Half Life

So several people have brought our attention to other cool things besides Skin on Shelley Jackson's website. Something that I came across that no one else has mentioned is her novel, Half Life, which is published by Harper Collins, a big-name publisher, and has been (quite favorably) reviewed by such big-name newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Now, although the above 'mainstream' apparatus surrounds her novel, Jackson has developed a little part of her website (which is less mainstream than the NYT) into a sort of advertisment/quiz/story that relates to her book. She calls it the Mutant Typology Test, or MuTT, and I highly recommend taking it. You answer several pages of questions about yourself, which range from the mundane to the fanciful to the existential, and then it tells you what kind of a mutant you are are and explains what this means. (No one is normal.) If you click on the button at the bottom of the page that says "Get your prescription", the quiz recommends that you go buy Half Life. The prescription is the same no matter what kind of mutant you are. You can then click on a button that says "Fill your prescription," which will direct you to the (amazing) independent bookstore Powell's, where you can buy Jackson's book-- either as a hardcover ($24.95) or as a downloadable e-book ($15.96).

I bring up MuTT because it reminded me of two different things we've talked about before in class:

1) It seems like MuTT is performing remediation in Bolter & Grusin's definition of that process, because it takes the idea/format of the personality quiz that you find in teen and women's magazines and incorporates it into its own literary/advertising sphere.

2) It also reminds me of a post by thisismycheese about the game/advertisement for the Honda Element and how it blended two different media and how the fact that it was a fun game didn't necessarily make it an effective marketing tool. Now, with MuTT, the content of the 'ad' does give the reader a hint of what the actual text of Half Life would be like, so maybe it is more effective than the Honda Element game. In any event, I'm thinking of asking for the book for Christmas...