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?"

So I've been thinking a lot lately about Skin and the one-word tattoos and people's postings. Here's where I'm getting tripped up...ok she could have potentially asked that volunteers get sentences, paragraphs, pages, or even the whole text, I suppose, tattooed on their body. If someone copied one of the volunteer's tattoos, their tattoo would be seen as a copy, a reprinting of Jackson's work. But words are different...if someone copied someone's tattoo of a word you would not even necessarily assume that they were "copying" someone, and that word would not be seen as a reprinting of Jackson's work. Single words can't be claimed by single authors (although I guess you can make up a new word and take credit for it).

Like Pimm, I’ve been looking at Jackson’s other projects. I was pretty interested in her autobiographical (with lies, as she writes) hypertext ”My Body.” Jackson has drawn a picture of herself (a pretty good approximation, I have to say) and each body part is linked to a story or thought. Within these body parts are links to further stories.

It’s pretty clear now that Jackson is really, really super interested in bodies along with words. But I wouldn’t say that this is a love letter to her body, there’s something a little unsettling going on here that I can’t explain at this point. Perhaps I should look more carefully; I’ve only spent a little time reading through.

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.)

"As soon as we say 'I' we begin to lie." I'm very curious about this approximate quote of Shelley Jackson's. By extension we assume that, since Jackson is a writer and explores this quote in her writing, it can also be stated, "As soon as we write 'I' we begin to lie."

I'm curious about this not so much because I agree or disagree, but because I fail to see the importance. I have never seen pure objective truth as a goal of writing. Perhaps more so in a supposedly nonfiction autobiography (but even then not some inarguable mathematical kind of truth,) but never in a fiction, even one based on real characters. The goal is to take little snippets of truth, character tics such as a boy who expresses himself through his toes, and meld them together into a character that reads as true, regardless of whether he or she is or not. The truth that writing strives toward is the truth of empathy. The establishment of an emotional connection between writer and reader.