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 As I was reading Reality Hunger and came upon the part explaining that most of our memories are stored verbally rather than as actual pictures, I thought back to what I think was an old Spongebob episode (but I could have the wrong cartoon, because my memory is, after all, only able to recollect bits and pieces). In the show, Spongebob forgets how to do something, and there's a scene that shows a mini Spongebob inside his own brain going through dozens of file cabinets, trying to locate whatever "file"/memory it was that was lost. I think that's the way most of us grew up imagining our memories and banks of knowledge, but Reality Hunger contests the idea.

 While my title for this post may sound highly critical of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, I did enjoy many of the ideas that David Shields presented. Some of his seemingly "random" bits of information, while I struggled to find a direct correlation to the overriding theme of a book (if there even is one of those- Shields seems to eschew the idea of "traditional" writing so much that it is challenging for me to follow even his set up for the book), really interested me. I found his fact that "In the second century b.c., Terrence said, "There's nothing to say that hasn't been said before" (7) both depressing and though provoking.

My name is Julia, and I am a senior East Asian Studies major.  This is my first English class since CSEM, which makes me feel kind of old, since I don't think it's even called CSEM anymore.  

Hello all!

I'm Kate Gould, a senior English major with a Biology minor. I've taken several modern/contemporary English classes but they have all concerned fictional prose and, as someone who loves science, I've been hankering for an English course on non-fiction. 

I worked this summer with Paul Grobstein in the Biology department in BSIE, which you can find links to under the "Come Talk About" column (if you're really that interested, that is. It's cool if you're not. Hah!), and a lot of that work took place here on Serendip. I've been posting things here since my freshman year so if anyone has any problems or issues (outside of administrative issues, of course) I'd be happy to help.

 My name is Sarah, I'm a freshmen, and I have never taken a class strictly on non-fiction, but I am very excited to take this course. I thought the reading, "Memory and Imagination" made an interesting point that forgetting details and lying, while similar, are not necessarily the same thing. I am also excited to read the book Reality Hunger.