Twelve Blue
Creative Work
Michael Joyce, the author of the first hypertext fiction, afternoon, a story, authored this, his first web hypertext, in 1996. Twelve Blue is an HTML hypertext that makes use of frames and image-maps. Although simple from a technical standpoint, the work tells a complex and enigmatic story of memory, desire, lust, truth, and consequences.
Now that everyone on earth wore beepers (or so it seemed in a walk through the Galleria), she wondered had it lost its sense of expectation or rather was the phenomenon now simply more widely shared. It seemed as if the whole pedestrian world strolled with small plastic packets of electronics at their hips-- in shades of pastel now as well as basic black-- all of them pleasantly abuzz and mildly aroused, awaiting word of what would be, word of what had been.
Everything can be read, every surface and silence, every breath and every vacancy, every eddy and current, every body and its absence, every darkness every light, each cloud and knife, each finger and tree, every backwater, every crevice and hollow, each nostril, tendril and crescent, every whisper, every whimper, each laugh and every blue feather, each stone, each nipple, every thread every color, each woman and her lover, every man and his mother, every river, each of the twelve blue oceans and the moon, every forlorn link, every hope and every ending, each coincidence, the distant call of a loon, light through the high branches of blue pines, the sigh of rain, every estuary, each gesture at parting, every kiss, each wasp's wing, every foghorn and railway whistle, every shadow, every gasp, each glowing silver screen, every web, the smear of starlight, a fingertip, rose whorl, armpit, pearl, every delight and misgiving, every unadorned wish, every daughter, every death, each woven thing, each machine, every ever after
They believed each other's stories and knew they were not minor characters.
Critical writing that references this work:
Teaching Resource that references this work:
http://www.elmcip.net/node/237
