Type-Os: The Word Donors

Reading “The Boat,” which is based on the story by Nam Le, adapted by Matt Huynh, was the strangest reading experience I’ve had in a while.  But I enjoyed it.   At the beginning, the words rock back and forth as if you are actually on a ship that is going through a storm.   

When you scroll through the story, it adds sounds and extra effects to help tell it.  The pictures and comics help to tell the story and it seems to give the story a life of its own.  At first, I did not like how the story was being told.  The white words were difficult to read against the storming sky and when they moved to the side of the page you had to speed read through the sentence before half of it was cut off.  But as I scrolled along, I found myself intrigued by the style and eventually decided that I loved the form that it was written in.  Not only does Matt Huynh bring the story to life, he also uses technology to do it.  I remember books from when I was younger that were pop ups.

I found Teju Cole’s fashion of storytelling to be incredibly riveting and groundbreaking in his story A Piece of the Wall. The story deals with the hot button topic of immigration between Mexico and the United States, and while the tweets began in March of 2014 it is still, unsurprisingly, a very prevalent and demanding topic. He deals with the inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants and how other organizations are trying to turn the tide, as well as U.S. citizens who are profiled for illegal immigration due to their race. It is a story of progress in a world that does not want it, the refusal of cruelty getting up into the face of the law.

Putting the plot aside, I found the use of Twitter as a storytelling platform to be refreshing and interesting, as well as easy to follow. Cole’s incorporation of pictures, side accounts and self-insertion is well done and unprecedented, putting a spin on the classic use of Twitter and repurposing it in a way that is not usually seen. In a way, the characters, the pictures, they are all “a piece of the wall”; not just symbolically through the story, but also by using the feed of the social media platform, the digital “wall”. I believe, if more people decided to use Twitter in this manner, people would be more inclined to visit specific accounts and to be more interested in getting involved, not only within the story but with the message Cole is trying to send, too.

Jennifer Egan, I think, was trying to say something with her unconventional story publication format. Egan first put “Black Box” into the world as a serialized story through nightly tweets for a week. The story was doled out sentence by sentence, tweet by tweet. For anyone following the story in real time, the experience is jerky and anxiety-inducing, but, paradoxically, can also lead to boredom quickly. 

Nowadays we normally assume that, whilst reading on the Internet, you are not reading so much as skimming (hence the beauty of the tweet). However, depending on how you follow her line of tweets, you are forced into reading every. Single. Sentence. Or you get bored with the unnaturally slow pace and having to wait in between little releases and you a) give up and forget about the story or b) wait for the story to finish and then go back and read it. If you choose the latter, your reading experience is still affected-- the sentences are generally short, straight-forward, staccato, almost automated. Oftentimes it seems like you’re reading the script for an automated recording. By playing with publication medium, Egan plays with how we receive the story--and our actual interest in it.

Technically speaking, a lot of people’s bodies are technological beings, what with modern medicine incorporating heart pacemakers, metal hip replacements, skin grafts, the list goes on and on. 

In an non-medicinal sense however, we typically think of our bodies as natural, as well, we are natural beings. However, Jackson’s My Body transforms her body into something completely accessible and understandable by technological means. Using a constantly intertwined series of hyperlinks, Jackson describes stories behind the parts of her body, allowing you to dive into interesting stories about everything from her tattoos to her vagina to her neck. They all seem unrelated, but there is always something in her story to connect the story to another body part and the related story.

Here’s a warning before you dive into reading it should you choose to subject yourself to a never ending confusing cycle of hyperlinks: some of the stories are really gross, and there is no way to foresee stumbling into them.

 When I first opened My Body, I found myself reading first “vagina”, with the assumption that it would be a great feminist piece about women’s sexual empowerment. In a weird, analyzed way, I guess you could read this section as such, but the story is weird, and super gross and disturbing. In relation to the author, though, in reading sections like this, you realize how vulnerable she is making herself. In writing explicitly and in-detail about each part of her body, describing how it looks, feels, and acts, and publishing it electronically, making it a technological interactive experience, Jackson is putting herself on the line.

Most of us, when we read written works, expect to follow a story (or unfolding of facts or events) in a general sequence, and we expect to know when we are at the beginning of the work and when we are at the end. Shelley Jackson’s My Body defies all of those expectations. We enter the text by encountering a rather grotesque drawing showcasing a crooked tongue and creepy breathing that we usually hear during tense moments of horror movies. A click takes us to a diagram of a female body, where we can select parts and move, textually, through a stranger’s body and life story.  

The text plays out through hyperlinks, such as you find here and in many texts online. Strange sketches accompany the “story” as the reader moves through a labyrinth of text and image. We don’t (and can’t) know where this work ends and where it starts. And we have no idea what order we should read it in. Ambling through this work feels a little bit like entering a virtual Twilight Zone with never ending pages of words to read.

However, unlike the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last,” we don’t find ourselves surrounding by traditional books, but a new(er) medium of writing meant to work with the technology and resources of the internet. Jackson’s My Body echoes and works with the reality of reading online that we live with everyday. We can never read everything on the internet (we couldn’t even get through all of Twitter if we wanted). Our text is almost always accompanied by images online, and we never run short of options for hyperlinks, which connect to more links, which lead to more links, etc., etc., ad infinitum. My Body feels unfamiliar when we compare it to traditional books, but it feels like one of the most natural pieces of text we could ever read when we consider our habits on the internet. We have an essentially endless supply of content, and we don’t know where it starts or where it ends. 

In fact, compared to the internet, Shelley Jackson is pretty straight-forward. 

I always carry a book around with me wherever I go. When I have any sort of free time, I pull out my book and read it. However, most people these days carry phones wherever they go. They pull out their phone whenever they have free time. When I am, bored I pull out a novel to read. Humanity is no longer sufficiently bored enough to pull out a novel. Why use a novel when you can just use a phone? Besides novels add like two pounds to your person and a phone you can just always keep in your pocket. It might be more practical, but is it more entertaining? After all the phone has games on it to take away the boredom of everyday life, while a novel only has words. Yet those words take you to a different time and place to experience life in different ways. Technology has changed the way the world works in so many ways. If there was technology in the movie Home Alone then Kevin would just have to text his mom saying she left him, and then no there would be no more point to the movie. Technology, the use of cell phones, enable us to take the easy way out in life. If there was technology during the Odyssey than Odysseus wouldn’t have gone on his many years’ journey to get back home to Penelope. The use of our phones prevents us from being sufficiently bored. I rather be sufficiently bored and read a book, rather than being bored and using a phone.

-penguin60561