"I think it’s something akin to attributed collage (sort of Deleuzian, if you’re into theory; if not, check out “Introduction: Rhizome” in A Thousand Plateaus). I’m not against documentation. But also: picture reading a mass-market Western on a fourth or fifth generation Kindle (or the iPhone as it currently stands). As you read, you toggle back and forth to various web pages and wikis, fleshing out the story. Maybe some google image searches. In fact, maybe the author - who’s paid a flat rate and wants to focus on the action - prompts you to google “free-range vs. ranching disputes” or “Jesse James” rather than fill you in on all the contextual stuff. A few artful sentences or paragraphs of choice desert description from an old Larry McMurtry novel are incorporated seamlessly into the text; clicking on them takes you to the Lonesome Dove amazon page. Now imagine this in an academic or argument paper."

I think there's something to this. It's giving me grandiose ideas of palimpsests and telescoping texts, what with that bit about "fleshing out the story," and I wonder why I, and the author of this blog post are so drawn to iterative art. Everything is intertext, one might say, in the digital age, and I recall John Mellencamp talking in an NPR interview about how he feels that anything he's heard, anything he's read, no matter if it was already written by Shakespeare or sung by the Beatles (loose paraphrase), it's fair game for him.

Isn't this fundamentally how we think? We take an idea and build on it and jerry-rig it for whatever purpose we need -- a word, a game, a computer function. So too, in art?