I felt a little bit lost jumping into this project to be perfectly honest. The actual creative element I’ve been exploring enthusiastically; I found myself even with a surplus of ideas because of the delicious openness of the project itself. What I found daunting was locating a particular piece of sound art that could be said to inform my own approach to the topic, probably because my understanding of how one piece of art informs another is obviously more deeply engrained in fiction writing; digging through various sound art across the spectrum, I found myself asking: “How can any of these be directly related to my own understanding of the work, which derives from a place totally independent of any digital background or even audio/musical background?”
Charles Bernstein’s piece, “Piffle (Breathing),” felt like it opens from a very similar place to where I intend to go with mine, simply by virtue of its use of basic body sounds to set a particular mood. My own piece is still developing in its conception, simply because my instinct is the same with fiction, furniture and anything really: clutter the hell out of things until I feel like I need to dig my way out. Where it begins, though, is with a very simple concept. When I was a child, my family was not religious; I went to church approximately 4 times, and only so my parents could dump my brother and I off while they went golfing with my grandfather. Beyond that, my only religious experience was in something called vacation bible school, which was basically us being shunted off to a local church for a week to sing songs and reenact Bible stories with sock puppets. While we were there, a group of about 200 children would sit in this huge chapel and play “thunderstorm,” a game in which everyone would rub their palms together, then start snapping, then stomp their feet on the floor to simulate the sound of a rainstorm. This only worked with a bunch of people participating, and for me it began to embody everything I understood about organized religion: you cannot find God without lots of people, and sometimes we as individuals are forced to find him, even if we don’t want to.
My sound piece begins from the attempt to reenact that thunderstorm sound with the sound effects from a single person, namely, myself. I am going to do as much as I can through manipulating it, but I ultimately expect to fail, which is part of the point. On top of this, I intend to layer a narrative which I am currently writing, which begins with the sentence, “She found Jesus in a rainstorm, even though she was not looking for him.” Beyond that, I’m still deciding on any additional layers.
Back to Bernstein. What immediately struck me about this piece when I began listening to it was the very basic and yet disturbing place it opens. For a good moment, we get only the artist breathing. I was so uncomfortable about this after the first few seconds that I found myself actually skipping ahead to find what else the piece consisted of on the first listening. What it develops into is three layered pieces: the first, the breathing; the second, a conversation that begins after this; and the third, a conversation between the artist and someone else regarding the logistics of the actual piece. What drew me to this was two things. I was interested in the use of breathing in the piece for numerous reasons: the discomfort it causes, the background rhythm it creates, and the fact that it’s so simple and yet shapes the piece so definitively. Also, the meta-art tactic it uses with the one conversation makes us that much more aware of the piece’s art-ness, and this artistic self-awareness is always something I’m interested in.
I’ll talk about this more in class. But to round this piece out, I’ll leave you with a little AC/DC and admit that on some level I’m sure this informs my piece as well (forgive the video; it's a poor substitute for the original music video, which was difficult to find an accessible copy of):
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Trees falling in a presentation hall...
I’ve gone about seven different directions trying to put into some sort of context The Yes Men and last week’s Hacker Manifesto. I think seeing the film enabled me to better respect the ideology expounded upon in the reading, although more in the sense of using artistic expression in its most open interpretation as a means of stirring things up politically. I don’t think what bothered me so much about the Hacker Manifesto was the ideology itself, although its strictly Marxist idea of art being constantly co-opted I did resist somewhat, if only for the more romanticized reasons from Chabon’s essay I discussed last week: the pleasure inherent in any art form makes it ultimately too personal and thus impervious to being completely made into product. To put it simply, art finds a way. I imagine the Trickster of Chabon’s essay, in the bookstore or otherwise, defying convention, skirting expectations.
What I came out of last week’s viewing interested in was this idea of art’s adaptation into what might not normally be considered art for specifically political means. Which is not to say that doing so for other means isn’t interesting. Rather, I feel like, for myself, if there is no political or at least social vein to one’s work, some attempt to “stir things up,” then why am I paying attention to any convention you’re attempting to defy, or even why do I bother to write myself (I think I‘ve seen too much literary work, experimental fiction specifically, which seems to be experimenting for its own sake without saying anything remotely interesting with it)? I’m intrigued by the whole concept of political art, if only because the conventions it attempts to escape are frequently not merely conventions of form but of law and social behavior. How does one use art to express something political that moves people under a government that, let’s face it, doesn’t exactly encourage that sort of behavior?
So I started looking into some political art on the internet, focusing finally in two places: the Yes Man’s continued work pretending to represent organizations they find reprehensible, and the work of artist Ron English, specifically his political billboards. Something I found intriguing about the Yes Man’s more recent work was the effect that their notoriety had on their efforts, specifically how it preempted any shock value they made have had in front of a board of individuals ignorant to their usual hijinks. I was interested particularly in their infiltration of a Dow board meeting in 2005, since I did my undergrad in Mt Pleasant, MI, about fifteen minutes from where the meeting was held, and am well aware of how that company shapes the economy and political climate of the region. The response to their presence, specifically a whole slew of guards who apparently knew exactly who they were, while entertaining, brings up an important issue in their work: is this in fact the co-opting that the Hacker’s Manifesto is pointing to? Has the general alert to their existence and the success of their efforts to draw attention to corruption drawn so much attention that their methods themselves have become obsolete? Will it be necessary for them to find new ways to continue this work in order to get the same point across? How does one’s work remain vital when the very point of it--garnering media attention--makes the continued work impossible?
This is part of what drew me to the work I found of Ron English and other billboard and graffiti artists. The messages seem to be along similar lines in English’s work, although his seems to be a bit more partisan, specifically his endorsement of Obama. But the difference in medium means that there is both a smaller group of people contacted by a particular work but a greater amount of anonymity. The artist is not directly part of the work, and thus the risk involved in presenting that work is smaller, insomuch as that work is less likely to be prevented from presentation and thus has a higher possibility of reaching its target audience. The art is less persona and more representation and so the artist is not openly associated with his work. At the same time, though, the risk in the Yes Men’s choice of medium is coupled with a higher volume of press and therefore a greater impact if it succeeds. A billboard, however well-done, is easier to ignore. English’s work seems dependent also upon volume, but this volume derives from the number of billboards he creates and the location of presentation, in other words, the likelihood of press coverage due to the significance of its presence. In either case, a work is dependent to a certain extent upon press. If the audience reached is limited, the work is somewhat defeated in its intentions. As was discussed in the film, the initial presentation was not the point so much as the fallout it created; without fallout, the work is merely an extremely well-prepared prank.
All of this seems more resonant with explicitly political work, but it brings up a question for all art that attempts to break down barriers and create precedents: if no one hears you, does it fail? Who is art for: the artist or the audience? What does it mean to be a successful as an artist? I suppose that this is a question we all as individual artists must answer.
What I came out of last week’s viewing interested in was this idea of art’s adaptation into what might not normally be considered art for specifically political means. Which is not to say that doing so for other means isn’t interesting. Rather, I feel like, for myself, if there is no political or at least social vein to one’s work, some attempt to “stir things up,” then why am I paying attention to any convention you’re attempting to defy, or even why do I bother to write myself (I think I‘ve seen too much literary work, experimental fiction specifically, which seems to be experimenting for its own sake without saying anything remotely interesting with it)? I’m intrigued by the whole concept of political art, if only because the conventions it attempts to escape are frequently not merely conventions of form but of law and social behavior. How does one use art to express something political that moves people under a government that, let’s face it, doesn’t exactly encourage that sort of behavior?
So I started looking into some political art on the internet, focusing finally in two places: the Yes Man’s continued work pretending to represent organizations they find reprehensible, and the work of artist Ron English, specifically his political billboards. Something I found intriguing about the Yes Man’s more recent work was the effect that their notoriety had on their efforts, specifically how it preempted any shock value they made have had in front of a board of individuals ignorant to their usual hijinks. I was interested particularly in their infiltration of a Dow board meeting in 2005, since I did my undergrad in Mt Pleasant, MI, about fifteen minutes from where the meeting was held, and am well aware of how that company shapes the economy and political climate of the region. The response to their presence, specifically a whole slew of guards who apparently knew exactly who they were, while entertaining, brings up an important issue in their work: is this in fact the co-opting that the Hacker’s Manifesto is pointing to? Has the general alert to their existence and the success of their efforts to draw attention to corruption drawn so much attention that their methods themselves have become obsolete? Will it be necessary for them to find new ways to continue this work in order to get the same point across? How does one’s work remain vital when the very point of it--garnering media attention--makes the continued work impossible?
This is part of what drew me to the work I found of Ron English and other billboard and graffiti artists. The messages seem to be along similar lines in English’s work, although his seems to be a bit more partisan, specifically his endorsement of Obama. But the difference in medium means that there is both a smaller group of people contacted by a particular work but a greater amount of anonymity. The artist is not directly part of the work, and thus the risk involved in presenting that work is smaller, insomuch as that work is less likely to be prevented from presentation and thus has a higher possibility of reaching its target audience. The art is less persona and more representation and so the artist is not openly associated with his work. At the same time, though, the risk in the Yes Men’s choice of medium is coupled with a higher volume of press and therefore a greater impact if it succeeds. A billboard, however well-done, is easier to ignore. English’s work seems dependent also upon volume, but this volume derives from the number of billboards he creates and the location of presentation, in other words, the likelihood of press coverage due to the significance of its presence. In either case, a work is dependent to a certain extent upon press. If the audience reached is limited, the work is somewhat defeated in its intentions. As was discussed in the film, the initial presentation was not the point so much as the fallout it created; without fallout, the work is merely an extremely well-prepared prank.
All of this seems more resonant with explicitly political work, but it brings up a question for all art that attempts to break down barriers and create precedents: if no one hears you, does it fail? Who is art for: the artist or the audience? What does it mean to be a successful as an artist? I suppose that this is a question we all as individual artists must answer.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Oh You Theory People and your Wind Shouting...
I ran into Becky in the library today, which struck me as a little ironic considering I was going to the lab to blog on the extremely dense Hacker’s Manifesto, having failed to get my internet at home to bend to my will. Becky of course inquired as to how the class was going, and I of course immediately launched into my usual tirade about theory, this time with an additional paragraph explaining the lead-in of Marx and his own manifesto as it fed so directly into our reading for today. I am not anti-Marxist by nature, nor am I even anti-theory; I have always actually been intrigued by the ideology behind most of it, despite its tendency to embed itself in turgid, exclusionary prose. I find Marxism intriguing because the economic lens is one through which we must inevitably view the world, since it permeates our lives so entirely. But cultural economy, or put another way, cultural capital – this is a concept that just turns my stomach.
Explaining the whole thing to Becky, who is herself a Lit student and thus ass deep in all of that theory jazz, I think I was able to put my finger on what I found so difficult about the whole thing: the obsolescence of the style, in its obvious imitation of Marx, cheapened the argument and made the idea itself seem obsolete. Ironic, I think, because the whole point it seemed to make was that the whole theory of Marxism, which proved impractical at least inasmuch as “communism” didn’t pan out, needed to be updated because it was outmoded. Paying homage to him or just raping the original style – couldn’t decide in the end.
What I think got left out of the argument in its rush to explain the commodification of art and the hacker’s responsibility to fill a continuous need for the “abstract” was something Becky and I both agreed lies at the center of the artistic experience: the individual. While I think this attempts to address that notion, I’m not sure it quite makes it, or, more accurately, ends up contradicting itself in its adherence to the language of universals borrowed from our dear old Karl. We’re both reader response people through and through; in other words, we are both big believers in throwing out the application of a lot of traditional theory and coming back to a very basic, personal place. While I agree that commodification can determine what we experience and how we do so, I feel like this is a bit of a cop-out. The personalization of creative experience, both from the creative and receptive perspectives, can only be co-opted so much. Art is not material. And no amount of “vectoralist” intervention will make this so, not entirely anyway.
On a slightly divergent but similar note, I’ve just begun reading Michael Chabon’s recently released book of essays about reading and writing called Maps and Legends. He has some thoughts along similar lines: puts in his two cents about theory, fiction as entertainment, the fallacy of genre, and how much we seek to over-analyze art and categorize the hell of it. A lot more readable (and yeah, I’ll give you that he’s one person whose prose I will consistently pimp for anyone who’ll listen). It felt like a good companion to this piece for me. The essay is called “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” for anyone interested.
A couple things from the essay that stuck me as particularly relevant, for those interested:
With regard to his feelings as to why he reads/writes:
"I could uncork some stuff about reader response theory or the Lacanian parole. I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could abduce Kafka's formula: 'A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.' [...] But in the end--here's my point--it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles."
How so-called genre writers of any tack distinguish themselves:
"When it comes to conventions, their central impulse is not to flout or to follow them but, flouting or following, to play."
The Trickster in the evolution of fiction:
"Because Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way the novel has done so often in its long history, the short stort must, inevitably, go."
These are particularly relevant if you are willing to play a little bit with his references to "entertainment" and the "short story" as his ideas gestate.
Explaining the whole thing to Becky, who is herself a Lit student and thus ass deep in all of that theory jazz, I think I was able to put my finger on what I found so difficult about the whole thing: the obsolescence of the style, in its obvious imitation of Marx, cheapened the argument and made the idea itself seem obsolete. Ironic, I think, because the whole point it seemed to make was that the whole theory of Marxism, which proved impractical at least inasmuch as “communism” didn’t pan out, needed to be updated because it was outmoded. Paying homage to him or just raping the original style – couldn’t decide in the end.
What I think got left out of the argument in its rush to explain the commodification of art and the hacker’s responsibility to fill a continuous need for the “abstract” was something Becky and I both agreed lies at the center of the artistic experience: the individual. While I think this attempts to address that notion, I’m not sure it quite makes it, or, more accurately, ends up contradicting itself in its adherence to the language of universals borrowed from our dear old Karl. We’re both reader response people through and through; in other words, we are both big believers in throwing out the application of a lot of traditional theory and coming back to a very basic, personal place. While I agree that commodification can determine what we experience and how we do so, I feel like this is a bit of a cop-out. The personalization of creative experience, both from the creative and receptive perspectives, can only be co-opted so much. Art is not material. And no amount of “vectoralist” intervention will make this so, not entirely anyway.
On a slightly divergent but similar note, I’ve just begun reading Michael Chabon’s recently released book of essays about reading and writing called Maps and Legends. He has some thoughts along similar lines: puts in his two cents about theory, fiction as entertainment, the fallacy of genre, and how much we seek to over-analyze art and categorize the hell of it. A lot more readable (and yeah, I’ll give you that he’s one person whose prose I will consistently pimp for anyone who’ll listen). It felt like a good companion to this piece for me. The essay is called “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” for anyone interested.
A couple things from the essay that stuck me as particularly relevant, for those interested:
With regard to his feelings as to why he reads/writes:
"I could uncork some stuff about reader response theory or the Lacanian parole. I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could abduce Kafka's formula: 'A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.' [...] But in the end--here's my point--it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles."
How so-called genre writers of any tack distinguish themselves:
"When it comes to conventions, their central impulse is not to flout or to follow them but, flouting or following, to play."
The Trickster in the evolution of fiction:
"Because Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way the novel has done so often in its long history, the short stort must, inevitably, go."
These are particularly relevant if you are willing to play a little bit with his references to "entertainment" and the "short story" as his ideas gestate.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Inventing Gender and its Political Ramifications (which actually means nothing)
Thematically, I find myself with something of a surplus of possibilities with regard to the pieces Kelly and I were assigned to, The Essence of a Nation: Chinese Virtual Persons on the Net and Inanimate Alice. The most over-arching of these is one whose scope is large, opening itself up to numerous interpretations in this context: the issue of identity. Both obviously come from artists who identity at least partially as Chinese, but in the course of their lives have ex-patriated and whose work thereafter is made and sponsored from other countries.
Kelly and I have chosen to take one each of the pieces as our focal point, but at the same time, in this issue of identity, it is hard not to directly address the overlap in the two. Each addresses on both a personal and socio-political level the concept of how identity manifests itself in their work. Each comes from a particular political origin (though they approach this subject in quite different ways) and, more notably given this origin, are both female artists. The female in Chinese culture is so evident a subject for this identity question that it feels somewhat unnecessary to waste space discussing reasons.
My focus was Xiao Qian’s The Essence of a Nation, whose title itself draws attention to this question. The claim it makes is that the artist has created six separate personas through a series of images on which text is directly imprinted in what sometimes appears to be arbitrary placement but in other cases places visual emphasis on a particular detail of the photo. The title clearly makes the argument that these characters embody one would assume something political or at least social about her homeland, though none of them seem to have a dramatically political bent. The exception is perhaps being the artist who claims that Chinese linguistic characters are in and of themselves art, contrasted with the Western alphabet, which is only capable of forming words. What becomes interesting about this is of course that the entire piece is in English, and the reader is in fact being given these assertions in simple English over images of Chinese character-art held up by the “fictitious” artist. But I might be straying a bit off my initial point.
I am interested, though, in the way the gender issue plays into this whole schema. The artist establishes two notable platforms at the beginning of the piece. First, in describing her intent in the piece to create several fictional people, she includes herself as one of them, another persona created in conjunction with the others. And while manifestations of the artist in his/her work are essentially projected persona, this does so in a direct way, claiming that the artist is in fact creating herself, and separates herself only inasmuch as her section is not linked with the others at the top of the initial page (though it is in other locations).
Second, while discussing her process she says, “as a woman designing virtual persons, I only like to create men.” While she makes a number of allusions to the enigmatic nature of her own created persona, this seems notable inasmuch as she directly calls into question her own gender identity, describing herself as possibly non-gender specific or even a ghost (a different heading in fact claims that her name derives from a story about a beneficent female ghost). The lines are blurred as to her personal identity, but given the significance of being a woman in Chinese culture, this seems particularly notable.
I’ll go into this in greater detail in our presentation. But even this seems like a whole can of worms that may end up just making a big mess.
Kelly and I have chosen to take one each of the pieces as our focal point, but at the same time, in this issue of identity, it is hard not to directly address the overlap in the two. Each addresses on both a personal and socio-political level the concept of how identity manifests itself in their work. Each comes from a particular political origin (though they approach this subject in quite different ways) and, more notably given this origin, are both female artists. The female in Chinese culture is so evident a subject for this identity question that it feels somewhat unnecessary to waste space discussing reasons.
My focus was Xiao Qian’s The Essence of a Nation, whose title itself draws attention to this question. The claim it makes is that the artist has created six separate personas through a series of images on which text is directly imprinted in what sometimes appears to be arbitrary placement but in other cases places visual emphasis on a particular detail of the photo. The title clearly makes the argument that these characters embody one would assume something political or at least social about her homeland, though none of them seem to have a dramatically political bent. The exception is perhaps being the artist who claims that Chinese linguistic characters are in and of themselves art, contrasted with the Western alphabet, which is only capable of forming words. What becomes interesting about this is of course that the entire piece is in English, and the reader is in fact being given these assertions in simple English over images of Chinese character-art held up by the “fictitious” artist. But I might be straying a bit off my initial point.
I am interested, though, in the way the gender issue plays into this whole schema. The artist establishes two notable platforms at the beginning of the piece. First, in describing her intent in the piece to create several fictional people, she includes herself as one of them, another persona created in conjunction with the others. And while manifestations of the artist in his/her work are essentially projected persona, this does so in a direct way, claiming that the artist is in fact creating herself, and separates herself only inasmuch as her section is not linked with the others at the top of the initial page (though it is in other locations).
Second, while discussing her process she says, “as a woman designing virtual persons, I only like to create men.” While she makes a number of allusions to the enigmatic nature of her own created persona, this seems notable inasmuch as she directly calls into question her own gender identity, describing herself as possibly non-gender specific or even a ghost (a different heading in fact claims that her name derives from a story about a beneficent female ghost). The lines are blurred as to her personal identity, but given the significance of being a woman in Chinese culture, this seems particularly notable.
I’ll go into this in greater detail in our presentation. But even this seems like a whole can of worms that may end up just making a big mess.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Stories too Powerful to Make Up
This is the line that jumps out of the middle for me about Six Sex Scenes. The language of the piece is so simplistic in its syntax and word choice that I begin to take it as a mere recounting of facts rather than a work of fiction, something that I can't really be sure of.
Diving in from the opening page, I get the impression that just that is happening: I am diving into a body of water made up of numerous disturbing images interwoven with seemingly innocuous (at least by comparison) reminiscence about frequently unpleasant childhood memories or recollections from the narrator’s relationship with Andy. The options offered through which to enter the text are both from the adult perspective of the character, and both are probably significant in their own ways: one, a quick recollection of an evening out with her boyfriend in which she effectively severs herself from him by fantasizing about switching orientations; the other, a therapy session with the two in which their slightly dysfunctional sexual relationship is tempered by the therapist’s assertion that they are relatively healthy. This is the first section I read, and this inevitably informed the rest of the text for me; it feels like a lens through which to view the rest of the piece. I can see, though, that entering through the other section could dramatically alter the reader’s initial perception of the piece.
After this, the reader swims between scenes through the embedded links, all of which remain internal and thus give the feeling of being lost IN something (differing from the Caitlin Fisher piece, in which new page tabs open up with different hyperlinks, thus making it more of a unraveling structure whose contents we can view fairly simultaneously). This creates a stronger sense of fluidity but, in concert with the content of the story itself, contributes to a feeling of being overwhelmed: by the sexuality of her relationships to her boyfriend and her father, and by the mere flow between sections. The “Home” link at the end of each line at the bottom permits the reader to exit at any time and reenter from a different place when ready to do so, but it implies that this is a last resort. Even when I reached the end of a thread, leaving me with this as my only option, I was left thinking I ought to backtrack instead, as one inevitably has to do in order to absorb the whole of the piece. Certain links are only available from certain pages, which requires a reader to eventually repeat pages in order to locate everything. I noticed early that a page suggesting an “Introduction” was lost in the middle, offering the possibility to make sense of the muddle the author creates in our minds, perhaps a means of organizing the images or disclaiming the assertions made in particular about her childhood relationship with her father. I found myself waiting to come back to this page hoping that this was the case. The “Introduction,” though, was in fact her meeting with Andy and thus more a transition between the dual worlds in the piece. So at the end I am left wondering about a comment made by the lady who does her family’s laundry when she is a girl, that stories are simply too powerful to make up. And attempting to apply this casual assertion to the whole of the piece, leaving me with the question: is this the narrator or a character talking? Is this piece fictional slices of a dysfunctional character or a life whose content is too powerful to make up?
Diving in from the opening page, I get the impression that just that is happening: I am diving into a body of water made up of numerous disturbing images interwoven with seemingly innocuous (at least by comparison) reminiscence about frequently unpleasant childhood memories or recollections from the narrator’s relationship with Andy. The options offered through which to enter the text are both from the adult perspective of the character, and both are probably significant in their own ways: one, a quick recollection of an evening out with her boyfriend in which she effectively severs herself from him by fantasizing about switching orientations; the other, a therapy session with the two in which their slightly dysfunctional sexual relationship is tempered by the therapist’s assertion that they are relatively healthy. This is the first section I read, and this inevitably informed the rest of the text for me; it feels like a lens through which to view the rest of the piece. I can see, though, that entering through the other section could dramatically alter the reader’s initial perception of the piece.
After this, the reader swims between scenes through the embedded links, all of which remain internal and thus give the feeling of being lost IN something (differing from the Caitlin Fisher piece, in which new page tabs open up with different hyperlinks, thus making it more of a unraveling structure whose contents we can view fairly simultaneously). This creates a stronger sense of fluidity but, in concert with the content of the story itself, contributes to a feeling of being overwhelmed: by the sexuality of her relationships to her boyfriend and her father, and by the mere flow between sections. The “Home” link at the end of each line at the bottom permits the reader to exit at any time and reenter from a different place when ready to do so, but it implies that this is a last resort. Even when I reached the end of a thread, leaving me with this as my only option, I was left thinking I ought to backtrack instead, as one inevitably has to do in order to absorb the whole of the piece. Certain links are only available from certain pages, which requires a reader to eventually repeat pages in order to locate everything. I noticed early that a page suggesting an “Introduction” was lost in the middle, offering the possibility to make sense of the muddle the author creates in our minds, perhaps a means of organizing the images or disclaiming the assertions made in particular about her childhood relationship with her father. I found myself waiting to come back to this page hoping that this was the case. The “Introduction,” though, was in fact her meeting with Andy and thus more a transition between the dual worlds in the piece. So at the end I am left wondering about a comment made by the lady who does her family’s laundry when she is a girl, that stories are simply too powerful to make up. And attempting to apply this casual assertion to the whole of the piece, leaving me with the question: is this the narrator or a character talking? Is this piece fictional slices of a dysfunctional character or a life whose content is too powerful to make up?
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