H. M. Franking, Ph.D.
Second-Generation Hypertext in A Life Set for Two
A Life Set for Two: A Hypertext Poem
by Robert Kendall
Eastgate Systems, Inc.; Windows software; $19.95; Fall, 1996
Reviewed by H. M. Franking, Ph.D.
Robert Kendall calls his book-length hypertext poem, A Life Set for
Two, a lyric. He should know. He’s a print-published, award-winning poet,
who teaches writing on-line for The New School of Social Research in New
York. But if “lyric” makes you think Shelley and Keats or Hallmark, don’t.
A Life is lyrical in the sense that it is a personal meditation.
The narrator recalls a past lover. The lover is an intriguing woman who
is passionately right for him but wrong for him in every other way. Kendall
even uses a romantic setting—the Café Passé—where the reader
makes selections from two main menus: WHAT FED ME and WHAT FED HER. Items
from the first menu include the following: Fall’s Fruit, Seasoned Heart,
Manna from the Stars, Seefood, Wild Game (In Season), Handouts, and from
the second menu include: Fruit’s Falls, The Juicy Part, Dainties Under
Glass, Naughty Treats, Prison Rations, and The Recipe.
There, however, obvious comparisons end between A Life and the traditional,
print lyric. For one thing you need a PC with a color monitor and Windows
to “read” this poem. Kendall, you’ll find, is playing the long, rich history
of the lyric form against the hard-wired, disparate form of computer hypertext.
Hypertext to most is that ubiquitous and seemingly innocuous computer code
used to link computers on the Internet. To others, it’s a harbinger of
the end of print literature and of the concepts of “author,” “reader,”
and “text” as we know them. For instance, Robert Debray, in The Future
of the Book, fears that hypertext will create a kind of “fatherless
and propertyless, borderless and customs-free text, which everyone can
manipulate and which can be disseminated everywhere.”1
A Life should be placed between these two different views
of hypertext. When a reader clicks menu selections in this poem, new screens
open with delightfully vivid and often emotionally charged lines that literally
move onto and around the screen. Here are some examples:
“The sticky
dialogue of our bodies/ wound down into silence.”
“Sometimes
I just had to get out of the house/ and walk through her intentions.”
“I was looking
for a way in/ from her cold/ when our eyes met/ by accident/ in that back-alley
doorway behind desire,/
clutching their
dirty pictures.”
“We didn’t
know where we were headed./ Give me a child,/ she said,/ and we’ll be able
to see the future.”
“There was
a life set for two, somewhere,/ a steel-jawed trap.”
By connecting screens in this way, Kendall uses hypertext as a simple link.
But to prevent his poem from becoming Debray’s worst nightmare, an interactive-reader-dominated-authorless-closureless
text, Kendall creates what I would call “second-generation hypertext.”
As Kendall points out in his essay, “Hypertextual Dynamics,” typical hypertext
lets readers choose different paths through a text. Consequently, he adds,
“the text of individual nodes remain as fixed as pages of print.”2
Using the Visual Basic programming language, Kendall changes this
earlier “static” hypertext into a more dynamic medium with a combination
of “floating links” and “variable nodes.” “Floating links” record and alter
the reader’s progress through the poem by a mix of variables chosen both
by the software at runtime as well as by the reader before and during the
reading. For example, Kendall provides an Option screen that lets the reader
control certain functions, such as text display (kinetic or static), kinetic
text speed, and the duration of pauses between lines. During the reading,
the links are determined by previous menu selections, their chronology,
and other factors programmed into the poem, for instance, the appearance
of a new menu once the reader has read a predetermined portion of the poem.
“Variable nodes” change their text according to the context, depending
again on reader choices from various menus. Once into the poem, the reader,
for example, can change the mood of the speaker by choosing BLUE, RED or
BLACK from the AFTERTASTE menu. A change in mood affects the text even
within the same menu selection.
Below are some lines from the menu WHAT FED ME - Fall’s Fruit displayed
under the BLUE, RED, and BLACK options:
BLUE: “Ah,
the fruit gone by…/ it’s always nicely chilled/ by the lengthening shadows./
I try to remember walking/
through her/
promises/ in their autumn,/ their colors so crisp and delicate,/ her need
rustling gently/ through her
meanings.”
RED: “Ah, the
fruit gone by…/ it’s always/ nicely chilled/ by the lengthening shadows,/
bitter/ though it may be./ I try to
remember walking
through her/ intentions/ in their autumn,/ though their sharp colors cut
into me.”
BLACK: “Ah,
the fruit gone by…/ it’s always/ nicely chilled/ by the lengthening shadows,/
however spoiled/ it may be./
I try to remember
walking/ through her promises in their autumn,/ their plaintive tints flecking/
the breeze.”
Kendall also uses independent “variable nodes,” which alternate certain
words every few seconds as in the following examples:
“The pain/
came from a great distance/ and arrived under a distinguished name/ (‘Trust,’/
’Tenderness,’)/ but was really
just the feel/
of lies against the flesh” and
“Come in search
of/ my (well-meaning/ hard-to-please/ willful) past.”
The “hypertextual dynamics” with which Kendall programs A Life creates
a second-generation of hypertext specifically for this poem. At this time
it cannot be used either by Kendall or other poets for other poems. But
that limitation aside, A Life, as a result, is a more coherent and
complex form of hypertext poetry than offered by most previous hypertext.
It gives the reader a wonderfully high level of choice and interactivity
without diminishing the vision and voice of the poet. A Life is
an excellent model for future hypertext poetry.
Notes:
1. Geoffrey Nunberg, ed., The Future of the Book (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1996, 146.
2. Robert Kendall, “Hypertextual Dynamics in A Life Set for Two.” Proceedings
of the Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext, Washington, DC, 1996. See
copy on Kendall’s website at http://www.wenet.net/~rkendall/ht96.htm.
Copyright 1997, H. M. Franking, Ph.D.
H. M. Franking’s most recent work is CELEBRITY INK, a free on-line tabloid
satire at www.diskotech.com. She also writes books and software and publishes
multimedia novels and nonfiction on CD-ROM and the Internet.
Switched-on Gutenberg
Thematic Contents / Vol. 3, No. 1
Back / Forward