A brief primer on hypertext project 'The City and the Sea'.

1. The City and the Sea
A Brief Overview
(hit F5!)

2. What is Hypertext?
• Writing with undefined structure
• Interactive to some degree
• Examples: Wikipedia, Goosebumps Choose-
Your-Own-Ending Books, Text-based
Adventure games
• Like a complex labyrinth: winding paths

3. This is Cool Because:
• Readers are engaged on an extra level—allows for
reader driven experience
• Variety of content: central text can be prose, but
link to: poems, pictures, videos, fake ‘encylopedia’
entries
• Broader detail, more *variety* of detail, but most
of it ‘optional’
• Could read straight through central plot, or lose
yourself exploring nuances and tangents
• Can have “mirror plots”—same scenes written
from different perspectives…more depth, follow
favorite character, etc.

4. This is the end of a scene from early in The
City and the Sea. Hover over the hyperlinks
for brief explanations, then try and click
through.
The world split into pieces and blurred outside the window. A few minutes
of pastoral nowhere; browning grass and crisp blue lakes, then abruptly cluttered
forest. That gave way to rows of identical warehouses, utilitarian and drab.
Occasionally Klavier saw people. He felt like a deity, or maybe just intrusive: peering
into to all these worlds, lives, moments only to rush away just as quick. Somewhere
in there was in image; something metaphorical, almost meaningful, the kind of
creative fuel he could refine into the idea for a new song if he put enough though
into it. But the motion of the train, the metronome click-chug-clack, the blurred
scenery; it made for a potent sedative when you tossed four hours of sleep the
night before into the mix.
The woman in the next seat said something pointed, and Klavier drifted
off to sleep. He awoke abruptly, frequently, finally gave up and stared out his
window at the thickening twilight. The woman had fallen asleep: this meant no
more squawking complaints, the trade-off being saural snores and a wayward elbow
that kept jabbing into Klavier’s side.
He put his headphones back on, loaded an evocative, somber song, and
watched night push the sun past the horizon. At some point he fell back asleep and
dreamed.

5. This is what the first page of ‘The
City and the Sea’ looks like: you
pick your character, click, and start
reading. Go ahead and try out all
three—they link to short selections
from each intial scene.
A struggling musician feels called to the sea
and sets off on a journey. A woman without a
name wakes up in a nowhere landscape.
Somebody only half-real begins to cohere.

6. A short visual representing the
possible sceneflow from part of ‘The
City and the Sea’—think of it as a
hypertext cross-section.

7. (After this is just the physical location of the
stuff you hyperlinked to earlier, so hooray:
you’re done. Thanks for checking out.)

8. On a schoolbus, age 16, caveman hair and an outfit that tries to argue grunge isn’t dead.
Klavier’s cranking something crunchy and furious on a dollar-store CD player.
“Hey,” says the kid next to him, some dweeby jackass with Grandpa glasses. “Hey.”
Klavier can hear him—cheap headphones—but pretends he doesn’t.
“HEY.” The kid jabs Klavier in the shoulder. “Could you turn it down?”
Klavier pauses the music. He musters the most withering glare he can. Then he shakes his
head and presses play.
“Hey hey.” The poke is back, jabbing into Klavier like the beak of some pernicious bird.
“Listen man, please. At least change the song, I hate these guys…”
Klavier pulls off a headphone. He makes his eyes flat and apathetic—something he’s
mastered the past few months. “Only CD I have.”
“Here.” Poindexter rifles around in his backpack. He pulls out a thick CD case with a broken
zipper. “You can listen to one of mine, you can even borrow it, just please, I hate those guys, they’re
so whiny.”
Disaffected Klavier wants to shrug and press play again; musical Klavier is too insatiably
curious to pass this up. “Sure,” he says coolly. “I guess.”
He flips through, ends up picking a some burned CD with ‘Dream mix” scrawled across it in
slapdash handwriting. (“That’s a good one,” the nerdy kid advises nasally.)
Klavier throw it in, presses play and:
It’s like setting sail on an unknown ocean. Stepping into a pool on the first day of summer.
Closing your eyes after hours of laying back and staring at the clouds.
He ends up borrowing the kid’s entire CD collection, burning copies of all of it.

9. Klavier’s dream plays out something like this:
It’s not even clear it’s a dream at first: he’s still on the train.
Everything is silent and tombstone still. The light is sepulchral and evanescent.
It smells like ancient brine from the bottom of the ocean and, if he inhales
deeply enough, ash. All the seats are crooked, fluorescent, broken: littered with
coats, skulls, empty suitcases. In the seat across the aisle, a silhouette floats—
not black, but a sort of puddle drab off-brown. Klavier stares, trying to will
himself awake.

10. The scene plays out something like this:
On a train, so everything’s shaky and off-balance. The light is utilitarian
and unflattering. It smells like dust from a dozen different cities and, if you inhale
deeper, pseudofloral cleaning solution. Everybody’s slumped and plugged-in: to
phones, music, laptops, movies. A bold few stare out the window; maybe they’re
thinking, because there’s nothing to look at, only so much night. Or maybe
they’re just staring, trying to slip into some sort of meditative in-between mode
of consciousness.

11. Later on, hard to remember that last day. Friday night DJ set meant Klavier
was roaring eardrums, gummy eyelids, sin-graph delirium and heavy limbs only barely
pinned together into a person. Friday night DJ set meant: start with hedonistic fuck-it-
all crowd pleaser, swap in some avant stuff, drift into autopilot while he slammed down
coffee and pills and whatever else, keep this up until somewhere outside the sun
started to rise, the spell broke, reality woke up, everyone drifted away and Klavier was
left reassembling himself into something coherent in the held-breath vacuum
abandoned by the music.
Friday night DJ set meant still awake at 6 am Saturday morning, fumbling
with thirty year old buttons and joysticks on the ancient arcade machine they kept by
the bar. Klaiver pumped in another quarter and narrowed his world to the screen,
fluorescent and pixelated. Gua-gua-gua beeped his character, chasing ghosts. Köhler
twitched at the controls, caffeine quick. Gua-gua-gua. Time blinked. His head jerked
up. GAME OVER flashed loud and absolute on the screen.
Shit. Must have nodded off. More tired than he thought. Onscreen his avatar
devoured itself over and over, something to nothing, GAME OVER still superimposed
over it all. Palm sweat slicked the buttons. One more game, then he’d stagger home
and go to bed. He reached in his pocket.

12. Finally.
Looks like she’s waking up.
Stretch, yawn, bleary shake of the head: everyday normal stuff you’d expect from
anybody. She sits up. She’s very pretty. Long black hair, and a dress that looks like it was
ripped straight from the fabric of the cosmos (you might even look for stars the first time
you see it). Between the hair and the dress being so dark it almost looks like she’s not really
there, or at least not completely, just a face and arms floating in space.
She’s on a shore. Or maybe you’d call it an island, because it wraps around in a
circle. She’s sprawled in the middle of it. All around is—no, not the sea. There’s nothing at
all. Nothing. Ink? No, ink wouldn’t be this lusterless. Empty space wouldn’t look this heavy.
Darkness wouldn’t be so restless. There’s nothing, okay?
It’s worth noting that the shore, island, whatever you want to call it—is more or
less just as black, only difference is that it’s dead and motionless, while the stuff out
there—well, it doesn’t quite writhe but it at least makes a lazy pass at it. Stagnant gray light
sits in the air like a bad smell. She observes all of this with cautious first time wonder.
What’s her name?
Well.
She doesn’t remember. Or maybe she doesn’t have one. Or maybe she did and
she lost it. Does it matter? What it boils down to is: she’s nameless.

13. He spent a lifetime walking down nameless streets in a nowhere city, himself a
faceless nobody, an eternity of this dream until he woke hot and sweating and realized he
was Nemo. Everything changed after that. He’d always been aware of the world, in a
vague, impressionistic way. Once he realized he had a name, though, other things started
to stick: he started to remember.
Today he woke like any other day: at the top of a dark, rolling hill, staring up at
an empty black sky. He was in a bed, which didn’t always happen. A pile of clocks was
mounded disorderdly to one side; some ticking, some spinning, some sitting still for
indeterminate stretches and then lurching drunkenly forward. A record spun soundlessly
on a wood-paneled gramophone. Portraits of finely dressed strangers were strewn to
about halfway down the hill. Farther along he could make out a dozen or so televisions
with cracked screens.
This would all be gone by the time he went to sleep—the bed, the clocks, all of
it. Besides the landscape itself, everything here was temporary. Before, when he’d barely
been here himself, before he had a name, this hadn’t bothered Nemo. Now, in his more
speculative moments, it made him wonder—where it came from, where it went. Perhaps
most importantly—why it went.