between poetry and prose
is the cost of whitespace?
so in
etextworld
where whitespace is
f
r
e
e
there may come a
poetic revival
as the
impact-per-byte
of whitespace
is re-appreciated
5 years ago i proposed that xml's
hierarchy-of-containers model
reflected nerd-neurosis
more than creative psychology
(what kind of blogger
makes a mental outline
before beginning to write?)
and that text composition is really about
blocks of text
separated by expressively-sized gaps
where whitespace is the cheapest form of
gap-size expression
for my online edition of the legendary
punctuationless last chapter
of Ulysses
i extended Nabokov's advice by adding
not commas but linebreaks
which experience drove home for me
how most punctuation is about pauses
comma short
fullstop medium
paragraph long
sectionbreak longer
chapterbreak longest
Joyce reliably edited
to minimise punctuation
which he distrusted
famously protesting that 'inverted commas
add an air of unreality to a page'
so if he could have afforded the
whitespace
he might have done away too
with commas and fullstops
and used transparent linebreaks
instead
