So, with no ill will for being put there in the first place, I feel like I essentially floundered when presented with the opportunity to soapbox on embodiment in the last five minutes of class today. Really, embodiment and Katharine Hayles' essay are interesting to me, just difficult. Here are my thoughts, late and still partially-formed.

As I re-read Walking Mornings for this afternoon's class, I realized that, ironically, my own relationship to this text has been similar to my relationships with hypertexts. It's ironic because in this essay, Joyce is trying to distance himself from the new technologies, like hypertexts, that he has been so involved in.

Now that I look back on it, reading this essay for the first time felt somewhat hypertextual, largely because of the recursive nature of the text, which hovers around and returns repeatedly to the sentence "I walk mornings" in exploring the different meanings encapsulated by those three words. It is, as Joyce says, a meditation, and in its lack of a clear linear progression, it resembles hypertext narratives.

The posts so far on Walking Mornings indicate that most people like the essay but some people don't follow all of his thoughts. I suppose I'm a part of both groups of readers, because I too enjoyed the piece, but I didn't understand some of his main points. Like Lulu, I think his Joyce is a good writer, and his skills came out a lot more in this essay for me than in "Afternoon", but that could have been that I was so fascinated with the hypertext form of "Afternoon" that I didn't stop to appreciate how he wrote. Anyway, some of the points in Walking Mornings that made me sit back and think "Wow, that was good writing" also made me think "Wow, I don't understand what he's talking about, but I feel like I should."

I was reading this random review of The Onyx Project that I came across online, and in it the reviewer mentions that Colonel Henderson talks about and quotes from several bloggers, which I thought was an interesting choice for the writer/director (Larry Atlas) to make. This would definitely help the film to seem more realistic, but I wonder if it also reflects something about the intended audience. Does Atlas think that film needs a new format or a level of viewer interactivity the same way text has been given new formats and interactive qualities? Hmm where am I going with this...I guess I'm wondering how a comparison would work. Reading something in print versus reading something online that now gives you the options of choosing the order you view the text in, and watching a movie from start to finish versus choosing scenes of film pretty much randomly until you've watched them all or get bored... how do the two compare and should I even be thinking about all of this in terms of this comparison?

Reading "Walking Mornings," the thing that struck me the most was the sort of aimlessness it projected. Not that the essay was aimless, but the story it told. Kind of.

I think what I found most interesting in his essay was--Alright. So. Take a man whose work is fiction, creating a disconnected digital something out of nothing. He gets tired of this and feels disconnected himself. He has his sabbatical, goes off, wanders around bits of Europe, does a little research up in Germany, which he deems rather unimportant and leaves unelaborated, but spends most of his time engaged in somewhat casual research and exploration and creation of the self, or of roads to reaccess a self that seems to have gotten somewhat lost or misplaced.

I just read “Walking Mornings,” and I agree with Frabby that it is a lovely, if despondent, piece. It did help me understand Joyce’s wariness of the internet and the Information Age better than I did before. He is deeply worried about the fate of attention, choice, and possibility—things that are central to how we interact with the world, how we make sense of it, and how we make a meaningful place for ourselves within it.

He writes, in reference to ever-proliferating technologies, “never before have human beings been as surrounded as we are now by so much empty possibility. Never before has there been such potentiality harnessed only to displaying itself” (90). It may look like we are making informed choices and absorbing ever-increasing amounts of knowledge from technology, but Joyce thinks that most of the information and experiences that are available to us are actually hollow. This worries Joyce, because he thinks that most of the things that technology presents us with are either insignificant or actually harmful to our ability to be thinking, self- and other-aware individuals. (Although I would argue that hypertext fiction is an exceptional technology: the good stuff seems to be able to suggest new modes of reading and thinking to us—certainly a meaningful contribution.)