So this is interesting: since we “read” Skin, I've brought it up twice outside class for very random contextual reasons in conversation with two different people, and both of them cut me off mid-sentence to say, "hey, ______ wrote a story about that!" Prior to our conversations about Skin, neither of them had known that this person’s story, which they read for a fiction workshop, was based on an actual project -- they’d thought it was ______’s own very insane, very original idea.

I emailed one of the Skin participants. I think I mentioned this in class Monday, but I was really curious why participants chose to become a part of the text. I'm not saying it's completely ludicrous that anyone would want to be a part of Jackson's project (hey, I might do it), but I wondered whether participants just wanted a tattoo or actually wanted to embody Jackson's text, as she says the participants do.

I sent the email before I found the community blog for the Skin participants, so some of my questions are perhaps answered on that. Nevertheless, I was excited to get such a quick response, so I wanted to share it with all of you. I have to add, I was really worried the person would be annoyed that I wasn't a word but still emailed her. I emailed the participant on the "footnotes" page with the word "floating" because we talked about that post in class and because the participant said she was from California and Ohio, so I felt I could make somewhat of a connection to her. I explained I was in a class that recently studied Skin. Here is part of what I wrote: "My classmates and I were curious what you felt like after you got your word and, later, read the story.  Was it thrilling to finally get your word and read the story, and was it ever a disappointment?  Also, do you feel like you are an 'embodiment' of your word, as Jackson says you become?"

I'm impressed that the discussion about Shelly Jackson has endured and diversified, and I am particularly grateful to Pimm and Lulu for bringing more of Jackson's work into the picture. I spent some time with the Skin community blog as well as My Body in an attempt to understand and evaluate my original reactions to skin.

I found the suggestion that Skin is intended to function as a jigsaw puzzle troubling, probably because it opposes my image of distributed narrative as "scattering the ashes" of a work of literature. So, as I read more about Jackson and her projects, I wanted to challenge my own take on the project. After looking around a little, I think I'm going to stick to my guns.

This might seem like I am stating the obvious, but is it just me, or does Shelley Jackson seem--in addition to being super interested in bodies, as Frabby pointed out--to also be obsessed with puzzles? It seems like if we were to simplify the concepts behind Skin and Patchwork Girl, then it would seem like Jackson is creating a giant jigsaw puzzle.

When I first looked at the frontpage of Skin, I was misled into thinking that her final project was supposed to be presented as a giant collage/puzzle of the people's tattoos. Pimm also linked us to Jackson's tatooed people's community blog, in which someone mentions that "I am we," which seems like the individual does acknowledge that he or she is like a puzzle piece in a larger collective identity. Not to strip people of their humanity and say that they're/we're all puzzle pieces, but it does seem like Jackson's hinting at this concept with her work.

At the end of class today we were wondering whether there are any sites outside of Shelley Jackson's main Skin site in which people with tattooed words could talk or connect with each other. Well, I found this. (And, to be honest, is wasn't that hard to find, so maybe others have seen it. It was linked on Wikipedia.) The livejournal page—A Mortal Work of Art—allows the tattooed people to set up a community, and it's cool to see how friendly and excited they are to "meet", even if only on the web. For example, look at "Rocks"'s intro and see the comments posted below of people saying hi. (And check out the joke at the bottom: "On a somewhat twisted note, although it's against the rules to get a word tattooed on the body part it describes (when it's obvious it's a body part like knee or wrist) it would have been a hilarious placement choice to put "Rocks" on your testicles. LMAO. Painful... but amusing." Sorry, I couldn't help but include that.) I think it's amusing, by the way, how "Rocks" and many others comment on how slow a process it is to receive the text and notification from Jackson.

Apparently I am. I looked at her website (which was linked as "IS" to her Skin project; check it out if you haven't yet) as well as some of her other projects. I don't even know how to begin to describe this, so check out the "toy" she created. Another unusual, interesting project she has is "The Doll Games." As it says on the bottom of the first screen, it has to do with "doll sex, doll mutilation, transgender dolls, prosthetic doll penises, doll death, doll dreams." She and her sister "began" it in 1970's when they played with and mutilated dolls. As Jackson says, "The Doll Games emerged in Berkeley, California at a time when race, gender, politics, and sexuality were fiercely and publicly debated. Indeed, as the dolls were taking their first steps toward literary history, the artists' family was opening a feminist bookstore just down the street from People's Park. The Doll Games' privately staged confrontations between androgynes and 'dainty ladies,' their outlaw utopias and anarchic child societies, and their uncompromising moral vision, cannot be understood without reference to the larger public discourse within which they took place." Cool concept, I think. You can look through journals they wrote for the dolls or look at pictures of transformed, reconfigured dolls. (As a sidenote, I immeditaley clicked on "voyeurism" photo album because, as I posted earlier, I was trying to understand what that word means. I thought the pictures made sense, because they are crotch shots of the dolls, but then I realized that the other albums contain similar photos. Oh well.)

I have been impressed with how much impassioned discussion has come in reaction to Jackson's "Skin" project. My initial reaction was positive, but reading the fire that has come down on this piece from thenewblack and tophat1 caused me to question the validity of my own response. Hopefully I am going to quality and break down some of what I am thinking, but there is a distinct chance that I will just step into the middle of this.

Honestly, I think that there is real art and interesting thought in what Shelley Jackson is doing here. Walker's piece on distributed narrative raised interesting ideas on what exactly a narrative is and how much unity must factor into the equation. In a modern or postmodern world, we have to respect that any writing is radically compositional by its very nature. We must accept the fact that we or any output we produce is more complex than we can consciously account for. Knowing that, the convention of reproducible narratives with a regular form and single location seems constructed. Our ideas aren't rational, so why should the products of those ideas pretend to be? An attempt to look finished or insulated can be almost pretentious in an era where we are beginning to now better.

I am almost unnerved by how furious the basic conceit of Skin makes me. Apart from the cult-like nature of Jackson's recruitment methods (Hey kids! Get an inane tattoo, in book font mind you, and I'll tell you the real story!), the idea of a text that you basically need to join a club to read is the height of elitism. I suppose if one accepts the whole indie mentality of obscurity as the highest good, then one might be inclined to be really excited about this. Not that I really have any right to tell Shelley Jackson how to express herself, but it seems to me that the goal of art should be to spread one's work as far as possible, to reach as many people as possible. I find it hilarious that Shelley Jackson has managed to practically pull this off, and is getting attention for an experiment without any accessible content to back it up. Let's just hope that the scientologists don't catch wind of this one. That said, the one thing that I do admire about Skin is the way that the "words" are free to express their own interpretations of their tattoos on Skin's website. At least they get some input here.

I have enjoyed reading everyone's reactions to "Skin" but after checking out the rules for participants, I have to wonder: "Is she really serious?" I don't mean to say the project is not worthwhile (I'm not sure I really have a judgement regarding this) but I do wonder what she really means by the people are not carriers of the words, but the words themselves. There are many interpretations that come to mind. Yet, none seem to quite apply if we consider: the people are not words before they are tattoed. If they remove the tattoo with a surgery, they are still the words. I don't understand. Isn't it vital that they still have the text?

I'm curious and confused how to define Implementation. Like Lulu, I don't necessarily think we need to pinpoint what Implementation is or isn't in order to read it, but its authors and Walker seem to beg readers to ask this question of it. For instance, in the intro to Implementation, Rettberg and Montfort define the readers, depending on how they read or use Implementation, as either "sheet readers", "place readers", "web readers", or "participants". For some reason I was annoyed when I read that only the people who post the stickers, photograph them, and send the photographs back to the authors are "participants." This identification/definition makes sense, but initially I was mad that I couldn't be considered a participant just from reading the narrative.