heh.
Anyway, it's a feeble attempt to joke on the decentering texts/deranking
works part of this thread (evacuating the centrality of the egg and the
limits the notion of centrality impose on relationships between text and
text, between writer and reader) & lead to an announcement about a bit of
fiddling I've done to one of our net/texts. Been meaning to try this for a
while, but this thread made me get off my duff.
Now if you go to the Interversity Circus thread
(http://www.missouri.edu/~rhentet/circus/) you'll find that each note in
the archive has a form attached that lets you respond to it. Each comment
entered via the form generates an html file for itself, adds a link from
the archive index, and includes its own response form.
See, I think in some respects *this* text that we're constructing here is
a decentered text. Any 'primary' or 'central' bits sustain that role only
briefly before new texts hold our attention and temporarily attain primacy
before yielding... Rather than secondary texts responding to primary
texts, everything almost immediaately becomes secondary. Responses to
responses to responses.
Lists just naturally give that shape to texts. But on the web we (so far)
have really been clinging (if reluctantly) to the primary<--secondary
hierarchy (see Texts, /rhetnet/texts.html, and
Net/Texts, /rhetnet/net_texts.html).
I think this latest rig up may make a difference. We'll see. What I hope
happens is sustained response, perpetual peer review, and the further
blurring of the line between reader and writer roles. MER and I have been
talking about this stuff off & on since Computers & Writing in May, but
have been too busy to bring the subject to the list. He's got some ideas
about how to bring Talmudic commentary practices and complexity theory to
bear on electronic publishing. Oh MER, where *are* you??
Take a look.. See what ya think. Write some comments.
[note: I'm only a kludger here, I have to remind ya, so don't have the
skill to make a sophisticated html-producing script. So it would help for
everybody, when writing comments, to add a <p> tag before or after each
paragraph. Add as much html as you like past that.]
--Eric Crump