Well. Don't think we're going to get along, Shelly Jackson. Or whoever you are.
When I was younger and thought that I was really edgy and insightful I would write things like Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl, by Shelly Jackson. But I certainly wouldn't publish them... This text is a strange philosophical venture into the idea of writing in hyperspace... I think.
Truthfully I had trouble following with the throughline. Basically, Shelley offers up several propositions as the sections of her piece. Examples include "BOUNDARY PLAY We don't think what we think we think." "AGAINST HISTORY It was not how they said it was." she goes on and on in Confusing circles about how nothing is as we believe and we must think of things as different or non existent or opposite. You know, the things that any basic eighth grader who thinks she is an existentialist or Nihilist because she doesn't know the difference or what either even means would just eat right up. Questioning beliefs! Undoing the dogmatic structures of thought! But now as a college student 5 years after eighth grade really I can't make sense of this piece of writing and I am just frustrated. Maybe I was smarter then. Or maybe this article is senseless. Probably the former, and I am looking forward to talking about this and figuring out what she actually meant in class today.
Jackson's text is unsettling in one way, because she proposes that we don't need to read along the same literate reading path that Gunther Kress describes. In fact, she advises us to find our own way through a text, which if we are honest, is what we do anyway. It makes sense to read a novel which is configured as a novel in a linear way, but a work such as "Stitch Bitch," is constructed of changeable and exchangeable parts or segments. Jackson suggests we read her hypertext in the order we choose. Radical reading.
ReplyDeleteAny Bolter post?
ReplyDelete“When I was younger and thought that I was really edgy and insightful I would write things like Stitch Bitch: The Patchwork Girl, by Shelly Jackson. But I certainly wouldn't publish them...”
ReplyDeleteI can’t begin to describe the laughter that escaped me when I read this. I, too, can imagine my eighth-grade self drafting something like Jackon’s hypertext. But why did we decide against publishing it?
As kids, perhaps we were thinking on literary levels yet to become status quo. Maybe if we had published our young works, we’d be literary geniuses.
Oh, well.
hahaha I felt the same way about Shelly Jackson as soon as I read the first sentence of "Stitch Bitch". I still did not consider it something that I enjoyed but that's college right? You have to read things you love and hate.
ReplyDeleteIt's true, when you're younger, anyone who is "rebelling" against norms is going to stand out as someone who is for lack of a better term, awesome. But once we grow up, this kind of writing just seems over the top and a little bit obnoxious. Plus she needs to pick an identity because that was confusing enough.