Understanding Hypertext by Richard A. Holeton Hypertext Re: Perth rep, PR-type hype. Per HTTP pretext, “Trey, eh Tex? Tee-hee!” (he, her hyper Exert petty hex, retype the eery “pyx pyre” text. Alan Richardson, a short, pale, freckled, pixie-eared Bay Area daytrader, amassed a fortune during the boom and, post-meltdown, decided to grow a ponytail and compose a poem using only hidden words and anagrams from the nine-letter word hypertext. He emailed it to friends. He said the poem was just a simple word game, though he hoped it might make “some kind of syntactic sense” or even “suggest a coherent narrative.
Ellen Richards was the first to notice that the 69 words of “Hypertext” comprise all the possible words hidden in hypertext, except for British spellings (tyre); out-of-fashion slang (prexy for president); archaisms and obscurities (ere, ye, ret, rete); and a few abbreviations (PE, PT, TX, and HRT, i.e., Hormone Replacement Therapy). Richards further noted that the poem uses each word only once; no plurals or other modifications are allowed; and the initial letters of each line unscramble to spell hypertext (allowing Ex = x).
Richard Alan Holeton, the author of this essay, would like to thank all those who have expressed their appreciation for his contributions to the “Hypertext” fan community. It has been suggested, ungenerously, that Holeton wrote this essay merely to plug his own “fan-fiction” story, “Another Day at the Office,” after it was rejected at all the existing venues. Not so.
Fan fiction is amateur fiction based on TV shows, movies, and other cultural products. It started in the 1970s when Star Trek fans began publishing stories about Captain Kirk and Commander Spock based on what they perceived as the homoerotic subtext. Kirk/Spock or K/S came to represent “slash” or homosexual fanfic, and slash grew to include lesbian tracks like J/7, focusing on the attraction between Captain Janeway and Seven of Nine, the sexy hybrid Borg-human in Star Trek: Voyager (and fanfic wife of Dick Hellton, below). Other series from the 1980s and 1990s—The X-Files, Xena: The Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc.—inspired their own fan communities to fill in the cracks, as it were, of the received mass narratives. Celebrity-inspired amateur writing got a huge boost from the Internet and the Web. Slash led to het (heterosexual), gen (G-rated fanfic), metafic and authorfic and subreality (a border zone where characters aware of their status as fictional creations may mingle with authors or other real-life characters). “Mary Sue” stories, named for a character in early Star Trek fanfic, are a wish-fulfillment genre in which a heroic and good-looking proxy for the author performs a crucial role, e.g., “Another Day at the Office.”
In “Another Day,” Dick A. Hellton, a hotly handsome computer-security middle manager, is the true author of both “Hypertext” the poem and “Understanding ‘Hypertext,’” an essay assessing current critical views of the poem....
If you liked this so far, Richard Holeton is head of residential computing at Stanford. E-mail: holeton@stanford.edu |