Jackson's MuTT bit me.

Is this a narrative or a game or a _____ ?

I tried going back and putting in what I thought were valid answers for various people I knew (without their knowledge or consent, of course). The test results came out different, and even had some resonance with my own unauthorized opinions.

I went back and tried to refine my own responses, making different choices that still seemed valid for myself. I did this three times, and the results were always identical. Clearly, I am just too much of a 3-eyed disopropic parapagus to realize it, whatever that means, and Ms. Jackson is working with some kind of system, whatever that may be.

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.

Okay, so this could be kind of weird, but it was something I was thinking about this morning in the airport...

Lance Armstrong ran the NYC marathon in just under three hours. The man is not a marthoner--he's a cyclist, obviously--and he hadn't really trained for this race at all (his longest run was 16 miles--most people do between 20 and 22 miles to prepare). But he pulled off an awesome time. (Well, if I had run that I would have retired.) Anyway in the NYTimes special "local only" section, one of his pacers, Joan Benoit (Samuelson) basically claims that he wouldn't have been able to finish without her help.

Given Shelley Jackson's guarantee to not republish Skin in any other format, do the criticism and discussion of those who meet her "words" not become the story itself as the original words die off?

Does Jackson not also thereby distribute authorship?

If so, is the story fictional?