Meredith's Week 2: Combinatory Poetics

 For my discussion this week, I’m choosing to focus more on Robert Coover’s “The End of Books.” It was such an interesting page that I thought showed how the digitization of literature helped creativity explode, especially in the case of the students that used the fiction space called “Hypertext Hotel.” It was an online room where anyone could interact, create new storylines, and cause mischief in the digital hotel. It also mentions the lack of solidity within hyperspace: “How do you move around in infinity without getting lost?” (Coover, 1). I related a lot to this concept just with my own work floating around “out there.” I have to click a bunch of links in Google Docs to get to my essay rather than pulling it out of my folder. There’s not necessarily an end to works now; for example, Wikipedia, one of the internet’s biggest encyclopedias, is constantly being edited and changed to keep up with the times. It’s so different from flipping through dusty old encyclopedias in the library that were done with change when they were printed.

I thought Christopher Strachey’s Love Letters generator was cute. I accessed it through a website called gingerbeardman.com. One of the sentences I got was kind of comical; "My craving craving holds dear your precious heart.” It shows how far generators have come and also how there can be imperfections like a repeated word in the poem. I want to dive a little deeper into the history of his life because he was one of the first to do this, and he was also gay at a time that it wasn’t really acceptable to be.