Lost in the path of the contour contorsion...

Dave Ciccoricco’s exposition leaves me puzzled. There is the memorial/landmark distinction followed by (layered with?) the sculpture-gate distinction. Both meant I believe to invoke a trope of divergence which is supplemented by the path-contour of the author's writing.

I'm puzzled because the semantics of "contour" would seem to suggest a "path around" yet Dave Ciccoricco’s prose piece begins with a marked reference to "betweeness" as a way of beginning to explore a particular individual's coming and going to/from a particular form of writing.

I think that there is potential in examining the to and fro path from the perspective of an around contour. It may lead to some interesting phenomenological considerations of the relation of the analyst to the object of study or the relation between the object of study and the analyst (which relations may not be identical). I find it intriguing that Dave Ciccoricco’s maintains a trace of the hypertextual distinction between a pointer (a relation to) and a link (a relation between).

Hmmm, wonder how that pointer/link distinction plays out in a terminology applicable to discourse that is not formally hypertextual per se. This might hook up with Kari Kraus's meditations on indices and icons. >> See Kari's June 18, 2003, entry and subsequent comments http://karik.wordherders.net/archives/2003_06.html

This could then be read back into the The Contour of a Contour piece and leverage that point at which a path-as-index gets read or re-written as contour-as-icon.