“Shorter American Memory” is a collection of prose poems by Rosmarie Waldrop, one of the poets who visited this semester as part of the English Department’s Literary Series. I read “Shorter American Memory” for another class this semester and found it to be an incredible reading experience, and so considered adding the piece to our suggested reading list based on a tenuous similarity to the writing process Katherine Hayles describes in her chapter on “The Humument” -- Rosmarie Waldrop crafted “Shorter American Memory” by undertaking what she calls an abridgement, or collage poetry. That is, working with the text of “American Memory,” a high school textbook on U.S. history, Ms. Waldrop went through the existing order of the text and its chapters -- selecting words, phrases, and fragments either according to certain rules or according to her whims -- to create her own version of American Memory.

I left class today very curious to see how the game designers themselves felt about game theory. How they feel they fit into the theory and reality of their medium. I decided to skim around and stumbled on The Art of Computer Game Design. "

I have just finished Daniel Punday's "The Narrative Construction of Cyberspace: Reading Neuromancer, Reading Cyberspace Debates." If you're interested, the article is on JStor. He loosely bases his discussion on the novel "Neuromancer" in which the term "cyberspace" is coined. I personally have not read the novel and familiarity with it is not necessary to find the article helpful. Punday begins showing how the concept is novelistic in origin which, to me, after all of our reading, also gestures toward the idea of cyberspace, and our experience online, as a metanarrative. In general, many of the more recent theorists seem to see the internet as spatial and narrative.

I have once again managed to run off on a tangent while reading for my final, critical project. This time, I've been reading "Radiant Textuality" by Jerome McGann. In it, he addresses some traditional perspectives on printed text. He talks about Mallarme's book, written about 100 years ago, about "the culture of the book." McGann says that in it, Mallarme rejects the idea of a book as a simple container for information. Instead Mallarme (there's an accent on the last "e")uses the book to mimic the structure of a musical score and the rhythmn of a poem. I liked the following sentence from McGann: "The Mallarmean book comes forth as a set of figurations behaving like sentient and purposive creatures, constituting and calling forth their world(s), which include all of the book's readers, living and dead, actual, possible, imaginary" (210).