narrative

The importance of consequences plots Brenda Laurel's response to Michael Mateas.

Eric Zimmerman whips "four naughty concepts" into disciplinary shape.

Against the notion that music is the most abstract of art forms, Olivia Block thinks of music as a language with its own vocabulary of sounds, patterns, rhythms, notes. On the day of a performance in Kyoto, Japan, these reflections alter Block's sense of her own language, English, deconstructed by Japanese advertisements, tee-shirts, "American" candy-bar wrappers, and text-cell phones.