Stitch Bitch

After reading Stitch Bitch, this bitch (Shelley Jackson) literally left my brain in stitches.

I don’t know if it is because I just watched Arsenal play (and win) one of their most important rivalry matches of the year, but this reading made me feel really anxious, exhausted, and disoriented.  However, Jackson certainly intended for her writing to be this way.

It mimics the exact subject she writes about.

And while her writing is certainly hard to digest, she carries some strong ideas in her piece.  I can most easily relate Jackson’s view on hypertext to writing a research paper.  When beginning a paper, we usually find an article that we enjoy or have an idea in our mind that influences us to dive deeper.   Eventually, after researching and clicking links within links, we’re in a world that is unknown to us.  Somehow we end up reading a preserved article from the Shakespearean period and we can’t make sense of old English, but then you’re thinking, my god, there’s got to be some juicy information there or else why was it linked in the first place.   Paired with the fact that you just read a bunch of other articles in a non-linear fashion, you’re really at a loss for where you are within your research.  Which recalls something that Jackson writes:

“In hypertext, you can’t find out what’s important so you have to pay attention to everything, which is exhausting like being in a foreign country; you are not native.”

As well as:

“This is the old kind of interactive writing: writing so dense or so slippery that the mind must do a dance to keep a grip on it.”

I’m going to disagree with a peer here; I believe Jackson refers to dance here in a formulaic way. Although, I would argue that when I dance, it is a drunken form of improvisation. “Hey, I’m exploring my inner abstraction (end art snob quote).”  Back to dance, I believe Jackson is saying we must organize, or dance (dance has steps, routine moves, timing, etc.), to make sense of everything that lies within hypertext.

In the end, I believe Jackson made a very creative piece.  It is not traditional at all, but she certainly recreate the mess that is hypertext: non-traditional writing.  It also echoes themes of non-linearity, which I believe will describe some of our creativity processes in the future since we all have different backgrounds right now.  As we have read, doing something outside of the box will get you noticed – and that’s just what Jackson has done.