Stitch Bitch

I must assume that Shelley Jackson was aiming for irony after she put the final full stop at the end of ‘Stitch Bitch’, as the entire subject of the article reflexed her own style of writing; ‘impure, improper, and disorienting’.

After sitting down on Sunday to read an article with an intriguing title, I was met with what only felt like a nagging girlfriend, who just could not get to the point. Every sentence was laced with an unnecessary slew of adjectives, metaphors and analogies that only dressed up a point that could of been made in half the words and half the concentrated effort to finish reading it. If Jacksons intention of this article was to convince readers that hypertext was in fact a better form of writing then I am not sure she achieved this goal.

After trying to fight through my initial irritation with this style of writing, amongst the word jungle that was on the page, Jackson made some extremely insightful points which I had hoped she would expand on further. Hypertext in its essence is supposed to be challenging and supposed to make the reader work for the meaning, Jackson highlighted very astutely that

boundaries between genres and disciplines keep people dumb and inflexible and make people careerists of the imagination. You can’t let other people decided what is important to think or write about. Other people are wrong…but also keep in mind that you are someones else’s “other people”. 

Jackson articulates a notion of the 21st century which I think is applicable to almost everything. It could be argued that everything has been done, much like in art, everything has been explored, painted and etched, and you are just copying and trying to develop a different interpretation that you hope will be deemed original. Unless there is someone hiding away waiting for the right moment to impose a new form of writing on us, then everything has been explored, tried and tested, and it is up to writers who want to keep their audience engaged to produce a piece of writing that does not become stale and predictable.

However this can become a double edged sword, and as Jackson points out that ‘hypertext doesn’t know where it’s going’, readers only like to be challenged so much and if the reading in which we assume they have voluntarily partaken in becomes a chore in itself, the purpose for hypertext looses its well meaning and it no longer inspires and challenges our brain but creates resentful readers and a bad review.

Looking for a nicely rounded out conclusion to this article was extremely hopeful on my part, as I was again met with bizarre analogies involving sawdust, boats, spider-webs and dead corpses. However, in the most basic terms that can be drawn from the article, language and the formation of sentences and the wonderful practise of writing is left entirely up to you and your pen/keyboard. Without hypertext we would have an extremely bland array of books and pieces of writings that were clones of each other, and lacked imagination and thought. Although hypertext is probably not everyones first choice of style of writing, it does provide the necessary difference and option for making provocative pieces of work.