She felt a strong desire to pick up one of the lighter texts on the table -- say the latest issue of People, or InStyle, which promised a "startling expose of Diana's latest exploits in the Virgin Islands." A wit had scribbled in the margin, "They weren't so virgin after Diana got there."

She turned, however, to the critical texts she had brought in her bag. She had heard that Barthes had had a column in the popular press in France. The French sensibility must indeed be different from her own, she decided, wondering if the average French reader had working definitions of terms like "hermeneutics" and "semiotics" on the tip of their tongue (or rather, brain). She was aware that she herself used terms like "trope" and "posit" with wild abandon in her papers and in her classes, hoping that they would lend an air of credibility to her work. She hoped she had approximated the real meaning in her usage, but as she had never been questioned, she assumed that either she was on target, or that no one else knew, either.

She turned to the storyspace web in front of her.