The Foucault-Borges quote (see Oz's comment to my previous entry, Mutatis Mutandi) probably can't tell us the breed of Jackson' MuTT, but I'm thrilled to see it again without trying to do a Vulcan mind-meld on my library. Thank you, Oz. Thank you thank you thank you!

The quote does seem to fold into the subject somehow (if an analogy involving cake batter may be applied liberally -- with my perhaps too-broad spatula). It relates recursively, I mean.

The (prime?) difficulty with Borges' supposed Chinese categories is that they don't follow a single principle of classification (so that, for example, a suckling pig may belong to the emperor, thereby hybridizing categories and making the whole system of classification in some ways unworkable).

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).