Both of my English courses this semester have a significant blog component. This has thrown me for a loop. Where before I would while away the hours I'd set aside for reading course texts by surfing the internet, now that my homework happens to be surfing said internet, I find myself raiding my roommate's bookshelves arbitrarily. It's probably not a bad thing for me to be reading Sartre or DeLillo, but doing so is not going to help my grades any. Which I know deep down in my procrastinator's soul is a good reason for pursuing anything.

What I think may be another upside of my gpa-destroying behavior is that it indicates -- along with the sentiment of a great many of our blog posts, and the fact that most of us read our very first hypertext only last week -- that the novel as we know it isn't going anywhere. And not because the future tried to make its changes and failed, but because the printed novel and the hypertext happen to be separate media. Some of our trepidation about the e-lit age seems to be located in the idea that it will elbow out or somehow force change upon the things we cherish in more established literature. Were I not worried I'd sound like a dirty optimist, I'd confidently assert that the emergence of widespread electronic self-publication and the hypertext format will only strengthen the novel we know and love, in that it will help us triangulate what we find essential about the medium. TV and film co-exist, painting and drawing and photography as well, and the dynamics of each are unique enough to warrant their continued relevance. I have to think it's the same with text media. And having more data with which to determine what's important about different uses of the written word can only be a good thing, right?