"Coffee stall by the front entrance. People drinking coffee in the shade of a tree. More or less everyone in suits. Business coffee-break. Giles, meet me at half-two, outside the church, for a power-espresso. Stockbrokers, financiers, commodity-dealers. I don't do tangibles, I do invisibles, I'm into futures, that's where the big money is. Right in front of the church steps. If Jesus were to pay an unexpected visit, I wonder if he'd knock their tables over?"

Continuing the hyperfiction based on visits to churches in the City of London. Part 2 takes in the following:

All Hallows by the Tower
St Olave
St Margaret Pattens

To view the London Churches project, go to http://edwardpicot.com/londonchurches/ .

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange

PS - Get well soon, Millie!

"The house was full of packing-cases. Even the pretty lawn at the side was to pack up, stiffly and slowly, through the bare echoing November. The very robin that her father had so often made, with his own hands, more gorgeous than ever; amber and golden; here, at this bed of thyme, began to speak of carrots. The grand inarticulate mighty roar."

I recently made contact, after many years, with an old college friend called Katrin McGibbon. When I inquired what she was doing, she revealed that she was abridging Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South for the radio. As a joke, I suggested that instead of trying to reduce the size of the book without losing any of the essentials, it might be an idea to discard all the important bits and keep the other stuff. Then I had a go at using this method myself, and found it to be both more difficult and much more rewarding than I had expected. I intend to abridge the whole book in this way, and the first eight chapters are now online.

http://edwardpicot.com/and/

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange

Newly co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange: a review of The Path, a "short horror game" by Tale of Tales (Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey), based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

"The two best-known versions of the tale are by Charles Perrault and the Grimm Brothers - but there are numerous others. Sometimes Red Riding Hood meets not a wolf but an ogre; sometimes, when she gets to the house, she is fed various parts of a dismembered grandmother. Samyn and Harvey retain the gruesomeness, the allusions to dismemberment, and the violent sexuality which feature in many earlier versions, and the symbolism which lurks beneath the surface of Red Riding Hood in all its various manifestations comes through particularly strongly."

To read the whole article, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewthepath.php or http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=358 .

- Edward Picot
personal website - http://edwardpicot.com

I have now finished revising The Puzzle Box, as follows:

1. A new interface/front cover
2. One new Help Card animation and a couple of minor amendments to other animations
3. More sparing use of the box-icon within the chapters: it now only appears at those points where the box is mentioned in the narrative, and where readers will find something new if they click to open it
4. The page-background for Chapter Three has been redesigned
5. The text has been thoroughly proof-read and various minor amendments have been made
6. On the back of this (show me the money!), a print version is now available via www.lulu.com and will soon be available from Amazon

http://www.edwardpicot.com/puzzlebox/
(If you don't see the new interface, with lots of pictures on it, when you get to the Puzzle Box index-page, click CTRL + Refresh to update.)

Some recommended videos:

Recently, largely under the tutelage of the film-maker Michael Szpakowski (http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/vlog/ScenesOfProvincialLife.cgi), I've been looking at a lot of experimental videos, and I've been really surprised and excited by some of the work. Below is a selection of some personal favourites, and it seems to me that one of the most noteworthy things about them is how different they are from each other in terms of their style:

OK Charlie by Brian Gibson - http://lucidunison.com/baio/okcharlie_web.mov: A portrait of the video artist Doron Golan by his fellow-artist Brian Gibson. Golan chinks his coffee-cup and says "OK Charlie"; the sequence is looped; and suddenly we're listening to a tune. Manages to be fingerclickin' funky and toe-curlingly clever at the same time.

Journey by Robert Croma - http://robertcroma.com/2008/09/24/the-journey/: Commuters on a tube train: profiles, the backs of heads, shoulders, sliding doors. About halfway through this video there's an extremely subtle transition from observational realism to something symbolic and metaphysical, leading up to a magical moment at the end.

Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie - http://www.myspace.com/orenlavie: A video, co-directed by singer-songwriter Oren Lavie, to go with his song of the same name. The song is pretty good, but the video is really lovely, a supremely inventive piece of stop-motion animation featuring a girl on a bed and a lot of pillows and laundry.

The 9th Allegro by Doron Golan - http://www.the9th.com/04/the9th_allegro/allegro9.mov: All of Doran Golan's videos are worth seeing, but this is one of the most outstanding, and contains many of his most important themes: a sense of place, a sense of character, a sense of culture and history, a really complex, stereotype-free attitude towards politically explosive material, and above all tremendous qualities of composition, structure and control.

Inaugurationanimation by Pall Thayer - http://www.vimeo.com/2917641: Television coverage of the US Presidential Inauguration, slowed down and processed until it acquires a rich painterly texture. Redolent not just of American history and American politics, but the history of American art too. The slowness of the action seems to bring out the patrician, studied aspect of the ceremony: the intensely aspirational quality, the feeling that individuals can make a difference, that the human spirit is inherently noble, and that the world can be made a better place if we just make a sufficient effort - along with the intense theatricality, the self-regard, the sense that these gestures are being made with the whole world for an audience, and that if you can just get the gestures right it almost doesn't matter what you actually do.

U cant hold me down by Donna Kuhn - http://digitalaardvarks.blogspot.com/2009/02/u-cant-hold-me-down.html: The dancer and artist Donna Kuhn has gradually been evolving her own completely individual style of experimental video, and this is one of the best examples. Glimpses of dance, glimpses of sea-shore, and glimpses of Donna's spiky, Klee-style drawings combine into something mysterious, tense, sad and poetic.

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website

“All of yesterday I feared for my husband's life,” said the Queen. “I carried him to my palace beneath the earth, and gave him food and drink. Ice-cold water from the well beneath the world-tree, and manna from the deserts of the moon. Tonight he stood up and asked what time of year it was. Then he went roaming out into the world, as he used to in the old days. I went up to the moon, to keep watch, and it seemed to me that the world already looked different. Then I remembered the puzzle that you had shown me, Dora, and I guessed the answer."

The secret of the box is revealed, the children see Father Christmas, and Dora learns what she has to do to get her Dad back.

"The Puzzle Box has all the magical numinous quality of Lewis, Tolkien,
and L'Engle." - Millie Niss, writer and new media artist, http://www.sporkworld.org .

Chapter eleven is online now: please note that chapter twelve will be uploaded on Christmas Eve. I shan't be posting any notices about it, so please remember to check back.

http://www.edwardpicot.com/puzzlebox/
(If you don't see links to all the chapters when you get to the Puzzle Box index-page, click CTRL + Refresh to update the page.)

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website

Newly co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange: an appreciation of David Daniels, the great shape-poet, who died in May 2008.

"Daniels is one of those figures who straddles the divide between digital and pre-digital art and literature... His art is about liberation, uninhibited outpouring, spontaneity and fun."

To read the whole article, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewdaniels.php or http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=323 .

A page of tributes to David Daniels (entitled "Tributes to David Daniels by divers hands") is also being compiled at http://hyperex.co.uk/reviewdanielstributes.php . If you would like to add a tribute of your own (in whatever form you prefer), please send it to edward at edwardpicot.com - a small prize will be sent to the best one received before 1st March 2009.

- Edward Picot
personal website - http://edwardpicot.com

"Urizen is trapped by his own laws. He no longer truly believes in anything outside himself. His only way of relating to the outside world is either to fear it or to steal something from it. He has turned the infinite possibilities of the human heart into a little machine of self-interest. And because of that, his life is a life without hope.”

In search of Dora's box, the children find their way right to the heart of Urizen's headquarters, and discover something entirely different from what they were expecting.

"A wonderful story... This is one for reading aloud, or working with online." - Judy O'Connell, HeyJude (Learning in a Online World), http://heyjude.wordpress.com/ .

The tenth chapter of twelve.

http://www.edwardpicot.com/puzzlebox/
(If you don't see links to all ten chapters when you get to the Puzzle Box index-page, click CTRL + Refresh to update the page.)

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website

“At the base of the back wall, between the skirting-board and the floor, the corner of something was poking out. It was pure fluke that she noticed it, because the skirting-board and the floor were both white, and the poking-out corner was white too. She crouched down and slid it free. It was like the back of a white credit-card, with a black magnetic band running across it. She turned it over. It was like an identity-card, except that there was no writing. At the left-hand end there was a picture of someone's face. Rather a disconcerting face: pale, white-bearded, with mournful, haunted eyes. People always look bad in identity-card photographs, but this face was especially ghoulish-looking. And she had the odd feeling that she'd seen it somewhere before.”

It's Christmas Eve, and Dora is trapped in a huge tower-block in the middle of London. She's lost the puzzle box, and she still can't find her Dad. But at least she's got Adam with her again.

The ninth chapter of twelve.

http://www.edwardpicot.com/puzzlebox/
(If you don't see links to all nine chapters when you get to the Puzzle Box index-page, click CTRL + Refresh to update the page.)

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website

“Tired as they were, they almost ran up the last part of the stair, and found themselves in another cave; but it was completely different to the one with the snake in it. As far as they could see by the light of the box, it was crammed with old bric-a-brac: bits and pieces of every possible description, some of them valuable but most of them not, thrown together in a horrendous jumble, stacked up high above their heads, and covered in dust and cobwebs. There were walking-sticks, pith helmets, books, dolls, carpets, bottles, pens, games of Monopoly, stuffed animals, false teeth, family photographs, toy trucks, maps, birthday cards, pram wheels, diaries, screwdrivers, umbrellas, plugs, pianos, old coins, kettles, picture frames, odd shoes, Gladstone bags, wooden legs, rocking chairs, someone's PE kit, and so on and so on and so forth and so forth – like the contents of the biggest, dirtiest and most badly-organised second-hand shop in the world.”

The children encounter a shape-shifter called Ratatosk, who tells them about the snake they have seen, a tree called Yggdrasil, some owls, and the Queen of the Night. Dora rediscovers one of her old dolls, and Ratatosk explains how possessions get lost so easily, and why things don't always work when they ought to.

The sixth chapter of twelve.

"We are enjoying The Puzzle Box very much!" - William, www.artselector.com

http://www.edwardpicot.com/puzzlebox/

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website


NEW FROM MY LINKS PAGES:

Title: Fundamentals (http://www.deenalarsen.net/fundamentals/)

Description: From hypertext fiction author Deena Larsen, an introduction to the fundamentals of hyperliterature. This is intended as a teaching aid, and it's not just for students of the genre but for those who are interested in producing hyperliterature themselves. As such, it provides a relatively jargon-free approach with lots of practical exercises and examples of work from here and there around the Web. It seems a trifle oldfashioned in its assumption that hyperliterary texts should generally have mazeliks structures of multiple links and nodes, in the style popularised by Eastgate, but it remains a thoroughly useful primer all the same.



Title: http://www.realitycpu.com

Description: From Tabor Robak. As described by Rhizome (www.rhizome.org), this is "like stumbling upon a scrambled memory bank of images captured sometime around 1993: a dream-arcade of faux vector graphics, neon color schemes, Uzi-blasting last action heroes and gratuitous drop-shadows". I'll go along with that. The same writeup goes on to attempt to ascribe some deeper meaning to the piece, which I'm not so sure about - but it's an absolute blast anyway.

"The mouse did seem to be waiting: instead of scampering into the darkness it held itself almost completely still, except for small attentive movements of its ears and the constant trembling of its whiskers."

On the run from Urizen's henchmen, the children undertake a hazardous underground journey. At the bottom of a frozen cavern, they find out more about one of the clue cards.

This chapter is dedicated to David Daniels (http://www.thegatesofparadise.com/), the great American shape-poet, who died in May. Two of his last e-mails to the WebArtery group (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/webartery/) were about The Puzzle Box: "I want to buy this yellow cards. This is gripping... truly healthy and mysterious in an elegant way!" It makes me very sad that he won't be around to read the end.

http://www.edwardpicot.com/puzzlebox/

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website