Writing Machines, and Why I am Never Building a Website Again...

(Okay, maybe that last part is a lie. Suffice it to say that I'm a tad frustrated).

Making a website is difficult. I think that most of it has to do with the system here at UWM, which continues to give me headaches. (I won't get into that). The hardest part is deciding what to put on it, where it will go, and why. I feel like I am caught in a manifestation of Weinberger's third-order, miscellaneous world. And I don't like it.

Sometimes, I really hate rhetoric. Anne, I fell into your trap. This is really, really, really hard -- and, of course, that's the point. If it were easy it wouldn't be worth doing, for one thing, and the whole purpose -- as I see it -- is to make us aware of these familiar practices and expectations. Which is good for me. But that doesn't mean I have to like it (which I do, actually, just not while I am working on it).

The real reason I posted is to talk about the connections I am seeing between our class and N. Katherine Hayles' book Writing Machines. The book takes up questions of materiality in the digital age, arguing that scholars/critics/academics transfer practices and assumptions from reading print texts, to digital ones. According to Hayles, this causes the facts of materiality to become invisible. (Remind us of anyone we've read?!?) She analyzes three main texts in her book: the "cybertext" Lexia to Perplexia, Tom Phillips' artist's book A Humument, and Mark Z. Danielewski's A House of Leaves in order to demonstrate the ways we might consider materiality, through authors that take up this question in the form and content of their "books."

While I wish she would have put more pressure on the three texts she discusses, at the same time I really enjoyed her book and her ideas. It made me reconsider how I thought about materiality, both as an aesthetic experience while reading, as well as a field of study. On the one hand, the pleasure of reading for me lies in the tangible, tactile: I love the smell of books, the feel of the pages, the sound that covers and pages make when they rub together. I love curling up and reading by dim soft light. I can't separate these physical, "real" experiences from reading, even if I am reading for school. So when I consider this, I am skeptical of how these internet texts call into question materiality, because it seems so flat for me.

On the other hand, however, I recognize that not taking a print text's materiality seriously leaves us in a bind. We run the risk of taking for granted the materiality of the internet, too -- something many authors we've read this semester have argued. It makes me wonder whether the internet, and texts produced on the internet for the internet, opens up spaces for new modes of materiality, and whether those will come to stand in for, or at least alongside, the other ones. Will I be wholly entangled in the experience of reading an online text, in the same way I am entangled in the experience of reading a printed one? Or, is the very fact that I am asking this question missing the point? And what about the ideas of two (or twenty) materialities arising alongside each other?

I'm not sure. I want to teach this book, someday. And just about everything else we've read. I guess I have a lot of thinking to do.