TIME REFERENCES
I am going to show some time references shown in almost all the chapters of Victory Garden which are on-line because the full text has more than 500 links and it is unavailable on the web. In some of the examples you can find links to other parts of the text. I have not disabled those links although they will not take you to the example given in the mentioned chapter but they probably take you to another chapter of the text where you could be able to see different examples of other time references mentioned in chapters which I have already explained after or before in my time references examples above.
Halftones
Just like TV from the thirties before Marshall McLuhan discovered the theory of living color.
They've made love with the TV going again, an unbreakable habit from his days on the newsbeat.
He can't for a moment give up the input.
She'll check sometimes while sucking his cock; if his eye starts to wander she knows what to do, but still.
Unreal
For the second time tonight the same thought seized her.
This is the end of the 20th century.
"That was 1938, dear. Way before my time of course."
Images
Thursday night, January 16, 1991. Here is what the war looks like so far:
Peter Jennings, automaton avunculus, looking like he could use a few minutes on the nod, which makes him seem almost human ...
Men in fatigues standing on hotel roofs trying to repeat the obvious while jets scream across the sky ...
Gun camera footage from Libya a few years back: think of these shots as rushes ...
Face the Wall
just as the men in blue had threatened some weeks back.
Unseen
"Guess we'll have to wait for the movies this time around."
Thea shuffled the channels, ended up in a teaser for the local news at ten.
"Where are you tonight, Clint Eastwood?" She stared at the CBS "War in the Gulf" logo running through its animations. The more she watched, the more clearly she understood what she had to do next. She got to her feet.
Face the Wall
Veronica stared at the back of the set. "Fuck." Dan Rather was saying something sanctimonious about Who Started This. Thea wanted to scream, but there it was. January 16.
American planes, no one knew how many, were playing tag-team mayhem over downtown Baghdad, just as the men in blue had threatened some weeks back.
Ground Zero
Bernie's charter back to Atlanta was booked for Thursday but it doesn't look likely.
Iraqi airspace seems pretty crowded at the moment.
Shaw has been told that the Al Rashid, being both tall and centrally located, may be used by Allied flyers as a reference point as they make their runs on the Presidential Palace and Hall of Ministries.
The air-raid sirens have just shut down, there is no immediate evidence of damage. But by now we know.
War Zones
Meanwhile the folks back home had also crossed into another space
Attuned
While it was happening all we wanted was to be multiply channeled and networked.
We yearned to hear all those voices around the dial, not out of distrust or skepticism so much as a hunger for input.
It was a reflex burned in somewhere between Dallas and the Sea of Tranquility
Frenzy
Urquhart stepped into the light again and it was like walking back through the doors of an asylum.
Hi there! Welcome once more to the world of the mad, we're so glad to see you again!
Meanwhile in the Persian Gulf...
All those many voices saying over and over again the same things.
If The Fool Would Persist
When arriving here the hypertext "finishes", but is not a normal finish because this link takes you to two kinds of glosary. One called Pillows of Folly and the other one is called Pillars of Wisdom and may find in both link to each other.
At the end of those pages you can find a link called "home" which takes you to the official web site of Stuart Moulthrop.
But I turned back to the chapter Frenzy and I clicked "more" in order to continue with the text..
Apocalypso
The man's obsession was familiar, almost comforting in a way.
He recalled other crises, all those dangerous intersections of recent years
Each time, a few minutes into the present danger, there'd be Macarthur on the line from New York, L.A., or the desert, talking in that vague tone that said all our operators are busy but passing on the updates nice and steady.
Buildup
"It's been so carefully worked out. Look: we had our last-minute diplomatic exercises, we had our Congressional debates, all three days of them.
We had our steady buildup of 'defensive' forces in the Gulf since about the second week of August. And if you want to go back before that, we had Panama, Grenada, and a couple of airplane fights with the Libyans back in the Reagan days, remember? Bush and his people have dreamed about this war for years."
Lucy Reasons
Sometimes Lucy was a voice on the telephone as well as in her head, and Veronica knew she would be calling soon.
Lucy had gone through a number of these stories in the time Veronica had known her.
Games
Thea stopped a second, hearing her own echoes, realizing that she was off on another lecture. But it was too late, the spirit was upon her, and after all, what was Veronica to expect
"That's right, kiddo. It's a serious game this time. A very big game."
Turbulence Down On Me
What is it about August? -- George Bush, 8-20-91
No more links in here. I had to click "more" to follow the hypertext.
New World Order II: The Evil Empire Strikes Back!
Just when you thought it was safe to plug back into daytime television...
but at the moment the reports are still sketchy.
So far it's been a time of wondering what's next. Is it the fire this time
No more links in here. I had to click "more" to follow the hypertext.
Balanced Coverage
Dan Rather flashes a quick smile of wry embarrassment and assures daytime America that he's trying to "balance" coverage of the Moscow coup against blabber about the Hurricane.
No more links in here. I had to click "more" to follow the hypertext.
9/91
Well there you go again. Iraq reneges on the February cease-fire, harrassing and threatening UN inspectors, and now we're back where we were last September with the White House talking about a military response. Oh it wouldn't be another war, they tell us, just a few punitive airstrikes to remind Saddam who his real masters are.
No more links in here. I had to click "more" to follow the hypertext.
Want More?
After clicking "more" in the last chapter, it takes you here. This page is one one the several finishes that Victory Garden has. But is not really a finish, is just the finish of the text on-line because, as I say in my conclusion, in some other part of this paper or as the author, Mr. Moulthrop, write to me in his e-mail, this hypertext, Victory Garden, only has on-line the 10% of the whole text.
So this has been my way of reading this hypertext. It could have more ways to read by clicking in the other links given in the different chapters and I have read other links that I have not posted on here but no one of them has a final because the very finish in not on-line but if you are interested in reading the whole text, is available in Eastgate.
He first started with an adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story ”The Garden of Forking Paths” (which included a mass of original text in addition to Borges’ source story) using software he had programmed himself for this purpose. He later transferred the text into the brand new Story Space hypertext environment – the work and its reception by a group of students is described in Moulthrop’s influential essay ”Reading from the Map: Metonymy and Metaphor and the Fiction of Forking Paths”. Victory Garden was published in 1991. After that he has done mainly Web-based works, including The Colour of Television (1996; with Sean Cohen), Hegirascope (1995/1997), and Reagan Library (1999). Hegirascope effectively uses push technology to produce a stream of narrative fragments starting with the highly charged ”What if the word would not be still?” header. Reagan Library uses Quick Time VR plug-in to add a three-dimensional panorama illustration to the hypertext – the work can be navigated both through the panorama or through the text links. Reagan Library also uses random operators in selecting the text materials – repeated visits to particular locations add information to them, thus ”reducing noise” and giving more coherent picture of the text.
One obvious difference between Victory Garden and Afternoon or Patchwork Girl is size: Victory Garden includes 993 lexias, and more than 2804 links connecting them (compared to 539 lexias in Afternoon with 951 links, and 323 lexias in Patchwork Girl with 462 links) . In Victory Garden there are also several original features like a menu of preordered paths, and a map of the ”Victory Garden” – this map differs fundamentally from the cognitive maps representing the hypertextual structure employed in Patchwork Girl (and in the PC version of Afternoon).
Victory Garden (Macintosh version) employs the most simple variant of reader interfaces Story Space offers. The navigating mainly happens through a toolbar with five functions: the backtrack button (takes you back to the previously read lexia), the link list button (opens a window listing all the links leaving from the current lexia, each link is named and the title of destination lexia is told), the yes/no button (can be used to answer possible questions in the text), the print button (makes a hardcopy of the lexia), and the type-in field. Usually each lexia has a default link, that is, simply by pressing the return key the reader can follow a path provided by the author. Pressing the control keys shows the anchor words/ phrases by framing them (double clicking these words activates links which may differ from the default link). In short, the reader may move in the text by pressing the return key after reading each lexia, double clicking anchor words, opening the link list and selecting a link from the list, by typing a word in the type-in box (an alternative to double clicking anchor words), or, back-tracking her way.
From the title page on, the reader has several options for going forward. She can go to the map and choose one of the lexias presented there as her starting point. She can also go to the page listing ”Paths to Explore”, thirteen preordered pathways through the text each concentrating on different aspects of the narrative materials (some of them loosely organised around various characters appearing in the text). From the ”Paths to Explore” there is a default link – which is easily left unnoticed – leading to a lexia listing ”Paths to Deplore”, offering seven more preordered paths (it should be noted that even when choosing one of these paths, the reader may always choose not to follow the default links and select an alternative narrative strain). There is still the possibilty of going to a lexia where you can build up a sentence by repeatedly choosing a word from two alternatives offered. This way several different sentences can be constructed, each leading to different starting points (some of the sentences coinciding with the starting of ”Paths to Explore” & ”Paths to Deplore”).
Once having started reading the reader confronts fragments of narratives (usually several clearly successive lexias developing a certain story strand), letters, tv-report transcripts, citations from books fictional and theoretical, song lyrics and other various materials. Most of the materials are related to the Gulf War in 1991 – either things happening in the Gulf area, or, meanwhile in the home front. The Gulf War figures heavily in all the story lines, if not concretely influencing characters’ lives, then at least as a background force for larger changes in society affecting indirectly (but not a bit more weakly) their lives.
There are direct citations from Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories ”Garden of Forking Paths” and ”Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, as well as more or less implicit allusions to them. There are also mentions to or citations from such novels as Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, and Finnegan’s Wake ("river Rerun"). The theoretical materials include citations from Donna Haraway, Neil Postman, Arthur C. Kroker, Jay David Bolter, Michael Joyce etc.
Victory Garden, like Afternoon, is dominated by plain alphanumeric text. The map in the beginning is one obvious exception; there are also a few lexias with crude graphics (see picture), the signatures in letters are reproduced in handwriting, and there is even one crossword-cum-concrete poetry style lexia. The letters differ from other text by different font type.
Source: Digital Literature
