Elizabeth Z.
last seen just now
September 11, 2021
Hello! 👋
Who's this?✔✔
Ellie!
Ellie? Ellie who?✔✔
...
Ellie. You know.
Elizabeth.
Ergodic Ellie.
E.Z.
How did you get my number? ✔✔
It's in your email signature.
Hmmm. I don't think it is. ✔✔
I thought this would be easier. Quicker.
Voicenote : So, I was going through the box again. And tucked behind this photo of a little girl on a swing, (who looks remarkably like I did when I was her age), I’ve found this folded star chart. Like, a proper old-school one. And someone has written on the back : ’In ancient times, the Polynesians discovered a way to navigate by following the wind, the sea, and the stars. Someone who was skilled in this practice was called a wayfinder.’ And I couldn’t stop thinking about that. About how navigation was never just about getting somewhere. It was about positioning *yourself* in the world.And then I thought about this. About what I’m trying to do with this project.
Voicenote : And so, naturally, I went digging. After going a bit of a rabbit hole, I found Tim Ingold, who in anthropologist who talks about wayfinding. Ingold suggests that navigation is a process of moving through space *and* memory, not merely following a pre-drawn map. I’m going to tie this to literature by saying: reading an ergodic text is exactly like way finding. You only discover the path by walking it. By effectively “reading” the environment. They even encoded journeys into stories and songs - like, if they wanted to pass on information about a prevalent wind, they’d tell a story about it to their people. This intrinsically connected navigation to storytelling. So, I’m proposing that navigating nonlinear story is analogous to that.
(Ingold, 2007)
You sure know how to romanticise chaos.
✔✔
❤️
It's a gift and a curse.
I bet that's what all the boys love about you.
✔✔
Yeah, I really should stick that on my Tinder profile; Loves long walks by the beach and romanticising chaos.
But you know, for all your lyricism, that's still not theory, right?
✔✔
🙄
Psh.
You want theory?
Prepare for theory with a capital TH.
2.1-The-Wind.pdf
Well, it's a good start.
✔✔
I was hoping for a little bit more than that.
It seems fairly thorough.
✔✔
I should hope so. I was up most of the night writing it.
Still not sleeping?
✔✔
Sleep is for the weak, Barrington. Or at least for people not writing a PhD and working evenings. Coffee is my only true friend.
Kids still in the sleepless stage?
✔✔
Kids? You mean my students? They're pretty demanding, I guess, but no midnight feeds there. Although I do think one of them fancies me.
Ah. Apologies. Perhaps I misread something in our emails.
✔✔
Wait. Did you think I actually had children? Like, small humans running around? Me? Not for some time. If at all.
It must've been someone else. Apologies. Senior moment. All you PhD students blur together after a while.
✔✔
Charming. And there was me thinking I was special.
You are. In your own way. Quite disarming.
✔✔
Yeah. Right. Sounds like you should sleep more yourself.
I'll take that under advisement.
✔✔
On an academic note - I've read through your navigation chapter again. And I can't help but wonder if your approach is still overly romanticised. Ingold's framework is elegant, yes, but aren't you projecting too much poetry onto what is, essentially, cognitive decision making?
✔✔
Voicenote : You think I'm romanticising Ingold. Well, I think academia's been sterlising things that were never designed to be clean in the first place. I'm not drawing a metaphor. I'm attempting to reveal a symmetry. This is the lived culture of an entire people - how they move, how they inform their stories. If anything, I think it is demonstrable that ergodic literature is well-practiced and observable not just through story - but through life itself. I'm not saying Polynesian Wayfinding is like ergodic literature. I'm not even saying Polynesian Wayfinding *is* ergodic literature. I'm saying that ergodic literature is wayfinding. That the principles of ergodic literature (navigation, configuration, construction) are not unique to digital or experimental texts. They are present in oral, spatial, and performative cultures. They are lived. I'm trying to recontextualise ergodic theory within a broader anthropological and cultural epistemology. I'm trying to challenge the bias that sees ergodic structure as something novel, Western, or digital — and repositioning it as something inherent to how many human cultures encode experience. That’s not romanticism. That’s ontological reframing. As for it being "cognitive decision making"? Pah. Behave. You know that's reductionist. You're taking something embodied, sensory, and dynamic and flattening it into a... a... an internalised psychological process! These are systems that inform movement! And for the record - the system, the framework? That's an ever-evolving, fluid thing being created to explain reality. Not a rigid system by which all things "within it" must function.
If I’ve leaned into metaphor, it’s only because Western theory hasn't made space for epistemologies where movement is meaning. Ask Hauʻofa. Ask Emalani Case. They’ll tell you: to navigate is to remember. To choose a path is to carry a story.
"Oceania is us. We are the sea, we are the ocean. Oceania is not just our past. It is also the sea of our memory, the sea of our dreams and aspirations."
— Hauʻofa, Our Sea of Islands (1994)
"To navigate is to remember, and to remember is to resist erasure."
— Case, Everything Ancient Was Once New (2021)
Woe betide the man that ever gets on your wrong side.
✔✔
Look. You're not wrong, Elizabeth. Just ambitious. And I respect that more than I let on. What you're doing - reframing ergodic literature through oral tradition, embodiment, cultural epistemology - its daring. Necessary, perhaps. And you've made the case for it moer convincingly than I'd expected.
✔✔
But let me offer you something. If navigation *is* meaning - if your whole argument rests on that - then we have to ask: how is meaning *made*? What actually directs the reader?
✔✔
That brings us, I think, to Iser.
✔✔
He talks about texts as structures full of blanks - not holes, but deliberate spaces. Gaps where the author steps back and the reader steps in. What happens in those blanks is what gives the text life. And I wonder if your 'escape room-inspired space' or box, your performance is doing the same thing? Giving performers fragments, sure - but also gaps. And it's how they fill those gaps, or don't, that generates the meaning.
✔✔
You say it's navigation. Iser says it's interaction. Perhaps we're both saying the same thing.
✔✔
Do you believe in God?
I'm not sure how to answer that.
✔✔
Well, it's simple, isn't it? You either do or you don't? Or you're agnostic? I think I'm agnostic.
No. I suppose I don't. I'm an aetheist. Is this related to your thesis?
✔✔
No.
It's nothing.
Just another late night contemplating the authorship of existence.
You know, August Barrington. You're not just reading my messages. You're *navigating* me.
Sorry.
Iser could be useful.
But you know. Aarseth explictily differentiates between ergodic systems and interactivity.
2.2-How-to-Navigate.pdf
Did you ever see that ‘art-piece’ where someone just exhibited a dirty bed?
It had like… used condoms and syringes on it or something. I can’t remember.
My mum hated it. .
She was a painter. Not a professional. Although I maintain that she could’ve been.
She didn’t think it was art.
Who was the artist? I’m gonna have to google it.
Tracey Emin.
✔✔
Emin! I knew you’d know…
Mum hated it.
That, and Hirst's cow.
She would go on about that bed though. Really despised it. And all I could think about as she ranted about it was how I’d been forced to sit down, watch and analyse an entire episode of Eastenders at performing arts college It was really old. It was like a half an hour long monologue with this old lady in it just banging on. Can’t remember a word of what she said, to be honest.
Dot Cotton.
✔✔
Yeah, her!
What’s all this about, Elizabeth?
✔✔
Nothing, really. I just thought it was interesting what is considered art. What the limits are.
Do you think a banana is art?
It sold for a ridiculous amount of money, didn’t it?
✔✔
Is that your criteria for what constitutes as art? How much it sells for?
Bet it's manky now.
You just wish you'd done it.
✔✔
We'll see who's laughing when I staple a clementine to a chair.
I do think the bed is art though.
Of course you do.
✔✔
I think it tells a story.
It's furniture. It's a vignette at most. It doesn't contain a sequence of events.
✔✔
It's a chalk outline.
Is this another metaphor?
✔✔
Criminal forensic scientists will study a space and trace the elements of that space back through time - they reintroduce temporality into the scene and piece together a story from the residual clues.
Emin’s bed is a character study.
In Eastenders the focus of our lesson wasn’t the old lady’s monologue. It was how the scene had been set. It was the creation of character and mood.
And hey, lots of people are paid a lot of money to build scenery, rig effective lighting and design evocative sound. Aristotle positioned plot above ‘spectacle’, but when you switch their roles and provide spectacle without plot, you really get people talking. Maybe only because it is so subversive in a Western lens.
But life is spectacle without plot, really.
BYOP.
BYOP?
✔✔
Bring Your Own Plot.
Prof. B.
Please don't call me Prof B.
✔✔
Barrington?
August is fine.
✔✔
First-name basis. Progress!
August?
Yes?
✔✔
Don't take this the wrong way...
But are you married?
No, I'm not.
✔✔
Hmmm.
Why do you ask?
✔✔
I need relationship advice.
I'm not sure that's really my place, Elizabeth.
✔✔
Please call me Ellie. Only my dad calls me Elizabeth. And only when I'm in trouble.
Okay. Ellie. I am here to help you cement your ideologies as an academic fold, I’m not sure I’d be best placed to offer you relationship advice. Least of all because it has been some time since I was last in one myself.
✔✔
Okay...
Did you read my last chapter?
I did.
✔✔
And...?
And I'm a little scared of being scolded again.
✔✔
Please.
The chapter is comprehensive. Ambitious, if we’re being generous. And rampant, if we’re not. Your threading of Barthes, Eco, Iser, Ingold, Hau’ofa, Ryan, Jenkins, Manovich, Eskelinen, and Calvino is impressive. Though I fear you’ve opened so many windows that the walls are starting to disappear.
✔✔
Let me start where I suspect you’ll bristle: you’ve positioned ergodic literature not as a form, but as a fundamental mode of being - a pattern of cognition, storytelling, movement, and memory. That’s no small claim. And while I admire the audacity, I wonder whether you’re not conflating lived experience with literary structure. Navigation in life, yes, may be iterative and embodied. But the moment we start encoding it - especially in performance or in writing - it becomes something else. Representation always flattens, doesn’t it?
✔✔
The strength of your chapter is its connective tissue: you’re not just citing theorists, you’re conversing with them. That said, the Hau’ofa and Case material deserves more space. If you’re adamant that you’re going to draw on deeply rooted ontologies - Pacific epistemologies about movement, memory, and resistance - I think you undercut them by skimming. A few paragraphs isn’t enough if you’re truly attempting to decolonise the framework, which is what it seems you are tip-toeing round.
✔✔
Also, well done for including Iser’s theory of blanks as a bridge. But you’d do well, perhaps, to distinguish more clearly between blanks designed for interpretation and those that demand action - you’ve started this process, but it could be more pronounced.
✔✔
A final note - your prose is already starting to fray. There’s a kind of breathlessness to the latter half. Escape rooms, Calvino, Lynch, Case - it’s all compelling, but there’s little pause for digestion. You risk exhausting your reader. Might be worth considering where you can afford to slow down.
✔✔
All told, though, this is the kind of work that raises eyebrows in panel rooms. And questions. So many questions. I wouldn’t want to be you in the Viva. It's going to be a challenge.
✔✔
Are you lonely, Professor?
I'm sorry?
✔✔
Are you lonely?
I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this conversation continuing if you insist on making it personal, Ellie.
✔✔
I'm lonely.
I find life very difficult, and almost impossible to connect with people.
I mostly find connection in art. Music. Theatre. Poetry. Fantasy.
Do you like musicals?
I do.
Wicked is one of my favourites.
I may not be green, but when I speak, I can see how people look at me.
And I would love to understand how a song about refusing to be used, refusing to conform, resisting oppression that is baked into a musical based off of another musical which is based off of a fantasy book published over 100 years ago can make me feel *seen*.
I don’t know how you feel, Professor.
I don’t know who sees you.
Who makes you feel connected.
Because for me, it expands. It clarifies. It anchors me to the world.
For me, ergodic structure isn’t a gimmick. It’s the only way I know how to make sense of my life.
Maybe art is not life. But sometimes it feels like it tells the truth better than life does.
Honestly, I’m not sure who sees me either.
✔✔
And maybe I underestimated what this meant to you.
✔✔
And while I still disagree on certain theoretical points, I understand your position better now.
✔✔
But I also want you to succeed. And it won’t be the intensity of your conviction, but your critical rigour that gets you through this.
✔✔
I know.
But I suspect my heart runs a lot deeper than my brains do.
I doubt that is true. And I recognise now how deep your heart is.
✔✔
Hah.
I'm a mess.
I'm meant to be going out on a date tonight.
Do you like my moustache?
It suits you. Very handsome.
✔✔
Voicenote : Hey - sorry, I know it's late. I was thinking about that thing you said earlier about-
[soft background noise - fabric movement. Breathing.]
[pause]
[a single, sharp laugh]
[indistinct voices, overlapping - impossible to make out]
[a door slams]
August. August. August. August.
[pause]
[male voice :]
She's not here right now. But she left the box open.
2.3-House-of-Leaves.pdf
I was expecting to be lost.
✔✔
Not in the metaphorical sense you love so much, but actually lost — disoriented by the density of argument, the twisting footnotes of Danielewski echoing through your own.
✔✔
But I wasn’t. You mapped it. Clearly. Carefully. Which surprised me.
✔✔
The House of Leaves chapter is strong, Ellie. Focused. It's one of your most contained pieces. I don’t mean that pejoratively. I mean it reads like a room with walls — structured, even while it speaks of labyrinths. That’s no small feat.
✔✔
Ironically your argument is very linear, here.
✔✔
Your handling of Hayles is thoughtful. As is your refusal to dismiss her, even as you counter her. I admire that.
✔✔
My one hesitation — and I’m sure you’ll be relieved I have one — is your closing paragraph. You almost rush into the digital pivot. Oxenfree deserves a cleaner hand-off, and I think you might consider whether the transition should be less about what the medium does, and more about how the medium feels. If House of Leaves makes us anxious through disorientation, does Oxenfree haunt us in a different way?
✔✔
(And for what it’s worth, your line — “The text doesn’t change, but the reader does” — that’s the sort of thing I wish I’d written. Damned annoying.)
✔✔
I won’t ask if you’re sleeping. I already know the answer.
✔✔
Don't you start being nice to me now.
Forwarded
Magical Living: Inside Britain’s Most Extraordinary Home
Step inside Talliston House – a time capsule of immersive storytelling, imagination, and eccentric beauty.
visitessex.com
You ever heard of this place?
No, I can’t say I have.
✔✔
Doesn’t look far from me though.
✔✔
Don’t start being nice to me now.
My dad's taking me there for my birthday
He's already been. He kept trying to tell me about it. But I'm not sure I understood.
Apparently the onwer is a fantasy author though. So that piqued my interest.
I’m guessing you don’t play computer games?
No. Never have, really.
✔✔
I’m wondering about my choice of case study for my next chapter.
Which one better represents the form you wish to ultimately cultivate?
✔✔
Uh. I don't really think like that. I feel more like I'm trying to present a philosophy than a form.
Careful, Ellie. You cannot entail everything. Curate carefully. This is another space in which structure will help you.
✔✔
Oxenfree.
I'm going to do Oxenfree.
Then play Breath of the Wild until I pass out.
Please take care of yourself.
✔✔
It’s been a few days, just checking in; how’s the writing going?
✔✔
Happy to read anything if you need a second pair of eyes.
✔✔
Everything okay, Ellie?
✔✔
2.4-Oxenfree.pdf
Forwarded
Thought this might help your research.