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Anne,
Forgive my email out of the blue, but I stumbled upon something you wrote online. You'll probably be amused to hear that it was via Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
I'm sort of an experimental narrativist (www.gmdstudios.com gives you a little glimpse at an attempt to describe what I do), a large part focused around interactive forms of narrative that have a high level of randomness involved: the phrase "alternate-reality game" is sometimes applied to some of our work, but the phrase "Chaotic Fiction" is starting to gain a broader acceptance in the community (as "game" sometimes sends the wrong implications.) From my perspective, these forms of narrative are way of trying to rediscover what made the oral tradition of storytelling important and harnessing our new "many-to-many" media toolset to play with those implications.
I offer up the above primarily as a way of describing why I found much of what you're writing about (esp. the role of narrative in grokking meaning) to be of the same rootstock. The conversations taking place in this community of practitioners and theorists are very much about absorbing in the concept of "chaos" into the definition of genre. I've been offering up Taleb as one of looking that (ie, the relationship between narrative, probability and heuristics.) So I've ended up using your posted review of "Black Swan" as another way of showing that people who are thinking about narrative can extrapolate from Taleb's assumptions (and thus, really, from the statistical models that Taleb invokes.)
Then, after I did that, I started to realize you might be one of the few people I've encountered on the Web who was focused on that aspect of Taleb's writing (which for me started sparking with "Fooled by Randomness" because he described the heuristics we try to utilize in interactive storytelling.) So I thought I would send an email of introduction and ask you if you had thought any further about Taleb or found in it any other insights about natural narrative behavior.
Thanks again for your writings: they were instrumental in discussions that could help to cement a narrative genre
Best,
Brian Clark
Founder/CEO, GMD Studios (www.gmdstudios.com)
Publisher/Manager, indieWIRE (www.indiewire.com)
407-657-8990 x40
brian.clark@gmdstudios.com