Word: veer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fiction--nonlinear storytelling in which plot lines unfold in different ways upon subsequent readings. Joyce, an associate professor of English at Vassar College, wrote the "classic" hypertext novel, afternoon, a story. The piece is told one screenful of text at a time; by clicking on adjectives and verbs, readers veer off in far-flung narrative directions. While this may sound like the same experience as following hypertext links around the World Wide Web, afternoon was written in 1987 and distributed on floppy disks--well before the Web opened its portals...
...torrents of mud filled with debris smashed into dwellings with terrifying force. No one died in the Rio Nido slide, but homeowner Gary LaCombe feels lucky to be alive. He vividly remembers watching a tree's mammoth root ball, 12 ft. in diameter, hurtle toward his kitchen window, then veer off at the last minute, narrowly missing his house. Now LaCombe, along with his wife Phyllis and a few hundred of his neighbors, has been evacuated by county officials, barred from returning home because geologists fear that an even larger slide may follow. Says LaCombe, who was forced to leave...
...these stories wander across the line of gritty fantasy. But categories kill, and so to say "Oh, yeah, magic realism" is to veer off several degrees from true north. The narrations are what they are, which is true of only the strongest kind of imagining. The Myths of Bears is a fine, loony love story. A brilliant, probably mad trapper, somewhere in the West, sometime about a century ago, drives his woman away with bizarre behavior, perhaps caused by something like epilepsy. She is bigger, a better runner, a forest dweller, who can sense his approach across continental divides...
Seldom does a film with a solid premise misfire completely. Even more seldom does one begin with a substantial story, veer completely away from it, and then subsequently turn into a disaster. Unfortunately, I Love You, I Love You Not becomes just such a debacle that not only confuses but also angers its audience...
Even readers who tend to veer away from poetry find themselves propelled toward the work of Derek Walcott. It's not just because the West Indian Nobel laureate has the classic gift of mixing ease with eloquence and of deepening, dignifying his most private moments with the high and burnished diction of a sunlit Shakespeare. Even more, Walcott has strained and struggled all his life to match sun and rain, to marry the world of autumn leaves and opera houses that he learned to love on paper with the unrecorded "pomme-arac" and fireflies of his long-colonized islands...