Patchwork Girl Podcast
For my podcast, I tried to come up with clever way expressing Patchwork Girl. I found it really difficult to express this hypertext in terms of a podcast. This podcast is a discussion of Patchwork Girl as symbolic of the hypertext creation itself. I remediated passages from Mary Jackson’s work in order to express the parallels I believe Jackson creates. Eventually I came to question what I believe Jackson’s stance is on the place for hypertext and on its future.
Thanks to Amanda Gartman and her [beautiful] Mac.
October 4th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Megan,
You’ve made a strong case for your claim that PG is a metaphor for Jackson’s creation of hypertext, and you’ve definitely raised to the surface the “commentary” aspect of Jackson’s work. It’s interesting that you mentioned in class you hoped to have a variety of female voices to patch together, and I do think that would have contributed to the experience of the podcast, especially if you made use of the editing function in Audacity, something I think/hope you’ll have fun playing with for the Oulipo podcast later this semester.
I, too, have found myself wondering about Jackson’s own feelings on hypertext as I read this time around. She is so self-aware it’s hard not to see some kind of critique of hypertext in there; on the other hand, she seems equally entranced by it. I think she’s also using hypertext as a metaphor in turn for postmodern experiences/theories of constructed identity and performative gender–and the writing of the hypertext is her way of embracing/coming to terms with how identity falls apart or must be continually put back together b/c we really don’t have the Enlightenment ideas about wholeness to fall back on anymore (I’m thinking especially of the Story “chapter” here and “frames” like “Denial and a Photo Album” and “Becoming Whole” which I’ll excerpt here:
BECOMING WHOLE
I believed that if I concentrated on wishing, my body itself would erase its scars and be made new. Molt, I advised, poring over it inch by glitch.
Even now I admire my bladed faith. My will, bully to flaccid fact! I felt like a thought concentrating into stone. Accept was a cotton doctrine. I thought thought would pulp the merely actual: this flesh with too brimming a measure of flour and dirt in it. Which exposed the cheap stuff it was made of by its readiness to flake and clump.
Body: the word starts tenderly but does not linger, fills with breath, then bends round a bone. It’s a frugal word, almost hard. I imagined a body perfectly sensate and stone-slick. I strained as if to shit. I could force that essence to precipitate out of my spongy self. My flesh would drop off in chunks like rotting bark.
I thought myself a secular archangel, elevated by will. I thought my thought an axiom, or a gun.
It seems to me when she “accepts” her multiple selves by transferring (?) Elsie’s history back to her, she finds her way to live in the world.
Those at least are my thoughts, hopefully building off and furthering your own.
PS I was just thinking before class today how hypertext won’t last (in part b/c of outdated software), and that I should start teaching it as historical rather than contemporary. How’s that for the way tech is influencing our culture–history is now 15 years old!