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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: May 2, 2004
Latest Update: May 2, 2004
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Debriefing Our First Hypertext Poem

I just spent ten minutes trying to get my file transfer program to transfer the updated main page for next week's issue. It just wouldn't work. I kept remembering Richard Moncure's advice: "When it doesn't work, your first consideration should be it's the machine's fault." And so I tried, and tried, and tried. And then I noticed that I had last week's issue up, not this week's, so of course, I couldn't see the changes I was making. Duh!

And then I thought of the Naked Space Exhibit and the lost Sign-In book, and how everyone kept telling me it must be somewhere we just hadn't thought to look. And then I found it when I went to pack my briefcase, lying there, all alone in the briefcase. The Naked Space is just like life. We're moving fast; we're tired; I've already moved over to planning Fall classes and new hypertext poems and papers for conferences.

In a linear world, in which we get up in the morning, have a nutritious breakfast, drive to school, spend an hour in our office preparing our thoughts and our day, and then take each task as the previous one is completed, we don't lose the sign-in book in our brief case. But in the reality world we live in today, in which we crawl ungracefully from bed in the morning, grab a cracker to eat in the car, drive (a mere euphemism), fight our way through cars full of other hungry, tired, anxious people who will rush to their first meeting, only to find that six things have gone wrong before the day even starts, in that world we lose things, like the Sign-In book.

If I hadn't been so tired, I would have been devastated that I'd blown it. I was too tired to care. Nevermind that this was the semester I wasn't teaching. Nevermind that I had a husband at home who didn't quite understand why I had to do it, since I was retired and not working this semester, nevermind that we had had to move the whole exhibit downstairs, where people were having trouble finding us because the President decided to move the African-American graduation celebration to Thursday, thus forcing the move, and the that African-American studies program was protesting his unfairness and unconcern for the African-American culture on campus, neverming that lots of our students were participating in that celebration, and so were pulled away from being here at the Naked Space Exhibit, and nevermind that we stayed open to well after the graduation celebration so we could make up for that. I was still devastated that I had lost the book.

This is when it's important to recall Intertextuality. I didn't lose the book in a vacuum. I lost it in the midst of putting up and taking down and putting up again an art exhibit, with many disgruntled people focusing on a separate agenda all around me. When I put the losing of the book in the midst of the infrastructure of myriad interpersonal exchanges and settings in which it took place, well, gee whiz, no wonder I lost the book.

Answerability means you have to listen to yourself, too, folks. Notice I give you A's for meeting the professional standards we set for our exhibit. Setting such standards, and trying to meet them, doesn't mean that things don't go wrong, especially in the structural setting in which we often find ourselves. Answerability means that you have a voice; try to hear it when it speaks to you, too. Sometimes in our rush to achievement and professionalism, we forget that we're not robots. We're Others, with Voices, who Cry Out in Answer, when we and others are too busy to hear.

love and peace, and let yourself answer, too
jeanne