My grandfather died Sunday. The funeral will be at Arlington National Cemetery. He was a doctor in the U.S. Navy. He was up walking the deck, a few minutes before sick call, when the Japanese planes appeared over Pearl Harbor. And, afterward, he did triage — choosing who would die, who they would let die, because there weren’t enough doctors to save everyone who should have lived. That was the part it hurt him to talk about.

I’ve cried for him and my family. And I’ve also cried because it’s through his pain that I read that the U.S. keeps bombing the city of Baghdad. It’s like bombing San Francisco instead of Pearl Harbor. In Basra there’s not enough water to drink. Someone there is having to choose which kids, who should all have lived, will have to die.

This is the writing exercise I did with my electronic writing students at our Tuesday class meeting. The Dallas half is from a workshop I took with Chris Spain.

A. Write “Dallas” or “Baghdad” at the top of your paper.

B. If you wrote Dallas, write the JFK assassination from Jackie’s first-person point of view. If you wrote Baghdad, write the “shock and awe” bombing of the city from the perspective of a civilian in the city. Time: five minutes.

C. Next, if you wrote Dallas, write the JFK assassination from JFK’s second-person point of view. If you wrote Baghdad, write the bombing from President Hussein’s second-person point of view. Five min.

D. Finally, if you wrote Dallas, write the assassination from Oswald’s third-person point of view. If you wrote Baghdad, write the bombing from the third-person POV of a soldier on a US aircraft carrier.

Of course, I hadn’t expected to wake up this morning to read “War erupted Wednesday night as the United States launched Tomahawk cruise missiles and aimed 2000-pound bombs at Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and other ‘leadership targets’ in Baghdad.” They’re spinning the war as assassination. One of the few methods that’s worked for starting up a world war.

Now, over the next two weeks, the results of the writing exercises are being interconnected and edited on our class wiki. Who knows what those weeks will bring.

Jill expressed interest in yesterday’s post about Screen, so, in case anyone would like to know more, here’s another image and a link to a short PDF about the project. Some out there may recognize the particular constrained writing form used in the PDF (one page, two columns, alphabetical authors…).

What happens at the end. (Michelle Higa)

In other news, I’m talking about The New Media Reader tonight at NYU with Ken Perlin and Christiane Paul (Nick can’t make it). The event’s at 719 Broadway, 12th floor, 7pm (more details on all of these at the NMR website). I’m particularly looking forward to tonight’s talk, because it’s hosted by the NYU Center for Advanced Technology — which provided essential support for the NMR. (Also, a nice post about the project from Adrian.)

My Cave collaboration with Joshua J Carroll, Shawn Greenlee, and Andrew McClain is coming along nicely. It’s called Screen. Words peel from the walls toward the reader, who can strike them back with her hand. Here’s an image:

(Michelle Higa)

Inspired by Scott Rettberg’s blogging of my talk at Temple, I’ve posted a section of my slides from that evening. These are the ones that address the questions “What is electronic writing?” and “What is hypertext?” (The folks at Temple asked me to give my talk a bit of a personal perspective, which explains the “What about me?” moments.)

I’d be interested to hear what folks think about these, though as my current blog software lacks both comments and trackback (this may change soon) it’ll have to be via email: noah@NOqueeg.SPAMcom (removing “NO” and “SPAM” from the machine name).