Batman: The Animated Series.

• Amy Goodman writes for Mother Jones about librarians in Connecticut who fought, and defeated, a National Security Letter.
• I am pretty excited that Bob Mould is writing an autobiography.
• The Complete Review reviews William Goldbloom Blooch’s The Unimaginable Mathematics Of Borges’ Library Of Babel.

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• Scott Esposito reviews Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention Of Morel over at Boldtype.

• The New Yorker profiled Harold Pinter last winter.

Meanwhile…

• Jacket Copy covers Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, which just had a new book come out recently. I didn’t even know this series existed until recently but a lot of people seem to think it will be the heir to the Harry Potter series. But, seriously, a seventeen year old girl moves to a new town and falls in love with a vampire? I think I have seen this before. Hmm…

• Delicious (minus the dots) 2.0 has finally launched in the past few days. Ever since Firefox added tagging to their bookmarks I haven’t had a lot of use for it anymore, but I will check it out.

• George Orwell’s diaries are going to be blogged starting this week.

• Pinter’s Nobel lecture from 2005 is pretty righteous.

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A brief Weekly Reader this week.  I finished up my summer course on Monday and have been dealing with job applications since.  Back to normal next week.

• By far the best review of Armageddon In Retrospect I have read is the one in The Quarterly Conversation.

• From Slayage issue twenty four, Julie Sloan Brannon’s essay about power structures in season six and seven of Buffy The Vampire Slayer “It’s About Power”: Buffy, Foucault, and the Quest For Self.  I am particularly interested in Brannon’s discussion of season six and Campbell’s “refusal of return.”

• Lauren Elkin on Simone de Beauvoir.

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