Decluttering bookshelves has turned up many old scribblings. A notebook from 1998 is full of blog posts, though I hadn’t yet realised that blogging was the name of my native genre. Here’s a quotation from Shelley Jackson‘s Patchwork Girl that would have been an epigraph for my thesis if I’d remembered it:

If you think you’re going to follow me, you’ll have to learn to move the way I do, think the way I think; there’s just no way around it. And then you’ll have trouble telling me apart from yourself.

That’s what computers do. Technology. Pens, too, for that matter.

2 thoughts on “follow

  1. Francolis Lachance

    Jill seems to be writing as “txt/jill” today.

    The quotation from Patchwork Girl could be the introductory quotation to your defense lecture in November. “If you think you’re going to follow me, you’ll have to learn to move” I like how it positions the relations between text, self and others in the realm of wish and will, pure and practical reason. And the clever resistive reader/listener will by the end of the quotation move to problematize “following” as opposed to “flow along with” or better yet “flow through”.

    txt > jill > txt

    Good luck with the preparations and rediscoveries.

  2. mamamusings

    my computer, my self
    Jill Walker has a great entry about a quote from Shelly Jackson’s book Patchwork Girl. (Which I’m going to have to read…) If you think you’re going to follow me, you’ll have to learn to move the way I do, think the way I t…

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