Frames!
I keep getting stuck in frames when I try to read "Waves of Girls". Once I hit 4 layers of frames on frames, that was it, I couldn't do it anymore. I don't know if it's my browser or I have really bad luck when it comes to clicking on links, but it gets to the point where it's so garbled and smushed together that nothing at all makes sense anymore. The story doesn't make sense, the images are all strange and all I know is this girl has lots of strange sexual encounters in movie theaters.
Yet again, I don't understand hypertext. I don't find it revolutionary. I find it impossible to wade through in order to make any real sense of what's going on, and all the time, I feel like there's some sort of hipster irony I'm missing, some sort of insider knowledge that would let me in on some kind of cosmic joke. Even though I know it's not mathematically random, it feels random, overwhelmingly so and too disjointed to even begin to understand. (And this from someone who opts to read Faulkner on a regular basis.) If this is the point of non-linear fiction, to be disjointed and fragmented, then I suppose the bigger question is why? What's the point? Is it just more post-modernism--discourse, deconstruction, etc? What does the reader get from the work aside from a sense of chaos? Nothing's relevant, everything's biased, flawed, etc? I don't understand the point. I'm trapped in four layers of frames, my browser's impossible to wade through and all I get is frustrated. This doesn't feel like a narrative, it feels like an exercise in futility.
I'm going to go read some nice, clear Byzantine liturgical documents in Greek from the 9th century now. Have a picture of my frames as a parting shot.
Yet again, I don't understand hypertext. I don't find it revolutionary. I find it impossible to wade through in order to make any real sense of what's going on, and all the time, I feel like there's some sort of hipster irony I'm missing, some sort of insider knowledge that would let me in on some kind of cosmic joke. Even though I know it's not mathematically random, it feels random, overwhelmingly so and too disjointed to even begin to understand. (And this from someone who opts to read Faulkner on a regular basis.) If this is the point of non-linear fiction, to be disjointed and fragmented, then I suppose the bigger question is why? What's the point? Is it just more post-modernism--discourse, deconstruction, etc? What does the reader get from the work aside from a sense of chaos? Nothing's relevant, everything's biased, flawed, etc? I don't understand the point. I'm trapped in four layers of frames, my browser's impossible to wade through and all I get is frustrated. This doesn't feel like a narrative, it feels like an exercise in futility.
I'm going to go read some nice, clear Byzantine liturgical documents in Greek from the 9th century now. Have a picture of my frames as a parting shot.
