Robert Coover, the Hypertext Hotel, and Disappearing Trends

Internet wondering and wandering can be marvelous at times; disconnected threads combine to find a home in one's thoughts. However, what is the goal of the wondering wanderer? To find a home in the wanderer's thoughts, or to be able to learn and teach about the experience? Does one need to be a pondering panderer instead? Regardless, let us start with the dual threads:

• The March 14, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.
• The Intellectual Capital Management (ICM).

Thread No. 1--The New Yorker: This begins with opening up the issue to a full page photograph of an angry Kewpie. For most people, this would mean nothing; but for graduates of David H. Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri, well I guess yes, a Kewpie is it--our unique team mascot. But, the post isn't about the Kewpie, but about the facing single page short story: "Going for a Beer" by Robert Coover. I was an avid fan of Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.,read his other work (backward and forward), and lost track of him after he published (in 1977) The Public Burning,so was very surprised to see that he was still around and writing, so have now embarked to catch up again.

 Thread No.2--ICM and the ICM Movement: This is not my thread, but as with my exploration of the seven principles of learning and of knowledge journalists, a Google search inspired by my wife's reading and wanting to know who or what was the Intellectual Capital Movement and the ICM Group and the ICM Gathering. Well, I found out some stuff, but it was a bit difficult, as it appears to be a thing of the past. ICM built up steam over the 1980's and 1990's as a discipline for channeling the intellectual capital in corporations and then ratcheted up in the early 2000's as a capital M Movement. And then, it was over.


Thanks to an article in 2007 by Joseph E. Root in Intellectual Property Today--"Rembrandts in the Rear View Mirror: The Demise of Intellectual Capital", we can read some of the story of that demise. However, Root's contribution to my wondering was this:

Written explanations for the demise of Intellectual Capital are practically non- existent. Just as the general business press never runs retrospectives about Quality Circles or TQM, the intellectual property trade press concentrates on “law-review lite” legal analysis, trend du jour overviews, and celebrity profiles. There being no sources, the analyst must start with a blank slate.

Like trying to prove a negative, the Net is no different than popular press. You can finding your trending tweet, but what about your nontrending tweet? More significantly, since the Internet leaves many trails of past headlines, that it is much easier to track those down than subsequent disappearances.

So, let me bring Robert Coover back into the story. In investigating what he was doing between 1977 and 2011, I found links about the "Hypertext Hotel" and, as with ICM, wondered what has happened to it, and found it a trial, just as Root did. In fact, in reviewing my searching, I cannot even determine where I did see the first reference, and a clean new search didn't help. Thus, Coover's Wikipedia entry does not mention hypertext, but does link you to the Electronic Literature Organization, of which he was one of the founders. No mentions of the Hypertext Hotel. So, I cheated and just searched for Coover and Hyptertext Hotel and got right to his article "The End of Books" in the New York Times dated June 21, 1992. Hypertext, according to Coover:

"Hypertext" is not a system but a generic term, coined a quarter of a century ago by a computer populist named Ted Nelson to describe the writing done in the nonlinear or nonsequential space made possible by the computer. Moreover, unlike print text, hypertext provides multiple paths between text segments, now often called "lexias" in a borrowing from the pre-hypertextual but prescient Roland Barthes. With its webs of linked lexias, its networks of alternate routes (as opposed to print's fixed unidirectional page-turning) hypertext presents a radically divergent technology, interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author. Hypertext reader and writer are said to become co-learners or co-writers, as it were, fellow-travelers in the mapping and remapping of textual (and visual, kinetic and aural) components, not all of which are provided by what used to be called the author.

And the "Hotel":

In addition to the individual fictions, which are more or less protected from tampering in the old proprietary way, we in the workshop have also played freely and often quite anarchically in a group fiction space called "Hotel." Here, writers are free to check in, to open up new rooms, new corridors, new intrigues, to unlink texts or create new links, to intrude upon or subvert the texts of others, to alter plot trajectories, manipulate time and space, to engage in dialogue through invented characters, then kill off one another's characters or even to sabotage the hotel's plumbing. Thus one day we might find a man and woman encountering each other in the hotel bar, working up some kind of sexual liaison, only to return a few days later and discover that one or both had sex changes.

And the killer comment for my thread, Coover's desires for the Hypertext Hotel:
I would like to see it stay open for a century or two.Well, not, I guess! Trying to check into the Hotel, I find dead links from here (in fact, lots of deadlinks to "http://duke.cs.brown.edu:8888/" and nothing in the Wayback Machine) and a statement of inactivity here. So where can we check into the Hypertext Hotel? As recently as June 2010, Coover could apparently talk about "On the Way to the Hypertext Hotel", but a conference agenda item does not tell one much (although we do have a blog hint of his presentation here and here in another blog). According to Wikipedia, there IS life to electronic literature, but disappearance of it is to be expected:

Electronic literature, according to Hayles, becomes unplayable after a decade or less due to the "fluid nature of media." Therefore, electronic literature risks losing the opportunity to build the "traditions associated with print literature."

So, we are just left to prowl and find what we can:

• a blurb from Australia (whose "Web presence was merely an extension of previously created MUDs" which "left the Hypertext Hotel Web site a potential space with little in the way of characters or plot"),
• a wonderful meta-essay from the Wag's Revue ("Almost two decades later, the Hypertext Hotel still stands, but without upkeep over the years it has decomposed into a creaking mass of dead links and empty rooms. And meanwhile, contrary to Coover’s prediction, linear narratives are still being printed by the ton, while the genre of hypertext fiction has dwindled almost to extinction."),
• a paper speaking to the death of hypertext ("Rumor was that Coover used to stay at the Hypertext Hotel. It was a big shiny place when it was built a few years ago. Now it was run-down, old-fashioned, some of the rooms locked forever."), and
• a tantalizing page with dead links ("My friend was a violinist in a Gainesville band which I learned, to my suprise, back in '97, composed a song about the Hypertext Hotel burning down.") Now that would be nice he hear!

Interesting, so just add this entry as another link in some greater hypertext about hypertext. But do read the early Coover; it was/is great stuff: