As I mentioned before, this is an excellent journal, with a great blend of remembrance, recipe, and image! Check-plus.
You seem to be attempting a similar portrayal of this (ridiculous!) event to those offered by some of the more abstract "cultural commentary" areas of the A.V. Club site, but this comes off as more of a subjective list of opinions than a more objective evaluation (remember the distinction between these two that we discussed in class today). The process of desubjectifying your writing is integral to composition. Check.
Your third journal asks some fairly central questions to the progression of the story; in fact, these are things that we're *meant* to wonder about, paradoxes and contradictions that suggest that something very atypical is going on. I don't think that there's any easy answer to any of them! Check-plus.
Exactly; this is how Propp's elements play out in this story, and "Cinderella" is an interesting choice, too, because one of the preset modes of generation that the online story creator we'll discuss on Friday adopts is precisely that story. However, when you wrote this response, you were probably thinking of the Disney version of Cinderella, and it would be interesting to compare what happens in other versions—in the one I was told as a child, one of the stepsisters slices her heel off with a knife to attempt to fit her foot into the slipper at the end, but the prince is warned of the deception by a talking bird. Gruesome! Bizarre! In any case, this is a good journal entry. Check-plus.
A pretty fair assessment of how Chroma operates, though I would have appreciated a little more attention to the source material; if it doesn't make sense the first time around, you should examine it again, until you finally arrive at some reasonable conception of what it's suggesting. The text of each individual section was also available after you perform those chapters. In short, this is a fine reaction, but I would've liked you to talk in more detail about the messages of the text… simply saying that you're confused by it doesn't get us very far. Check.
This is, essentially, what I expect from these journal entries: an analysis of the characters and events involved with an eye to how they've played out in the novel thus far and what might happen with them next. However, in future journals, you might want to read a little deeper into those characters and events; try and show not only their characteristics (intelligence and craftiness, for instance), but also what they seem to represent / what common types or stereotypes they seem to be engaging with. Check-plus.
A large part of what remains unknown about this book is who, exactly, is manipulating who. There are many structures of power in place, but Cayce seems to exist outside of most of them; this puts her in a unique (and unsettled) position, constantly wondering who's on who's side. We'll see how some of these interesting relationships play out… Check-plus.
A good journal that deftly speculates about future events in the book… I've made reference to detective novels and how they impact the way Pattern Recognition is laid out, and your summation of the suspense of these few sections seems in line with this. Check-plus.
Well, it's almost anyone's guess as to how (and how many!) of these details that Gibson has been throwing out over the course of the book will be resolved. Remember the significance of the title: it suggests the process of parsing through vast quantities of information. Some of it will be useful, but some of it will doubtlessly be useless or insignificant. We'll need to keep a close eye out for which, if any, of these threads will be resolved in the coming reading. Check-plus.
Journal 10 is a good one; though you do seem to have encountered some confusion, I think that's a reasonable reaction given the highly unusual flow of the narrative. You've also put your finger on some of the common arguments made in favor of this kind of storytelling: the interactivity and the feeling that you're somehow in command of the story. Whether or not you ARE in fact in control in this particular instance, though, is up for debate… Check-plus.