January 14th, 2010

Some reviews about “Making Scenes”

Adrienne Eisen: Making Scenes

Alt-X Press (Trade Paperback), ISBN 0-374-52704-0

I read this book from cover to cover, only putting it aside when the demands of my life became too persistent to ignore, and then I thought to myself, Wow!

I knew from other reading that Adrienne Eisen won an award for her electronic writing. So I ran a quick Google search to learn more about a genre called hypertext fiction at which she evidently excels.

From what I can gather, this mode of writing attempts to exploit the capacities of hypertext in order to create a layered, non-linear, reading experience for its audience. A piece of hypertext fiction therefore, comprises a few dozen or so individual scenes, linked to each other either directly or in roundabout way for the reader to browse in whichever sequence appeals to her, perhaps as she might view a collage of visual images. The reader assimilates all these bits in her mind, together with her own experience to synthesize a unique work of art — one conceivably quite different from the one that another reader might compose from her readings.

The tangible nature of a dead-tree book can’t properly reproduce this kind of text, yet Eisen manages to approximate some of the adventure of hyper-textuality inMaking Scenes. She constructs her entire book as a number of vignettes and scenes narrated by her protagonist. Then she arranges them randomly in terms of time and place to try and escape the bounds of linearity. She also introduces an occasional subtle discrepancy between the young woman narrator’s version of events and that which an observant reader might detect as what really occurred.

Making Scenes traces the life of a twenty-something-young woman rebelling against her parents’ expectations by underachieving academically and over-indulging in sensory stimulation. The disjointed nature of the text evokes very effectively the confusion and pain of a young person trying to make sense of the experiences of her childhood. Perhaps not a novel to enchant the faint-hearted reader, but it will pique the reader whose comfort zones gladly engage with assault.

Moira Richards


Information found in: http://www.crescentblues.com/7_12issue/bk_eisen_scenes.shtml


Book Review: Eisen’s Everywoman:’ She’s Neurotic to the Bone

“Making Scenes” is now in wide release.

She’s just about the only person I know who has kissed her own dad. And not in that dad-kissing kinda way. The nameless narrator of Adrienne Eisen’s “Making Scenes” moves to L.A. and does all the “typical L.A. girl stuff.” That is to say she marches through a foray of shocking sexual affairs with admirable perseverance and zeal, binges and purges, thinks she might be a lesbian and spends all of her time traipsing around in her bikini. She may not have a name, but she’s infinitely recognizable.

Adrienne Eisein is better-known for her award-winning hypertext writings and Making Scenes is her first novel. The influence of her hypertext background shows itself in the discontinuous and non-linear (some might say choppy) presentation of the events of the novel. For those veteran novel readers approaching Making Scenes, Eisen’s hypertext-esque narrative style can be a bit uncomfortable.

Like Eisen herself, the narrator is a native of Chicago. The novel opens with her flipping out upon college graduation, refusing to accept money from her wealthy suburbanite parents and moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career as a professional beach volleyball player. At first glance it looks like it’s going to be a funny book. And while it is funny, at the same time it’s really, really not.

She can’t hold down a relationship because all the guys she goes for are married or engaged. She can’t hold down a job because she gets fired for stealing food to support her bulimic activities. But she’s not stupid. She’s not ugly or fat. She’s smart, she’s athletic and she loves to read. She wants to go back to graduate school and when she does I’m both exuberant and dejected, because it’s just another great thing her hang-ups will make terrible for her. There’s no way it can last, just like everything else she tries to do.

If you feel like it, you can read the novel online at her website www.apc.net/adrienne. It’s the same novel, but it’s not as optimism-crushing as reading the whole thing in its entirety without interruption (yes, even having to click the mouse can make a difference, I think). Both are written discontinuously and you start to wonder what the heck is up with this girl until you find yourself in the middle of her childhood (after you’ve just been in the middle of her adult life) and things start to make sense. It’s interesting to see where she’s coming from after you already know where she ended up.

Eisen’s narrator is identifiable but still completely isolated in this novel that takes you through non-chronological snapshots of her life. While she’s dancing all over the continent chasing dreams and fleeing nightmares, watching which baggage she leaves behind and which new baggage she picks up is a rewarding and sobering experience.

Information found in:

http://www.dailycal.org:8080/article/8497/book_review_eisen_s_everywoman_she_s_neurotic_to_t

”Scenes” offers glimpse of post-college life

BY: JULIA GOLDSTEIN
FOR THE DAILY
PUBLISHED MARCH 6TH, 2002

At the end of the undergraduate experience, each of us is left with but one question to answer: now what? In her debut novel, “Making Scenes,” Adrienne Eisen employs a spunky, independent, yet nameless woman to explore the possibilities of post-college life. From the first page, societal expectations are cast aside as Eisen”s principal character begins, “I announce that I am no longer accepting money from my family. I write a letter to my advisor thanking him for all the honors-student-research-money he finagled for me during the last four years, and p.s. I withdrew all my applications to graduate school I want to play professional beach volleyball.”

Fortunately for the suspecting reader, Eisen”s work does not develop into a defiant rags-to-riches tale. Her heroine fails several times, in several ways. There are endless troubles involving work, love, as well as her physical and mental well being. The constant struggle enables readers to empathize with Eisen”s generic first person narrator throughout her eccentric twists and turns.

If the description so far remains vague, it is the strategic working of Eisen herself. She has structured the book so that the narrator”s name is never revealed, even in the midst of several passages of dialogue presented in screenplay form. This main character, without exception, refers to herself as “I” and is referred to by others as “you.” Many concrete biographic details are also omitted. We never learn where the narrator attended college, or where exactly she grew up.

When she does begin to reveal intimate experiences she shares only enough to create an enticing tale, and carefully avoids letting the outside world in to view her true feelings. One such instance occurs as she allows her father to photograph her in the semi-nude. She concludes her description of the event by divulging, “For the last shot he ties my arms above my head with his belt and I struggle to get loose.” The audience is left wondering about the exact nature of this strange father/daughter relationship, or how the narrator herself feels about it. There are other similarly sexually twisted tails that remain unexplained throughout the novel.

Since much of the emotion of the work remains on the surface, this book quickly becomes a plot driven romp through the life and times of a gutsy, yet anonymous woman. There are numerous twists of fate and changes of heart to keep things interesting. Eisen”s narrator has an affair with a married man, tests the waters of lesbianism, and steals thousands of dollars from the home furnishing favorite, Crate & Barrel. So much of the driving force behind the piece relies on the action of the story that it becomes weird, grotesque, and at times pornographic in its attempt to keep the pages turning. This woman, while lacking any interest in discussing her attraction to her father, or her bulimic hatred of her perfectly toned body, has absolutely no qualms about openly sharing her erotic encounters with a rubber spatula. With the wildness of her work, Eisen risks the alienation of her audience as it becomes too embarrassing at times for some readers to stay connected with the book.

Amidst the eerie sexually explicit recounts there are some light-hearted moments reminiscent of Helen Fielding”s Bridget Jones. When ending an evening with her ex the narrator slams the car door. She recounts, “I do it dramatically, and when he drives away, I fall over because my beach bag is caught in the door.” These tidbits are what salvage “Making Scenes” and offer a glimmer of hope for future Adrienne Eisen works.

Information found in:  http://www.michigandaily.com/content/scenes-offers-glimpse-post-college-life-0

January 14th, 2010

Interview with Adrienne Eisen

Posted by Rhizomer on August 1, 2000 12:00 am

http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/29735/#1796


[Adrienne Eisen, the only hypertext winner of the prestigious
New Media Invision Award
, has just launched her new set of
online hypertexts. The former Editor of artcommotion.com, Eisen
is a frequent speaker and panelist at events such as PEN West
and the Dartmouth Institute for Advanced Graduate Studies. Her
first major work of online hypertext, “Six Sex Scenes,” was a
featured exhibition at the Alt-X Online Network back in early
1996 and has received international attention from both the
academic and underground literary art worlds. Eisen, who just
released a batch of new work at www.apc.net/adrienne, agreed to
participate in the following email dialogue with me.]

+ + +

Nile Southern: When did you start writing in hypertext?

Adrienne Eisen: I started writing hypertext in 1992 when I first found
out about CD-Roms. They were actually called CD-i back then, and no one
could think of something to put on them. I had all this writing that
didn’t work as a linear novel, so I went to Philips Media–they invented
CD-i–and I said, “Look, I wrote stuff for CD-i.”

NS: Are you active in hypertext scenes?

AE: As far as I know, the hypertext scene in Los Angeles is me, alone in
my bedroom.

NS: What is the advantage for you, in terms of communicating with an
audience creatively, of writing in hypertext and distributing it over
the web?

AE: The reason I put my writing on the Web is because my writing is
nonlinear, so it makes more sense as hypertext than as a linear novel.
Distribution over the Web reaches a different audience than distribution
in print. That’s why I think it’s important for me to do both.

NS: Your stories have a wonderful blend of deadpan narrative
description, and outrageous, often very funny behavior on the part of
the narrator. There is a kind of deviance at play in these stories,
oftentimes within a formal or very credible setting–what is this
impulse?!

AE: I think my writing comes off as deadpan because I don’t always know
what people will think is funny, deviant, etc. My frame of reference is
fairly mainstream, so I would sound like a lunatic trying to write
anything else.

NS: Were you funny as a kid? Or did your sense of humor kind of come
late in life?

AE: My parents would not say I was funny. My mother would say that she
was funny. My father would say I ruined their marriage.

NS: Given the powerful mix of eroticism and dark humor that permeates
your stories, I imagine you must have received some pretty strange email
replies. Care to share one with us?

AE: I think people search using sex as a keyword, and after they’ve gone
through all the top-tier porn, they search for something off the
beaten-path and they come to me. So I get emails like, “Great stories,
please call, I’d like to tell you some of mine.” I got one that said,
“Do you take requests?”

NS: When I first read your work, it was on Mark Amerika’s popular Alt-X
site, just a few links away from interviews with Martin Amis, Nicholson
Baker, Mark Leyner, and the like. Do you see these authors as
contemporaries who you share satirical writing interests with? Are there
other writers or satirists that have heavily influenced you over the
years? What about Kathy Acker?

AE: I like all those writers, and of all of them, I think I’ve been most
influenced by Baker and Acker. Baker writes pages and pages where
everything is interesting but nothing happens. To me, this sort of
writing falls outside of the arc of the novel. And when I think about
what works as hypertext I think that first, the writing style has to
fall outside the arc of the novel. I found Kathy Acker when I was young
and desperate and having bad sex, so she really spoke to me.

NS: In your story “Winter Break” you have three possible links at the end
of each story, and no ‘back’ button. A similar structure is explored in
Six Sex Scenes. I think I once read that your work was intentionally
exploring the potential of “narrative arc.” What about that? Do you see
your writing as ‘modular’? How would you describe it’s overall
structure?

AE: The overall structure is all about how can I present my writing in a
way that will not make people sick of me. You know how when you go to
therapy, and you take two steps forward and one step back? Well, I think
that’s what life is aobut, but no one wants to hear the step back part,
because they’ve already heard it. That’s why we pay therapists. I write
about the same thing a lot, so I had to find a way to include redundant
stories without boring the reader.

NS: Do you think the mediocrity and narcissism that dominates the lit
mag world has spread to the net–or is the net more happening?

AE: I don’t think I’ve experienced this mediocrity and narcissim; I have
a good eye for shitty writing and I stay away.

NS: Of course the idea of a writer locating an agent and trying to
publish their ‘quality lit’ via the old publishing system is rapidly
becoming outmoded by the likes of on-demand technology, web publishing
and e-books. To paraphrase the rapper Chuck D., “the days of the lazy
artist are over.”–One can simply do-it-themselves and, given the new
media technology, probably should. You are already doing the web
publishing; have you thought of pursuing other alternative strategies
that would allow you to publish an on-demand or e-book? Why or why not?

AE: My print novel, “Making Scenes”, is coming out in August 2000. I’m
trying to think of something catchy to say about Chuck D. so that he
mentions “Making Scenes” on the next song that everyone puts on Napster,
but nothing comes to mind.

NS: What fiction are you working on next?

AE: I’m working on another hypertext. I have the pages spread all over
my bedroom.

NS: Technical question; do you use special software to construct your
hyperlink structure–like Storyspace? Give us a run-through explaining
how Adrienne goes from story idea to online publication.

AE: I write about 300 stories. Then I throw out the bad ones. Then I put
the stories all over my bedroom floor until I find an order that makes
sense. Then I do the html. I am very loyal to html — it’s the only
reason I got a job after going to grad school for writing.

NS: Your stories are like mini-narrative explosions. I could easily see
a Fox or HBO situation comedy being developed around your characters —
have you thought of writing for the TV screen? What would you call it?
Any scenes come to mind?

AE: Yeah, lots of scenes come to mind. Can you put me in touch with HBO?
Thanks for the interview.

NS: What are you going to do now?

AE: I’m going to Disneyland.

January 14th, 2010

Adrienne Eisen works

In this page http://www.adrienneeisen.com/ you can read her hypertext works: “Six Sex Scenes“, “The Interview“,” Winter Break“, “What fits”  and “Considering a baby“, you can find some brief information about her, or even you can contact her if you like.


January 14th, 2010

What is a hypertext?

Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature, characterized by the use of hypertext links which provides a new context for non-linearity in “literature” and reader interaction[1]. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction.

The term can also be used to describe traditionally-published books in which a nonlinear narrative and interactive narrative is achieved through internal references, hypertextEnrique Jardiel Poncela‘s La Tournée de Dios (1932), Vladimir Nabokov‘s Pale Fire (1962) and Julio Cortázar‘s Rayuela (1963; translated as Hopscotch) are early examples (predating the word hypertext), while a common pop-culture example is the “Choose Your Own Adventure” format of young adult fiction.

Information found in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_fiction

January 14th, 2010

Adrienne Eisen or Penelope Trunk Biography

Penelope Trunk is CEO of Brazen Careerist, a career management tool for next-generation professionals. This is her third startup. Each company Penelope built was focused on a community. Her own career path has had twists and turns and in a world where straight, safe career paths are nowhere to be had, Penelope appreciates the power of managing oneself through community.

Penelope’s career began in Los Angeles, where she played professional beach volleyball. She then went to graduate school for English. During that time she learned HTML which allowed her to get a job in the marketing department at Ingram Micro.

After a stint in the Fortune 500, she went to a few smaller software companies and then started her own company, Math.com, a math-tools resource for the teaching community funded by Encore Software. She sold that company for a small sum, and founded eCitydeals, an online auction service for city governments, which was funded by Shelter Ventures, and was shut down in the dot-com bust.

During this time, Penelope wrote a column for Business 2.0 magazine about her experiences as a startup founder. She relocated to New York City and after only a few months at her next startup, she found herself a block from the World Trade Center when it fell.

She decided to be a full-time writer so she did not have to leave her apartment. And she focused on giving career advice instead of writing about herself. At that point, generation Y was entering the workforce and they were looking for advice to tell them how to steer a career that accommodates their lives: old career advice was irrelevant to them.

Penelope started writing career advice for a new generation of workers. Today Penelope is the author of a bestselling career advice book for generation y and the number one career blog.

She explains why old advice – like pay your dues, climb the ladder, and don’t have gaps in your resume – is outdated and irrelevant in today’s workplace. She has a reputation for giving advice that is counterintuitive but effective, like take long lunches, ignore people who steal your ideas, and stop vying for a promotion.

She is dedicated to helping people find success at the intersection of work and life, because that’s what she wants for herself. She thinks of career advice as a group effort. And she launched her company, Brazen Careerist, to create a large-scale community for young people manage their careers for the new millennium.

Information found in:  http://www.penelopetrunk.com/aboutme.html

January 14th, 2010

Bibliography

http://www.altx.com/ebooks/scenes.html

http://www.altx.com/ebooks/download.cfm/scenes.pdf

http://www.penelopetrunk.com/aboutme.html

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/

http://www.adrienneeisen.com/about.html

http://www.adrienneeisen.com/

http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/29735/#1796

http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/olp/bluemoon/2001/coverley/notesmn.htm

https://www.bankrate.com/cnn/news/career/Trunk_bio.asp

http://www.amazon.com/Making-Scenes-Adrienne-Eisen/dp/0970351704

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_fiction

http://www.crescentblues.com/7_12issue/bk_eisen_scenes.shtml

http://www.dailycal.org:8080/article/8497/book_review_eisen_s_everywoman_she_s_neurotic_to_t

http://www.michigandaily.com/content/scenes-offers-glimpse-post-college-life-0

January 14th, 2010

Conclusion

After have been talking about some aspects of Making Scenes, to sum up we can say that this is not a novel in a digital format and there are not hypertext links to go from one story to the next one, we as readers do not have the freedom to chose what will come next and we have to follow the sequence order that have chosen the narrator, but still, the narration order do not follow the traditional patterns of linearity and it has actually a non-linear narrative, typical of hypertext fiction and pop-culture. The different stories that make up this novel seem to have been placed a bit randomly, what makes the story a bit rare or surreal. Also the fact that the whole story is divided into four different stories makes the narration have a bit lack of consistency but in some way there is a kind of hidden structure, as if the stories were pieces of a puzzle, that make them have all sense together in the end.

Also the lack of most of time and space references, as we have analysed before, helps to escape from linearity and make up and establish this non-linear narrative, and what is more, in my opinion this two aspects of the novel are the main ones that actually become the text into an authentic hypertext.

To conclude we can say that because of all the reasons that I have explained in this essay, in my opinion, this novel is not just a print text but it is a real hypertext fiction.

January 14th, 2010

Time & Space analysis

Other important features of hypertext fiction visible on this novel are the way in which time and space are treated.

There is not any external time reference in the text, but we can guess that the action takes place in present days because of some sentences the protagonist says like “ I tell them I am going to model nude to pay my rent”, referring to tell her parents. We see here that there is freedom for a woman to decide what to do with her life and with her body, so we understand that the narration takes place in the modern world.

Another thing that makes us recognize that the time is today’s world is the language used by the narrator, who is the main character using first-person narrative voice. She uses colloquial language and sometimes a bit down and obscene “I rub my cheek against the soft blond curls on his leg while he fishes his market computer out of his pants….He’s short yen, and he has to watch the market” so by the words she uses referring to sex we can recognize that the action is passing nowadays.

Regarding to the internal time, there are references such as the day of the week in which she is. We could make a separation between the weekend and the rest of the week. What determines this division is the action in itself. Contrary to what is usually more common, she is always alone during the weekend while the week is the time for her to socialize (with Cameron in the beach, Robert, in her job etc), fact that is very important for her taking into account her lack of self-steem.

Another aspect to talk about is that there is only little background information about the main character. We just know that she is a woman but there is no existence of any reference to her name.

We can deduce some things about her life because of some short references she makes sometimes such as the sentence “I write a letter to my advisor thanking him for all the honours-student-research-money he finagled for me during the last four years, and p.s. I withdrew all my applications to graduate school-“in which we can guess that she is a graduate woman so we can know about her estimated age. Or in the sentences “Dad says to go to the upstairs living room and he’ll take the pictures…” and “For the last shot he ties my arms above my head with his belt and I struggle to get loose.” the narrator says to us that her father is taking her pictures nude so we can see she has not an ordinary relationship with her father.

Also we know she is bulimic by sentences such as:

“Everything is easier when I’m eating.

When I get back to my apartment, I sit down at my desk and eat. I eat all the cookies and finish half the tube of cookie dough and then my stomach starts to hurt. I take the rest of the food to the incinerator, and sit back in the chair to wait; right after my stomach stops hurting is the best time to vomit because the food is mushy enough to come up smoothly…”

One of the few things she tells us about herself in a loud voice is that she wants to become a professional volleyball player. And also surprisingly she is not ashamed to describe her relationships with her boyfriends, including her sex life, or even when she thinks she is a lesbian. But apart from these things, we can only get knowledge about her life and about her thoughts by the small references she does sometimes, but she never says in an open way what she thinks or what she feels about the things that happen to her.

Focusing now on the space of the novel, there are some references to different places in which the story takes place. There are some cities such Chicago or Los Angeles that are expressed in an explicit way “I move to Chicago….”,I’m moving to Los Angeles”, but when the narrator refers to places she usually does it in an implicit way in order we can think about it and deduce it from the things that are happening in that moment: “CAMERON AND I are leaning back on our hands in the sand, and when he shifts his weight, more sand covers my hand.” Here we can deduce that they are in the beach. Or in “Cameron screens his calls while he stirs his pasta….[…] I go to his bathroom…” the narrator does not tell us that they are now in Cameron’s apartment but through the action that is happening at that moment we can know it.

Again, as well as happened with the way to present us the time, she gives lot of importance to the action in order to present us the context or the place of a specific situation.

Another thing to take into account is that almost all the story takes place in closed spaces, in her apartment, Robert’s apartment, her parent’s home, etc, and there are only a few references to open spaces. The most significant exception of an open place is the beach. Thing that could be maybe interpreted as this is the only open space important because is in there where her dream of become a professional volleyball player could take place, thing that also established the main topic of the novel.

Other feature that called my attention was that when the narrator changes from a part of the story to the next one, inside the same story, she always starts the first sentences with some words in capital letters. This is a way to make the reader conscious that what they are going to read now is going to happen in a different place or situation. This also helps to get a kind of continuity, and do not be lost among all that stories that are put together, and have a better understanding of the sense of the whole novel.

January 14th, 2010

Introduction

In this paper I am going to talk about Adrienne Eisen’s work, Making Scenes, and more concretely I would like to focus on the characteristics that, in my opinion, make us to consider it as a hypertext fiction.

At a first glance Making Scenes does not seem a hypertext fiction by the fact that is a printed novel, but is this enough to consider it as just another traditional novel?

I would like to start with a brief summary of the plot made by a reader of this novel:

“Making Scenes is the story of (actually, four stories about, but we’ll not split that hair here) the Everywoman of the 1990s as given us by Eisen. She’s bulimic but handling it, unsure about her various relationships, trying to find a steady job in a shaky market, and dreams of being a professional beach volleyball player. Unlike most, she has an actual shot at it, and spends the majority of her time outside her various stress-causing activities either playing volleyball, getting ready to play volleyball, or coming home from playing volleyball. And while that may sound monotonous, it’s anything but.[…] “

Robert P. Beveridge

As we can see by the different topics in the novel (among other many things), the narration goes changing all the time like jumping between a scene and the next one. It is structured as a compilation of four different stories: “Trading Futures”, “Angels”, “Six sex scenes” and “Going back”, and there is not an explicit context behind of all that can join everything together, what means that there is not existence of linearity. And non-linearity reading is one of the main requirements of a hypertext fiction.

November 6th, 2009

Bibliography

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_du_Maurier

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_du_Maurier

http://www.dumaurier.org/bibliogr.html

http://www.dumaurier.org/videos.html

http://movies.amctv.com/person/166394/Daphne-DuMaurier/films

http://movies.amctv.com/person/166394/Daphne-DuMaurier/details

http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/Rebecca_(1940)

http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/The_Birds_(1963)

http://www.hitchcockwiki.com/wiki/Jamaica_Inn_(1939)

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