this week was a very interesting unlecture, despite us not getting to my question :(. i guess there were just so many good things to talk about in regards to the other questions that we just ran out of time for mine.

the biggest point i took away from it was about the amount of control the author can have? and how much is that? well, right now it doesn’t seem like a lot. that’s the problem with the gap between the author and the reader, you can never know just how they’re gonna interpret  your work. so, in a sense, emphasising your lack of control can give you more control. if we write something that allows for different interpretations, we are showing that we are understanding how our audience works. actually, i don’t know. i lost myself just then. but it made sense when i started, haha. it’s also about not being able to know exactly what the author was thinking or intending, we just need to take the work as it is and attempt to make sense of it independently of the author.

another aspect of this, which was also brought up in the unlecture was the notion that context cannot and does not survive the text. so how could we know what an author was thinking when he wrote a book 150 years ago because it was a completely different time with different social norms and ideologies. we can only interpret it the way we see it today because we no longer have access to the context in which the work was created.

i know there was more important stuff that was discussed but my brain is falling out on me, it’s been a long day at work. but the last thing i want to mention (which was actually the first thing adrian mentioned so working backwards here) was that awesome animal book (i forgot it’s name!!!!) with the ten animals that you could mix and match to create almsot endless possibilities. oh, how i would love to read that book. that book is probably how they make pokemon now a-days, seeing as how they are really running out of ideas for those little pocket monsters (fairy floss pokemon??? say whaaaat??). but, being the child at heart that i am, i really wanna read that book and see what cool animals i can make. it was an interesting point to, the difference between that and the “choose your own adventure book”. although everyone was talking about that because the reading mentioned something similar, the titanic online game/book was pretty much a choose your own adventure because there were more limited outcomes (well, thats what i assume, i haven’t actually read/played it). but the endless sonnet was cool. i wonder if anyone has done all the possibilities? i guess not considering it would take, what was it?, 200 million years. ok so maybe not, but there’s no harm in trying 😀