in a staring contest between me and the computer, I'm going to lose.

So, like Shock and Awe, I was thoroughly seduced by Kind of Blue. Which means that I spent a couple hours glued to the computer screen, and towards the end of that time, I was pretty sure that my eyes were going to fall out.

And let's be clear: I am no computer-screen-staring lightweight. My summer/winter break job=eight hours a day sitting in a cubicle staring at a computer screen. One of my hobbies involves writing jibberish (code) in a text editor. I blog, I scour four or five news sites every day, and Facebook kind of owns me.

But during the summer, my internet-surfing time drops precipitously. When I'm working all day at a computer, the last thing I want to do when I get home is...sit at the computer. I come home and I go for a walk or cook something or read a book or, at the least, watch television--anything that keeps me more than twelve inches away from that glowing screen.

This, to me, is a serious potential problem with electronic literature, because I know I'm not the only one whose eyes get sore after a few hours in front of the computer. Reading a book is just easier on the eyes. It's a pretty pedestrian complaint, I know, but I think it's a legitimate one. People can only spend so many hours a day at their desks, and we've got to be close to the upper limit.

Okay. All of that aside, I just wanted to point out one line from Kind of Blue:
Someday you'll have to explain to me, or provide for my reading, or viewing, etc. how all these tendentious jigsaw pieces could conceivably fit together.

Sometimes I feel like that's our whole project here, with a lot of the things we're reading. All of these blog entries feel like tiny pieces of a billion-piece jigsaw puzzle, scraps of physical reactions and emotional attachments and complaints and commentaries. Like the wiki--I keep waiting for it to develop into some sort of cohesive whole.