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.
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.
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…