So this blog is definitely not one to go down in history. (Wow, I had to spell definitely five times before spell check could even register it, that is sad and pathetic.) I have been struggling in terms of content for my blogs this week but I said I would pump out two of these babies tonight and by God, I will do it.

Here goes, I was doing reading for my creative journalism class and a very dim light bulb flickered in the distant reaches of my mind that it might be something I could blog about so that's what I'm gonna do. The book I was reading is Robert's Rules of Writing, authored by my professor Robert Masello. Despite being a clever attempt to boost book sales by making it required reading, the book is an attempt to give the reader "101 unconventional lessons that every writer needs to know." Rule #47 Lay Down the Law, warns readers that "when you're writing, you're creating your own world on the page,and in that world you are God. So act it." The rule cited the short-lived popularity of make your own adventure books. My professor argued that these stories failed to become a staple in publishing circles because readers don't want to have to choose their own ending. He said if readers wanted to choose what happened in a narrative they would write the book themselves.

K I wrote this one in my notebook and forgot to type it up, so I'm skipping way back to Hamlet on the Holodeck:

Chapter 10 of Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck focused on the "kaleidoscopic world" that can be represented with new digital media, allowing audiences to choose which characters to follow among a variety of choices, and perhaps by a variety of authors. Murray writes that this "can feel to some like an unauthored world," but I see it as a much more appropriate representation of the real world - in which we each have a unique vantage point, and can get closer or distance ourselves from the perspectives of others. This "ability to capture experience as systems of interrelated actions" suggests that narratives will become more complex in the future, broadening the "good guy/bad guy" stance taken by many television shows and movies to expose the intimate perspectives and motives of each character - something the traditional television show or movie does not have the time to explore.

Aldous Huxley's idea Murray uses as throughout the book (basically "will the stories brought to us by the new representational technologies 'mean anything' in hte same way that Shakespeare's plays mean something, or will they be 'told by an idiot'?") is insanely interesting, and one which I've been thinking about since reading Brave New World in a high school class.

What I've been thinking about more lately, though, is the inherent assumptions within such a question: why exactly do Shakespeare's plays mean what they mean? I think it's a strong tendency of American culture to privilege the past in such discourses, to assume the supremacy of what's come before in the face of what's new. I know, I know, Shakespeare is Shakespeare and obviously his work is exemplary, but it isn't because he was working in literature. It wasn't the medium that made Shakespeare as amazing and influential as he was, it was him, his work, and his ability to manipulate his medium.

I am not really sure what else to write about this week, so here is a general observation of mine. More and more, I find the subject material from my classes this semester interlinking and commenting or adding onto each other. And also raising nagging personal questions of mine that have long been nagging me in the back of my mind. My Metropolis class at Scripps talks about how perception changes with technology; it refers to the Industrial Revolution, but so much of it is relevant to how our understanding or perception of authorship changes as we move into postmodernism and the computer-dominated world.