Alexis Turner

The Book of Disquietude....Hypertext Prose

(books, form, hypertext — )

14 Aug. 2007

Even as I am trying to save money for moving to NY, I couldn't help but peep into Daedalus on Saturday (seriously, this is one of 5 things I will actually miss about Portland - I don't think there is a better bookstore anywhere). I ended up carting off 3 books, including Pessoa and Zenith's The Book of Disquietude, Picard's Affective Computing, and Ullman's Close the the Machine.

I've started in simultaneously on all three. At this particular moment, though, I'm thinking of Pessoa's (of course, in another two hours, it'll probably be Picard). It's an interesting form - throughout his life he worked on this semi-autobiographical prose piece...almost like a diary, random thoughts, text snippets, and scribblings on envelopes, ledgers, papers, journals, or whatever was handy, and which he would then throw into a trunk, rearrange periodically, put some bits together in an envelope, others languishing in the trunk, others elsewhere. The book was never completed in his lifetime, and so he basically left behind these....pieces. Snippets. Thoughts.

Then the editors found them and had a field day, putting them together this way and that, rearranging, choosing, sifting. Every version of the book now published is a little different. Different order, different message, different focus. Given this, there's no reason that the reader has to go in this order - you can read it however you want and get a different story, but still the same history, every time. It's 1920's hypertext.

Normally I find hypertext fails to live up to the hype in the name. It's poorly written, the story itself doesn't gain anything by being non-linear. It's just a tired gimmick stretched thin. But in this case, I'm intrigued by the form. Given some of what I was discussing earlier on how the mind makes connections between different events and bits of information, I think such a form of prose offers interesting possibilities. As just one example, I think it'd be awesome to design a system where each of the snippets is exploded out in a database and the user can actually rearrange the story into the form that makes the most sense to them, save it, and order a print on demand book from the results.