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     Letters
     
     Volume 8, Number 2
     January, 1998
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     The following responses were submitted by PMC readers
     using regular e-mail or the PMC Reader's Report form.
     Not all letters received are published, and published
     letters may have been edited.

     Copyright (c) 1998 by the authors, all rights reserved.
     This text may be used and shared in accordance with the
     fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may
     be archived and redistributed in electronic form,
     provided that the editors are notified and no fee is
     charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or
     republication of this text on other terms, in any
     medium, requires the consent of the authors and the
     notification of the publisher, the Johns Hopkins
     University Press.

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     Reader's Report on Michael Joyce's "Twelve Blue" (PMC
     7.3):

     "Twelve Blue" reminded me of this excerpt from from
     Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories:

          ...the Water Genie told Haroun about the Ocean of
          the Streams of Story, and even though he was full
          of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic
          of the Ocean began to have a magic effect on
          Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it
          was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and
          one different currents, each of a different color,
          weaving in and out of one another like a liquid
          tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and the
          [Water Genie] explained that these were the
          Streams of Story, that each colored strand
          represented and contained a single tale. Different
          parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of
          stories, and as all the stories that had ever been
          told and many that were still in the process of
          being invented could be found here, the Ocean of
          the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest
          library in the universe. And because the stories
          were held here in fluid form, they retained the
          ability to change, to become new versions of
          themselves, to join up with other stories and so
          become other stories...

     These comments are from: Caroline Honig

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     Michael Joyce replies:

     Dear Caroline Honig,

     PMC has passed along your reader's report and I am
     grateful for your reminder of Rushdie's strands and
     streams which, while not explicitly on my mind when I
     literally drew out the strands for "Twelve Blue,"
     cannot have been out of mind either.

     In his essay "In the Ocean of Streams of Story"
     (Millenium Film Journal No. 28 [Spring]:
     Interactivities, 15-30:
     http://www.sva.edu/MFJ/GWOCEAN.HTML), the interactive
     cinema artist Grahame Weinbren asks:

          Can we imagine the Ocean as a source primarily for
          readers rather than writers? Could there be a
          "story space"... like the Ocean, in which a reader
          might take a dip, encountering stories and
          story-segments as he or she flipped and dived? In
          these waters, turbulences created by the swimmer's
          own motion might cause an intermingling of the
          Streams of Story where the very attempt to examine
          a particular story-stream transforms it. What a
          goal to create such an Ocean! And how suitable an
          ideal for an interactive fiction!

     The hypertext novelist Carolyn Guyer, whose Mother
     Millennia project (http://mothermillennia.org) imagines
     its own sea of "2000 stories of mother by the year
     2000" came to hypertext after imagining artist's books
     where the connections among characters, themes, images,
     etc., would literally be threaded through the leaves of
     the book into cat's-cradle-like webs of shifting forms.

     My own favorite memory of story strands is from a
     session at an educational conference where I asked
     people in the audience of the final luncheon to create
     a human hypertext (what else is there?). As they took
     part in the discussion I asked successive speakers to
     toss balls of colored yarn across the room to others in
     the audience with whose ideas they felt a connection.
     It did not take long before the audience was strewn
     with trails of brightly colored yarn marking the weave
     of shared ideas.

     Your note struck me as one such strand. Thank you.

     Michael Joyce

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     Richard Crew and Arkady Plotnitsky, Exchange on
     Plotnitsky's essay, "'But It Is Above All Not True'"
     Derrida, Relativity and the 'Science Wars,'" Postmodern
     Culture 7.2

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