In an email on WPA-L following the “attack on America,” Keith Rhodes noted that: “we're all revved up with nowhere to take it”. This sentiment describes, in part, my feeling upon reading this collection. I was thoroughly engaged in the play-FULL-ness from the beginning, with John and Dene's delightful introduction, the MOO dialogue complete with talking bots (and the bots often have the most incisive comments), to the final "hypertextual" (albeit a flat hypertext) MOO with annotations.  But frustrated, too, that I had to contain the playful text/ideas in cardboard covers; that I had to carry it around with me, reading it silently; that I couldn't be physically engaged with the text except to read it, change positions, and read it again.  Of course, I could (and did) make notations in the margins, entering into a dialogic conversation with the authors--but a one-sided dialogue, a call and response, not a give and take where knowledge (and community) are constructed and re-constructed.  Well, I suppose the text did alter my state somewhat, and knowledge might even have been constructed.  But not in the dynamic manner that I wanted after engaging with the text.

To clarify:
Being revved up is a GOOD thing—one of the best of things, because it often precedes other good things: work, play, FULLness, or some combination of these. And I lied; I can find somewhere to take it. I can take it to the hallway for intellectual conversation; I can take it online, to private discussion; I can take it to a public list. But I can't take it where I want to take it.

-beckster