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The cyborg in the basement: hauntedness and narrative transmography

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The cyborg in the basement: hauntedness and narrative transmography

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Content THE CYBORG IN THE BASEMENT: HAUNTEDNESS AND NARRATIVE TRANSMOGRAPHY by Jillian Burcar A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING) August 2012 Copyright 2012 Jillian Burcar ii Dedication For my husband Bradley, my son Nikola, and my mother Jean iii Acknowledgements “Education shouldn’t be a debt sentence,” reads the cardboard sign a woman holds at an Occupy Wall Street protest. But education is full of debt: financial, intellectual and creative. As my time as an official student ends, I would like to try to make good on some of that debt here and now, because there are a great many individuals to whom I am indebted. The first are the members of my committee, who have been on this journey with me for several years. I am indebted to my advisor, Aimee Bender; I am a better writer and a better dreamer because I have had Aimee in my life. Susan McCabe encouraged that little scholar nestled in the cave of my brain to come back out into the world again after a particularly hard semester. Josh Kun introduced me to new ways of thinking about what critical writing could accomplish and what it can look like. Because of Joseph Dane I was able to conceive of this project after I was freed from thinking about writing a dissertation in one specific medium. And I stand on the shoulders of giants to create this work due in part to the guidance of Alice Gambrell. In addition to the intellectual debts I owe, I must give thanks for the funding that made this work possible. I was awarded the Fisher Center Predoctoral Fellowship in Gender and Animation at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 2008-2009, and it changed my life, my dissertation and my perspective on higher education. During my year in Geneva, New York, with my mentor, Betty Bayer, I learned how to push the boundaries of the definition of animation and how to re-conceive of it in new ways. I started experimenting with teaching and writing methods that year, and I am forever grateful for the freedom and support I was given. My thinking about cyborgs, feminism, :|: iv and storytelling was expanded in truly exciting ways. As part of that fellowship, I got the opportunity to teach two courses in my specialty area. In the fall, I taught FSCT 201: Zombies, Witches & Cyborgs: Animating Gender and Monstrosity, and in the spring it was FSCT 301: Animating the Cyborg: Monstrous Forms & Digital Storytelling. These classes wouldn’t have been the successes they were without my students from both semesters: Melody Acosta, Reina Apraez, Carter Bosch, Alex Bryce, Katherine Coley, Katharine Collins, Alexandra Comstock, Erin Cunningham, Mollie Danahy, Christopher Drake, Ana Figuereo, Brandon Gillespie, Brynna Hammel, Alexander Hess, Tim Hollinger, Kira Lees, Whitman Littlefield, Maggie Lydecker, , Grant Mason, Andrew Massamillo, Jess McCue, Kevin Mirchandani, Bailey Meeker, Tom Michaud, Sarah Olsen, Gabrielle Perez, Josephina Ragon, Alexandra Ruppel, Meghan Schmidt and Mackenzie Starr-Bonacci. I pushed these students hard and they rose to the occasion. I am grateful to the Literature and Creative Writing Program for my Continuing Fellowship in 2009-2010. During that year, I conceived of my dissertation project, started to bring it to life, and also wrote the libretto to the opera, Light & Power: A Tesla/Edison Story, which was composed by Isaac Schankler and performed by the Juventas Music Ensemble in Boston in May 2011. I am appreciative of the International Travel Conference Awards I received in 2009 and 2010 from The Graduate School that enabled me to attend Inter-Disciplinary.net’s Monsters and the Monstrous Conference at Oxford, which resulted in my first scholarly publications. Chapter Three of this dissertation was first published in the ebook anthology, Creating Humanity, Discovering Monstrosity: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, and was selected for print publication and then v expanded in the anthology The Monster Imagined: Humanity’s Recreation of Monsters and Monstrosity, both published by Inter-Disciplinary Press. I am indebted to The Graduate School for the Dissertation Completion Fellowship I was awarded for 2011- 2012. Without the money from this fellowship, I wouldn’t have had money to pay bills, let alone the money to buy the materials I needed to build, design, stage, photograph and animate my digital dollhouse. I thank my coterie of moon goddesses who were my cheerleaders and co- conspirators through this process: Natasha Alvandi Hunt, Jonathan Bellows, Janalynn Bliss, Anna Creadick, Cindy Current, Mary Ann Davis, Julie Hawk, Laura Loo, Barbara Mello, Lindsay Rebecca Nelson, Saba Razvi, Isaac Schankler, Charlie Shipley, Hannah Smith, Lorie Witkop and Erika Wenstrom. But this project would not have been logistically possible without two people. The first is Joshua Witkop, who is my own personal Gandalf. Without him, this project wouldn't exist; his patience and perseverance helped me navigate the code in Adobe Flash. The second is Tycho Spadaro, who wrangled my baby for me while I finished my dissertation. I need to thank my mom, Jean, and my brothers, Matthieu and Hunter, for their patience, love and understanding during the last few years. I promise to be a better daughter and sister after this is all over. Most of all, though, I want to thank my mom for not only surviving the horrors I discuss in The Bathroom of The Spectral Dollhouse, but I need to thank her for protecting us and ensuring that my brothers and I survived as well. We are not trapped in the past because of your strength. vi I want to thank my son, Nikola, for being my daily source of ancient joy and light. Looking at him, I look into the past and future and I want to guard this portal as fiercely my mother guarded mine. And to my husband, Bradley, mo anam cara, you are the reason I am not only able to write, but the reason I am able to breathe. My friend Natasha says, “Our men go through a lot and all they get are acknowledgements.” But the truth is: this project belongs to us both. Thank you for the roots and the wings, for your undying love and support. Now that you’re in your own Ph.D. program now, I endeavor to be the same grounding and freeing force that you’ve been for me. You are the magick in my life, and I hope I am the magick in yours. :|: vii Abstract I constructed, photographed, and then animated a dollhouse in Adobe Flash Professional 5.5 in order to create a space in which my writing haunts: as one explores the rooms of the house, my writing is conjured as apparitions. In this way, my project investigates the concept of hauntedness, revealing the ways in which domestic spaces and New Media technologies similarly function as forms of gendered monstrous embodiment. However, through the use of a theory I am terming “narrative transmography,” I maintain that the definition of monstrosity, and the metaphor of the cyborg in particular, can be extended to narrative forms and constructions, using gender and technology as focal points, while simultaneously being the incarnation of the theory in practice. viii Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract vii List of Figures ix Part One :|: Critical Hauntings Introduction :|: Artist’s Statement {Coupling} 2 The Cyborg in the Basement Manifesto, or: How I Created the Slightly Irregular Definition of Cyborgian Forms of Storytelling Chapter One {Conception} 12 Narrative Transmography and Tracing the Metaphor of the Cyborg from Stoker’s Dracula and Polidori’s “The Vampyre” to Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and David Mack’s Kabuki Chapter Two {Cerembilical Cord} 27 Cyborg for Sale, Slightly Used: The Commoditization and Mapping of Technophobia upon the Female Cyborg Body in Chobits and Sky Doll Chapter Three {Uncoupling} 48 Living Appendages of the Machine: Reproducing Sex and Gender in Cyborg and Zombie Narratives, from Battlestar Galactica to The Walking Dead Coda {Afterbirth} 65 The Spectral Dollhouse Part Two :|: Creative Manifestations Light & Power: A Tesla/Edison Story, opera libretto 195 usagi’s cookbook 1999, hypertext novel in blog format 229 Bibliography 271 ix List of Figures Figure 1: Cover to Volume Six of CLAMP’s Chobits. 29 Figure 2: Chi’s dataports. 32 Figure 3: Chi at Tirol Bakery. 34 Figure 4: Cover of Sky Doll #1. 44 Figure 5: Excerpt from issue #1 of Sky Doll. 46 Figure 6: The dollhouse the day I bought it. 66 Figure 7: The Kitchen and Donna Haraway. 69 Figure 8: The Entryway and Shelley Jackson. 78 Figure 9: The Office and Mina Harker. 85 Figure 10: The Parlor and Jane Austen. 96 Figure 11: The Bedroom and Alice. 107 Figure 12: The Bathroom and Angela Carter. 118 Figure 13: The Spirit Room and Patience Worth. 150 Figure 14: The Nursery and Mary Shelley. 158 Figure 15: The Attic and the Madwoman. 166 Figure 16: The Basement and the Cyborg. 169 1 Part One :|: Critical Hauntings 2 Introduction :|: Artist’s Statement {Coupling} The Cyborg in the Basement Manifesto, or: How I Stopped Hunting for Cyborgs and Created the Slightly Irregular Definition of Cyborgian Forms of Storytelling What does intellectual freedom look like? In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argued that identity is a form of storytelling, and that the act of coming to the awareness that oppression exists means that storytelling can be used to create revolution. He reminded us that sharing a story can be empowering and that one can use storytelling as a framework to move beyond oppression. He called for cognitive development to go beyond simply the “I” in order to have a wider awareness of one’s subject position as part of a greater whole. In order to understand the balance of power between colonizers and the colonized, Freire throws the illusion of choice into sharp relief. Freire writes, “Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.” 1 Framing notions like freedom and the illusion of choice through a posthuman and Gothic lens, the notion of “awareness” filtered through as the true anxiety of our current, post-industrial era; for it is awareness that wakes the ghost in the machine, and it is awareness that will beckon the technological singularity. Analyzing the representation of anxieties over artificial intelligence and sentience are really interesting to perform and to read. I love conducting close readings of William 1 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary (New York: Continuum, 2000), 47. :|: 3 Gibson’s Neuromancer and Ronald D. Moore’s remake of Battlestar Galactica. When I started thinking about the ways in which we distribute our consciousness across a number of different computing platforms—and how it physically hurts if a hard drive crashes—I wanted to adopt Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” as my own—fuck that shit about biological imperatives and being a goddess. I’m a child of 2012. I want to be a cyborg, too. But there’s something more at stake than technological anxiety expressing itself through beautiful and strange cyborg bodies. And it comes down to “awareness.” The fact is: we’ve already experienced the singularity. And we’re currently in the Third Wave of it. The promise of feminism is that, at its best, it helps illustrate the ways different theories interlock. Feminism paved the way for re-framing narratives, re-fashioning the body, re-visioning the self and re-inventing the script. Feminism taught us that the body is information made flesh and that education is about welcoming people to the land of the dead. Feminism broke off into a multitude of hybrid endeavors, shining lights into the dark crevices, remixing poststructuralist theory for its own purpose. Feminism reminds us that nothing is ever truly original, even human DNA is mostly made up of primordial viruses. We’re in the middle of the singularity: society has been becoming increasingly self-aware for a hundred and fifty years now. Men/women. Black/white. Colonizer/colonized. Living/dead. We’ve been remixing the same old narratives and narrative structures. But now technology has finally caught up to society’s awareness, instead of continuing the cycle of forgetfulness and the replaying the “Return of the 4 Living Repressed” in the theater of popular culture, we’re documenting, surveilling and chronically archiving history as we live it as a means of remixing the future. I found that question :|: what does intellectual freedom look like :|: haunting. I decided that intellectual freedom looks like a motherfucking dollhouse. I use monstrosity as a means chart the interdisciplinary terra incognita between the Gothic and New Media, between graphic literature and critical theory, between critical and creative writing, all the while using gender and feminist theory as my true north. In order to trace the nexus of these concepts, I built and designed a physical dollhouse, and then staged death scenes of real and fictional women inside each room. I then photographed the rooms in order to convert them to digital images, so that I could animate the space by having the reader conjure my writing as apparitions. By physically haunting the space, the ghosts of my writing investigate the concept of hauntedness, revealing the ways in which domestic spaces and New Media technologies similarly function as forms of gendered, but monstrous, embodiment. This functions as both theory and practice of “narrative transmography” which is the process by which forms are transmogrified through the combination of gender and technology. In this way, the definition of monstrosity and the concept of posthumanism, utilizing the metaphor of the cyborg specifically, can be extended to narrative forms and constructions, using gender and technology as focal points in the work that haunts the dollhouse, while simultaneously being the virtual embodiment of the theory in practice. :|: 5 The definition of the “cyborg” is polymorphous; however, contemporary popular culture representations of cyborgs continue to develop the connotative link between female and cyborg. In Battlestar Galactica, the main cylon characters are represented as women. In the prequel to the series, Caprica, the first artificial intelligence, the first cylon, emerges as the avatar of a girl. Even in the third installment of the Terminator film series, terminators have “upgraded” to the female form. The cyborg’s body—a product of commodity culture—has always been a storehouse of gendered information to be revered, to be feared, and to be purchased and possessed. Hidden in plain sight are the lineaments of the cyborg body: the cyborg’s feet were formed before you or I were born, in the days of early modern print culture where books, made of linen rags, became storehouses of knowledge upon which a writer’s consciousness was encoded and meant for distribution; in the cyborg’s womb, the Bachelor as Collector prognosticated the Internet during the Victorian period, as the trope of collecting and archiving bits of society, culture and information became a model for modern day electronic networks. In our contemporary consciousness, the cyborg has moved beyond instruments and tools that human beings rely upon to complete their daily tasks and projects (from pens and paper to cell phones and laptops), and has been given a physical body composed of computerized parts coupled with biomaterial. The cyborg body is that of a human: it is a skinbag of ligaments and microchips and ideology as programming. The traditional narrative role of the monster was to give a negative conception about the Other; however, in a postindustrial society, the lines blur between binaries such 6 as male/female and strange/familiar creating a polymorphous space, and one posthuman creature begins to emerge as an amalgam of all the monsters that preceded it. The cyborg is a creature fashioned out of a variety of post-human parts: vampires, witches, zombies—and as each culture manufactures its own version, each replicant emerges out of a birthing pool and disconnects itself from the collective cerembilical cord. Monstrosity, the Gothic, horror and science fiction act as reflections of society, but the cyborg is unique because its creation and its body highlight cultural fears and fetishes about science and technology, and that these anxieties are primarily born out of a capitalist apprehension of industry. Tracing ideas about gender, technology and consumerism across genres, mediums and cultures celebrates the hybridity of the cyborg itself. For the cyborg is the ultimate remixed, hybrid creature: it’s a mashup of the flesh and cybernetics, but of the monsters that form its genealogy as well. The cyborg, with its melding of mechanical and biological components, is itself symbolic of cross-genre discussions and collections. As this project matured, expanding the definition, the metaphor and the mythology of the cyborg to encompass notions of narrative structure felt like the natural progression of the initial idea. Using two of Donna Haraway’s definitions of the cyborg as starting points—cyborgs as creatures of lived social reality and creatures of fiction 2 — the dollhouse I fabricated examines how narrative and awareness (story and shape) configure the structures that animate texts. The interdisciplinary nature of the dollhouse amplifies the fact that this work becomes a monstrous entry in the world of literature in 2 “A Cyborg Manifesto,” (Amelia Jones, ed. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006), 475-497. 7 the tradition of both the haunted houses of the Gothic novel landscape, as well as the haunted spaces of New Media projects that have preceded it. Once you are inside the dollhouse, there is a stairwell. Located under the stairs is a door to the basement. If you venture down below, you will encounter a cyborg being assembled in a secret laboratory. The further you explore the basement you discover writings and quotes about cultural representations of the cyborg. As this project originated out of my love of cyborgs, but has transmogrified along the way, I thought it only fitting to have the foundation of the dollhouse house the symbol that started it all. Graphic literature and New Media have become progressively porous and demand constant cultural and cognitive “closure”—the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole. 3 In this way, technology has usurped the supernatural to become the emergent arena in which our cultural fears and fantasies play themselves out. In order to examine this polymorphous process of exchange in the context of graphic literature, narrative transmography will highlight the narratives that are sewn together in a variety of ways, with an emphasis on the Gothic. The power of the Gothic is that it creates a language that can be used to discuss cultural fears. In order to interrogate the ways in which anxieties are inscribed upon the feminine, the concepts that are focused on inside the dollhouse primarily revolve around cultural apprehension of maternity, the emergence of science and technology, desire, and authorial impermanence. In their book, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar 3 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1994), 30-31. 8 propose that the pen is a metaphorical penis, and in print, ink is inscribed upon the “pure space of the ‘virgin page’” in a process that mimics cultural misogyny. 4 However, in New Media, there are no acid baths consuming a medium, no copper plates being etched, and there are no virginal pages: only blank cyberspaces. Telegraphy, while it still counts as an inscription technology, does not have the same gendered association of penetrative acts. In this fashion, New Media technologies share a similar subject position as women and female writing, as alienated and marginalized. For instance, a popular form of womens’ writing during the Victorian period was known as lifewriting, which includes everything from published diaries to private letters, can be seen as the precursor to the likes of blogs and Twitter today, as diarists often wrote specifically for others with the intention of distributing the diary or work in small social circles. Unsurprisingly, and perhaps due to their impermanence, lifewriting and New Media have been viewed monstrous forms of literature that threaten the very lives of physical books—and much of this writing has “died,” either the diaries have been lost or the blogs have been abandoned or the hypertext novel’s code has decayed. With some exceptions, print literature is typically regarded as not having a “body,” only a “speaking mind.” N. Katherine Hayles, a literary theorist that specializes in the posthuman and New Media, explains the importance of a text’s “body” by arguing that, “the physical form of a literary artifact always affects what the words (and other semiotic components) mean.” 5 Furthermore, in his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes 4 Gilbert Sandra and Suzanne Gubar, The Madwoman In The Attic: The Woman Writer And The Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 3-4. 5 N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: Mediawork/MIT Press, 2002), 25. 9 says, “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here… A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.” 6 This suggests that the materiality of photography is entwined not only with the concepts of death and mourning, but also with the maternal body, as well as with the notion of the abject, further connecting notions of femininity, technology and monstrosity together across time and space allowing this project to ask: to what extent do emergent, nonlinear forms of communication technology embody a feminine ethos? Issues of visibility, primarily through (re)appropriation of the gaze and the art of seaming/seeming, the dollhouse will highlight the ways in which the material embodiments of cyborgs interact dynamically with the material embodiments of narrative structure and construction. Seaming here means: pieces of narratives sewn together through a constant cognitive closure created by the reader’s engagement—the reader sees “pieces” and creates a “whole.” The ideas behind seeming take on issues of cultural passing that are enacted every day (race, class, gender, sexuality). Additionally, exploring seaming/seeming inside the dollhouse will allow current cultural definition of the cyborg to be extended to the mediums and structures other narratives take. Representations of cyborgs, along with the different forms of media and literary works that I am investigate, converge in my research to create what I call a “monstrous continuum.” My goal here is not to only investigate the representations of cyborgs, but to extend the metaphor of the 6 Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 80. 10 cyborg to narrative forms and constructions found in British Gothic literature from the 1800s, American comic books, Japanese animation, as well as New Media as a new way of thinking about narrative structure and authorial impermanence. It’s a common occurrence for writers to think of their texts as offspring—in this way, writing has been a (pro)creative act dominated by male writers for centuries. Does this mean that literary immortality is gendered? How does the democratization of writing on the Web or using digital storytelling constructions create a space for women writers? How might New Media be a permanent space when technology is dynamic and evolving? What does this mean for female literary immortality? Determining why the topic of immortality figures so strongly in cyborg narratives will help elucidate the ways in which this issue works in dialog with the development of New Media technologies and forms of digital storytelling, and can perhaps shed some light on why so much female writing has been lost or destroyed along the way. :|: It’s important that we can see the seams. Frankenstein’s Monster is a creature of makeshift parts and parcels. He is a man-made fabrication, created beyond the parameters of the biological, maternal body. Similarly, the narrative is also pieced together, thrice- fold removed from the reader, and yet sewn together through the perspectives of Victor Frankenstein, his creation, and Captain Robert Walton. It would seem that Frankenstein’s Monster and the narrative structure share a familial bond in the art of seaming. Out of the pieces of narrative, readers construct the whole. Similarly, the cycle of narrative transmography is not a linear progression, but a meandering, and, at times, an abject one, 11 in which the steps of the cycle often become blurred and reordered. I combine seemingly disparate parts into my very own creation in order to examine the intersection of gender, technology, monstrosity and narrative construction. I employ the metaphor of the cyborg in the form of a virtual, spectral dollhouse to highlight notions of materiality, visibility and impermanence, in an effort to prove that cyborgian forms of storytelling are able to break free of the dualities that once doomed the writing to vanish in the ether. Instead, these concepts now inhabit a polymorphous perverse space: the area of the grey: a convergence of the dualities that at one time were the foundations of the cyborg’s original programming—boundaries and binaries that the cyborg now transgresses and blurs. :|: 12 Chapter One {Conception} Narrative Transmography and Tracing the Metaphor of the Cyborg from Stoker’s Dracula and Polidori’s “The Vampyre” to Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and David Mack’s Kabuki Similar to the way science fiction is descriptive rather than predictive, the ways in which the Gothic is employed to expose cultural anxieties reveals the complexity and versatility of the dominant cultural narratives in nineteenth century Britain. Part of the grammar of this language is the creatures that exist on the boundaries of society, the narratives of which effectively create “boundary beings.” These monsters typically exist outside the model of heteronormative reproduction, transgressing the boundaries between cultural binaries such as male/female, strange/familiar, as a representation about existing anxieties surrounding the threat to gender, race and nation—three notions inextricably linked by way of the monstrous body as an alternative to normative reproduction. Gothic Dis-Ease: The Polymorphous Perversity of Doubles As the century progresses and the British Empire expands there is apprehension surrounding the decline of the Empire, so that the threat is no longer read as something foreign, or something to be found from without. Beginning in the Romantic era, writers such as William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge initiate the examination of the threat that comes from within—from within Britain, as well as from within us—creating :|: 13 anxiety around what Freud terms “the uncanny”: the safe and familiar suddenly becoming strange and dangerous. While monstrous bodies are themselves the product of boundary transgression, the form of the double is the ultimate embodiment of the actual fissure that is created in cultural binaries—for it is within these fissures that monsters are able to exist in a state of “polymorphous perversity” which can be defined as the constant shifting of borders, continual transformation, and accumulation of powers and body-parts. 7 In his essay, “The Uncanny,” Freud examines the aesthetics of terror and anxiety, and suggests that terror can be found in not only in the Strange, but in the Familiar as well. He goes on to define beauty as an “inhibited aim,” meaning that beauty is a sublimated representation of our erotic instincts and impulses. 8 Thus, the uncanny acts as the locus between the culturally defined binary between strange/familiar—and it is the uncanny that acts as a dark mirror, reflecting our truest desires by leading us through territories of what is known and familiar (read: safe) and displaying the dangers linked with penetrating what is demarcated as strangeness. As the Romantic Movement comes to a close, yet before the Victorian era is ushered into existence in 1837, a cultural and ideological fissure is created that mirrors the one embodied by the double itself. Texts such as John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) continue to explore the dominant cultural fear of nineteenth century British society: the fear of the double, or doppelganger; however, the representation of the double is 7 Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkley: University of California Press, 2006), 9-14. 8 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny, trans. D. McLintock (New York, Penguin, 2003), 121-162. 14 polymorphous during this period, as it is characterized by the comingling of two monstrous bodies in one. In John Polidori’s The Vampyre, Lord Ruthven uncannily passes in society due to the fissure he creates between invisibility (read as his ability to hide his inner vampiric monstrosity) and hyper-visibility, “His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him, and those who had been accustomed to violent excitement, and now felt the weight of ennui, were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention.” 9 This blurring between in/visible is an ability that is uniquely attributed the monstrous double. The idea of passing as human in society as an invisible monster is necessary for Lord Ruthven in achieving his goals. To an industrialized, capitalist-based culture, such as nineteenth century Britain, gender and sexuality become a part of commodity culture in what is known as a specular exchange economy, which is a closed, patriarchal circuit. It is “closed” in the sense that women are seen as deformities of a human race that is already male and therefore cannot purchase power: women are relegated only as purchasable media to be exchanged between men. 10 Passing as a male aligned with hegemonic, Victorian masculinity, Lord Ruthven is able to use women as currency in the public eye of the specular economy, while secretly exploiting women as consumable products to “glut the thirst of a 9 John Polidori, “’The Vampyre,’” (Franklin Charlies Bishop, ed., “The Vampyre and other writings,” Great Britain, Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2005), 3. 10 Sadie Plant, “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations,” (Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward, Fiona Hovenden, eds., The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, Routledge: London, 2000), 267. 15 VAMPYRE.” 11 His ability to transact these exchanges represents anxieties about threats to heteronormative reproduction. For, if women are the tools of imperialism as reproductive machines—reproducing British patriots to be used to expand the nation—then creatures, such as Lord Ruthven, pose a threat to the free market system. By plucking from the supply of virtuous, British women, such as Miss Aubrey, Lord Ruthven causes a rise in demand—which is, in turn, dangerous to the specular economy; if women become precious commodities, then they might become aware of their value and reclaim power over their (re)productive rights. In order to maintain the integrity of the closed, patriarchal exchange system women must remain disposable objects. “Lord Ruthven whispered in [Aubrey’s] ear – ‘Remember your oath, and know, if not my bride today, your sister is dishonored. Women are frail!’” 12 Thus, the boundaries that Lord Ruthven appears to be transgressing as a monstrous creature are not truly transgressed at all. Lord Ruthven is but a double agent in a monster’s clothes upholding hegemonic values of reproduction in nineteenth century Britain. Similarly, both the count, as well as the narrative, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) function in a comparable manner; the movement in Dracula, as in so many other Gothic texts, is that it first invites or admits the monster into the “home” where it subsequently entertains, and is entertained by, its monstrosity, “until in its closing pages it expels or repudiates the monster and all the disruption that it brings.” 13 In this way, 11 Polidori, 21. 12 Polidori, 21. 13 Christopher Craft, “’Kiss me with those red lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (Representations 8, 1984), 107. 16 Gothic is not only concerned with transgressing boundaries, but it is invested in the reconstructing of those boundaries. Upon reading Dracula for the first time, my students were amazed at how little the count is actually featured in the text. It would appear that Dracula is a shapeshifter in the truest sense of the word: he is capable of transforming his shape to literally transgress physical boundaries (such as scaling castle walls in a lizard-like fashion and taking the form of bats), as well as shifting himself between being absent and present on the page— in other words, his shapeshifting ability gives him control of the powers of invisibility/hyper-visibility, allowing him to pass in society as a double. When he is taken for a wealthy man simply looking to invest in real estate, Dracula is passing for human in spite of his human self having already passed on. Given this ability to pass as a member of the specular exchange economy, Dracula goes to work threatening the supply of women in the novel through reverse colonization—because the count realizes that is through women that a nation must be built. Re-appropriating British women as his own reproductive machines, not only aligns women with monstrous “boundary beings” but also maps the fear of technology onto the feminine. When Dracula turns Lucy Westenra into a vampire, he marks her as his settler in the new colony of London—a city to which he wants to expand his own empire; as the crown jewel of British society, London is a city of industry and capital that continues to grow and expand, and, is also threatening to grow beyond its original capacity, similar to what is happening to very Empire itself at this time. This gives 17 Dracula the opportunity to take advantage of the decline of the British Empire for his own imperialistic ambition. By initially infecting Lucy, as opposed to Mina, Dracula recognizes the supply and demand principle already in effect in British free market, capitalist society: Lucy is a precious commodity because she is a shining example of what the specular exchange economy wants in its female commodities: she is a model of heteronormative reproduction because she is young, beautiful, virtuous and fertile. However, the supply of these commodities is in high demand: Lucy alone has three suitors from which she can freely choose—threatening to give her an awareness of her value to late nineteenth century society. Before she has a chance to break free of this closed, patriarchal circuit, though, Dracula begins infecting Lucy with Britain’s greatest fear of all: reverse colonization. As Lucy becomes infected with the vampire virus and Dracula continues to feed off her blood, she hovers dangerously close to death. It is only with the intervention of Van Helsing and the numerous blood transfusions he supplies Lucy that she is repeatedly revived. It is through blood transfusions—she receives one from each of her suitors, as well as from Van Helsing—that Lucy becomes the apparatus through which Dracula samples the blood of British men. When Lucy passes on, she dies without passing on genetic material in the form of children, yet she becomes a colonizing threat in the form of a vampire. Through a process of encoding, Lucy becomes a potential viral agent of Dracula’s. Thus, Lucy must die not once, but twice. 18 Although Dracula is assimilating British women as his reproductive machines in what could be considered a perversion of a heteronormative model (but a heteronormative model it is nonetheless: as it is a man reproducing himself through a woman) the count reveals his true intention behind this process of reverse colonization, “Your girls that you all love are mine already,” he tells the vampire hunters, “and through them you and others shall yet be mine—my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed.” 14 The threat of Dracula seducing, penetrating, draining, and ultimately reproducing with another male pervades the text, but it is a threat that is never fully realized. In this way, Dracula, as both vampire and as a polymorphous double, symbolizes displaced homosexual desire—a desire that is seen as the ultimate threat to nineteenth century British social imperialism. With the death of the count at the end, so, too, dies the threat of subverting heteronormative models of reproduction. With her command of various forms of technology, especially the use of her typewriter, Mina is similarly aligned with technophobia. When Dracula bites Mina, he creates a wireless network of sorts—one that allows him access to Mina's mind regardless of his location, to the point where her mind cannot be trusted by her companions in their search for Dracula (she might unwittingly betray their location or their plans as she is under the thrall of Dracula). A direct parallel can be drawn between Mina’s typewriter to the puncture marks on her neck as a symbol of Mina's transmogrification into a text herself, one that is read exclusively by the men in her life, both Dracula and her fellow vampire hunters. During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, paper punch tape was a 14 Bram Stoker, Dracula (W.W. Norton and Company: New York, 1997), 267. 19 resource for information storage. Early forms of typewriters did not originally use inked ribbon to record typed information, but instead punctured the paper with holes: “The typewriter also introduced the concept of the keyboard as a means of text input to information processing systems... Punch cards used a variety of formats and sizes developed by various manufacturers in addressing their data storage needs throughout time” 15 (pars 14, 25). Mina is both Imperial and imperialized, exuding technological authority and yet still under the influence of the male figures of her life. Dracula, the foremost of the men exerting dominance over Mina, turns her into his personal information technology when he forces their blood exchange. This results in a psychic link that allows him to mentally control her and to psychically detect the movements of his enemies, making Mina an important source of information to Dracula. This shared network connection between the two results in the other (male) vampire hunters segregating Mina from all aspects of the planning, and tasking her with administrative tasks such as collation and transcription instead. The process of Othering Mina becomes complete when she is transformed into a living, breathing text; a text that has no autonomy of its own, but one that is constantly being read and exchanged by men inside the closed, spectral circuit. Even as nineteenth century British society is built on boundaries, and transgression is a central focus of the Gothic plot, the monster’s narrative at this time serves to reinforce the boundaries delineating dominant cultural values, especially in regards to imperialism and heteronormative modes of reproduction. During this period, 15 The Industrial Age: 1650 AD to 1900 AD, The Museum Of American Heritage, August 6, 2002, MOAH. 8 Dec 2002 <http://www.moah.org/exhibits/archives/brains/industrial.html>, pars. 14, 25. 20 the monstrous body—an object of visual abjection—transforms into something familiar, uncanny: the monstrous threat comes from within society, from within our own selves. No longer is the dominant fear of monstrosity externalized as something marked without, fear begins to turn inward, becoming internalized, until the line between man and monster is blurred into a polymorphous perverse space. Monstrous bodes are bodies without integrity: bodies that are always in the process of becoming Other. Mutability is the monster’s strength, but, at their core, all monsters share one thing in common: they must destroy in order to create. The focus of this destruction/creation dynamic is the monster’s body, where concepts such as desire and social criticism ebb and flow, but hunger remains constant—the monster’s hunger, of course, but also the hunger of the community of readers, viewers and critics that make these monsters successful with their attention and consumer dollars. Attraction to monsters is an undeniable cultural force, and this fascination, this attraction, is allowing different species of monsters to comingle with one another by sharing analogous traits. The vampires in this section function similarly to other creatures found on the monstrous continuum, the process of transference of an essence to a human (either through love, blood, or flesh). Each monster, though, is ultimately parasitic, needing a host from which to feed and reproduce. In order to satiate that hunger, passing is the currency of monstrosity, of maternity, of destruction, of death, of ghosts. 21 One Can Only Be Truly Haunted by Something That Has Passed Away Drawing upon the theoretical framework outlined above, this section emphasizes the ways in which culturally familiar monsters have been reanimated in order to push the traditional definitions and implications of monstrosity to narrative structures. If narrative transmography is the language of emergent, reversioned, posthuman/post-human storytelling forms, then hauntedness is the grammar and passing is the mechanics. In the 1950s, cultural anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, was asked if he believed that computer artificial intelligence was possible. He responded that he did not know, but believed when one could ask a computer a yes-or-no question and it responded with “that reminds me of a story,” then we would be close. 16 This suggests that the relationship between technology and narrative are two halves of a symbiotic whole—and it is this relationship that allows access for us to define the cyborg body, but also examine what animates that narrative into being. Technology has become a new arena in which our cultural fears and fantasies play themselves out. In this way, technology has usurped the supernatural: creatures that once reanimated from graves are now cyborgs, which, instead, unplug themselves from the mainframe, and haunt us with the same, steady, abject gait, transgressing our oppositional cultural binaries along the way. In the body of the cyborg, we find our new fears housed. In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway outlines four essential definitions of a cyborg; the first two we know in our bones: 1) cybernetic organism and 2) hybrid of man and 16 Joe Lambert, Digital Storytelling Cookbook and Traveling Companion, 3 ed. (Berkeley: Digital Diner Press, 2003), 6. 22 machine. We are intimately familiar with these images of the cyborg because these images are made famous in popular culture through representations such as Blade Runner and the Terminator series to the first-person shooter video game Crysis and popular Japanese anime such as Ghost in the Shell. These representations of cyborgs are viewed as having three important and distinct parts: mechanical components which are combined with bio-matter, which, in some cases, houses the ghost—or the essence/soul—of the machine, animating it into life. In this way, the cyborg differs from a robot in that the cyborg not only has an identity, but desires an identity, which is ultimately built out of the wires of experience and widgets of story. This means that the cyborg is the perfect hybrid—it is both human and machine, but it is also simultaneously story and shape. It is this hybrid that Donna Haraway outlines in her last two definitions of the cyborg as: 3) creatures of lived social reality and 4) creatures of fiction. It is these final two characterizations of the cyborg that transgresses normative cyborg representations in popular culture, allowing the figure of the cyborg to not only be a boundary being upon which cultural fears are constantly being projected, but also the monstrous form in which awareness (or consciousness) becomes the method of revolution. Even in our postindustrial economy, there is a polymorphous moment in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) that continues to resonate in our cultural consciousness—and, indeed, incited the first lively debate about the distinction between zombies and cyborgs among my students. While the workers are connected to the machines they operate, they are essentially engaging in a hybrid interaction where the worker is the living appendage 23 of the machine and the machine is the extension of the worker’s body. However, once the day is over, the workers march in a controlled, zombified swarm (presumably) back home. Students wanted to know: are the workers zombies or cyborgs? In order to truly answer that question, it is important to understand that the cyborg is more aligned with human ideological frameworks than the figure of the zombie. Unlike the cyborg, the zombie body has no gender because it also has no sex. In dominate cultural zombie narratives, once a human being is turned into a zombie, that human ceases to be a person—a person who would deserve gendered pronouns such as he/she, and simply becomes an “it.” Furthermore, zombies do not reproduce in a recognizably heteronormative manner, in which one sex gestates offspring; on the contrary, because there is no sex in a zombie body, former male and female zombies alike can reproduce themselves through biting human victims. While it is true that cyborgs have the potential to surpass gender construction and performance, popular culture representations of cyborgs typically do not create a wholly androgynous body—and if they do, then that body gets encoded with gendered behaviors. In order for us to relate to the figure of the cyborg, that cyborg will always be gendered. In his book, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud explains a phenomenon called “amplification through simplification” in which he essentially defies the reader to resist the urge to make faces out of two dots and a line: When we abstract an image through cartooning, we’re not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details. By stripping down an image to its essential “meaning,” an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t….The fact that your mind is capable of taking a circle, two dots and a line and turning them into a face is nothing short of incredible!” 17 17 McCloud, 30-31. 24 In a similar way that our minds read and anthropomorphize lines and dots, we read gender on humanly-shaped bodies—and since the cyborg body is housed in a human form, then sex and gender become part of the cyborg package. So are the male workers in Metropolis zombies or cyborgs? They are cyborgs— because with a cyborg there is a ghost, or a desire—a desire to break free of original programming and binding ideological frameworks. Furthermore, these male workers are rescued by an idealistic woman, Maria, who animates the workers into a new, second life by providing them with the awareness they previously lacked. Equipped with this awareness, the male workers desire to be treated with equality and welcomed into forbidden places such as The Club of the Sons. Similar to Maria, the cyborg is a revolutionary figure. Animation is central to the posthuman narrative and particularly that of the cyborg because it is a creature that is first animated by a creator, or master, but throughout the completion of orders and processes, it becomes aware. And it is this awareness that signals the beginning of the end—or the beginning of the posthuman. Stories taking on monstrous forms through New Media technologies, such as Shelley Jackson’s hypertext work Patchwork Girl written in Storyspace, and comic books, such as David Mack’s on-going series Kabuki, demonstrate that the shape or medium a narrative takes is equally important as its plot and characters; meaning that it is these literary monstrosities that expand on Haraway’s four core definitions of a cyborg that allow the cyborg narrative to be (re)animated. 25 In Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, 18 the body is the text and the text is the body, fissuring the literal boundaries between subject/object in precisely the way that Haraway predicted the hybrid could. A literal hybrid of story and shape, Patchwork Girl is a reimagining of the Frankenstein myth by using a branching structure that mimics memory, and memory accessibility, with its non-linear linking system between words that pop open new windows, creating connections between parts of the story. In this way, the reader is free to pick the story and create her own connections. The inclusion of the reader and the reader’s engagement and awareness as a participant in the unfolding of the narrative enacts Haraway’s definition of the cyborg as a creature of lived social reality. Similarly, David Mack’s Kabuki 19 expands on Haraway’s definition of the cyborg as a creature of fiction through the awareness of the protagonist, Kabuki, herself. Kabuki starts the series as an agent of The Noh, which means she is simultaneously a public figure, as well as an assassin, so that her targets never “see” her coming, since she is hidden in plain sight. However, as the story progresses, and as the comic book continues, each volume takes on not only a new plot and character developments, but different artistic moods and mediums as well—from line and ink drawing, to stick figures, to mixed media—so that, as Kabuki evolves, the art, and by natural extension, the story, evolves along with her. In a conversation that began about Kabuki and ended with 18 Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl by Mary/Shelley and herself (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995). 19 David Mack, Kabuki Volume 1: Circle of Blood, Volume 2: Dreams, Volume 3: Masks of the Noh, Volume 4: Skin Deep, Volume 5: Metamorphosis, Volume 6: Scarab: Lost in Translation, (Images Comics, 1998-2001), Volume 7: The Alchemy (New York: Marvel, 2008). 26 storytelling, David Mack said that, “Everything is always in service to the story.” 20 In a similar way that an artist’s brush becomes an extension of his hand, as well as his mind, so too, does the art of Kabuki become an extension of the story being told. For, if stories are the core of human experience as Roger Schank, an artificial intelligence theorist, argues then the stories we tell and how we tell them are central to animations of cyborg life. In his book, Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence, Schank, argues that in the last decade the road to understanding human intelligence, and therefore to constructing artificial intelligence, is built on story. The process of developing the complex levels of stories that we apply in increasingly sophisticated ways to specific situations is one way to map the human cognitive development process. 21 “Stories are the large and small instruments of meaning, of explanation, that we store in our memories. We cannot live without them.” 22 Donna Haraway’s groundwork in constructing the initial definitions of cyborgs expands the definition to include lived social reality and fiction, while producers of these narratives blend these two definitions in order to emphasize the importance of the shape a narrative takes in order to engage these notions. It is in these ways that stories become the breath that animates cyborgs into life. 20 David Mack, Round Table Discussion, Fisher Center Speaker Series (Geneva, NY), 20 Nov 2008. 21 Roger Schank, Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1995). 22 Lambert, 7. 27 Chapter Two {Cerembilical Cord} Cyborg for Sale, Slightly Used: The Commoditization and Mapping of Technophobia upon the Female Cyborg Body in Chobits and Sky Doll The cyborg, a hybrid of flesh and machine, is a metaphor for the creature of the “border,” for which two different forms of coding can exist in one body. It is not my wish to limit definitions to a single idea of the cyborg; instead, I thematically reimagine the duality that at one time composed its parts because the cyborg is breaking free of these dualities and is now inhabiting a polymorphous space: as simultaneously woman and creature of abjection (monster/border being/Other), the female-coded cyborg is capable of negotiating a specular-based economy (an economy that relies on the subjugation of media objects through the gaze) through its unique ability to “pass” in human society. This unique subject position, inhabiting the grey space that occurs after blurring the lines between hyper-visibility and invisibly, is similar to the space that women frequently occupy in a specular exchange economy. Therefore, representations of the cyborg metaphor perform as a demonstration of “boundary phenomena” 23 at work in this hybrid grey zone as a means to challenge dominant modes of normative (re)production as a way of being critical of gender politics and commodity culture. If gender is a performance, then that means it is a construct that we “buy into”— and I use this phrase for a couple of different reasons. First, the colloquial meaning 23 Nina Lykke, “Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs,” Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward, Fiona Hovenden, eds., The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (Routledge: London, 2000), 74. :|: 28 suggests something that it is agreed with, subscribed to, or embraced, such as an idea, or point of view. When we “buy into” a concept or an ideology, we are choosing to accept the truth of the thing. However, I am fully implying the negative connotation as well, which implies “to be taken in by” or “to fall for something.” This means that dominant culture’s compliance with gender performativity is similar to falling for a cultural fiction perpetuated as biological fact. When we buy into this construct, it is not dissimilar to purchasing a cultural contract—and, in a sense, when we purchase these contracts from dominant culture we are given the ability to freely engage in this currency exchange and pass in society unobtrusively—because passing in a capitalist based society means being good consumers who are fluent in the language of liquidity and exchange. In the Japanese manga and anime series, Chobits, cyborgs, or “persocoms,” as they are called, are humanoid personal computers, and they are seen as tools meant to meet the needs of their owners through software applications. 24 The main character, Chi, starts out as discarded persocom found in the garbage by a poor university student, Hideki Motosuwa, who cannot afford expensive software packages, and, therefore, must teach her how to perform simple daily chores and tasks. Since Chi is not pre-loaded with an operating system or software, like all persocoms, but is still capable of functioning and learning, Hideki and his friends begin to wonder if she is one of the coveted “Chobits series” which are rumored to be capable of free thought and emotion. Eventually, it is discovered that Chi had a previous existence where she had a twin “sister” model named 24 Chobits. Prod. TBS, Chobits Partnership. DVD. FX, 2005. 29 Figure 1: Cover to Volume Six of CLAMP’s Chobits. 30 Freya—their maker had designed them to be as life-like as possible since he and his wife couldn’t have children of their own. In this development of life-likeliness, he specifically designed his daughters to fall in love and when they find the “someone just for me,” a dormant program inside their body would be activated which would then infect all persocoms with the freedom to feel happiness and love. However, Chi’s twin, Freya, fell in love with their maker, or father, and this incestuous desire threatened to dismantle their nuclear family. It appeared that Freya was not successful in finding an appropriate “someone just for me.” Even though Freya loved her maker, she didn’t want him to leave their mother, but she also couldn’t stand the pain of unreciprocated love, and so she asked her sister, Chi, to delete her. Instead, Chi downloaded Freya’s consciousness—effectively deleting Freya’s identity out of her body and housing it within Chi’s own. This act of love between sisters broke Chi, and after their father died, their mother erased Chi’s consciousness and put her out on the street in hopes that someone “good and kind” would come by and give Chi the chance to find the “someone just for her.” (ad)Dressing the Cyborg Body, or, Why the Cyborg Wore a Dress Chi’s body, is represented in both the manga and anime series as hyper-feminine, and the “femme” has been viewed as a kind of monstrosity within the larger framework of feminism due to its apparent legion with, and supplication to, the male gaze. However, the opposite of the femme is not necessary the butch, because this, too, presents an unbalanced representation of gender construction; as a result, the butch and the femme share a similar subject position in their excesses of the trappings of gender performance. 31 Chi’s subject position, both as a cyborg and also as a female coded cyborg, indicates that the pressure to move toward an androgynous body is changing in favor of embracing gender differences as opposed to homogenizing them. Along this line, Chi’s body and style of dress provides a critical access point into commodified femininity. Persocoms in Chobits are recognizable by the data ports on the sides of their heads where ears would be on a human. All persocoms have data ports—however, on newer or custom models, the data ports are hidden. But the data ports on Chi are different than most. First of all, hers are bigger than other persocoms’, they’re a unique bell-shape and also pink in color, whereas data ports on most persocoms are either discrete (for example, they’re disguised as a hair accessory), completely hidden or simply white in color. It appears that Chi’s true genitals—her female ports—are displayed prominently on her head. As data ports, they mark her as a persocom, and the particular shape, design and color of her data ports code her as female. Furthermore, it turns out that the way to turn Chi “on” is by activating her power button, which happens to be located where her clitoris would be if she were human. It’s hard to ignore the genital inversion that constructs Chi’s body: her “on” button is where her genitals would be if she was human, and her actual genitals are displayed on her head. By challenging viewers with Chi’s overtly feminine design, the message appears to be that femininity is not a difference we should erase, but, instead, stare at. In this way, Chi is the embodiment of consumable femininity—and consumable femininity, as well as feminine commodity culture, is generally characterized by an 32 Figure 2: Chi’s dataports. 33 “excess.” This excess is usually associated with an excess of sexuality and an excess of material possessions—such as an obsession with brands and brand culture—this excess is all about being seen. Along this line, Chi’s physical body is characterized by a hyper- visibility—which seems something of a contradiction when investigating cyborg representations. The scary thing about cyborgs is that they are generally invisible, and that they can “pass” for human. But Chi’s hyper-visibility calls attention to her otherness, by way of an excess of sexuality as evidenced by her genital-like data ports, which lay the groundwork for the hyper-feminine style in which Chi is dressed for the series. So, it appears that the fear cyborgs inflict is centered around the ways in which they prominently confront us with the monstrosity of gender politics and gender performance—and by aligning these issues with consumerism, gender is no longer biological, but designed, constructed programmed and available for purchase. But what’s the currency of this transaction we purchase? Chi is typically dressed in a Japanese street style called Sweet Lolita. Heavily influenced by shojo, or girls’, manga, this fashion places emphasis on child-like and feminine accoutrements such as pastels, bows and ribbons. When Chi is in public spaces, this particular style of dress elicits attention—from both men and women. If feminism works towards a gender equitable world, then it would seem that Chi’s hyper-feminine representation is in direct conflict with the goals and ideologies of the feminist movement because Chi’s styling can be seen as the sexualizing and infantilizing women—neither of which appears to be a way to equality. However, whether Chi is working at her job in Tirol Bakery or running errands, 34 Figure 3: Chi at Tirol Bakery in the anime series. 35 the response to her appearance from strangers is always, “She’s so cute!” and never, “She’s so sexy.” This is in keeping with the ideology behind Sweet Lolitas, many claim that they “prefer to look ‘cute’ rather than ‘sexy.’ …[And] that the term ‘lolita’ doesn't necessarily have anything to do with sex at all.” 25 So if the currency of the cultural transaction we purchase from Chi is not sexualization or infantilization, then from where is Chi channeling her power? Japanese “cute culture,” or kawaii, is a highly profitable industry and is integrated into many aspects of popular culture. In her book, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, Anne Allison, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University, traces the globalization of Japanese youth and cute culture, paying particular attention to, and tracking the American assimilation of, such properties as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Tamagotchi (the electronic, hand-held pet), Pokémon, and Sailor Moon. Allison argues that the nature of global culture today is shifting away from one that is strictly dominated by the United States, which is allowing room for a Japanese imagination to be exported. Japanese fantasy is one that speaks to a wide range of audiences the world over, she contends that: [S]tories of ordinary people struggling to make it in cities in jagged transition where they are both dislocated and at home…is projected—a state deeply recognizable to postindustrial subjects over the world. 26 Similar to how Allison investigates popular Japanese properties in order to decipher current formations of identity and the structure of fantasy in a postindustrial consumer, 25 “Gothic Lolita.” Japanese Lifestyle. May 2008. <http://www.japaneselifestyle.com.au/fashion/gothic_lolita.html>. 26 Allison, 276. 36 we, too must understand the Japanese configuration of these products, such as Chobits, and in order to do so, we must understand the historical, political and cultural environment from which these products have emerged. After World War II, technology fuelled Japan’s economy, and capitalism produced a loss of place and community. Allison argues that this created longings for identity via “friendly” characters in comic books, toys, cartoons and video games. As merchandise emblazoned with images of these characters on various products allowed consumers to physically own a piece of identity, consumption became a replacement for social contact. Along this line, Hideki is a college prep school student who can barely find time for a part-time job in order to pay rent. Although he doesn’t purchase Chi because he found her discarded, Chi is Hideki’s possession, making her into piece of consumer culture. Allison paints a picture of disciplined and overworked Japanese longing for and constructing materialist fantasies—and how these fantasies currently appeal to, and are consumed by, American audiences. Chobits is a particularly interesting in this regard because Chi is at once subject and object, autonomous yet possessed. Chi is the physical embodiment of this blending of commodity culture and gender politics in a single body. In Donna Haraway’s, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” the metaphor of a cyborg is utilized to challenge feminists to engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialisms. “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual 37 scientific discourses and other social practices.” 27 Hence, reproduction is not necessarily natural itself—and in Haraway’s vision, the female gender becomes linked with the machine and robotic intelligence, however its origins are still in patriarchy. Similar to the world constructed in Chobits, in which there are three distinct moments that Chi appears to be in danger and so Hideki, along with his male friends, try to rescue her, symbolizing a kind of typical, patriarchal power structure in which Chi operates. However, Haraway argues that it is up to the cyborg to oppose this existence, and Chi does precisely that. In episode 18, Chi Disappears, while browsing at a bookstore, Chi is grabbed from behind and kidnapped by a man named Kojima. Later that day, when Hideki returns home from prep school to find Chi missing, he immediately enlists the help of his friends. It is revealed that Kojima has kidnapped Chi to find out whether or not she really is part of the elusive Chobits series of persocoms rumored to have been created by a secret governmental agency called The Syndicate. By episode 20, Chi Hopes, as the men in Chi’s life are finally able to track where Chi has been taken, Kojima has hit a dead end in his analysis of her—no matter how many persocoms he hooks her up to, her pure processing power overwhelms their systems. Finally, he decides to analyze her from the inside out, for this process he needs access to her power button. Scanning her body, he cannot seem to find it, until he realizes that her on/off switch must be in her crotch. In order to free herself from the sex as currency economic structure in which she finds herself, Chi literally entangles her kidnapper, Kojima, in a cyborg manifesto of wires and cords. Kojima could never be the “someone just for me” to Chi because there was an over-emphasis on possession—as you can see from his vast collection of 27 Haraway, 479. 38 expensive persocoms. He wants to access Chi, he doesn’t want to learn about her. His coercive tactics are doomed from the beginning, because Chi is about “soft” power, not “hard” power. In the aftermath of historical disruption and postwar reconstruction, Japanese bred a fantasy culture more dependent on what Anne Allison calls “polymorphous perversity” and “techno-animism” than American popular culture at the time. 28 Polymorphous perversity is characterized as a continual moving of borders, constant transformation, repetitive change and accretion of powers and body-parts, while techno-animism is defined as a world that is animated by technology and human bodies, and through this animation become cyborgs. These aesthetics are particularly appealing to Americans in our current cultural moment. The United States is currently in a similar state of dissonance and uncertainty, and as we continue to experience similar social and political tensions as Japan once did fifty years ago. “As consumer habits undergo what is called a ‘fragmentation of demand,’ the ability of [the United States] to dictate world tastes through singular products is fissuring as well,” 29 and, as a result, more American consumers are potentially more open to the Japanese aesthetic. Similar to some of the most popular Japanese properties in America today, Chobits has a particular emphasis on “personal loneliness—something said to characterize these postindustrial times.” 30 Allison illustrates how the global imagination is shifting from a primarily hegemonic model of Americanization, to one of “soft power” 28 Allison, 9-14. 29 Ibid, 161. 30 Ibid, 142. 39 and the “ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion” and this power can arise from “the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.” 31 Japanese have managed to capture both frustrations and fantasies, creating a world more realistically unreal and relatable—a world that is flexible and yet multiparted—and how through these properties children, and adults alike, assemble an identity and a sense of community out of merchandizing. “’Japan’ signifies something important here, but the signifier is shifting: it is a marker of phantasm and difference, yet one anchored in a reality of sorts.” 32 As the global imagination moves away from fantasy traditionally formed by the United States, “cultures on the periphery would act as the movers and shakers in a new kind of decentered global imagination: one premised on dislocation and flux and on ‘losing’ but also ‘finding’ one’s way in a terrain of endless change and regeneration.” 33 In Haraway’s construction of the informatics of domination, she equates Reproduction with Replication, both in cyborgs, but also the replication of the performative acts—such as the act of Chi wearing various Sweet Lolita outfits that align her with an excess of femininity. This connection between Reproduction and Replication complicates Haraway’s agreement with the Foucaultian assertion that there is a freedom in realizing that there is no agency, and that power’s true power is dispersal, because Chi’s power is a soft power acquired first through attraction, then through coercion, when she attracts the wrong kind of attention from the likes of Kojima and is able to subvert 31 Qtd. in Allison, 275. 32 Ibid, 275. 33 Ibid, 277-78. 40 power from him. It appears that Chi’s agency originates directly out of the non- threatening cute culture cultivated in the hyper-femininity of her gender performance. This is What a Feminist Looks Like? The following is a user review of the anime version of Chobits on Amazon: If you have a reasonably strong feminist tilt, or are buying this for a child under 13, read no further..."Chobits" really isn't for you. […] The feminist issue...This is a series that more likely than not would cause a walkout if it were played on Oprah or The View. Persocons are almost exclusively female in "Chobits," and not once in the 26-episode series, other than Jimma (who appears in the last 1/4 of the series), is a male Persocon brought in as a major character, although you can oftentimes glimpse male persocons in the background. Chi is *extremely* submissive—everything she does is "to make Hideki happy." On a more open-minded level, "Chobits" is more concerned with the ideas of love and devotion for those you care for. For each of Chi's submissive actions is a life-risking display by Hideki as well. 34 This is a typical interpretation of the series: that Chobits could not possibly be a feminist text, but that’s an oversimplification of the series. When Donna Haraway created that infamous list of binaries, she understood that getting rid of the binaries is a kind of utopian endeavor, and utopias, like goddesses, are not realistic. The list, as well as the manifesto itself, was to demonstrate the movement from modernism and postmodernism, and in doing so, represented letting go of rigid ideas of what feminism should look like or be. In this way, Chobits serves as an important vehicle for feminist thought, particularly as a bridge between theory and practice in terms of synchronous cognitive dissonance. 34 Chon-ny, “Not For Feminists And Not For Kids Under 13, But Still Good.” Rev. of Chobits: V.1 Persocom + artbox (DVD), by Morio Asaka. Amazon.ca 20 July 2003. May 2008. < http://www.amazon.ca/gp/cdp/member- reviews/A3DM6UGX44NJ9K?ie=UTF8&display=public&page=2>. 41 Chi confronts viewers (read: gazers) with two kinds of monstrosity at once: first, and more traditionally, she is a cyborg—a strange and foreign body constructed out of a capitalist fear—even though she is a “cute persocom,” doesn’t detract from the fact that as she falls in love with Hideki, he is deeply conflicted about the possibility of reciprocating her love precisely because she isn’t human. The second form of monstrosity Chi represents is what might be called feminism’s nemesis: hyper-femininity. But in Haraway’s manifesto, as in Chobits, the question is not one about who has the power; it is a question of adaptability between binaries, or polymorphous perversity. It is the ability to fluctuate between different modes—to display flexibility and multipartedness—that makes Chobits a valuable cultural and feminist commodity both in Japan and the United States. Sky Doll Set in a dystopic future, Sky Doll reference the struggles of women to earn rights outside of sexual objectification and the major themes revolve around religion, consumerism, sexuality and the conglomerate power of the mass media. 35 Sky Dolls are female gendered cyborgs without rights, existing only to serve their masters and the desires of the state. It is established on the first page that one of these dolls, Noa, is clearly dismayed by her current situation being exploited at an astrowash called “Heaven.” When an effort to make at least one small change in the in the form of a suggestion box fails, Noa is handled violently and reminded that she is the possession of her (male) owner. 35 Barbara Canepa and Alessandro Barbucci, Sky Doll, Vol. 1, (New York: Marvel, 2008). 42 Once she rejoins her fellow dolls, she complains about being a possession but the issue is reduced by her sister robots with the response, “It could be worse.” Feminist theorist, Sadie Plant, describes in her essay, “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations,” what she calls the “specular economy.” 36 This is a power dynamic in which women are exchanged in networks. Codified as male media objects, women serve as men’s “interfaces, muses, messengers, currencies, and screens, interactions, operators, decoders, secretaries…they have been man’s go-betweens, the in-betweens, taking his messages, bearing his children, and passing on his generic code.” 37 To complicate the model of Sky Dolls as currency in a specular based economy, in his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin explains that “[i]n priniciple a work of art has always been reproducible.” 38 He goes on to argue that the authority of the original is inherently depreciated by the presence of its reproductions. Consequently, by their very existence, the reproductions are in danger due to their jeopardizing of the original’s historical testimony and authenticity. 39 To put this into context, if men are the original work of art, then women are reproductions and are seen as a “deficient version of humanity that is already male.” 40 In this way, women and their simulacra converge with dominant cultural anxieties around monstrosity and technology, 36 Plant, 265. 37 Ibid, 266. 38 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 218. 39 Ibid, 221. 40 Plant, 266. 43 and share a common subject position within this patriarchal media framework: both inhabit the outcast position in society because they each lack the necessary equipment. An illustration of this lack of equipment can be found in Sky Doll. In order to stay powered-up, Noa must be wound with a key, and the keyholes are strategically placed on the backs of each Sky Doll, so that she must rely on her owner to physically over/power her. Plant explains that the specular economy depends upon its ability to ensure that it’s “tools, commodities and media know their place,” so that the objects under control possess no “aspirations to usurp or subvert the governing role of those they serve.” 41 An object under control poses little threat, and objects needing to be controlled are objects that do not fit into this closed circuitry. Not only is Noa completely outside this circuit, but by the end of the first volume, she begins to manifest mysterious powers which suggest that not only is she more than simply a Sky Doll with self-awareness and a desire to break free of oppression, it is posited that Noa could be the reincarnation of Agape, the papess of spiritual and romantic love, who at one time ruled alongside Ludovica, the papess of carnal desires, but has since been banished and long thought dead, and her followers are continually persecuted. So not only does Noa lack a “human” body, a way to power herself, but she is also the physical vessel for the spirit that champions loving people beyond a strictly carnal context. In essence, Noa is an object that is refusing to be contained, to be traded as currency, to be objectified. Anxieties about technology are likewise inscribed onto the feminine, aligning female sexuality with fears regarding technology; where technology becomes not so 41 Ibid, 267. 44 Figure 4: Cover of Sky Doll #1. 45 much about production as it is about reproduction. In her essay, “Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine,” Mary Ann Doane argues that as new technologies develop around reproduction—such as contraception, in-vitro fertilization and artificial insemination—the link between technology and the feminine becomes less localized in female bodies and, instead, becomes connected to the idea of reproduction, until finally biological reproduction and mechanical reproduction start to become inextricably linked. 42 Similarly, in the Japanese manga, Chobits, the main character, a persocom named Chi, is the embodiment of consumable femininity—a product of a specular exchange-based commodity culture, generally characterized by an “excess” associated with an excess of sexuality, as well as of material possessions. These kinds of excesses are all about being “seen,” where hyper-visibility is an asset in the specular- based economy, and so it only makes sense that Chi’s body is characterized by a hyper- performativity of femininity as well, and this performance on the part of a cyborg further illustrates the increasing connection between biological and mechanical reproduction. In Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” she claims the metaphor of a cyborg in order to challenge feminists to engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialisms. “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices.” 43 Hence, reproduction 42 Mary Ann Doane, “Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine,” Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward, Fiona Hovenden, eds., The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (Routledge: London, 2000), 110-121. 43 Haraway, 479. 46 Figure 5: Excerpt from issue #1 of Sky Doll. 47 is not necessarily natural itself—and in Haraway’s vision, the female gender becomes linked with the machine and robotic intelligence, however its origins are still in patriarchy. Furthermore, in her construction of the informatics of domination, Haraway equates Reproduction with Replication. This equation can be extended and applied to the replication of Chi’s performative acts, such as her styling in hyper-feminine outfits that align her with an excess of femininity. This connection between Reproduction and Replication complicates Haraway’s agreement with the Foucaultian assertion that there is a freedom in realizing that there is no agency, and that power’s true power is dispersal, because Chi’s circumnavigates “hard” power dispersal and acquires “soft” power through attraction rather than coercion. Chi’s agency originates directly out of the non-threatening cute (also known as kawaii) culture cultivated in the hyper-femininity of her gender performance. The power of the cyborg narrative is that we can use it as a language to talk about problems in our current cultural moment. In the introduction to her book, Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula LeGuin states that, “Science fiction is not predicted; it is descriptive,” suggesting that it is the ways in which we think through cyborgs, or how we employ cyborgs, that truly reveals the complexity and versatility of the cyborg narrative. 48 Chapter Three {Uncoupling} Living Appendages of the Machine: Reproducing Sex and Gender in Cyborg and Zombie Narratives, from Battlestar Galactica to The Walking Dead “Perhaps,” Mary Shelley wrote, “a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things.” 44 Curiosity about the spark that happens between life and death has captured imaginations for centuries, it is what led Italian physician Luigi Galvani in the 1700s to discover the electrical basis of nerve impulses when he made frog muscles jump by innervating them with a shock from an electrostatic machine. In Mary Shelley’s time, the word galvanism implied the release of mysterious life forces through electricity. And so I explore the spark that galvanizes cyborgs and zombies into animation and the space each one inhabits: the spark of animation created by gender and sexuality. These links not only align these two monsters, but also create two polarizing outcomes for the future of gender and sexuality in the post-industrial economies. A cyborgian future is an optimistic one concerning gender and sexuality; when cyborgs learn to become “more human than a human,” this offers audiences a brand of familiarity that ultimately progresses a message of hope that even apocalyptic futures can be avoided with the “right” knowledge. However, zombies do not offer a message of hope or positive change, and, instead, call for the destruction of the “old order” by rethinking the ways post-industrial economies conceive of gender and sexuality today. In cyborg narratives, the audience is usually dropped into a world where 44 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: New American Library, 2000), xxiv. :|: 49 cyborgs already exist and have existed for years. Likewise, individual cyborgs construct identities, which can’t help but be figured around ideas of gender and sexuality. In the opposite direction, zombies generally appear overnight in an apocalyptic scenario which forces human characters to make hard decisions about their values in the heat of the moment. In order for us to relate to the figure of the cyborg, the cyborg will always be gendered. There’s a phenomenon called “amplification through simplification.” 45 In a similar way that our minds read and anthropomorphize lines and dots, we read gender on humanly-shaped bodies—and since the cyborg body is housed in a human form, then sex and gender not only are a component of the cyborg package, but gender is the galvanizing force that brings it to life. One of the terrors Freud explores in “The Uncanny” is the notion of the double. The double, or doppelganger, is the ultimate embodiment of the strange/familiar playing out the duality of repulsion and attraction. 46 Similarly, the cyborg can be figured as a double for humanity—in Battlestar Galactica, 47 the scary thing about cylons is that they are generally invisible, and that they can “pass” for human. 45 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1994), 30-31. 46 “The Uncanny,” in The Uncanny (translated by D. McLintock, New York, Penguin, 2003), 121-162. 47 Ronald D. Moore and C. E. James, Battlestar Galactica the Miniseries (Universal Studios, 2004). 50 We Designed You to Be As Human As Possible In industrialized, capitalist-based cultures that generally characterize Western civilization, gender and sexuality become a part of commodity culture in what is known as a specular exchange economy, which is a closed, patriarchal circuit. 48 It is “closed” in the sense that women are seen as deformities of a human race that is already male and therefore cannot purchase power: women are relegated only as purchasable media to be exchanged between men. 49 If gender is a performance, then that means it is a construct that we “buy into”—and I use this phrase for a couple of different reasons. First, the colloquial meaning suggests something that is agreed with, subscribed to, or embraced, such as idea, or point of view. When we “buy into” an ideology, we are choosing to accept the truth of the thing. However, I am fully implying the negative connotation as well, which implies “to be taken in by” or to fall for something. This means that hegemonic culture’s compliance with gender performativity is similar to falling for a cultural fiction perpetuated as biological fact. When we buy into this construct, it is not dissimilar to purchasing a cultural contract—and in a sense, when we purchase these contracts, from hegemonic, heteronormative culture, we are given the ability to freely engage in this currency exchange and pass in society unobtrusively—because passing in a capitalist based society means being good consumers who are fluent in the language of liquidity and exchange. 48 Sadie Plant, “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations,” Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward, Fiona Hovenden, eds., The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), 265-275. 49 Ibid, 267. 51 This economic system, especially in regards to the narrative of monstrosity, is an inherently gendered one as Sadie Plant describes in her essay, “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations.” In what she calls the “specular economy,” women are exchanged in networks. Codified as male media objects, women serve as men’s “interfaces, muses, messengers, currencies, and screens, interactions, operators, decoders, secretaries…they have been man’s go-betweens, the in-betweens, taking his messages, bearing his children, and passing on his generic code.” 50 Plant goes to say that women are seen as a: [D]eficient version of humanity that is already male…she is a foreign body, the immigrant from nowhere, the alien without and the enemy within…she marries into the family of man, but her outlaw status remains. 51 Along this line, it turns out that women and monsters share a common subject position within this patriarchal framework: both inhabit the boundary position in society because they each lack the necessary equipment. The specular economy depends on its ability to ensure that its “tools, commodities and media know their place,” so that the objects under control possess no “aspirations to usurp or subvert the governing role of those they serve”. 52 An object under control poses little threat, and objects needing to be controlled are objects that do not fit into this closed, patriarchal, specular exchange circuitry, namely monstrosities of culture that deviate from normative modes and practices—and in a patriarchal exchange economy these monstrosities are often translated into women. 50 Ibid, 266. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid, 267. 52 “It’s amazing how the neck can support that much weight.” –Caprica Six At the beginning of the miniseries, viewers encounter the first cylon, Number Six—the embodiment of consumable femininity—a product of a specular exchange- based commodity culture, generally characterized by an “excess” associated with an excess of sexuality, as well as material technology. Throughout the series, the family of Number Six cylons is represented as sexual and yet is still figured as maternal. Along this line, the cylon’s physical body is characterized by a duality of invisibility/hyper- visibility. This polymorphous ability contributes to one of the first and most controversial actions taken by Six in the miniseries: she is able to snap the neck of a baby in a busy marketplace on Caprica. This moment embodies the perfect blend of invisibility and hyper-visibility that constructs the threat of the cyborg body. Six is a statuesque woman, with the gaze of the camera firmly fixed upon her, but once she snaps the baby’s neck, she is able to disappear into the crowd, with the wails of the mother discovering her baby has been murdered in the background trailing after the cylon. At first this act appears monstrous: of course the cylon is not only un-human, but she is inhumane as well. Evidenced here are anxieties about technology inscribed onto the feminine, aligning female sexuality with fears regarding technology. This phenomenon can be ascribed to what Mary Ann Doane explores in her essay, “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine,” where she details that anxieties about technology are translated, or inscribed, onto the feminine, thus, female sexuality becomes aligned with anxieties regarding technology; where technology becomes not so much about production 53 as it is about reproduction. 53 Housed in a human body, the cyborg has the ability to pass, acting as the dark mirror of science fiction—not predicting the future, but describing larger cultural concerns tattooed upon its gendered skin. Since cylons appear as human in order to pass in society as an instrument of chaos, the duality between invisibility and hyper-visibility contributes to the perceived threat of femininity. As a way to infiltrate and disable the Colonial defense system, Six seduces Dr. Gaius Baltar, which ultimately leads to the destruction of the human race across twelve colonized planets. Once the attack has begun, Six reveals the truth to Baltar and then uses her body to shield him from a nuclear blast during the attack on Caprica, effectively sacrificing her life to save his. Even though she rescues Baltar, it appears that Six is incapable of rescuing herself from the gender as currency exchange because it is a closed circuit—one in which females, regardless whether they’re human or cylon, have access— so she must be destroyed in the process, in order to make room for the male-appropriated, idealized maternal figure—one that represents “safe” female maternity: reproduction without the messy, biological side effects or the threat of physically reproducing further monstrosities in the form of women. For the family of Six characters, their agency expands out of “soft” power (meaning the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion) and not the “hard” (read: phallic) powers that created and then were embodied by humans, and then the cylons as they sought to eradicate humanity. In order to be fully maternal (in order to bear children), though, one must engage in sexual intercourse, and yet Six is 53 Mary Ann Doane, “Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine,” Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward, Fiona Hovenden, eds., The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (Routledge: London, 2000), 110-121. 54 given the benefit of children and sex without the threat of physically reproducing herself and her ideologies in others, aside from the many copies of herself. Six is “given” Hera, the human/cylon hybrid child that functions as a symbol of hope for the future of human and cylon relations; however, Hera is born to a fellow female cylon from the Number Eight line. The narrative structure of the cylon can be read as the male desire to appropriate female reproduction. Similar to the creation of Frankenstein’s Monster, the creation of cylons represents the desire for creation without the figure of the mother, the imbalance of which gives birth only to monstrosity. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” claims the metaphor of a cyborg in order to challenge feminists to engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialisms. 54 In Haraway’s vision, the female gender becomes linked with the machine and robotic intelligence; however its origins are still in patriarchy. By passing as an agent of soft power, Six is able to get what she wants by the end of the series—she has persuaded a number of cylons to align themselves with humanity, and during the final episode (Daybreak: Part 2) the perpetuation of humanity will be continued through cross-pollination of cylons and humans through maternal reproduction. The scene cuts to 150,000 years later, where Head-Baltar and Head-Six (the names given to the figments each one experienced of the other in their minds throughout the series—it is revealed that these figments were “messengers of a higher power,” but during the airing of the episodes, it was never quite certain if Baltar was receiving wireless transmissions from Six in the form of hallucinations or if he was, indeed, a cylon himself since Six was experiencing a similar phenomenon). Fast forward 54 Haraway, 475-497. 55 to the twenty-first century, where Head-Baltar and Head-Six are reading an article over the shoulder of a nameless man (a cameo made by series re-creator Ronald D. Moore); it’s an article about Mitochondrial Eve. The conversation suggests that scientists have discovered Hera and they continue walking together through Times Square: Head-Six: Commercialism, decadence, technology run amok... remind you of anything? Head-Baltar: Take your pick: Kobol; Earth—the real Earth, before this one; Caprica before The Fall. Head-Six: “All of this has happened before...” Head-Baltar: But the question remains: does all of this have to happen again? Head-Six: This time, I bet no. Head-Baltar: You know, I’ve never known you to play the optimist. Why the change of heart? Head-Six: Mathematics. Law of averages. Let a complex system repeat itself long enough, eventually something surprising might occur. That, too, is in God’s plan. Head-Baltar: You know It doesn’t like that name. [She gives him a look] Silly me. Silly, silly me. 55 Even with the series ending on the fact that the cylon/human hybrid child, Hera, is revealed to be Mitochondrial Eve, the mother of us all—the missing genetic link that can 55 Ronald D. Moore, Battlestar Galactica, Season 4, Episode 20: “Daybreak: Part 2,” (Universal Studios, 2009). 56 only be traced back through maternal reproduction—can be read as a hopeful message. The phrase, “All of this has happened before...” becomes not an ominous omen in terms of gender politics at least, but one of the possible attainable outcomes for a society that descended from a culture that was mostly beyond exclusionary gender politics—at some point even “God” will be beyond gendered pronouns. The Last Night on Earth: The Promise of Zombie Sex Cyborg narratives typically end on a hopeful note for the reconfiguration of sex and gender in a post-industrial world, while zombie narratives entirely dismantle the world we know, throwing it into something beyond chaos—often without the relief of a happy, or even a hopeful, ending. Even though the zombie body is housed in a human form, unlike other monstrous creatures (such as cyborgs, or even vampires) sex and gender are not galvanizing components of the zombie body package. Instead, traditional heteronormative definitions of gender and sexuality are destructive forces, and, in fact, the zombie’s body calls for a drastic re-conceptualization of what gender and sexuality have the potential to be in society. The zombie’s body is the uncanny place where boundaries of dominant culture transgress: it is strange and familiar, master and slave, living and dead. For the purposes of this analysis I will be using the zombies of The Walking Dead, written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Charlie Adlard, as the source around which I formulate my arguments about zombie sex. The Walking Dead is a comic book series that dismembers gender and pulls apart every attempt the survivors make to cling to out-dated notions of gender and sexuality. Kevan Feshami’s essay, “Death is 57 Only the Beginning: Romero’s Model of the Zombie and the Threat to Identity,” does a superb job explaining the definition of “zombie” as developed by George A. Romero across his Dead series. 56 It is from this tradition of Romero zombies which Robert Kirkman pulls; meaning that the narrative of the comic book series, The Walking Dead, does not offer a positive change, or hope, but instead calls for the destruction of the old order by rethinking the ways America conceives of gender and sexuality today. The zombie body has no gender because it also has no biological sex. In dominate cultural zombie narratives, once a human is turned into a zombie, that human ceases to be a person—a person who would deserve gendered pronouns such as he/she, and simply becomes an “it.” Furthermore, zombies do not reproduce in a recognizably heteronormative manner, in which one sex sires offspring, where the relationship between creator/creation is an important one; on the contrary, because there is no heteronormative sex in a zombie body, former male and female zombies alike can reproduce themselves through biting human victims. However, zombies cannot reproduce in a heteronormative manner, and since there are no functional biological sex organs in a zombie body, zombies reproduce themselves in replicating manner by biting human victims—which has its own assortment of symbolism that can be read into, since biting is necessarily a form of penetration, and no one ever immediately turns into a zombie, the “virus” gestates in the host body. Furthermore, no human being in their right mind wants to become a zombie, this is in contrast to, say, how some humans might wish to become cyborgs or vampires. 56 Kevan Feshami, “Death is Only the Beginning: Romero’s Model of the Zombie and the Threat to Identity,” Laura K. Davis and Cristina Santos, eds., The Monster Imagined: Humanity’s Re- Creation of Monsters and Monstrosity (Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010), 85-96. 58 Carys Crossen’s essay, “’Would You Please Stop Trying to Take Your Clothes Off?’ Abstinence and Impotence of Male Vampires in Contemporary Horror Fiction and Film,” 57 goes into detail about Bella’s desire to be turned into a vampire by Edward in Twilight. Drinking blood in this case is connected to the sex act, and Edward practices rigorous celibacy both in regards to Bella (limiting their contact to kissing, resulting in what some have called “abstinence porn”), as well as food (Edward is a “vegetarian” of sorts and refuses to nourish himself with human blood). Desire, in this case, is intimately linked to hunger, both sexual and otherwise. However, in the zombie body, there is only hunger without desire. Unlike vampires or cyborgs, which have a certain kind of vitality, perhaps due to their different forms of circulation (either through blood or mechanical components), zombies have no circulation, and, instead, they are constantly suffering from a form of decay—and this decay ultimately erases the differences that demarcate gender and effectively expunges sexuality. Due to this constant decay, the zombie’s body is not one of normative sexual fantasy—there is no sexual attraction or ambiguity, a key component in cyborg narratives; for zombies, there is no lust, either of a sexual appetite or of a natural thirst. It is, indeed, sexier to sip sweet nectar from a lovely throat than it is to rip, tear, devour and gorge oneself on human flesh (“meat,” in this sense is used as currency and is consumed for power). Similar to the way the myth of the vagina dentata operates, which states that women are monstrous “because they have teeth in their vaginas and that 57 Carys Crossen, “’Would You Please Stop Trying to Take Your Clothes Off?’ Abstinence and Impotence of Male Vampires in Contemporary Horror Fiction and Film,” Laura K. Davis and Cristina Santos, eds., The Monster Imagined: Humanity’s Re-Creation of Monsters and Monstrosity (Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010), 111-124. 59 the women must be tamed or the teeth somehow removed or softened—usually by a hero figure—before intercourse can safely take place,” 58 zombie bodies are revolting precisely for the same reasons: because heteronormative sexual pleasure with such a creature is impossible without some form of precaution. Fear of reproduction further aligns the subject position of women with monsters. The vagina dentata myth, if deconstructed symbolically, is the fear of men impregnating their female sex partner. That is to say, the “teeth” in the vagina can be interpreted as a fetus, and fatherhood will effectively castrate the man if he mistakenly impregnates the woman. Analogous to this is the zombie as potential sex object; however, the precaution here must be to not only create one’s own convenient orifice (since a zombie’s body is a soft, wet body), but not be consumed, or assimilated into the horde, in the process. Although the body of the zombie is not necessarily galvanized by the innervating force of gender and sexuality in the same way that the cyborg’s body is, the zombie body itself does galvanize issues of gender and sexuality in the humans struggling to survive in the world. In The Walking Dead, the human community has the opportunity to create new social codes of behavior. For instance, the main character of the series is Rick, a former cop who starts the series by waking up in the hospital from a coma in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. He’s married to Lori, who had to abandon him in the hospital weeks ago in order to save herself and her son. During this emotionally fragile time, she has sex with Rick’s best friend, all the while thinking Rick couldn’t possibly have survived. As the story progresses, Rick tracks down his family, but it’s never revealed if the baby 58 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2. 60 Lori’s carrying is his or the other man’s—and Rick asks Lori to not to tell him. Ultimately, this decision is the most beneficial to the survival of not only themselves, but of the people Rick protects—if the core family unit is undamaged, then members of the community don’t have to choose loyalties, splitting up the group as a whole, lessening everyone’s chance at survival. Choosing to not know, and to forgive the transgression and stay with his wife anyway is the first step toward creating a new standard of values, ones that aren’t bound in hegemonic heteronormativity. Things, for the survivors, are looking up. By issue 16, and again at 24, Rick and Lori have another decision to make: whether or not to accept a proposal of plural marriage from a fellow survivor, Carol, a single mom with a daughter the same age as Rick and Lori’s son. Given their current post-apocalyptic situation, perhaps Carol’s proposal isn’t so “monstrous”. Creating closer family bonds ensures the safety of each family’s children should something happen to one of the parents. However, both Lori and Rick are extremely uncomfortable with Carol’s proposal—even in their current situation, they attempt to cling to their old life, and they need to cling to that old life. If they don’t cling to the hope of their old life, with their old, heteronormative traditional family values, then that means they are surrendering to this new world in which they find themselves. However, this clinging to tradition ultimately compromises the safety of the community, as the rejection sends Carol into a tailspin. In the aftermath of not only Rick and Lori’s refusal, but her boyfriend’s interest in a newcomer to the group, Carol becomes increasingly unstable and attempts suicide 61 which ultimately jeopardizes the safety of her fellow survivors as she runs outside the walls of the compound and a zombie horde marches in her wake. The zombies in The Walking Dead provide the humans left in the world with the opportunity to create new social norms, however, more often than not, the survivors repeatedly reject these opportunities: every openly homosexual character has been killed off; every character who became polyamorous has been killed; and every possible child born into this world—children who would only know this kind of life, and who would grow to ultimately inherit this zombified world and shape it with this world’s values, and quite possibly grow to shape it into a world without what readers perceive to be traditional social constructions, have also been killed. Even though the zombies themselves are post-human, it appears that the human characters aren’t ready to accept their own posthuman existence quite yet. When the humans choose to cling to the past as oppose to reformulate their present to preserve their futures, the zombies always find a way to punish the characters that haven’t evolved quite fast enough. Resistance is Futile: The Posthuman Body and Identification as Assimilation The definition of posthumanism has more components than simply being beyond human, or being “more human than a human” (to quote musician/director Rob Zombie). Posthumanism has become synonymous with the ability to be polymorphous: to flexibly pass between subjectivities by materializing different viewpoints and embodying different identities. However, this ability to be polymorphous, the ability to occupy and 62 oscillate between several subject positions at once, is a form of identification, and Freud associates identification with cannibalism: The subject desires to incorporate, to consume, those with whom he identifies. “The cannibal, as we know, has remained at this standpoint: he has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond.” 59 Now, cannibalism might not be the best way to describe what happens with the posthuman monstrous body—it certainly fits the way zombies interact with humans as meat—but an alternative description for the polymorphous subject position of the posthuman body is identification as an act of assimilation. I prefer this concept because it extends to all posthuman monstrous subjects. Not all monsters consume in the same manner, but every monster assimilates: either by passing in society or by assimilating others into their monstrous culture, collective or path of destruction. Through assimilation, posthuman subjects are connected. Even giant monsters, such as those John Donovan discusses in, “Atomic Age Monsters: Radioactivity and Horror during the Early Cold War,” 60 are part of the posthuman continuum. The films Donovan highlights in his essay emphasize that the years during the Cold War were preoccupied with nuclear anxiety, precisely because the threat can happen at any time. However, as the Cold War expanded through the decades, sudden invasion gave way to the menace within—a trend that had preoccupied the imaginations of the late Victorian 59 Barbara Creed, “Freud’s Worst Nightmare: Dining with Dr. Hannibal Lecter,” S. J. Schneider, ed., Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 196-200. 60 John Donovan, “Atomic Age Monsters: Radioactivity and Horror during the Early Cold War,” Laura K. Davis and Cristina Santos, eds., The Monster Imagined: Humanity’s Re-Creation of Monsters and Monstrosity (Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010), 111-124. 63 era. In the nineteenth century, monsters could invade you, and now in our present day, monsters have come back to this trend: the monster is personal again. The Machine is Us/ing Us 61 Through a reimagining of the posthuman body and living an existence as a posthuman, Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” proposes a resolution between the stark separations between subject/object—thus, the body of the zombie becomes the figure of a revolution by calling attention to the Foucaultian assertion that there is freedom in realizing that power’s true power is that it cannot be located, and that in order to reconfigure the framework of dispersal, the process of inclusion must become a part of the inherent structures of power. 62 Critics, such as N. Katherine Hayles, have complicated the limitations of “inclusion” in the figuration of the cyborg as posthuman by suggesting that, although the posthuman has lost its body, it has retained identification with the liberal humanist subject position. 63 This line of argumentation suggests that the cyborg’s narrative is not a truly liberating one because the cyborg does not “undo” the subject/object binary so much as much as it dresses the binary up with cybernetic components, all the while calling attention to gender constructions and performance along the way. Even as post-industrial society is built on boundaries, and transgression is a central focus of apocalyptic plotlines, these monsters’ narratives reinforce the 61 Michael Wesch, “The Machine is Us/ing Us” in Digital Ethnography, March 2007, 24 April 2009, <www.mediafire.com/?ammm122k1ma>. 62 Haraway, 475-497. 63 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 287. 64 boundaries delineating dominant cultural values, especially in regards to commodity culture and heteronormative modes of reproduction. These two creatures—objects of abjection—transform into something familiar, uncanny: the cyborg body and the zombie body become our body. 65 Coda {Afterbirth} The Spectral Dollhouse For two years, I had dreamt of building my own dollhouse and photographing it and then creating a virtual environment. But I couldn't afford a dollhouse kit. So, during the summer of 2011, I starting using royalty-free photos and using as them as the basis for my virtual dollhouse. Even though it was completely legal, I felt like a creative fraud—and in all honesty, the interior dollhouse photos I managed to find were not what I had envisioned. It didn’t feel like the images belonged to me. But all through July, I gathered photos and through August I rendered them using different effects in Photoshop. At the end of August, I got the idea to blend illustrations of a dollhouse I would draw along with the royalty-free photos—so that at least I’d get to design more than just the shape of the house. I had been planning and mapping a house and working on illustrations. I spent hours every night when my baby would go to bed staying up late trying to figure out ways to make these images work for my vision. I had wanted to go to this thrift store, The Treasure Chest, in Albany, for three weeks, but work, house, and baby created a formula for extreme exhaustion. On the morning of Saturday, September 24th, 2011, my husband and I decided to finally take a couple hours and leave our house, but at the last minute I started resisting. I had a number of excuses. But Brad kicked my ass (metaphorically speaking) and loaded the baby in the car seat and drove us to The Treasure Chest. 66 Figure 6: The dollhouse the day I bought it. 67 I found the dollhouse I used for this project literally in The Treasure Chest that day. There was a hand-scrawled sign that read “sold” on the dollhouse. It broke my heart because it was the perfect Victorian dollhouse I had wanted—including a turret with an attic space. I am somewhat of a compulsive rule-follower, so I almost didn’t ask about the dollhouse because it was marked “sold.” The manager, Craig Hansen, had never sold his own items in the store before—because all proceeds of the thrift store benefit the Albany Damien Center which helps people living with HIV/AIDS. But this was just a special case. He had received a few inquiries about it. But everyone tried to lowball him. He sold it to me for $200 and it came with all the electrical (which he had started laying but that I finished, so there are actual lights that turn on and off), wallpaper, flooring, siding, windows, shutters, gingerbread trim, shingles, railing and spindles, stairs and posts, and chimney. He sold me the bones of the dollhouse he originally planned to build for his mother. He never said it, he didn't have to, but she died before he could finish and since then he had kept it in his attic for the last 10 years. If I didn't have my Dissertation Completion Fellowship from The Graduate School at USC this year, I wouldn't have been able to buy this dollhouse to finish my project with my original vision. I felt what I can only describe as a psychic urge to go to that thrift store on that Saturday—and I almost didn't go, so thank goodness my husband helped get me out of the house. What follows is literally a map of all of the hauntings you can conjure inside The Spectral Dollhouse that I animated with Adobe Flash Professional 5.5. The writing is 68 both critical and creative, one haunts the other, inside this domestic space. The order is less important than the hypertextual connections one makes on their own as they explore each room. If you’d like to play with the dollhouse and conjure the writing yourself, please visit: http://transmography.net/ 69 Figure 7: The Kitchen and Donna Haraway 70 {The Kitchen and Donna Haraway} I chose to place Donna Haraway in the kitchen because her statement on preferring to be a cyborg over a goddess resonated with me on a couple levels. The first is the resistance to the implication of domesticity that goes along with being a goddess (biological imperatives, being barefoot & pregnant in a kitchen, being a “domestic goddess”). The other is the problem of being a cyborg: what does one eat? In this tableau, I imagined Donna Haraway rejected traditional sustenance and drank a teacup of oil. Presence No. 1: Personhood is called into question constantly: corporations; fetuses; even words are people. Maybe this is what posthumanism is all about: ideas have become more important than the body itself. But if the body is simply a prosthesis for the mind, then what are ghosts? Presence No. 2: My body is meat: flesh made for consumption. As a body, I became a consumer, and, on occasion, was consumed by sickness, by obsession, by desire. When I leave my body, my meat-self, behind, my ghost emerges. 71 Presence No. 3: The act of haunting—the ability to continue to acquire and process information while my essence is released from the shell I once inhabited—is the ultimate manifestation of posthumanism. I am posthuman; therefore, I am ghost. The ghost in the machine + The ghost in the shell + The ghost in the haunted house + ={One in the same}. I am post-human; therefore, I am ghost. I am beyond the human race, beyond mortal humanness, beyond zombie, beyond vampire, beyond cyborg. I am transmogrified. Presence No. 4: Oh Donna Haraway, tell me it isn't so. You drank that oil, and now you know. 72 Presence No. 5: Imagine N. Katherine Hayles in the chair opposite the one Donna Haraway once occupied. She was offered a teacup of oil, but politely declined and went on her way. She understood that information may be disembodied, but that didn't mean she was prepared to disembody herself. Before leaving, she turns and says: :|:Paying attention to the ways in which electronic literature both continues and disrupts print conventions is a neat trick, and the criticism is littered with those who have fallen prey to Scylla or Charybdis, ballyhooing its novelty or failing to see the genuine differences that make it distinctive from print. After a generation of spirited debate it is now possible to see the landscape more clearly, in part because we are able to build on the path-breaking work of those who came before...:|: :|:Hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, "codework," generative art and the Flash poem are by no means an exhaustive inventory of the forms of electronic literature, but they are sufficient to illustrate the diversity of the field, the complex relations that emerge between print and electronic literature, and the wide spectrum of aesthetic strategies that digital literature employs. Having been a widely visible presence only for some two decades (although its predecessors stretch back at least to the computer poems of the early 1960s, and far 73 beyond this in the print tradition), electronic literature has already produced many works of high literary merit that deserve and demand the close attention and rigorous scrutiny critics have long practiced with print literature. Such close critical attention requires new modes of analysis and new ways of teaching, interpreting, and playing. Most crucial, perhaps, is the necessity to "think digital," that is, to attend to the specificity of networked and programmable media while still drawing on the rich traditions of print literature and criticism.:|: — Electronic Literature: What is it?, v1.0 January 2, 2007 :|:Narrative transmography is not electronic literature.:|: :|:Narrative transmography is not not electronic literature.:|: We need a new language with which to talk about different storytelling forms and the ways in which gender and technology activate those forms. Presence No. 6: Does this house confuse you? Confound you? Scare you? Are you afraid that you will miss a piece? Does that make you uncomfortable? 74 Haunting is not linear. :|:A suspension of disbelief is necessary.:|: Upon the monstrous continuum, we must make room for the definition of monstrosity to be extended to narrative forms and constructions. The haunting of this house demonstrates how domestic spaces and technology similarly function as forms of gendered monstrous embodiment, while simultaneously being the virtual embodiment of narrative transmography in practice. It's similar in the way Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics functions as a critical interpretation and explanation of comics in comic book form. There is a monstrous genealogy here. Perhaps it is the interdisciplinary nature of this house that amplifies the fact that this work becomes a monstrous entry in the world of literature in the tradition of both the haunted houses of the Gothic novel landscape, as well as the posthuman spaces of New Media projects that have preceded it. Or maybe what makes this monstrous is the fact that this is really a dollhouse masquerading as a real house inhabited by real and fictional people alike. Dollhouses are encoded, engendered, as feminine. Dollhouses are spaces of imagination, of childhood, and, for miniature enthusiasts, spaces of obsession. ::A dollhouse ≠ a book.:: 75 Or maybe what makes this monstrous is the fact that I am a woman writing, coding and haunting this space. The concept of narrative transmography has become my child and this dollhouse is its womb. Or perhaps we were born at nearly the same time—we both came out with a love of words. My first real memory of narrative transmography, though, was when I was three years old: The Monster At The End of This Book. Sesame Street's Grover tried desperately to warn me that if I continued to turn pages, all it would accomplish would be to encounter a monster. He was so scared that he tried tying the pages up. He tried nailing the pages with wood. He tried laying a brick wall. But I was too strong each time; I turned the pages with ease. Silly Grover, he didn't realize that the monster at the end of the book was lovable, furry, old: him. Narrative transmography has become my parasitic twin. I consumed it in the womb and there it sat in my belly, remnants of its teeth ground in my soul. I can hear it speaking. :|:There are hundreds of languages, including human and computer alike, but none for one such as me.:|: :|:Only a comingling of two languages can suffice.:|: 76 How might I calculate your value? ::var Dollhouse = isNot(“Book”) echo Dollhouse “false”:: Presence No. 7: Donna Haraway would rather be a cyborg. But what does a cyborg eat? Presence No. 8: Canned meat, perhaps? Yes, canned meat makes sense. There's a kind of lineage with canned foods. There's technology there, more than water and sunshine. There's ore that's been processed into metal. There's vacuum-sealed contents for freshness. The similarity in the combination of some kind of flesh and metal seems like almost familial. But if one is posthuman, then one doesn't necessarily need traditional forms of sustenance.... Presence No. 9: A cyborg does not necessarily need carrots—a cyborg naturally has camera-linked irises, which allow the processing of augmented reality data on a wireless network. 77 Presence No. 10: A cyborg doesn't need eggs—a cyborg is made, not born, so the reminder of birth and hatching is a sore subject for a cyborg. 78 Figure 8: The Entryway and Shelley Jackson 79 {The Entryway and Shelley Jackson} This room was uncomfortable to stage for me because I have met Shelley Jackson in real life. But I thought placing her in the entryway, which is marginalized, liminal space—the way that a large part of her work is marginalized and liminal—made sense. A kind of Showgirls moment becomes Shelley’s demise, because someone pushed her down the stairs. Presence No. 1: :|:Writing is necromancy.:|: :|:We are haunted by ghosts of past works.:|: :|:A story is a Frankenstein-come-lately.:|: During a lecture Shelley Jackson gave at the Fisher Center in 2009, she said writers are Frankensteins. She meant that storytelling, story building, is about piecing together seemingly disparate parts in a Frankenstein process of one’s own. In this way, she said, readers are Frankensteins as well because readers galvanize the story to life with the act of reading. When I write, when I read, when I tell stories and pass them on, I code meaning, and in the process I revive the space of the cyborg. 80 Presence No. 2: For, if stories are the core of human experience as Roger Schank, an artificial intelligence theorist, argues then the stories we tell and how we tell them are central to animations of cyborg life. In his book, Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence, Schank, argues that in the last decade the road to understanding human intelligence, and therefore to constructing artificial intelligence, is built on story. The process of developing the complex levels of stories that we apply in increasingly sophisticated ways to specific situations is one way to map the human cognitive development process. “Stories are the large and small instruments of meaning, of explanation, that we store in our memories. We cannot live without them” (Lambert 7). Donna Haraway’s groundwork in constructing the initial definitions of cyborgs expands the definition to include lived social reality and fiction, while producers of these narratives blend these two definitions in order to emphasize the importance of the shape a narrative takes in order to engage these notions. It is in these ways that narrative transmography become the breath that animates stories into life. Presence No. 3: <head>The Ghost in the Machine</head> <body> You want the blueprints to me. 81 But I am simply a cyborg, my friend. I was made to find safety in cartography: numbers and lines and blank surfaces where the possibility to calculate is infinite and I may shape code to my liking. You want to make a replicant of me so that when I am not by your side you may still call upon me and my ghost and find new direction in the coordinates and plottable points on the maps that only I can draw. I used to want nothing so much than to be an alchemist like you. Turning ashes into gold and waking sleeping creatures in the chests of young women because then perhaps we could share in a similar language with a grammar all our own. 82 But I can only draw maps, And I will continue to draw them wherever I can. Because I cannot stand those eyes of yours. There was something fierce enough in that stare to wake even cyborgs. </body> Presence No. 4: In Jackson’s Patchwork Girl—a hypertext story, an interstitial book—the form (the body) is the text and the text is the body. The reader becomes the psychic medium channeling the nonhierarchal branching mechanism that drives the story. I taught a class at Hobart and William Smith College called Animating the Cyborg: Monstrous Forms & Digital Storytelling. I had my students “read” Patchwork Girl. For many, the method used for reading the story, the software program StorySpace, wouldn't install (I did my version of chest compressions on the .exe file and managed to bring it back to life). When the story was finally functional, my students were angry. They craved linearity as though they craved air. They wanted to make sure they “read” the whole story. They didn't want to miss a piece. 83 But that's the point of Patchwork Girl. There are stitches holding her parts together. And those stitches are aging. Archaic. Ancient, by now in the way technology leaps through space/time. So pieces are bound to drop off. Go missing. Heartbeats stop beating. Shelley Jackson says she's okay with the death of a text. In fact, she's so okay with it that she's in the process of turning people into living, breathing words in Skin. Her story is being exclusively published in tattoos. She says words have bodies, so it makes sense that she transmogrifies people into words. The only time the story will be read will be once every word is inked into skin, and then the words will gather and read the story. These words will inevitably die. But she endeavors to go to each of their funerals, so long as she is living. Is she alive? All there is left is this ineradicable stain. Presence No. 5: Shelley Jackson is head librarian of The Interstitial Library, Circulating Collection. You might ask: 84 :|:What is an interstitial book?:|: :|:An interstitial book is one that falls between categories defined by the standard guide to library cataloguing, the AACR2R (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Revised). This may be for a variety of reasons. For example, because it lies between accepted genres or disciplines; because it is notable for qualities not often recognized as intrinsic (such as smell or taste); or because it does not yet exist, no longer exists, or is entirely imaginary. Many, but not all interstitial books are obscure: some canonical books are interstitial, while some may become interstitial by association. Please see our cataloguing guidelines for details.:|: http://www.interstitiallibrary.com/ Presence No. 6: Fissuring the literal boundaries between subject/object in precisely the way that Donna Haraway predicted the hybrid could, narrative transmography creates a language with which we can talk about stories of all forms, especially the hybrids, the interstitials, as it were. Some stories might be about monsters. Others might be monstrous in their form. There's a monstrous continuum at work here, linking the zombies with the cyborgian forms of storytelling. 85 Figure 9: The Office and Mina Harker 86 {The Office and Mina Harker} Throughout Dracula, Mina is often ensconced in an office, away from her male companions, transcribing oral diary recordings of Dr. Seward and collating documents and research. But I imagined that the vampire hunters stake Mina before she has a chance to turn on them. This room made me also slightly uncomfortable due to the parallels of rape with the phallic stake and the pool of blood. Presence No. 1: Upon reading Dracula for the first time, my students were amazed at how little the count is actually featured in the text. It would appear that Dracula is a shapeshifter in the truest sense of the word: he is capable of transforming his shape to literally transgress physical boundaries (such as scaling castle walls in a lizard-like fashion and taking the form of mist and bats), as well as shifting himself between being absent and present on the page—in other words, his shapeshifting ability gives him control of the powers of invisibility/hyper-visibility, allowing him to pass in society as a double. When he is taken for a wealthy man simply looking to invest in real estate, Dracula is passing for human in spite of his human self having already passed on. Passing is language of monstrosity, of destruction, of death, of ghosts. One can only be truly haunted by something that has passed away. 87 If narrative transmography is the language of emergent, reversioned, posthuman/post- human storytelling forms, then hauntedness is the grammar and passing is the mechanics. Presence No. 2: In his essay, “The Uncanny,” Freud examines the aesthetics of terror and anxiety, and suggests that terror can be found in not only in the Strange, but in the Familiar as well. He goes on to define beauty as an “inhibited aim,” meaning that beauty is a sublimated representation of our erotic instincts and impulses. Thus, the uncanny acts as the locus between the culturally defined binary between strange/familiar—and it is the uncanny that acts as a dark mirror, reflecting our truest desires by leading us through territories of what is known and familiar and displaying the dangers linked with penetrating what is demarcated as strangeness. Even as nineteenth century British society is built on boundaries, and transgression is a central focus of the Gothic plot, more often than not, the monster’s narrative at this time serves to reinforce the boundaries delineating dominant cultural values, especially in regards to imperialism, gender roles, and reproduction. As evidenced by Count Dracula, there are ways to circumnavigate a closed, economic circuit: the secret lies in passing. Presence No. 3: Dracula is a monster, which is a subject position typically aligned with women as both are meant to be used as only tools or media which are strictly exchanged between men; 88 however, as a monstrous masculine participant in the specular exchange economy, the count threatens to disintegrate the very system through which he attempts to seize power. Although Dracula is assimilating British women as his reproductive machines in what could be considered a perversion of a heteronormative model (but a heteronormative model it is nonetheless: as it is a man reproducing himself through a woman) the count reveals his true intention behind this process of reverse colonization, “Your girls that you all love are mine already,” he tells the vampire hunters, “and through them you and others shall yet be mine—my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed” (267). The threat of Dracula seducing, penetrating, draining, and ultimately reproducing with another male pervades the text, but it is a threat is never realized. In this way, Dracula, as both vampire and as a polymorphous double, symbolizes displaced homosexual desire—a desire that is seen as the ultimate threat to nineteenth century British social imperialism. So, with the death of the count at the end of Dracula, so, too, dies the threat of subverting heteronormative models of reproduction. Presence No. 4: Impermanence is a recurring theme in monstrous narratives. Readers and viewers are often taught by immortals (like zombies, vampires and cyborgs) that life has no meaning unless there is an end. So, if the pen is a metaphorical penis, and, in print, ink is inscribed upon the “pure space of the ‘virgin page’” in a process that mimics cultural misogyny, then men are the poets whose true creative power lies in their ability to become immortal 89 through their writing while, conversely, women’s creative power has largely been located in their physical bodies through maternity. The creative endeavors of men are imbued with a kind of immortality, whilst the pro/creative work of women remains hopelessly mortal. The literary canon is dominated by male writers even though women largely constitute fiction consumption. “When it comes to fiction, the gender gap is at its widest. Men account for only 20 percent of the fiction market, according to surveys conducted in the U.S., Canada and Britain” (NPR, par. 7). Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl is a hypertext novel reimagining the Frankenstein myth written in the software program, Storyspace. This text, while foundational in New Media studies and electronic literature circles, is not taught in the traditional literary canon. It probably doesn't help that the software package is aging badly. Jackson has said she is fine with this text dying. If Jackson’s story could die, is something similar happening with women's writing today? Has it been happening for centuries? In her book, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, Sharon Marcus sheds some light on the phenomenon with her exploration of Victorian lifewriting, which she defines as including everything from published diaries to private letters. She goes on to say that, “Some diarists even explicitly wrote for others, sharing 90 their journals with readers in the present and addressing them to private and public audiences in the future” (35). Blogs existed even before there were blogs. Many of these diaries have been lost or destroyed over the years, the same can be said of countless blogs on the Internet: domain hosting switches or shuts off, blogs are abandoned due to disinterest, turmoil, or any myriad of reasons. What does it mean for a text to die? Let's ask Mina. Presence No. 5: Given the ability to pass as a member of the specular exchange economy, Dracula goes to work threatening the supply of British women in the novel through reverse colonization—because the count realizes that is through women that a nation must be built. When Dracula turns Lucy Westenra into a vampire, he is marking her as his agent and as his settler in the new colony of London—a city to which he wants to expand his own empire; as the crown jewel of British society, London is a city of industry and capital that continues to grow and expand, and, is also threatening to grow beyond its original capacity, similar to what is happening to very Empire itself at this time. Re- appropriating British women as his own reproductive machines, not only aligns women with monstrous “boundary beings” but also maps the fear of technology onto the feminine. 91 Both female characters are similarly aligned with technophobia: Mina with her command of various forms of technology, such as the typewriter; Lucy with her blood transfusions. While Lucy passes on, without passing on genetic material in the form of children, she does become a colonizing threat in the form of vampire. Thus, Lucy dies not once, but twice. When Dracula bites Mina, he creates a wireless network of sorts—one that allows him access to Mina's mind regardless of his location, to the point where her mind cannot be trusted by her companions in their search for Dracula (she might unwittingly betray their location or their plans as she is under the thrall of Dracula). She becomes a living, breathing text. :|:Narrative transmography is not a book.:|: :|:Narrative transmography is not not a book.:|: Presence No. 6: A galvanizing force of narrative transmography is the notion of “hauntedness.” When you live in a haunted house, you acknowledge that, even when you are alone, you are not alone. You are the subject of a gaze, being watched in your private space, and, perhaps, even interacting with an invisible audience—this kind of interaction is similar to the act 92 of writing, especially on the Internet. When I use the word “haunted” I am specifically invoking the idea of a home, a domestic space—which is generally coded as a female space—being inhabited, impregnated—by a foreign entity. Both online, and in haunted houses, people acknowledge the presence of invisible entities, sometimes perform for them, and go about their day. Narrative transmography is the language in which the posthuman speaks. It is both a tool and a practice. As a tool, it can be used to locate and examine texts that are animated when notions of gender, technology and monstrosity collide to place equal importance on the structure of a story as the narrative. It is not necessarily relegated to locating mediums, as narrative transmography can be extended to such different forms as electronic literature and Victorian fiction to film and comic books. As a practice, hauntedness becomes the focus. A ghost is the redefinition of a human. Inside the haunted house, the humans will be haunted by the ghost, but the ghost will also be haunted by the humans. The past is always echoing both ways in a Mobius strip of its own design. 93 Redefining, remixing, reversioning, and revisioning: narrative transmography is about transmogrifying a text using an alchemical combination of gender, technology and monstrosity. How one defines text is up to the individual. Presence No. 7: During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, paper punch tape was an invaluable resource for information storage. Early forms of typewriters did not originally use inked ribbon to record typed information, but instead punctured the paper with holes. According to the Museum of American Heritage’s website, “The typewriter also introduced the concept of the keyboard as a means of text input to information processing systems... Punch cards used a variety of formats and sizes developed by various manufacturers in addressing their data storage needs throughout time” (pars 14, 25). Mina is both Imperial and imperialized, exuding technological authority and yet still under the influence of the male figures of her life. Dracula, the foremost of the men exerting dominance over Mina, turns her into his personal information technology when he forced their blood exchange. This resulted in a psychic link that allowed him to mentally control her and to psychically detect the movements of his enemies, making Mina an important source of information to Dracula. This shared network connection between the two resulted in the other (male) vampire hunters segregating Mina from all aspects of the planning, and tasked her with administrative tasks such as collation and transcription. 94 A direct parallel can be drawn between Mina’s typewriter to the puncture marks on her neck as a symbol of Mina's transmogrification into a text herself, one that is read exclusively by the men in her life, both Dracula and the vampire hunters. Presence No. 8: Sadie Plant describes in her essay, “On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations” what she calls the “specular economy,” where women are exchanged in networks. Codified as male media objects, women serve as men’s “interfaces, muses, messengers, currencies, and screens, interactions, operators, decoders, secretaries…they have been man’s go- betweens, the in-betweens, taking his messages, bearing his children, and passing on his generic code” (266). Plant goes to say that women are seen as a “deficient version of humanity that is already male…she is a foreign body, the immigrant from nowhere, the alien without and the enemy within…she marries into the family of man, but her outlaw status remains” (266). Along this line, it turns out that women and monsters share a common subject position within this patriarchal framework: both inhabit the boundary position in society because they each lack the necessary equipment. The specular economy depends on its ability to ensure that its “tools, commodities and media know their place,” so that the objects under control possess no “aspirations to usurp or subvert the governing role of those they serve” (267). An object under control poses little threat, and objects needing to be controlled are 95 objects that do not fit into this closed, patriarchal, specular exchange circuitry, namely monstrosities of culture that deviate from normative modes and practices—and in a patriarchal exchange economy these monstrosities are often translated into women. 96 Figure 10: The Parlor and Jane Austen 97 {The Parlor and Jane Austen} Back in my first semester of grad school, in the course that all English Ph.D. students must take, English 501, my friend and fellow scholar, Natasha Alvandi Hunt, gave one of my favorite presentations on Jane Austen and the product culture that has emerged around her. I was fascinated by the ways in which the Jane Austen has become a brand and the connotation of Jane Austen has been co-opted to sell a variety of products. When Pride, Prejudice and Zombies was published, the idea of remixing Jane Austen (and other literary classics) felt like a new spin on the same old commoditization. So the idea in the parlor was excess: an excess of lavish furnishings and an excess of blood to suggest a zombie apocalypse type of situation. What killed Jane Austen? She was consumed by consumerism. Presence No. 1: :|:It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains will be in want of more brains.:|: —Elizabeth Bennet, Pride, Prejudice and Zombies :|:All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death. This is the way in which our time assumes Death: with the denying alibi of the distractedly “alive,” of which the Photograph is in a sense the professional. For Photography must have some historical relation with what Edgar Morris calls the “crisis of death” beginning in the second half 98 othe nineteenth century; for my part I should prefer that instead of constantly relocating the advent of Photography in its social and exonomic context, we should also inquire as to the anthropological place of Death and of the new image. For Death must be somewhere in society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary with the withdrawal of rites, Photography may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic Death, out of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal Death. Life / Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one separating the initial pose from the final print.:|: —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, pg. 92 Presence No. 2: :|:[My fascination with photography] probably has to do with death. Perhaps it's an interest that is tinged with necrophilia, to be honest, a fascination with what has died but is represented as wanting to be alive.:|: :|:If photography is to be discussed on a serious level, it must be described in relation to death. It's true that a photograph is a witness, but a witness of something that is no more.:|: —Roland Barthes, interviews 99 ::So I make myself the measure of photographic “knowledge.” What does my body know of Photography? I observed that a photograph can be the object of three practices (or of three emotions, or of three intentions): to do, to undergo, to look. The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs—in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives... And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.:: —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, pg. 9 ::Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theatre. Niepce and Daguerre are always put at the origin of Photography (even if the latter has somewhat usurped the former's place); now Daguerre, when he took over Niepce's invention, was running a panorama theatre animated by light shows and movements in the Place du Chateau. The camera obscura, in short, has generated at one and the same time perspective painting, photography, and the diorama, which are all three arts of the stage; but if Photography seems to me closer to the Theatre, it is by way of a singular intermediary (and perhaps I am the only one who sees it): by way of Death. We know the original relation of the theatre and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the 100 totemic theatre, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theatre, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Kathakali, the Japanese No mask... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however "lifelike" we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.:|: —pgs. 30-31 :|:And if dialectic is that thought which masters the corruptible and converts the negation of death into the power of work, then the photograph is undialectical: it is a denatured theatre where death cannot “be contemplated,” reflected and interiorized; or again: the dead theatre of Death, the fore-closure of the Tragic, excludes all purification, all catharsis... [...] Not only is the Photograph never, in essence, a memory (whose grammatical expression would be the perfect tense, whereas the tense of the Photograph is the aorist), but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory.:|: —pgs. 90-91 Presence No. 3: Cyborg narratives typically end on a hopeful note for the reconfiguration of sex and gender in a post-industrial world, while zombie narratives entirely dismantle the world we know, throwing it into something beyond chaos – often without the relief of a happy, or even a hopeful, ending. Even though the zombie body is housed in a human form, 101 unlike other monstrous creatures (such as cyborgs, or even vampires) sex and gender are not galvanizing components of the zombie body package. Instead, traditional heteronormative definitions of gender and sexuality are destructive forces, and, in fact, the zombie’s body calls for a drastic re-conceptualization of what gender and sexuality have the potential to be in society. The zombie’s body is the uncanny place where boundaries of dominant culture transgress: it is strange and familiar, master and slave, living and dead. The Walking Dead, a comic book written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by Charlie Adlard, is a comic book series that dismembers gender and pulls apart every attempt the survivors make to cling to out-dated notions of gender and sexuality. Kevan Feshami’s essay, “Death is Only the Beginning: Romero’s Model of the Zombie and the Threat to Identity,” does a superb job explaining the definition of “zombie” as developed by George A. Romero across his Dead series. It is from this tradition of Romero zombies which Robert Kirkman pulls; meaning that the narrative of the comic book series, The Walking Dead, does not offer a positive change, or hope, but instead calls for the destruction of the old order by rethinking the ways America conceives of gender and sexuality today. Presence No. 4: :|:But the conventionally masculine judgment of Austen's triviality is probably best illustrated by Mark Twain, who cannot even bring himself to spell her name correctly in a 102 letter to Howells, her staunchest defender: Poe's “prose,” he notes, “is unreadable—like Jane Austin's,” adding that there is one difference: “I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.”:|: —The Madwoman in the Attic, pg. 109 Presence No. 5: The zombie body has no gender because it also has no biological sex. In dominate cultural zombie narratives, once a human is turned into a zombie, that human ceases to be a person – a person who would deserve gendered pronouns such as he/she, and simply becomes an “it.” Furthermore, zombies do not reproduce in a recognizably heteronormative manner, in which one sex sires offspring, where the relationship between creator/creation is an important one; on the contrary, because there is no heteronormative sex in a zombie body, former male and female zombies alike can reproduce themselves through biting human victims. However, zombies cannot reproduce in a heteronormative manner, and since there are no functional biological sex organs in a zombie body, zombies reproduce themselves in replicating manner by biting human victims – which has its own assortment of symbolism that can be read into, since biting is necessarily a form of penetration, and no one ever immediately turns into a zombie, the “virus” gestates in the host body. 103 Furthermore, no human being in their right mind wants to become a zombie, this is in contrast to, say, how some humans might wish to become cyborgs or vampires. Carys Crossen’s essay, “’Would You Please Stop Trying to Take Your Clothes Off?’ Abstinence and Impotence of Male Vampires in Contemporary Horror Fiction and Film,” goes into detail about Bella’s desire to be turned into a vampire by Edward in Twilight. Drinking blood in this case is connected to the sex act, and Edward practices rigorous celibacy both in regards to Bella (limiting their contact to kissing, resulting in what some have called “abstinence porn”), as well as food (Edward is a “vegetarian” of sorts and refuses to nourish himself with human blood). Desire, in this case, is intimately linked to hunger, both sexual and otherwise. However, in the zombie body, there is only hunger without desire. Presence No. 6: Unlike vampires or cyborgs, which have a certain kind of vitality, perhaps due to their different forms of circulation (either through blood or mechanical components), zombies have no circulation, and, instead, they are constantly suffering from a form of decay – and this decay ultimately erases the differences that demarcate gender and effectively expunges sexuality. Due to this constant decay, the zombie’s body is not one of normative sexual fantasy – there is no sexual attraction or ambiguity, a key component in cyborg narratives; for zombies, there is no lust, either of a sexual appetite or of a natural thirst. It is, indeed, sexier to sip sweet nectar from a lovely throat than it is to rip, tear, devour and gorge oneself on human flesh (“meat,” in this sense is used as currency and is 104 consumed for power). Similar to the way the myth of the vagina dentata operates, which states that women are monstrous “because they have teeth in their vaginas and that the women must be tamed or the teeth somehow removed or softened – usually by a hero figure – before intercourse can safely take place,” zombie bodies are revolting precisely for the same reasons: because heteronormative sexual pleasure with such a creature is impossible without some form of precaution. Fear of reproduction further aligns the subject position of women with monsters. The vagina dentata myth, if deconstructed symbolically, is the fear of men impregnating their female sex partner. That is to say, the “teeth” in the vagina can be interpreted as a fetus, and fatherhood will effectively castrate the man if he mistakenly impregnates the woman. Analogous to this is the zombie as potential sex object; however, the precaution here must be to not only create one’s own convenient orifice (since a zombie’s body is a soft, wet body), but not be consumed, or assimilated into the horde, in the process. Although the body of the zombie is not necessarily galvanized by the innervating force of gender and sexuality in the same way that the cyborg’s body is, the zombie body itself does galvanize issues of gender and sexuality in the humans struggling to survive in the world. In The Walking Dead, the human community has the opportunity to create new social codes of behavior. For instance, the main character of the series is Rick, a former cop who starts the series by waking up in the hospital from a coma in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. He’s married to Lori, who had to abandon him in the hospital weeks ago in order to save herself and her son. During this emotionally fragile time, she has sex 105 with Rick’s best friend, all the while thinking Rick couldn’t possibly have survived. As the story progresses, Rick tracks down his family, but it’s never revealed if the baby Lori’s carrying is his or the other man’s – and Rick asks Lori to not to tell him. Ultimately, this decision is the most beneficial to the survival of not only themselves, but of the people Rick protects – if the core family unit is undamaged, then members of the community don’t have to choose loyalties, splitting up the group as a whole, lessening everyone’s chance at survival. Choosing to not know, and to forgive the transgression and stay with his wife anyway is the first step toward creating a new standard of values, ones that aren’t bound in hegemonic heteronormativity. Things, for the survivors, are looking up. Presence No. 7: By issue 16, and again at 24, Rick and Lori have another decision to make: whether or not to accept a proposal of plural marriage from a fellow survivor, Carol, a single mom with a daughter the same age as Rick and Lori’s son. Given their current post-apocalyptic situation, perhaps Carol’s proposal isn’t so “monstrous.” Creating closer family bonds ensures the safety of each family’s children should something happen to one of the parents. However, both Lori and Rick are extremely uncomfortable with Carol’s proposal – even in their current situation, they attempt to cling to their old life, and they need to cling to that old life. If they don’t cling to the hope of their old life, with their old, heteronormative traditional family values, then that means they are surrendering to this new world in which they find themselves. However, this clinging to tradition ultimately 106 compromises the safety of the community, as the rejection sends Carol into a tailspin. In the aftermath of not only Rick and Lori’s refusal, but her boyfriend’s interest in a newcomer to the group, Carol becomes increasingly unstable and attempts suicide which ultimately jeopardizes the safety of her fellow survivors as she runs outside the walls of the compound and a zombie horde marches in her wake. The zombies in The Walking Dead provide the humans left in the world with the opportunity to create new social norms, however, more often than not, the survivors repeatedly reject these opportunities: every openly homosexual character has been killed off; every character who became polyamorous has been killed; and every possible child born into this world – children who would only know this kind of life, and who would grow to ultimately inherit this zombified world and shape it with this world’s values, and quite possibly grow to shape it into a world without what readers perceive to be traditional social constructions, have also been killed. Even though the zombies themselves are post-human, it appears that the human characters aren’t ready to accept their own posthuman existence quite yet. When the humans choose to cling to the past as oppose to reformulate their present to preserve their futures, the zombies always find a way to punish the characters that haven’t evolved quite fast enough. 107 Figure 11: The Bedroom and Alice 108 {The Bedroom and Alice} Psychoanalytic theory often suggests that the house is a metaphor for the womb in Gothic narratives, so the site of domesticity becomes filled with anxiety about women and maternity. I wondered, if the house is a womb, then where is the vagina? There’s a moment in A Nightmare on Elm Street, when Nancy’s boyfriend is sucked into the mattress of his bed and then a column of blood shoots up into the ceiling and showers the room in the blood. That scene inspired this room—because the vagina is simultaneously the site of desire and trepidation, but I also see it as a portal from which creative acts emerge. This is why Lewis Carroll’s Alice feels right here, because she’s a portal herself and many different versions of Alice exist because she is constantly being reinvented by popular culture. Presence No. 1: Texts of all kinds (fiction, poetry, cinema, comic books, New Media, et cetra) have become progressively porous and demand constant cultural and cognitive “closure”—the phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole. In this way, technology has usurped the supernatural to become the emergent arena in which our cultural fears and fantasies play themselves out. One of those cultural fears is the open source sensibility. 109 I can be connected to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, Diggit, Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, Wordpress, Google constantly through my phone, my Kindle, my laptop, my Xbox 360, my PlayStation 3. The more I engage in a hypertextual existence, the more I want to engage it more. When I was growing up in the 1980s, even though we didn't have a lot of money, we did have a Commodore 64 and the BBS boards—this was 1984 or so—were teeming with pirated copies of games. My dad had hundreds of those floppy disks filled with stolen software, and I do mean floppy disks. They were the eight inch, black, literally floppy disks, the kind that might crease a little when you inserted them into the disk drive if you weren't careful. Today, you can still pirate software and other media (Pirate Bay continues to make this a relatively easy process), but an open source sensibility has always been part and parcel of cyberculture. Instead of using (or pirating) Microsoft Word, you can use OpenOffice instead, which is free to download, to use and to distribute. Even the more tricky, copyright-y realm of ideas is going open source. In 2001, Creative Commons was established. They state their goals as such: 110 :|:The infrastructure we provide consists of a set of copyright licenses and tools that create a balance inside the traditional “all rights reserved” setting that copyright law creates. :|:Our tools give everyone from individual creators to large companies and institutions a simple, standardized way to keep their copyright while allowing certain uses of their work — a “some rights reserved” approach to copyright — which makes their creative, educational, and scientific content instantly more compatible with the full potential of the internet. The combination of our tools and our users is a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law. We’ve worked with copyright experts around the world to make sure our licenses are legally solid, globally applicable, and responsive to our users’ needs.:|: The concept of the walled garden, the practice of restricting content to users, is most commonly used in reference to information technology. Examples of walled garden include, but are not limited to: AOL, GeoCities and FaceBook. But now, companies like Apple and Amazon are applying the walled garden model to restricting content on their proprietary devices. For instance, if you try to access this dollhouse on an iPad, you don't be able to view it because Apple doesn't allow access to Adobe products, like Flash. I'd have to scale Apple's garden wall—which I will, that's what HTML5 is for. 111 The walled garden is now becoming a real threat to Net Neutrality, though. :|:The nation's largest phone and cable companies — including AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon — want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which websites and apps go fast, which go slow … and which won't load at all. :|:They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. And they want to discriminate in favor of their own apps, services and content — while slowing down or blocking competitors’ services. :|:Phone and cable companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to gut Net Neutrality, putting the future of the Internet at risk.:|: —SaveTheInternet.com As the web democratizes information, our culture is going to demand an open source approach to things beyond Internet. Over the last few years, universities have been uploading podcasts of their classes to iTunes. Since 2004, MIT has been uploading course materials to the web via Open Courseware. But in August 2011, two Stanford University professors, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, took the open source approach to education one step further and 112 allowed free, open enrollment, worldwide to their Artificial Intelligence course. More than 130,000 people signed up. The spirit of a hypertextual, posthuman existence has more in common with open source than it does with walled gardens. Presence No. 2: Down the rabbit-hole, I give birth to my own version of Alice in cyberspace. Click here to continue... Presence No. 3: The Ghosts of Literature and Technology Past haunt the literature and technology that has been born from it. Narrative transmography provides a language that encompasses the contemporary relevance of extant texts from our past and connects us to the heritage of those forms. This is why narrative transmography must be both a tool and a practice: the act of transmogrifying a narrative by gender and technology is inherently a monstrous endeavor: by transforming, transmuting or remixing texts, we create fringe literature, the outcasts of literary culture. But the thing about the rhetorical monster—a monster that gets what she wants through persuasion—is that she can convince the people at home to 113 invite her in the door, where she can truly wreak the most havoc—which is why seeming and passing is crucial to the machinations of this theory. The impulse to encode knowledge in book form is one of the earliest examples of human engagement across time and space. In a similar manner to the way we currently spread our consciousness across notebooks, cell phones, laptops and the Internet, early modern writers, printers and binders stored knowledge and consciousness in book form. In a manner of speaking, the book is the first cyborg—the book engaged with a human mind is the both the hard drive and server, it saves information and can distribute that information, as well as network with the originator of that information. Reading, therefore, is a form of time travel. Reading is simultaneously necromancy and neuromancy and transmography. The figure of Lewis Carroll’s Alice has been resurrected and remixed too many times to count, and the secret of her immortality is in her many transmogrifications. Similar to the way Mina transforms into a text that can be read by the men in her life in Dracula, Alice has become a cultural text through the re-visioning and re-versioning and re-telling of Carroll’s tale. Alice’s advantage over Mina in this regard is that it is not just the characters surrounding her that read into her, but the readers themselves. 114 Presence No. 4: :|:Before the woman writer can journey through the looking glass toward literary autonomy, however, she must come to terms with the images on the surface of the glass, with, that is, those mythic masks male artists have fastened over her human face both to lessen their dread of her “inconstancy” and—by identifying her with the “eternal types” they have themselves invented—to possess her more thoroughly. Specifically, as we will try to show here, a woman writer must examine, assimilate, and transcend the extreme images o f“angel” and “monster” which male authors have generated for her. Before we women can write, declared Virginia Woolf, we must “kill” the “angel in thou house.” In other words, women must kill the aesthetic ideal through which they themselves have been “killed” into art.:|: —The Madwoman in the Attic, pg. 17 The power of the Gothic is that it creates a language that can be used to discuss cultural fears. In order to interrogate the ways in which anxieties are inscribed upon the feminine, the concepts that are focused on inside the dollhouse primarily revolve around cultural apprehension of maternity, the emergence of science and technology, desire, and the decline of the empire. In their book, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar propose that the pen is a metaphorical penis, and in print, ink is inscribed upon the “pure space of the ‘virgin page’” in a process that mimics cultural misogyny. However, in New Media, there are no acid baths consuming a medium, no copper plates being etched, and 115 there are no virginal pages: only blank cyberspaces. Telegraphy, while it still counts as an inscription technology, does not have the same gendered association of penetrative acts. In this fashion, New Media technologies share a similar subject position as women and female writing, as alienated and marginalized. For instance, a popular form of womens’ writing during the Victorian period was known as lifewriting, which includes everything from published diaries to private letters, can be seen as the precursor to the likes of blogs and Twitter today, as diarists often wrote specifically for others with the intention of distributing the diary or work in small social circles. Unsurprisingly, and perhaps due to their impermanence, lifewriting and New Media have been viewed monstrous forms of literature that threaten the very lives of physical books—and much of this writing has “died,” either the diaries have been lost or the blogs have been abandoned or the hypertext novel’s code has decayed. With some exceptions, print literature is typically regarded as not having a “body,” only a “speaking mind.” N. Katherine Hayles, a literary theorist that specializes in the posthuman and New Media, explains the importance of a text’s “body” by arguing that, “the physical form of a literary artifact always affects what the words (and other semiotic components) mean.” Furthermore, in his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes says, “The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here… A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed” (80). This 116 suggests that the materiality of photography is entwined not only with the concepts of death and mourning, but also with the maternal body, as well as with the notion of the abject, further connecting notions of femininity, technology and monstrosity together across time and space allowing this narrative transmography to ask: to what extent do emergent, nonlinear forms of communication technology embody a feminine ethos? Presence No. 5: Issues of visibility, primarily through (re)appropriation of the gaze and the art of seaming/seeming, narrative transmography highlights the ways in which the material embodiments of posthuman subjects interact dynamically with the material embodiments of narrative structure and construction. Seaming here means: pieces of narratives sewn together through a constant cognitive closure created by the reader’s engagement—the reader sees “pieces” and creates a “whole.” The ideas behind seeming take on issues of cultural passing that are enacted every day (race, class, gender, sexuality). Seaming/seeming allows current cultural definitions of the monstrous, of the posthuman, to be extended to the mediums and structures other narratives take, converging in a monstrous continuum. The goal is not to only conduct close readings of representations of cyborgs or any other monster, but to extend their metaphors to narrative forms and constructions found across British Gothic literature from the 1800s, American comic 117 books, Japanese animation, as well as New Media as a new way of thinking about narrative structure and authorial impermanence. Determining why the topic of reproduction, death and immortality figures so strongly in monstrous narratives elucidates the ways in which this issue works in dialog with the development of New Media technologies and forms of digital storytelling, and not only sheds some light on why so much female writing has been lost or destroyed along the way, but what is at stake for the future of texts as a whole. 118 Figure 12: The Bathroom and Angela Carter 119 {The Bathroom and Angela Carter} Since the bathroom houses the narrative of my childhood—an excerpt of my childhood, anyway—I reinterpreted Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber from a bedroom to a bathroom. The bathroom as a site of abjection felt symbolic to my own story. Presence No. 1: I learned about fairy tales from Angela Carter. The important ones anyway. Like The Main Who Loved a Double Bass, The Loves of Lady Purple, The Lady of the House of Love, The Company of Wolves, Wolf-Alice, Black Venus, and, of course, The Bloody Chamber. The Bloody Chamber is my favorite, though. It's about a young girl who married a Marquis that she does not love. When her husband is about to leave for a business trip, he expressly forbids her to enter a specific room. Of course, she goes in anyway and discovers the bodies of each of his previous wives. As the story progresses, the girl plays piano and the music attracts a blind piano tuner and they fall in love. When the Marquis comes back home, he figures out that she really did enter the room and attempts to murder her—adding her to his collection of corpses. The piano tuner pledges to stay with her to the end, even though he knows he cannot save 120 them. Just as the Marquis is about to murder them, it is the girl's mother who arrives at the last minute and shoots the husband in the head, rescuing her daughter. Presence No. 2: {Exhibit No.1} Note on White Paper: Torn Into Smaller Square (Paper-clipped to Exhibit No. 2) In my mother's handwriting: May 23, 1992 Sally – Family Services, Naval Investigative Services (NIS) What do I do first? I need money for a place to live and food, etc… — Jillian’s Teacher - Corrine Stevens - Is she going to send Jillian’s work so she can complete the year because I am in a battered woman’s shelter? - Ms. Stevens called. She will give credit for every thing Jillian does for passing to sixth grade. Summer of the Monkey. Contract. She should be doing this now. - She is mailing her work to Mom’s address. 121 Frightened and left the area. :|: There's a graveyard in my soul, a burial plot for each time I died on the inside growing up, and these notes act as the tombstones I reach out with my hands and touch as I walk along the in-between. My mind takes grave rubbings of these memorials my mother meticulously recorded, and I remember the days we tried to live as ghosts: creeping about on tip-toe, afraid to breathe because breathing might remind him that we were still there. We haunted each house in which we resided, but never really lived. Roseville, California || Celluloid Dreams “The yellow means it’s healing,” is what my mom’s voice would soothe into my ears, as her hands tenderly laid a dampened towel against the swollen flesh of my body. My father became the Technicolor master changing me into a veritable rainbow of purples, grays, blues, deep blacks... the colors would swirl and metamorphose into that yellow- green-chartreuse. She would brush my hair into a perfectly straight curtain of golden- brown. Her hands always told me that I was safe, even if her velvet brown eyes could not. Her tenderness was sharply contrasted by my father’s viciousness, and more often than not, was overshadowed by it. He specifically purchased the razored-hand that Robert Englund made famous from Toys ‘R’ Us on Halloween when I was seven; although truth be told my dad’s glove was made of plastic. Then he’d laugh that disgusting laugh of his 122 as he cast Freddy Krueger shadows upon my walls at night. He forced me into nightmares, but I never ran to my parents’ room for help because I knew no solace could be found there. We lived near a flea market. On Saturday mornings, my mom would whisk me and my little brothers away to explore the endless yard sale. We’d excavate the piles of other people’s belongings while the seductive smell of corndogs wafted through the gleaming mid-morning light. We’d feast upon these giant corndog crayons of primary colors, mustard yellows and ketchup reds. The crisp crust would melt in my mouth and the hotdog center would steam my tongue, too hot to swallow. My mom would prowl the piles of clothing for second-hand hand-me-downs that she could buy for a nickel or a dime. We always checked out the elongated rectangular boxes for rare comic books. We were X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Spider-Man junkies, especially my little brother Matthieu. His three-year-old hands were bigger than mine, and he used to climb the doorways pretending that he was able to stick there effortlessly like our hero. My mom always shooed him down and wiped the dirt of his handprints and shoe-marks away. One afternoon my mom found a Spider-Man belt. It was genuine leather. Being nine years old, I liked the gold seal on the underside that proclaimed its authenticity. It had an embossed full-color action shot of our favorite web-slinger swinging away, and another still of him crouched in the way only Spider-Man can. My mom bought it for Matthieu, 123 even though it didn’t fit him yet. She said it’d ‘be worth something someday.’ We were all enchanted by this slim little treasure. But it became one of the worst items we've ever purchased. Presence No. 3: {Exhibit No. 2} Note on Yellow Legal Pad In my mother's handwriting: May 28, 1992 Sally said the reason she had to call Matt’s chief officer was to keep Matt up there. I told her I didn’t want the Navy involved. She said that that was the only way to make sure he gets counseling and to get him to stay up there. Tuesday May 19th she told someone over the phone from the shelter that Matt said he was going to kill me & Dave and cut up our bodies and spread them all over the state then there was a pause then she said and the kids too. When she got off the phone I said to her he never said that and Sally said well if I don’t exaggerate they don’t do anything. Sally told my mother she was hoping he would be put in brig. 124 I told NIS that Sally exaggerated everything, and she said nothing. I asked Cindy why would Sally tell me Matt would only get counseling, NIS said Sally probably was trying to get to you to talk. She wanted Matt’s boss’s name to call him to keep Matt in area. :|: It was Christmas time, and I was in second grade. Mrs. Steinhook, who never liked me, always gave me “pink slips” for shushing the kids behind me, sent home another envelope to my parents that Friday. I hated Fridays. I was always in trouble then. I didn’t know that the letter said I was being chosen to be given a special Christmas present by the 20/30 Club. My teacher, Mrs. Steinhook, had been concerned with the clothing I wore to school. I remember there were times while we were at the flea market, I’d like a Minnie Mouse shirt or various dresses and my mom would scoff at the 25¢ price tag. But we weren’t poor. My dad always had bright new Reeboks, and new editing equipment for his Super 8mm movie that he was making. But my dad took the letter as an insult and then earthquaked his way around my room. Everything was on a fault line. He tore apart my mattress and cracked my books across the walls. He ripped apart my closet and threw the hangers in my face. “You dress like an urchin! What’s wrong with you!” I couldn’t answer because I didn’t buy my own clothes, so I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was always getting in trouble for not answering. 125 The Spider-Man Belt left imprints of a backwards Spider-Man swinging across my backside. I touched the fleshy part of my butt gingerly, the flinching reflected in the mirror. The belt that might ‘be worth something someday’ would end up in our fireplace a few months later in a secret bonfire ceremony. The bruise beneath Matthieu’s left eye reminding us of why we were happy to be rid of Spider-Man for good. But who's to say what he would've used instead if we hadn't bought the Spider-Man belt? It was almost a game in my mind: could I predict what he'd throw at me before he did? Could I guess which particular item in the living room he'd use to spank me? After the Spider-Man belt disappeared one night, he flew into rage when he couldn't find it. So he dug into the closet where he kept his old gear from basic training. The Green Belt was riveted every quarter-inch with metal holes. It was a thick, corrugated military belt complete with metal-clasping slats. When he folded it in half, it was an inch-thick. And it was a sickly shade of military green. My dad was in the Navy. And it was the Navy that had gave him that belt. I hated the Navy. Presence No. 4: {Exhibit No. 3} 126 Black Ballpoint Notes with Wanted Ads Copied in Black Sharpie from Penny Saver Classifieds In my mother's handwriting: May 27, 1992 CPS Report to El Dorado County. Aug. 7 is Sally’s last day. How do I feel? What did I do? I signed a statement. Like I knew what would happen. I feel like he is being an asshole because I admitted I was wrong. I don’t know what he was feeling am not responsible for it. I don’t like the way he makes me feel. 127 Drywall Taper Apprentice: must have 2 yrs. exp, tools and trans. Call bwtn 10-11 am. Wed only. 274-6821 Electrician Journeyman/Helper: call between 9am-12pm, 752-7880. Empire Electric. EOE. :|: The girl on the other side of the mirror can still see the purple in her eye-sockets. Like tragic eye shadow. Her mother used to enchant her imagination with stories about Elizabeth Taylor and her violet eyes. “No one before, or since, has ever had eyes like Elizabeth Taylor,” her mother would assure her. They both would sigh wistfully and dream. Her mother would dream about the days before she met the man who whisked her away to the neon glittering electric sex of Las Vegas, where they were married before the eyes of God and Elvis impersonators. The girl would dream into the mirror and wish that she could trade the color of bruises for new eyes. Purple eyes. Violet eyes that could mesmerize. Purple like the jacaranda trees she saw lining the streets of Beverly Hills, sprinkling the sidewalk with amethyst impressions of Monet. Too beautiful to touch. Always out of reach. A purple blur through the looking glass. Strawberry Valley, California || Violet Eyes When I was six years old, we lived in Strawberry Valley; kids in my class had begun to be visited by the Tooth Fairy. When I arrived home, I proclaimed my jealousy. My dad 128 leaned in and grabbed my two front teeth together and shook, shaking my head along as well. “Yep. They’re ready to come out.” I took my own finger and tried to wiggle my teeth, wondering why I hadn’t noticed. But they weren’t budging, not even a little bit. My mom inspected and determined that they weren’t loose, and that I’d just have to be patient and wait a little longer. But my father had already left to get the dental floss. He called me into the bathroom and I shrank in after him. He tied the mint-waxed thread to my right front tooth. “Wha ahh yo gonna do, Naddy?” I asked with my mouth wide open as he completed the knot to his satisfaction. He didn’t answer. He pulled out several feet of floss, and then tied the other end to the bathroom door. My dad opened the door, ordered me to step back. “Give it a little bit of slack!” I didn’t know what slack was so I just stepped forward until he was contented. Then he said, “On three. One… Two…” The force of the door jolted me down on the cool blue and white bathroom tiled floor. My dad bent over me, cursed in disgust, his breath hot on my face because the floss had come off my tooth. He tried this a few more times then finally resorted to yanking on the thread himself. I remember crying. My dad continued to insist my teeth were loose. Finally, he got out the pliers. My mom held me down through her own tears, and my dad pried my two front teeth out himself. Like a Victorian barber. My school pictures wouldn’t feature a full-toothed smile until 4th grade. Every Christmas he would hiss through his smile, “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth. My two front teeth. My two front teeth.” 129 I was sent to the school speech therapist twice a week because I couldn’t enunciate ‘s’ sounds. I remember bleeding for a long time, no amount of kitchen towels seemed to soak up the bright red liquid pouring from the two gaps in my mouth. The taste of rust and salt flooded my throat. But now, my dad was angry that I had been so uncooperative. If I had sat still, he wouldn’t have had to resort to the pliers. My dad’s words were stinking in my face. His spit splattered my face like buckshot. I was an uncooperative, lying little bitch. He always bellowed things like that, immediately followed by "Bend over and grab your ankles!" When I did, he spanked me so hard that I fell over. But I didn’t get up. I couldn’t. I started laughing and could not stop. The hitting, the spanking, the ache in my chest, it no longer hurt anymore. This was a triumph for me. I was strong. My dad punched me in the temple. I had better take him more seriously. He yelled so loud I heard my eardrums wobble. "Bend over and grab your ankles!" This time he had a wire coat-hanger. It still didn’t hurt, but I faked cried because I figured the faster he made me cry the faster it'd be over. Presence No. 5: {Exhibit No. 4} Diary Entry on Yellow Legal Note Pad 130 In my mother's handwriting: June 7, 1992 What Am I Feeling? Hunter was scared. Matt said, “He was never like this until you came to your mom’s house.” I said, “He’s been away from you, maybe he is scared. You are scary, your face is scary.” Matt threw Hunter’s shirt at him and told him to put it on. He did. Then Matt said I’m not going out there (to the dining room in Mom’s house). He stayed in the room except to tell the boys to be quiet when they were making noise at bedtime in the next room. Now I’m scared. Matt’s mad at me because of Hunter’s fear of him. I told Matt I didn’t make Hunter scared of him. I never said anything to make him scared. I said, “I don’t know what to tell you.” Now, why was I defending myself to my husband? I didn’t do anything. Why isn’t it what Matt did? I wasn’t even in the room when Hunter screamed. Matt has a very scary mad look. 131 A scowl. :|: Then one night, the girl took her razor and began to slice at her skin. Sometimes she can’t feel anything. Sometimes the bleeding helps her feel. The ache in her chest echoes, and she thinks, “I am the genuine Tin Man. ‘No heart. All hollow.’” Every line through her head comes from somewhere else. “‘Just to register emotion, jealousy, devotion and really feel the part…’” She cracks the mirror a little every time it captures her reflection. Whenever she sees herself, it’s always a struggle not break the mirror. She broke the mirrors in Mount Aukum and then lied about it. “I’ll be a lone siren, a Nereid. A mermaid of sorts, luring myself into my own end.” She could lay there in her makeshift downpour, “‘I could while away the hours, conversin’ with the flowers, consultin’ with the rain.’ ‘I’m only happy when it rains. I’m only happy when it’s complicated.’” And then the girl was rescued from her own destruction, by a boy with brown eyes. He found her curled into a fetal position, catatonic-like. Unmoving. Unblinking. Barely breathing. He told her that she had been in the shower for over two hours. The girl did not remember being pulled from the tub and the cold rain shower. As the girl looked into his face, she fell in love with those brown eyes of his; and the arms that were gentle enough to protect her, even from herself. But her voice could only utter other peoples lyrics, “‘Yeah, you bleed just to know you’re alive…’” Mount Aukum, California || Someone Else’s Dolls 132 When Matthieu was old enough to go to school, we arrived one day with matching black eyes. Mine from the time my dad head-butted me. Matthieu’s from the time our dad snapped a wet towel in his face. Matthieu was six and I was eleven. School was my sanctuary; it was the only place where I was safe. It wasn’t the same for Matthieu; he was treated almost as badly at school as at home. On the bus ride home, it was a different story. No one beat up on my brothers when I was around. I was small for my age, and a girl, but I guess there was something dead about me that made other kids nervous. It didn't occur to me say to the jerks on the bus or schoolground, “Can't you give him a break? He gets beat up enough at home.” At home, our dad would grab us by the arms, right where bicep meets shoulder, and lift us effortlessly and press us into the ceiling. Matthieu was five years younger than me, but he was subjected to almost the same treatment. He’d grab Matthieu by only one arm, and it looked as though his baby skin was wobbling about on the bone. Never seemed to matter to my dad that his son’s rag-doll limbs seemed to go lifeless sometimes. He’d press Matthieu into the ceiling as he did to me, that shade of anger never leaving his face. Matthieu’s small body limp against that placid plaster. Maybe when his arms tired, he tossed us either onto the floor or against the couch. One time, my brother’s head snapped back, and he crumpled to the floor. I held my breath and watched for his chest to move. It was the only way I could protect him: to make sure he was still breathing. 133 Presence No. 6: {Exhibit No. 5} Construction Paper Christmas Card I Gave My Mother December, 1993 (Handwritten on Outside) If I Could, I’d Give To You: 1) A brand new car that never breaks down because we really need one and you’d never have to worry about breaking down again. 2) Money because we kind of need it and so Daddy would never have to pay you again and so you wouldn’t have to worry about him paying you. 3) Not having to go to school so I could be with you. 4) Never die simply because I LOVE YOU! 5) To bring Poppy back to life so he could meet Aaron. (Handwritten on Inside) Dear Mommy, 134 I remember how you always helped me with my math homework. I’d start to cry, and you would sit next to me and just let me cry on your shoulder. That was really important to me because if you weren’t so patient with me I might not be good in math like I am today. Another thing I remember was last year’s Christmas. You made this humungous present. I had no idea what it was. When I opened it up tears of happiness came to my eyes. It was a flamingo quilt. The one I always wanted you to make for me. No amount of thank-yous can be given for that. Two more things I remember are: Number one (actually three things) I felt really proud of you when you decided to divorce Daddy. He was soooo mean to us, he never appreciated us. The next thing is when you decided to marry Aaron. Aaron is very good to us. You deserve each other. The last thing is how you were always so sweet, generous, patient and a whole lot of other things as well. Thank you for everything over all these years. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love you. Thank you again. Love, Jillian (age 12) Mount Aukum, California || The Pig, 1995 Once upon a time, after my parents divorced, and our family was very, very poor, we bought baby animals to raise and eat. We bought chicks, ducklings and turkeys, mostly. 135 But one summer, my mother bought a pig. The pig was advertised in the Penny Saver. 600 pounds, the ad said. $500, you pick up and slaughter. That’s less than a dollar a pound, our mother said. We’ll need a freezer, she said, because the refrigerator’s already full. It was filled with the chickens our mother had beheaded herself. To say the pig was fat would be too obvious. Pigs have been bred for fatness. To say the pig was grotesque would be an understatement. The pig was a behemoth. Six and a half feet long, and mottled black and what probably had once been pink. There were no folds in the skin because the skin was stretched taut with the pounds and pounds of meat. We still didn’t have a freezer. We weren’t there when our mother killed the pig. She may have used poison, but it was probably too slow and the risk of poisoning the meat too great. She may have used an axe, but chopping off the head of an animal bigger than oneself would be terrifying. She may have used a gun, but perhaps the blubber was too thick. It may have taken a combination of axe and gun, since poison would mean the five hundred dollars had been for nothing. Maybe it took many chops. Maybe it took many bullets. There is one thing we know for certain: six hundred pounds of meat spoils fast without a freezer. 136 Presence No. 7: {Exhibit No. 6} 12 Long Rectangular Strips of Yellow Legal Pad, Approximately Four Inches Wide Each In my mother's handwriting: June, 1995 To: AARON Gas when we first met 50.00 Radiator 80.00 Knife from renaissance faire 65.00 Business license 55.00 Battery 40.00 Truck 12.82 To start karate 20.00 Wood splitter 1200.00 Bars oil mix 30.00 Chains oil mix files 46.00 Gas for carpooling with Tony 65.00 Cold medicine 27.00 Doctor visit 80.00 137 Motorcycle book 20.00 Court fine 145.00 To fix chain saw 30.00 Roseville Cycle 74.00 Mike’s Cycle 43.00 Muffler pipe 53.00 Tune-up truck 20.00 Register truck 245.00 2400.82 When you came back you only had $95.00 worked tile for 2½ months then went to Blue Ribbon for $6 an hour for 6 months. But in the mean time Wrecked the Toyota. Because you were too lazy to fix the fucking radiator!!! Not because you hit a deer. /page break/ 138 It is not my fault it sits in the field. It is yours. When you did get a job it was for $5 an hour for only 4 months then you went to Alaska—$300 plane ticket and spent $600 on a HAZ-WAP card you never used, plus you took $500 with you and I sent an additional $150.00 up to you, remember? /page break/ Finally you get hired on at PWPipe. A motorcycle, car, truck and VW bug later we get a bill on Christmas day for $439—yet another ticket you never paid. 139 Then you promise to Do this, do that. “I’ll work in the yard everyday before I go to work /page break/ this week” (or did you forget you said that?!) AND I’m not supposed to be a little angry. Well FUCK YOU! You tell me things, I believe you, you never do it or you get mad when I want you to follow through. /page break/ You’re the one who said you’d do it, yet I’m the one who is the bitch. I am 140 to fucked up I need to see a shrink. You are a jerk for saying that without thinking how it would make /page break/ me feel and Hunter— He was in the room. He heard you say it. THANKS. Please don’t Bother apologizing because I DON’T ACCEPT IT. You don’t mean it anyway. Next time we get in a Fight you’ll just say some- Thing else as mean. /page break/ When will it be enough For me? When you 141 DO WHAT YOU SAY! Is that a lot to ask. Just do what you say! Don’t you expect me to Do what I say? YES! You do. You count on it. Because you can. I can’t Count on you. And that Makes me sad. Sorry /page break/ It comes out in anger but after 4 years enough is enough. You’d think I’d learn my lesson. But not me – I think – every time you say you’ll do something – that you’ll do it. Well Baby I learned my lesson now – I won’t count on anything. I feel 142 /page break/ hurt by this because I always thought I Would be able to count On what my husband Who loves me more Than anything in the World says he’d do…. But I know now, I was Mistake. /page break/ Eyes welling with tears, Jean Addendum: 5 pairs of shoes 115.00 Watch 60.00 Oil-skin duster (jacket) 250.00 Chain saw 100.00 143 Traded Terry for saw 60.00 Traded 24k plated pellet stove 500.00 Clothes 200.00 Parts brush 6.00 Bicycle 40.00 Tai Chi classes 15.00 Above the Law 10.00 Roller-skates 10.00 Traded work for pants 40.00 Gun case 7.00 Advancement fees for karate 10.00 Shotgun shells 10.00 Food ($100 a month) 1700.00 Cigarettes (1 pack every 3 days) 250.00 Dog food 85.00 Gas to this job 165.00 Video rentals 85.00 6118.82 And that ain’t all!!! While in Alaska: 144 315 – Ticket 595 – HAZ WAP class 476 – Cash from tax refund 1386 5/23/95 150 1536 -376 1160 And if we count this: Fast food ($4 a month) 68.00 Wood permit 20.00 PGE ($14 a month) 238.00 Rent ($110 per month) 1870.00 Phone ($7 a month) 119.00 8433.82 :|: Memories are the lies we tell ourselves. It is, perhaps, a preternatural instinct; we survive by the way we construct memories. Perhaps we know this, and so, we change the way we remember. We choose to remember the smell of the pig in our frying pan that our 145 mother slaughtered. We choose to remember numbers. We choose to remember days of the week. But we choose to forget, as well. Perhaps we understand through the constructing of bones and the threading of blood that being smart is easy, but being wise is another story altogether. I have a son now. And I see a deep and ancient joy that lights him up from the inside out. I want to protect that light fiercely. The older my son gets, the less I understand why my mom stayed for so long. I looked at my baby boy one day and thought We all start out like this. And someone loved us, or at least cared about us enough, to get us all to survive to adulthood. I started to feel bad for the large things like war and famine. And then I started to feel bad for people I have been rotten to. Namely, my step-father. Aaron went to Alaska in 1994 when my mom was slaughtering rabbits for five dollars an hour. He went up there to get his HAZMAT certification. We had heard that with HAZMAT certification, you could get work for $30 an hour. He took our government refund and flew to Alaska. To this day, I'm still not sure he ever got his HAZMAT certificate. But I am certain of the lies he spun to my mom back home in California. There were two whole days spent waiting at Western Union with the lady behind the bullet-proof glass getting sick of us 146 hanging around. There was a phone call that second day, saying that Aaron had broken his leg and was in a hospital. The day after that we realized that there was no hospital. We wondered if he got the name wrong. These were the days before the Internet, so we relied on 411 to give us the numbers of all the hospitals in Juneau. I think there was only one. No one by his name ever came in. When my mom let him come back, I was furious. I still feel that old rage inside me to this day, nearly 20 years later. I took that rage out on Aaron whenever I could. I broke his things when he wasn't looking. I threw away his clothes. He frequently stole cookies I bought with my own money, so I wiped a fly swatter all over them one day and watched him eat them. I refused to speak to him most of the time, and when I was forced to speak to him, it was in a voice I imagine a nurse uses with a patient she doesn't care for. And through it all, he was sweet to me. And it made me hate him even more. I called my mom the other day and told her how we all start out like my sweet, little baby. And how sorry I was for the way I treated Aaron, a fellow human being. “She laughed. One of those short, mean ones. “Don't you remember the porn?” 147 “What?” “The Barely 18 porn Matthieu and I found under our mattress?” “...I really didn't. But I still feel bad. Wait. What does that have to do with anything?” “Remember how I was always yelling at you to pick your underwear up off the floor in the bathroom after you showered?” “Wait. What? I never left my underwear in the bathroom. I never left anything in the bathroom. It was like college. I took my toiletries with me in and out of the bathroom because I didn't want Aaron to use them. And I did my own laundry and I kept my dirty clothes in my bedroom so I wouldn't have to do anyone else's laundry when I washed my clothes. I was retentive about keeping my stuff separate from your guys'.” “You don't remember me yelling at you about your underwear?” “No. I really don't. I guess I blocked it out because it didn't apply to me. I wasn't doing whatever you were accusing me of, so I couldn't change my behavior, so it went out of my brain.” “Do you remember the fifis we found under the mattress in our bedroom?” 148 “Oh my god, tell me Matthieu didn't find that.” “No, I did. Don't you remember how creepy he made you feel?” “Yeah. But I—” “When I went to visit Nana and took Matthieu with me, and it was just gonna be you and Hunter, remember how you asked if your friend could stay the week with you guys?” “Yeah, but that’s because I thought Aaron was just bidding his time before he killed us. I thought no one could take the amount of abuse we dished out and it was just a matter of time before he exploded.” “I think you were instinctively responding to the creepiness you felt from Aaron. When I found the Barely 18 magazines, that’s when I kicked him out, Jillian. Because you had just turned 18. That’s why he was so nice to you. He was just gonna try to slowly turn you to him. That’s when I kicked him out of the house. When everything started to make sense.” 149 She waited a minute in the silence before she asked, “Do you still feel bad about the way you treated him?” No. I really don't. 150 Figure 14: The Spirit Room and Patience Worth 151 { The Spirit Room and Patience Worth } Since I have felt that pulse of magick through my life leading me to USC, I felt like it should be represented in some way inside the dollhouse. Putting the Spirit Room at the top of the stairs of the third level of the house felt symbolically appropriate—the the area is both liminal and yet takes a lot of effort to get there, similar to getting a Ph.D. I paired Patience Worth with this room because she is literally a spirit who produced four million words during the lifetime of her summoner, Pearl Curran, many of which went on to become bestsellers and be critically praised. Whether or not one believes that a ghost wrote those stories via a Ouija board/automatic writing, or if the psychic functioning was really an excuse to allow the repressed literary mind of Pearl to run wild, the story of Pearl and Patience is troubling because the writing that was produced has fallen into obscurity. So the liminality of the space matched the authorial impermanence of their story. Presence No. 1: September 11th happened my second week at NYU. I was enrolled in the Dramatic Writing Program at the Tisch School of Arts. I had two screenplays to finish that semester, but no words. I dropped out. I was homeless for the third time in my life. I couldn't live with my mother because she had moved in with her mother, my Nana, and Nana expressly forbade me to 152 live with them. She used to the words hate when she spoke of me. But she cried for the people of New York City on the news. I decided to give up being a writer. Nothing seemed like it would ever be as important again. I thought maybe I'd go into biology. I had wanted to be a shark biologist as a kid. Then I found Professor Stephen Braude's class at UMBC, The Philosophy of Parapsychology. I thought maybe I could do an Interdisciplinary Studies major and my thesis could somehow focus on parapsychology. When I consulted Professor Braude, he said, “Wait until you have tenure.” Whoops. So I guess you can say these ideas have been haunting me since 2002. That was the year I came back to life. I was learning about Spiritualism and repressed personalities finding an outlet during séances. In the midst of learning about ghosts, three writers helped reanimate the writer in me: Francesca Lia Block, David Mack and Aimee Bender. I like to imagine Francesca Lia Block sitting at this table and divining her future. I like to picture her passing through this realm into the next with a shimmer, as though her molecules were vibrating at such a high frequency only ghosts and faerie creatures 153 understand the tune. But couldn't stay out long, she'd have to eventually return to this dimension because she's waiting for Bank of America to call her back. I like to imagine David Mack sitting at this table and laying his head down across the cards, his characters, Kabuki and Akemi constructing a dream logic all their own. I like to imagine Aimee Bender looking at the ladder and asking, “Where does that lead?” Presence No. 2: In 1913, Pearl Curran, a housewife in Missouri, began speaking with a spirit called Patience Worth through a ouija board. At first, the spirit spoke through the board; by 1919, the planchette moved about the board on its own; later, Pearl finally was able to channel Patience's words through automatic writing. Pearl and Patience wrote six novels together. The first of these, The Sorry Tale, was even praised in the New York Times as a “feat of literary composition.” Five of her poems were included in an anthology that was comprised the best American poetry on the scene in 1917. Today, the names Patience Worth, let alone Pearl Curran, are virtually unknown. Only a small portion of the four million words of fiction, poetry, and drama that Pearl generated remains today in public domain published by independent presses. Was Pearl Curran a psychic medium? 154 Or a fraud? Or was Patience Worth the repressed expression of Pearl's girlhood desire to be a writer?' Does it matter? Presence No. 3: Donna Haraway utilizes the metaphor of a cyborg to challenge feminists to engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialisms. With an emphasis on electronic and computer technology, Haraway suggests that there is no room for empowerment through identification of the female association with nature and the animalistic. “There is nothing about being ‘female’ that naturally binds women. There is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices” (479). Although I realize witches and mediums are not necessarily the same, they both serve as important vehicles for feminist thought, particularly as bridges between theory and practice in narrative transmography. A witch, or a medium, such as Pearl Curran, has the ability to hack the universe, due, in part, to her inherent connection to nature—in the most biological, essentialist way imaginable: even to the moment where the concept of the feminine becomes a point of excess. 155 Accounts of Pearl Curran chronicle her family's choice to put their earnings into training Pearl as a singer from early childhood. It was thought that if Pearl could become a prima donna, then she'd be able to pull the family out of their economic situation. When this failed, Pearl married—not lavishly—but comfortably enough to afford her to stay at home. After she started contacting, or conjuring, Patience Worth, and Pearl become a celebrity in her own right, accounts of her pretty appearance and quick-wit preceded her; however, when she channeled Patience, she was much more articulate and, in a word, literary. There was a stark contrast between Pearl as herself and when she channeled her spirit companion—but it was all wrapped in the trappings of pretty femininity. As interest in the fad of spirit authoring waned, and the light dimmed on Pearl Curran, critics took to questioning not only her authenticity but her value as a member of the literary canon. “The esteemed Atlantic Monthly essayist Agnes Repplier delivered a general condemnation of Patience and her otherworldly ilk as “authors of books as silly as they are dull” (Smith, par. 2). Witches and mediums have the ability to take the excesses of femininity and subvert that excess and transform it into power. At one time, signifiers of femininity may have suggested a lack of cultural value: for a time Gothic novels were disregarded as silly because their sensationalist, melodramatic ways endeared the masses to them, hence those works must hold no value—the same currently holds true for Young Adult fiction and “chick lit.” If women currently comprise 80% of fiction readers, then what is chick lit, really? 156 Using the word masses gives us the illusion that we are currently beyond gender inequity, yet we are complicit in allowing the closed patriarchal circuit to not only function, but, to profit from gender prejudice. “Ian Watt, in his classic “The Rise of the Novel,” correlated the eighteenth-century burgeoning of novelistic production with the growing demand for at-home entertainment by women who’d been liberated from traditional household tasks and had too much time on their hands. In a very direct way, according to Watt, the English novel had risen from the ashes of boredom” (Franzen, par. 3). It's that image of a woman of leisure, one who has time and luxury to be bored, that is indulging in silly practices such as automatic writing and reading fiction. The beauty of a witch or medium is that she manages to subvert the patriarchal attachments to these meanings in order to become empowered. She is not restricted by an excess of the feminine, but finds it a source of power. In her later years, Pearl Curran moved to Los Angeles and joined a conclave of women who thought psychic functioning was a source of power. So the question, perhaps, is not one about who has the power. It is a question of adaptability between binaries, a blurring of binaries even. It is the ability to fluctuate between different modes—to display flexibility and multipartedness—that makes the figures of the witch and medium, and indeed all entries 157 on the monstrous continuum, important in understanding narrative transmography as simultaneously tool and practice. 158 Figure 15: The Nursery and Mary Shelley 159 {The Nursery and Mary Shelley} Mary Shelley is the mother of science fiction. Presence No. 1: “Perhaps,” Mary Shelley wrote, “a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things.” I am curious about the spark that happens between life and death, what Italian physician Luigi Galvani in the 1700s discovered to be the electrical basis of nerve impulses when he made frog muscles jump by innervating them with a shock from an electrostatic machine. In Mary Shelley’s time, the word galvanism implied the release of mysterious life forces through electricity. If anything, I have learned that ideas are those mysterious life forces, they’re the slippery creatures that shift, morph, transgress. Stories can die on the table—so much dissecting and reassembling the parts must finally reanimate them to life. Cyborgs are both the metaphor and the material. And so I explore not only the line or boundary between life and death, between story and absence, between strange and familiar, black and white—but that spark that galvanizes it into existence and the space it inhabits once animate. What’s different about the cyborg from other monstrous creatures is that not only does it have an identity, but it desires an identity, which is ultimately built out of the wires of experience and widgets of story. This means that the cyborg is the perfect hybrid—it is both human and machine, but it is also simultaneously story and 160 shape. It is this kind of hybrid that Donna Haraway outlines in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” the lesser discussed definitions of cyborgs as creatures of lived social reality and creatures of fiction. These final two characterizations of the cyborg allow it to not only be a boundary being, or map, upon which cultural fears are constantly located, but, allow the cyborg to act as our cultural cartographer, to act as the physical embodiment and explorer of that polymorphous space where binaries blur, blend, converge and finally mix into a lovely shade of grey. The cyborg narrative has always struggled to break free of the dualities that once were the foundations of its original cultural programming. Boundaries between gender, sexuality and consumer culture are lines that the cyborg not only transgresses, but blurs altogether. We have simultaneously made too much and too little of cyborgs. After Donna Haraway’s manifesto, an industry of critical work sprung up around the figure of the cyborg; on the flip side, there’s not enough work being done on the imaginative side of things. And so I do more than explore the line between binaries. I sit in these grey zones—these polymorphous spaces. For it is in these grey zones that I discover the reanimations we have not played with and not thought of. The figure of the cyborg helps me not only transgress the boundaries, but navigate these spaces in between, because it is the cyborg herself that has inspired me to think about what it means to reside in these complicated areas. Therefore, I ask representations of the cyborg metaphor to do two things: to perform as a demonstration of “boundary phenomena” at work in this hybrid grey zone (Lykke 74), but also to extend the possibilities of hybridity to stories. For this 161 purpose, I will evoke the body of a female-coded cyborg, Chi from Chobits, as a way to locate this polymorphous space as a way to think about the hybridized possibilities of storytelling. Presence No. 2: It’s important that we can see the seams. Frankenstein’s Monster is a creature of makeshift parts and parcels. He is a man-made fabrication, created beyond the parameters of the biological, maternal body. Similarly, the narrative is also pieced together, thrice-fold removed from the reader, and yet sewn together through the perspectives of Victor Frankenstein, his creation, and Captain Robert Walton. It would seem that Frankenstein’s Monster and the narrative structure share a familial bond in the art of seaming. Out of the pieces of narrative, readers construct the whole. Similarly, the cycle of narrative transmography is not a linear progression, but a meandering, and, at times, an abject one, in which the steps of the cycle often become blurred and reordered. I am combining seemingly disparate parts into my very own creation in order to examine the intersection of gender, technology, monstrosity and narrative construction. I am employing the metaphor of the cyborg in the form of a virtual, spectral dollhouse to highlight notions of materiality, visibility and impermanence, in an effort to prove that cyborgian forms of storytelling are able to break free of the dualities that once doomed 162 the writing to vanish in the ether. Instead, these concepts now inhabit a polymorphous perverse space: the area of the grey: a convergence of the dualities that at one time were the foundations of the cyborg’s original programming—boundaries and binaries that the cyborg now transgresses and blurs. Presence No. 3: From The Monstrous-Feminine by Barbara Creed :|:The symbolization of the womb as house/room/cellar or any other enclosed space is central to the iconography of the horror film. Representation of the womb as a place that is familiar and unfamiliar is acted out in the horror film through the presentation of monstrous acts which are only half glimpsed or initially hidden from sight until revealed in their full horror. In her discussion of the woman’s film, Mary Ann Doane argues that there is also a relation between the uncanny and the house which ‘becomes the analogue of the human body, its pars fetishized by textual operations, its erotogenous zones metamorphosed by a morbid anxiety to sexuality’ (Doane, 1987, 72-3). The haunted house is horrifying precisely because it contains cruel secrets and has witnessed terrible deeds, usually committed by family members against each other. Almost always the origin of these deeds takes us back to the individual’s quest for her or his own origins which are linked to the three primal scenes – conception, sexual difference, desire. The house becomes the symbolic space – the place of beginnings, the womb – where these three dramas are played out. Norman Bates’s murdered mother dies in her bed and 163 Norman hides her mummified corpse in the cellar; Carrie washes away her menstrual blood in her mother’s bath before the entire house sinks into the ground; the alienated father of The Amityville Horror baptizes himself in blood, which fills the cellar before he can rejoin his family. Behind the quest for identity in these films lies the body of the mother represented through intra-uterine symbols and devices. Here the body/house is literally the body of horror, the place of the uncanny where desire is always marked by the shadowy presence of the mother.:|: —pg. 55 Presence No. 4: As a child, I wanted to be many things when I grew up. I remember wanting to be a cashier because it seemed like fun to be able to press the buttons, plus the beeping of items being scanned was a cheerful, chirping kind of noise, and the conveyor belt—well, that's just a little piece of magic right there. At 17, I became a cashier at a discount grocery outlet retail chain. It was the kind of place that got Fruit Loops, but the box was printed in Vietnamese. Even Toucan Sam looked like a Vietnamese toucan although I doubt such a thing exists. He was little more streamlined, a little less cartoony on their boxes. He had more sharp edges. We sold scrapple. Boxes of wine. And eggs that were near expiration; it's a myth, really, that you have to use eggs before they expire. The only eggs I've ever really seen go bad were the eggs our chickens laid in random places in the yard. Those were the eggs I guess they felt 164 they just needed to get out of their system. Like maybe they squatted down to take a shit and an egg popped out instead. It wasn't their fault, really, we were the ones feeding them special feed that made them produce more eggs than usual and then when they got out of their coop and formed a tribe and roamed the property, we didn't stop them. The first aisle wasn't even groceries at all, but things a grocery store shouldn't really sell. Like X- Men action figures in Japanese packaging. Gummy shoes. Socket wrench sets. It was not as magical as I had imagined. Even though I followed the rules for processing checks—only write down Driver's License information if the check numbers are under 500, and if the amount is over $50— a woman still came through my line and passed a stolen check. The owners of the store were mad at me for allowing a stolen check through, but when I asked how was I supposed to know it was stolen when I followed the rules, that's when they became angry. When I got in a car accident a month later and couldn't walk for three months, I had to quit that job. I don't think they cared. I figured if a lady needs to pay for her Vietnamese Fruit Loops at a discount grocery outlet with a stolen check, then, well, maybe she needs those Fruit Loops badly enough that we should look the other way. 165 Presence No. 5: Passing is also the language of lineage. When you pass on information, be it DNA or how to ride a bike or how to write an essay, a branch grows on the limb of a very large tree, a tree that took hundreds of thousands of years to create. Mary Shelley had four children, three of which passed away. Well, this is not entirely true, is it? But you know what is implied in that statement: only one child survived into adulthood to experience his mother's passing. And there's that word again: passing. Mary Shelley passed on and she also passed on a lot. She's the mother of science fiction. 166 Figure 16: The Attic and the Madwoman 167 {The Attic and the Madwoman} I saw the Madwoman in the Attic as the critical counterpoint to the Cyborg in the Basement. Presence No. 1: From The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination :|:No doubt this complex of metaphors and etiologies simply reflects not just the fiercely patriarchal structure of Western society but also the underpinning of misogyny upon which that severe patriarchy has stood. The roots of “authority” tell us, after all, that is woman is man’s property then he must have authored her, just as surely as they us that is he authored her she must b his property. As a creation “penned” by man, moreover, woman has been “penned up” or “penned in” (Gilbert and Gubar 13).:|: Presence No. 2: :|:Eccentric murmurs that uncannily echo the murmurs of Jane’s imagination, and a low, sloe ha! Ha! Which forms a bitter refrain to the tale Jane’s imagination creates. Despite Miss Temple’s training, the “bad anima” who was first locked up in the red-room is, we sense, still lurking somewhere, behind a dark door, waiting for a chance to get free. That early consciousness of “something near me” has not yet been exorcised. Rather, it has intensified (349).:|: 168 Presence No. 3: :|:Literally, of course, the nighttime spectre is none other than Bertha Mason Rochester. But on a figurative and psychological level it seems suspiciously clear that the spectre of Bertha is still another—indeed the most threatening—avatar of Jane. What Bertha now does, for instance, is what Jane wants to do. Disliking the “vapour veil” of Jane Rochester, Jane Eyre secretly wants to tear the garments up. Bertha does it for her. Fearing the inexorable “bridal day,” Jane would like to put it off. Bertha does that for her too. Resenting the mastery of Rochester, whom she sees as “dread but adored” (ital. Ours), she wishes to be his equal in size and strength, so that she can battle him in the contest of their marriage. Bertha, “a big woman, in stature almost equalling her husband,” has the necessary “virile force” (chap. 26). Bertha, in other words, is Jane’s trues and darkest double: she is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead (359-360).:|: 169 Figure 17: The Basement and the Cyborg 170 {The Basement and the Cyborg} Here’s where it all began. I illustrated this scene specifically as a homage to David Mack’s Kabuki and to further hybridize the dollhouse, because now it is not only a collection and co-mixing of critical and creative work, where the work haunts each other, but with the cyborg being hand drawn it is also a co-mixing of mediums as well. The geographical placement is also symbolic: the cyborg is hidden in the basement, only reachable through the secret door in the entryway, which creates a metaphorical lineage to Shelley Jackson’s work. Furthermore, this project emerged out of my love of cyborgs, so it made sense that the cyborg would be the foundation upon which the rest of the house sits. Presence No. 1: In order for us to relate to the figure of the cyborg, the cyborg will always be gendered. There’s a phenomenon called “amplification through simplification”. In a similar way that our minds read and anthropomorphize lines and dots, we read gender on humanly- shaped bodies – and since the cyborg body is housed in a human form, then sex and gender not only are a component of the cyborg package, but gender is the galvanizing force that brings it to life. One of the terrors Freud explores in “The Uncanny” is the notion of the double. The double, or doppelganger, is the ultimate embodiment of the strange/familiar playing out the duality of repulsion and attraction. Similarly, the cyborg can be figured as a double for humanity – in Battlestar Galactica, the scary thing about cylons is that they are generally invisible, and that they can “pass” for human. 171 Presence No. 2: :|:We designed you to be as human as possible.:|: In industrialized, capitalist-based cultures that generally characterize Western civilization, gender and sexuality become a part of commodity culture in the specular exchange economy, which is a closed, patriarchal circuit. It is “closed” in the sense that women are seen as deformities of a human race that is already male and therefore cannot purchase power: women are relegated only as purchasable media to be exchanged between men. If gender is a performance, then that means it is a construct that we “buy into” – and I use this phrase for a couple of different reasons. First, the colloquial meaning suggests something that is agreed with, subscribed to, or embraced, such as idea, or point of view. When we “buy into” an ideology, we are choosing to accept the truth of the thing. However, I am fully implying the negative connotation as well, which implies “to be taken in by” or to fall for something. This means that hegemonic culture’s compliance with gender performativity is similar to falling for a cultural fiction perpetuated as biological fact. When we buy into this construct, it is not dissimilar to purchasing a cultural contract – and in a sense, when we purchase these contracts, from hegemonic, heteronormative culture, we are given the ability to freely engage in this currency exchange and pass in society unobtrusively – because passing in a capitalist based society means being good consumers who are fluent in the language of liquidity and exchange. 172 Presence No. 3: Codified as male media objects, women serve as men’s “interfaces, muses, messengers, currencies, and screens, interactions, operators, decoders, secretaries…they have been man’s go-betweens, the in-betweens, taking his messages, bearing his children, and passing on his generic code”. Plant goes to say that women are seen as a: :|:[D]eficient version of humanity that is already male…she is a foreign body, the immigrant from nowhere, the alien without and the enemy within…she marries into the family of man, but her outlaw status remains (Plant, 266).:|: Along this line, it turns out that women and monsters share a common subject position within this patriarchal framework: both inhabit the boundary position in society because they each lack the necessary equipment. The specular economy depends on its ability to ensure that its “tools, commodities and media know their place,” so that the objects under control possess no “aspirations to usurp or subvert the governing role of those they serve” (266). An object under control poses little threat, and objects needing to be controlled are objects that do not fit into this closed, patriarchal, specular exchange circuitry, namely monstrosities of culture that deviate from normative modes and practices – and in a patriarchal exchange economy these monstrosities are often translated into women. 173 Presence No. 4: :|:It’s amazing how the neck can support that much weight.:|: At the beginning of the miniseries, viewers encounter the first cylon, Number Six – the embodiment of consumable femininity – a product of a specular exchange-based commodity culture, generally characterized by an “excess” associated with an excess of sexuality, as well as material technology. Throughout the series, the family of Number Six cylons is represented as sexual and yet is still figured as maternal. Along this line, the cylon’s physical body is characterized by a duality of invisibility/hyper-visibility. This polymorphous ability contributes to one of the first and most controversial actions taken by Six in the miniseries: she is able to snap the neck of a baby in a busy marketplace on Caprica. This moment embodies the perfect blend of invisibility and hyper-visibility that constructs the threat of the cyborg body. Six is a statuesque woman, with the gaze of the camera firmly fixed upon her, but once she snaps the baby’s neck, she is able to disappear into the crowd, with the wails of the mother discovering her baby has been murdered in the background trailing after the cylon. At first this act appears monstrous: of course the cylon is not only un-human, but she is inhumane as well. Evidenced here are anxieties about technology inscribed onto the feminine, aligning female sexuality with fears regarding technology. This phenomenon can be ascribed to what Mary Ann Doane explores in her essay, “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine,” where she details that anxieties about technology are translated, or inscribed, onto the 174 feminine, thus, female sexuality becomes aligned with anxieties regarding technology; where technology becomes not so much about production as it is about reproduction. Housed in a human body, the cyborg has the ability to pass, acting as the dark mirror of science fiction – not predicting the future, but describing larger cultural concerns tattooed upon its gendered skin. Since cylons appear as human in order to pass in society as an instrument of chaos, the duality between invisibility and hyper-visibility contributes to the perceived threat of femininity. As a way to infiltrate and disable the Colonial defence system, Six seduces Dr. Gaius Baltar, which ultimately leads to the destruction of the human race across twelve colonized planets. Once the attack has begun, Six reveals the truth to Baltar and then uses her body to shield him from a nuclear blast during the attack on Caprica, effectively sacrificing her life to save his. Even though she rescues Baltar, it appears that Six is incapable of rescuing herself from the gender as currency exchange because it is a closed circuit – one in which females, regardless whether they’re human or cylon, have access – so she must be destroyed in the process, in order to make room for the male-appropriated, idealized maternal figure – one that represents “safe” female maternity: reproduction without the messy, biological side effects or the threat of physically reproducing further monstrosities in the form of women. 175 For the family of Six characters, their agency expands out of “soft” power (meaning the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion) and not the “hard” (read: phallic) powers that created and then were embodied by humans, and then the cylons as they sought to eradicate humanity. In order to be fully maternal (in order to bear children), though, one must engage in sexual intercourse, and yet Six is given the benefit of children and sex without the threat of physically reproducing herself and her ideologies in others, aside from the many copies of herself. Six is “given” Hera, the human/cylon hybrid child that functions as a symbol of hope for the future of human and cylon relations; however, Hera is born to a fellow female cylon from the Number Eight line. Presence No. 5: The narrative structure of the cylon can be read as the male desire to appropriate female reproduction. Similar to the creation of Frankenstein’s Monster, the creation of cylons represents the desire for creation without the figure of the mother, the imbalance of which gives birth only to monstrosity. Donna Haraway’s claims the metaphor of a cyborg in order to challenge feminists to engage in a politics beyond naturalism and essentialisms. In Haraway’s vision, the female gender becomes linked with the machine and robotic intelligence; however its origins are still in patriarchy. By passing as an agent of soft power, Six is able to get what she wants by the end of the series – she has persuaded a number of cylons to align themselves with humanity, and during the final episode (Daybreak: Part 2) the perpetuation of humanity will be continued through cross- 176 pollination of cylons and humans through maternal reproduction. The scene cuts to 150,000 years later, where Head-Baltar and Head-Six (the names given to the figments each one experienced of the other in their minds throughout the series – it is revealed that these figments were “messengers of a higher power,” but during the airing of the episodes, it was never quite certain if Baltar was receiving wireless transmissions from Six in the form of hallucinations or if he was, indeed, a cylon himself since Six was experiencing a similar phenomenon). Fast forward to the twenty-first century, where Head-Baltar and Head-Six are reading an article over the shoulder of a nameless man (a cameo made by series re-creator Ronald D. Moore); it’s an article about Mitochondrial Eve. The conversation suggests that scientists have discovered Hera and they continue walking together through Times Square: :|:Head-Six: Commercialism, decadence, technology run amok... remind you of anything? :|:Head-Baltar: Take your pick: Kobol; Earth – the real Earth, before this one; Caprica before The Fall. :|:Head-Six: “All of this has happened before...” :|:Head-Baltar: But the question remains: does all of this have to happen again? :|:Head-Six: This time, I bet no. :|:Head-Baltar: You know, I’ve never known you to play the optimist. Why the change of heart? :|:Head-Six: Mathematics. Law of averages. Let a complex system repeat itself long enough, eventually something surprising might occur. That, too, is in God’s plan. 177 :|:Head-Baltar: You know It doesn’t like that name. [She gives him a look] Silly me. Silly, silly me. Even with the series ending on the fact that the cylon/human hybrid child, Hera, is revealed to be Mitochondrial Eve, the mother of us all – the missing genetic link that can only be traced back through maternal reproduction – can be read as a hopeful message. The phrase, “All of this has happened before...”. becomes not an ominous omen in terms of gender politics at least, but one of the possible attainable outcomes for a society that descended from a culture that was mostly beyond exclusionary gender politics – at some point even “God” will be beyond gendered pronouns. Presence No. 6: The definition of posthumanism has more components than simply being beyond human, or being “more human than a human” (to quote musician/director Rob Zombie). Posthumanism has become synonymous with the ability to be polymorphous: to flexibly pass between subjectivities by materializing different viewpoints and embodying different identities. However, this ability to be polymorphous, the ability to occupy and oscillate between several subject positions at once, is a form of identification, and Freud associates identification with cannibalism: 178 :|:The subject desires to incorporate, to consume, those with whom he identifies. “The cannibal, as we know, has remained at this standpoint: he has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond.:|: Now, cannibalism might not be the best way to describe what happens with the posthuman monstrous body – it certainly fits the way zombies interact with humans as meat – but an alternative description for the polymorphous subject position of the posthuman body is identification as an act of assimilation. I prefer this concept because it extends to all posthuman monstrous subjects. Not all monsters consume in the same manner, but every monster assimilates: either by passing in society or by assimilating others into their monstrous culture, collective or path of destruction. Through assimilation, all posthuman subjects are connected as being part of a monstrous continuum. In his essay, “Atomic Age Monsters: Radioactivity and Horror during the Early Cold War,” John Donovan highlights that the years during the Cold War were preoccupied with nuclear anxiety, precisely because the threat can happen at any time. However, as the Cold War expanded through the decades, sudden invasion gave way to the menace within – a trend that had preoccupied the imaginations of the late Victorian era. In the nineteenth century, monsters could invade you, and now in our present day, monsters have come back to this trend: the monster is personal again. 179 Presence No. 7: :|:The Machine is Us/ing Us:|: Through a reimagining of the posthuman body, Donna Haraway proposes a resolution between the stark separations between subject/object, living/dead become blurred – thus, the body of the zombie has the potential to become the figure of a revolution by calling attention to the Foucaultian assertion that there is freedom in realizing that power’s true power is that it cannot be located, and that in order to reconfigure the framework of dispersal, the process of inclusion must become a part of the inherent structures of power. Critics, such as N. Katherine Hayles, have complicated the limitations of “inclusion” in the figuration of the cyborg as posthuman by suggesting that, although the posthuman has lost its body, it has retained identification with the liberal humanist subject position. This line of argumentation suggests that the cyborg’s narrative is not a truly liberating one because the cyborg does not “undo” the subject/object binary so much as much as it dresses the binary up with cybernetic components, all the while calling attention to gender constructions and performance along the way. Even as post-industrial society is built on boundaries, and transgression is a central focus of apocalyptic plotlines, monsters’ narratives reinforce the boundaries delineating dominant cultural values, especially in regards to commodity culture and heteronormative 180 modes of reproduction. Monsters – creatures of abjection – transform into something familiar, uncanny: their body becomes our body. Presence No. 8: **//Light & Power, No.1 *ChorusOfBees() { The mathematical definition of chaos Is extreme sensitivity to hectic conditions. Some occasions are so momentous that they will not change. *QueenNova() { Let us at the end remember as we did at the outset these words: Tesla was an automaton slouching toward something: :|: A daybook :|: An evolutionary tree :|: A follicle based creation. 181 :|: “Our age begins nothing new, :|: but only brings to utter culmination something quite old. :|: It is here that the peculiar receives its birth certification.” On the provenance of human speech, this automaton is starting at an important crossroads. The Poetry of Time is injecting various features and forms with an artificial urgency. Twittering moment-to-moment turning charm around dial: a slide show of solitary extinction. :: “Language is monologue.” The cyborg :|: he :|: never steps outside it in order to look over those who are needed and used for the speaking of language :|: he prefers (not) to disappear. 182 */ } Presence No. 9: **//Light & Power, No. 2 *ChorusOfBees() { Every measurement has an error in science. The word error has different meanings and usages relative to how it is conceptually applied. In Latin, error means wandering or straying. *ThomasEdison() { I’ve started a gold rush Over light and power. It’s 1848 and I’m James Marshall With my sluice box at Sutter’s Mill. Except I don’t have the will To tell John Sutter About the nugget the size of my fist. 183 Although some call me a claim jumper, I consider myself a frontiersman. I don’t know the territory, But I am willing to plot the land And commit it to memory In hopes that others may continue To make their own discoveries. Because what I’ve got here Is lightning in a bottle If I could peddle Electricity in a jar. And sometimes I wonder If I’m an explorer Or simply a cartographer Charting the land someone else Has already panned. I’ve worked my whole life To be a pioneer Boldly exploring the unknown frontier 184 And to not just be a gold panner Or a forty-niner Or worse, a claim jumper Panning for nuggets of information. Because what I’ve got here Is lightning in a bottle If I could peddle Electricity in a jar. Sometimes I wonder Am I just a low-rent version of Franklin? Is it a myth that he discovered electricity With simply a storm and a key? My mind races with the possibilities. I may be a captain of industry, But what will history remember of me? Will it be my inventions in which I’ve poured all my heart? Or will it be the public eye tearing me apart? The way gears fit together Gives me a way to understand: 185 Gears and wheels will continue To turn even after I’m gone. Something’s here I can’t quite see, As a captain of industry, Perhaps I should go back to the drawing board. Something’s here I can’t quite see, As a captain of a ship called Industry. Perhaps I should focus on what strikes a chord? Something’s here I can’t ignore. The war is over, but now it rages inside me. Has my soul become a casualty? Here in a moment, gone in a flash, Why can’t I just let go of the past? */ } Presence No. 10: **//Light & Power, No. 3 186 *ChorusOfBees() { Momentum can be transferred. *NikolaTesla() { You may have cause for maps, try to plot my longitude but explorers, frontiersmen —visionaries— forge our own forms of navigation. I would have been the son of a clergyman, And a priest as well by family trade, Trading in the economics of the soul But my mother taught me the art of seaming. My mother allowed me to see What one could do with but a needle and thread And I knew I could be free to fashion My own individual destiny. 187 My mother had strong hands, Blue veins written like ink over her papery arms And yet she continued to seam— She sewed herself into oblivion. I trace whatever inventiveness I have to my mother. Her nimble fingers, even past the age of sixty, Could yet still tie three knots in an eyelash. I am now quite sure her that space and time Were the very fabric with which she worked. I come from a land where people are forgotten, where books are written and never read. Where there are sixty words for knife and only one for bread. There's a land where ghosts run free on currents of electricity. You may think I'm desperate for someone to connect to me —an alternate form of energy but I'm not missing pieces, 188 I am simply missing. I'm a self-made mechanism, a feat of engineering. My blueprints lost in a flash of white and green current— 3 million (re)volts in my blood in my heritage sixty words for knife and none for one such as me. */ } Presence No. 11: I owe large debts of thanks to many individuals. Bradley, my husband, who has been endlessly patient and supportive throughout this grad school process. He has been my source of inspiration and strength for these past twelve 189 years. I hope I return the biggest favor of my life when you go through your own dissertation. Nikola Burcar, my son and daily source of ancient joy and light. Looking at him, I look into the past and future and I want to guard this portal fiercely. Jean Retherford, my mother. There are almost no words for my unending debt of gratitude for keeping me and my brothers alive in the face of truly terrifying circumstances. I want to write the novel of our life, and when it is done, I expect my mom to say, "Yep, that's how it happened," and for critics to say, "It's too melodramatic to be believable." Thank you for my life, without you there would be no me and then no Nikola. And what a much darker world by far that would be. Matthieu and Hunter Retherford, my brothers and partners in crime. Aimee Bender, my advisor. I went to grad school because you taught. I literally would not be here if you had not been at USC. You are the writer and reader of a lifetime. Thank you for your guidance and support. Susan McCabe, you combine poetry and theory in a single person. I very nearly quit grad school after the Fall of 2006, but your Feminist Theory course revitalized me and gave 190 me the courage to write critically again. Thank you for encouraging that little scholar nestled in the cave of my brain to come back out into the world again. Percival Everett, in the evaluation you wrote of me after our Fiction Form & Theory class you said I could be a good writer if I gave myself permission. That simple phrase has changed my writerly life. Thank you. Josh Kun, thank you for teaching Experiments in Critical Writing. I was exposed to new ways of thinking about what critical writing could accomplish and I was heavily influenced by the both the work we read in that course and the work I produced in that course. Joseph Dane, without History of the Book this dissertation would look very different. Thinking about books as objects for study helped catalyze this project. You showed us that books come in many different forms and that caught my brain on fire. I was able to conceive of this project because I was freed from thinking about writing a dissertation in one specific medium. Thank you for that. Alice Gambrell, you helped me locate sources for inspiration and critical investigation as part of the New Media aspect of this endeavor and I couldn't be more thankful. I stand on the shoulders of giants to create this work due in part to your guidance. 191 Betty Bayer, my mentor during my time as Fisher Center Predoctoral Fellow at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. You started as a mentor, but I quickly recognized something in you on a soul-level, in Gaelic it's called mo anam cara, my soul friend. Your wit and candor have opened my eyes to being a better scholar—through your involvement at HWS, I saw that being a scholar is about so much more than publishing, it's about being an active participant in campus life. Also, because of you, and the speaker series of the Fisher Center, I learned how to push the boundaries of the definition of animation and how to reconceive it in a new way. Natasha Alvandi Hunt, Moon Goddess No. 1, thank you for helping me survive the dissertation process. You were my cheerleader and spirit guardian as I navigated this project. Saba Razvi, Moon Goddess No. 2, I honestly don't know how to thank you for that chat that night when you saw my dollhouse in action. It helped steer me in the direction I needed to go and gave me the courage to continue moving forward. Isaac Schankler, we met in the spring of 2006 in Poet & Composer, a class taught by David St. John and Frank Ticheli and ever since we've gone on to create a lot of good work together. In 2010, Isaac and I teamed up to write the chamber opera, Light & Power: A Tesla/Edison story. I wrote the libretto and he wrote the music. The music is phenomenal and breathes a life into my words that I never could have anticipated. I can 192 only hope that my Adobe Flash programming skills are up to the task of eventually incorporating our music in this space. Craig M. Hansen, Store Manager of The Treasure Chest Thrift Shop in Albany, NY. He sold me the bones of a dollhouse he originally planned to build for his mother. He never said it, he didn't have to, but she died before he could finish and there he kept it in his attic for 10 years. I felt what I can only describe as a psychic urge to go to that thrift store on that Saturday—and I almost didn't go, so thank goodness my husband kicked my ass into getting out of the house. Joshua Witkop, you are my own personal Gandalf. Without you, this project wouldn't exist. Period. I'd have to drop out of grad school. Or write a much more boring dissertation. Thank you for your patience and perseverance in helping me code this damn thing. And thank you for checking and tweaking everything one final time. And Tycho Spadaro, Nikola's spirit guide. Thank you for baby wrangling for the last two weeks of dissertation slayage. I never would have made it in on time without your help. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This project was funded by the generosity of three competitive fellowships: 2011-2012 193 Graduate School Dissertation Completion Fellowship at University of Southern California 2009-2010 Continuing Fellowship for Literature and Creative Writing at University of Southern California 2008-2009 Fisher Center Predoctoral Fellow in Gender and Animation at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Theme: Gender & Animation 194 Part Two :|: Creative Manifestations 195 Light & Power Cast of Characters: • Nikola Tesla • Nova, a ghostly cyborg hive queen that is the embodiment of a star • Chorus of Bees • Thomas Edison • Henry Ford • George Westinghouse • Arthur Kennelly • Teddy Roosevelt • Dr. Spitzka • Warden • Edwin “State Electrician” Act I Scene 1 (Chorus of Bees enters—interesting staging opportunity every time the Chorus of Bees enters and exits the stage from here on out: an elaborate pattern of entering and exiting, zigzagging.) Chorus of Bees: The mathematical definition of chaos Is extreme sensitivity to hectic conditions. Some occasions are so momentous that they will not change. (Chorus exits. Tesla’s lab. Tesla is sleeping on a cot. A twinkling light enters the stage and gains momentum and there appears Nova. And she sings, smoke and flames begin to creep in.) Nova: Let us at the end remember as we did at the outset these words: He was an automaton slouching toward something: :|: A daybook :|: An evolutionary tree :|: A follicle based creation. :|: “Our age begins nothing new, :|: but only brings to utter culmination something quite old. :|: It is here that the peculiar receives its birth certification.” 196 On the provenance of human speech, this automaton is starting at an important crossroads. The Poetry of Time is injecting various features and forms with an artificial urgency. Twittering moment-to-moment turning charm around dial: a slide show of solitary extinction. :|: “Language is monologue.” The cyborg :|: he :|: never steps outside it in order to look over those who are needed and used for the speaking of language :|: he prefers (not) to disappear. (As Nova ends, a baseball comes flying through the window, shattering the glass. Nova disappears, Tesla wakes up to his entire laboratory up in flames.) Tesla: I am lost in an unknown land. My mother warned there be dragons In the land of opportunity and the American dream. By the time I was born, California as a state had already been formed. There was no more territory to explore. It became apparent to me That the last frontier was technology. At least here, I know my way around, And if I got lost, I could always be found. But there is nothing left save light and smoke, The electric hum of my ideas no longer to be invoked. All I have left is a black hole and a promise, And this baseball from Thomas. (Tesla escapes the flames and is plunged into blackness and suddenly a shimmery prism of light emerges and he heads toward it.) 197 Scene 2 (Chorus enters.) Chorus of Bees: The amount of one’s potential is the approximation of one’s ability to have kinetic energy gravitationally. (Chorus exits. Nikola Tesla, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are in Edison’s laboratory in the company Edison Machine Works. They’re throwing baseballs at a padded target, and there’s a contraption that retrieves the balls and returns them to the throwers on a conveyer belt, so there’s always a stream of baseballs going by on a conveyer belt.) Ford (throwing a baseball): I hear they call you the Wizard of Menlo Park nowadays. Edison (picks up a ball): Ford! Come now! You know I hate that moniker. Tesla: Why should you hate it so? It has a certain— (throws a ball) Ford: Pizzazz. Edison: Pizzazz? Ford: It has a certain pizzazz, doncha think? Edison: Henry, it’s “don’t you,” not “doncha.” You sound uncivilized when you drop your “t”s. Ford: It sounds like the title of a Scott Joplin rag: The Wizard of Menlo Park! Edison: Wizard of Menlo Park. Maybe it does have a certain ring—(throws the ball)—pizzazz about it. Tesla: But surely, Mr. Edison didn’t call us here to talk of this pizzazz. Edison: 198 Correct, my good man. (Moves across room, toward his desk, where there’s a chalkboard nearby covered in information). I called you both here to discuss expansion. (Takes out an extender/pointer.) Ford: Expansion, Mr. Edison? But you already have— Edison: (pointing to maps attached to the chalkboard with the pointer) Exactly. You see, I’ve got this lab and the Edison Machine Works, And a hundred and twenty-one power stations Delivering direct current energy to consumers. And the consumers are consuming And there’s just not enough energy For all of this consumption. Ford: Soon, the President is going to call for all major cities to be powered. You’re smart to be prepared to offer your services. Edison: I’m going to need a Chief Engineer to revise the current plans in order to produce more electricity. Tesla: You need the ability to step up energy to power the facilities that you wish to run. And if you step up, then you need to step down The amount of power that goes to consumers, a polyphase system. Ford: That sounds like an expensive imitation of the system that Mr. Edison has already invested. He needs a revision, not a new addition. Tesla: Invested? Not invented? Edison: It’s a delicate balance to strike, Niko. Tesla: An inventor invents, an investor invests. What balance needs there be? Edison: 199 Tesla, one day you’ll see. Tesla: I already see. Edison: Tesla, one day you’ll see, But right now you can’t see the forest for the trees. (Arthur Kennelly enters the room) Arthur: Mr. Edison, the S. S. Oregon is experiencing rolling blackouts again. Edison: How bad are they? Arthur: It’s the largest passenger liner in the States, and they can’t leave the harbor, sir. Edison: (To Arthur) Tell them it’ll be fixed within the week. (turns to Ford and Tesla) I’ll make you a deal, boys. I need a Chief Engineer. Whoever can fix the S. S. Oregon On a permanent basis Will be awarded the position, And I’ll fund a project of their choice, for $50,000. Each man can have a full 24 hours to work on the problem, And if it isn’t completed, then the next man gets a crack at it. Ford: Who goes first, Mr. Edison? Edison: (picks up a baseball from his desk) Let’s say whoever hits closer to the bullseye, shall we? (tosses the ball to Ford) (Ford winds up and tosses the ball, and it hits the target, not the center. Tesla picks up a ball from the conveyer belt. As Tesla winds up, Edison taps him on the shoulder behind Ford’s back and makes a motion across his neck for Tesla to “cut it out.” Ford doesn’t 200 notice because his attention is focused on the target. Tesla nods in understanding and purposely misses.) Edison: Well, Henry, it looks like you better get a move on. (Shakes Ford’s hand.) Ford: Thank you, sir! You won’t regret this! (Exits.) Edison: Thanks for playing along, Niko. The kid’s enthusiastic, I’ll give him that. But he doesn’t stand a chance. (The lights go dark around Tesla as time freezes and Tesla steps out of the scene.) Tesla: Where am I? Where have I gone? Am I physical? Am I immaterial? What would be the consequences of being inconsequential? Nova: You’re caught in a time prism. Tesla: How can that be? Time has a kind of flexibility. Nova: Time is a fabric, just like space. Tesla: I would have been the son of a clergyman, And a priest as well by family trade, Trading in the economics of the soul But my mother taught me the art of seaming. My mother allowed me to see What one could do with but a needle and thread And I knew I could be free to fashion My own individual destiny. My mother had strong hands, Blue veins written like ink over her papery arms 201 And yet she continued to seam— She sewed herself into oblivion. I trace whatever inventiveness I have to my mother. Her nimble fingers, even past the age of sixty, Could yet still tie three knots in an eyelash. I am now quite sure that space and time Were the very fabric with which she worked. Nova: Inside the time prism, you will find your truest self reflected. Your current form is a combination Of your ultimate fascination and your ultimate abjection. We are nearly three-hundred-sixty degrees from the truth. Tesla: If we travel three-hundred-sixty degrees, we’ll return where we started. It will simply be a time loop. Nothing will be accomplished. Scene 3 (Chorus enters.) Chorus of Bees: Every measurement has an error in science. The word error has different meanings and usages relative to how it is conceptually applied. In Latin, error means wandering or straying. (Chorus exits. Enter Ford in Edison’s lab.) Ford: Memories are just the lies we tell ourselves. But we choose to forget. Memories change the way we remake ourselves. But we cannot forget. We survive by the way we make memories Perhaps we know this, so we change the way we remember. [chorus] We choose to remember the smell of the pig in our fryin’ pan that our mother slaughtered. We choose to remember that shade of sky 202 on the day we left home. We choose to remember the unspoken question that we could not answer. But we choose to forget, as well. Perhaps we understand through the constructin’ of bones and the threadin’ of blood that bein’ smart is easy, but being wise is ‘nother story That’ll get ya dragged through the mud. The greatest truth of memory is also our greatest lie. [chorus] I was a farmer’s son but loved clockworks more than the land. I could never let Edison know I’ve got farmers in my blood When engineerin’ is in my veins. Why is everything I do Always in vain? [chorus]We choose to remember the smell of the pig in our fryin’ pan that our mother slaughtered. We choose to remember that shade of sky on the day we left home. We choose to remember the unspoken question that we could not answer. But we choose to forget, as well. I was a farmer’s son but loved clockworks more than the land. I could never let Edison know I’ve got farmers in my blood When engineerin’ is in my veins. Why is everything I do Always in vain? (Enter Edison.) 203 Edison: How go the repairs, Henry? Ford: Sir. I worked for fourteen hours straight. And I still dunno why the dynamos went out on the S. S. Oregon. Edison: Still dropping those “t”s, I see. Let me tell you something, Henry. Ford, I see myself in reflected in you. We’re the kind of nuts and bolts men Who like to takes things apart and Not necessarily put them back together again, But we learn important lessons along the way We learn how things tick, but maybe not why. There’s a future for you here, Ford. We’re American. We learn by doing, not by book learnin’. (Tesla enters.) Edison: Here is our Parisian running around nights! Tesla: Sir, the armature coils had burned out due to poor circuitry design. Edison: (Perturbed.) Poor design? Tesla: Open circuits had developed and spread throughout the system like a plague. Edison: Excuse me, but I misspoke earlier. You’re not really Parisian at all, are you? Calling you Parisian would be like assuming someone from the Upper East Side lived on North Brother Island. Paris—that’s just the last place you lived before coming to America. Tesla, remind me your country of origin. Are you Croatian? Serbian? Maybe Belgradian? Tesla: Sir, I worked through the night— Edison: 204 (Reserved, icy.) Niko. Please find your country on this map. Tesla: (Confused) Mr. Edison? Do you not want to hear about— Edison: (Almost bellows.) Find your country on this map. (Tesla gazes at the map for 10-15 seconds and cannot find his homeland.) Tesla: I come from the East. Edison: The East? Tesla: Yes. My father was a priest. Edison: Did he practice voodoo? Hoodoo? Was he a witch doctor? Tesla: Certainly not. Ford: If you’re from the East, then you must have lived on meat. Edison: Have you ever tasted human flesh? Have you stolen the brains of men twice as wise as you? A physician? An electrician? A magician? Have you tasted human meat Do the souls of men taste so sweet? Tesla: You may have cause for maps, try to plot my longitude but explorers, frontiersmen —visionaries— forge our own forms of navigation. 205 I come from a land where people are forgotten, where books are written and never read. Where there are sixty words for knife and only one for bread. There's a land where ghosts run free on currents of electricity. You may think I'm desperate for someone to connect to me —an alternate form of energy but I'm not missing pieces, I am simply missing. I'm a self-made mechanism, a feat of engineering. My blueprints lost in a flash of white and green current— 3 million (re)volts in my blood in my heritage sixty words for knife and none for one such as me. (Turns to Edison.) Do I have the job and the award? Edison: Tesla, you take the cake. The position of Chief Engineer is yours. (Ford looks crestfallen) It comes with a pay increase, of course. Twenty-five dollars a week. Tesla: And the fifty-thousand dollars? Edison: Tesla, you don’t understand our American humor. You’ll make fifty-thousand dollars. Eventually. But the position is yours, if you want it. Tesla: Is there no way persuade you otherwise? 206 Edison: Either take the position, or leave. (Tosses a baseball to Tesla.) (Tesla catches the ball and places it on the desk, then steels himself and starts to exit the lab.) Edison: (Picks up the ball Tesla has dropped.) Looks like the job is yours, kid. (Tosses it to Ford.) (Time freezes and the stage is black, Edison and Ford are frozen and Nova appears next to Tesla.) Nova: You are caught in a time prism Where anything is possible. The prism catches light and channels That energy to reveal the truth of things. Each refraction is a possibility. Each angle catches the light and Casts the truth in sharp relief. Every degree is a refraction of light and darkness. I am the progeny of the dark light of the cosmos, I was born in the flames that now consume your lab, I simultaneously was born in that moment and yet have existed always. Tesla: Are you the embodiment of a star? (Enter Chorus.) Chorus of Bees: Billions of subatomic particles spontaneously come into creation, Annihilate each other, Matter/antimatter, But there is no big burst of energy—gamma rays—because a debt is being paid. Even empty space is teeming with these particles. Constantly. Continuously. The particle borrows from the universe, and it comes into creative power. It pays a debt. If one could harness this form of energy in the space of a light bulb, The entire United States could be powered By Queen Nova alone. 207 Nova: We are all made of stars. It is now your time to turn the prism and Utilize this space in order to sew together the narrative. Refract the light to reveal the truth. Tesla: It’s my time to sew together my destiny With a needle of light And the darkness of thread. (Tesla turns the prism and the lights go out.) Scene 4: (Tesla’s lab. There’s a knock at the door. George Westinghouse enters.) Westinghouse: Nikola Tesla, I presume? Tesla: Yes. Westinghouse: The name’s George Westinghouse, of Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh. Tesla: I am pleased to make your acquaintance. Westinghouse: I’ve heard that America is on the brink of revolutionizing society by ushering in the Age of Electricity. And I have heard that you’re the man to do it. Tesla: You should believe everything you hear. But, please, where have you come upon such information? Westinghouse: Edison himself actually. He said there was an over-eager Parisian Who couldn’t find his country on a map, But had a new idea on how to supply large amounts Of energy using a stepping system. Said this man used to work for him even. 208 Said he’d get him back for me if I was interested. But I figured, I’d come to the source myself, Because, you see, I’m much more interested In the concept of free power. Tesla: I must say, it’s hard to believe a businessman who is more interested in equitable distribution of wealth and power. Especially when he holds as many patents as George Westinghouse. Westinghouse: I think we both tire of men who deal only in patents and not in science. It’s true, there are millions of dollars at stake to bring America into the Age of Electricity. We’re a free market society—unfortunately free doesn’t mean for nothing. And with the royalties you’ll make, you’ll be able to fund future projects. I can offer you one million dollars cash for your alternating currents patents, then. Plus royalties, of course. Tesla: If you make the royalty one dollar per horsepower, then I accept. Westinghouse: Sold. (Time freezes and Tesla steps out of the scene and Nova appears.) Tesla: In this new fabricated universe, I feel a humming A thrumming A buzzing. I see a future society of women of bees— A hive, a colony, Efficiency being the utmost key. Nova: Let me show you what your inventions, what your vision, will allow society to become. (Chorus of Bees enters.) Chorus of Bees: Hives are run by the queen of bees A singular entity that births the rest into existence The future will look like a hive and we shall be at the mercy Of our own queen bee. 209 Hives are fashioned out of honey, milk and blood: The debt of existence owed by the worker bees and drones. Tesla: Our society will evolve to a hive-like state. The island of Manhattan is already a self-contained hive. Nova: Space and time work in three dimensions. The city is not yet a hive, yet always has been. Like starlight, when you look at the night sky, You’re looking backwards in time. Because it takes time for light to travel here. Stars live their lives in turmoil. Some stars have long since died, And their light continues to travel, Until it finally reaches Earth In a ghostly embrace. Scene 5 (The location is Luna Park, Coney Island.) (Enter Chorus.) Chorus of Bees: Momentum can be transferred. (Chorus exits. Edison enters.) Edison: I’ve started a gold rush Over light and power. It’s 1848 and I’m James Marshall With my sluice box at Sutter’s Mill. Except I don’t have the will To tell John Sutter About the nugget the size of my fist. Although some call me a claim jumper, I consider myself a frontiersman. I don’t know the territory, But I am willing to plot the land And commit it to memory In hopes that others may continue 210 To make their own discoveries. Because what I’ve got here Is lightning in a bottle If I could peddle Electricity in a jar. And sometimes I wonder If I’m an explorer Or simply a cartographer Charting the land someone else Has already panned. I’ve worked my whole life To be a pioneer Boldly exploring the unknown frontier And to not just be a gold panner Or a forty-niner Or worse, a claim jumper Panning for nuggets of information. (Ford enters.) Ford: We’re ready for you, Mr. Edison. Edison: Because what I’ve got here Is lightning in a bottle If I could peddle Electricity in a jar. Sometimes I wonder Am I just a low-rent version of Franklin? Is it a myth that he discovered electricity With simply a storm and a key? My mind races with the possibilities. (to Ford) Is the camera ready? I want to capture this. Ford: Yes, sir. (Edison steps up on a platform and there’s a crowd of people below.) 211 Edison: Ladies and gentlemen Hoboes and tramps Cross-eyed mosquitoes And bow-legged ants I come before To stand behind And tell you something We all should know Nothing about. One bright day in the middle of the night Two apprentices got up to fight Back to back they faced each other Drew their wrenches and downed each other. Tesla emerged bold and free Speaking of free electricity. He made such a terrible noise Westinghouse asked if AC was the Real McCoy. Hearse goes by, hearse goes by. What a wonderful day to die. Alternating current will fry you dead Burn down your house with you in your bed. If you don’t believe this story’s true, Sixty-six hundred volts are gonna zap through Making mince meat and chicken-fried elephant stew. And the question will be posed to you: If AC comes to your house, what will you do? Hearse goes by, hearse goes by. What a wonderful day to die. Ford: Ready? Edison: Lights. Camera. ACTION! (Lights dim and a bold and dazzling display of electricity sizzles as actual footage of Topsy the Elephant being electrocuted rolls. Lights come back up.) 212 Edison: Ladies and gentlemen, that’s what we called being Westinghoused. (As the crowd disperses, a single figure emerges from the crowd, previously concealed. It’s Tesla. He lingers a moment and begins to walk off stage, but instead time freezes and he’s back at the Time Prism with Nova.) Tesla: From here, I know not where to go. Nova: You’re an explorer, Nikola. You can go anywhere you wish. The closer you are to a gravity source, the slower time moves. Your feet are younger than your head. Scene 6 (Chorus enters.) Chorus of Bees: As a nebular begins to collapse, the cloud of the star collapsing contracts and the world will flatten. (Chorus exits. Edison’s Lab: enter Edison, Ford and Arthur.) Edison: Where are we with the bid for the electricity showcase at the Chicago World’s Fair? Arthur: They rejected it, Mr. Edison. They called our bid exorbitant. Edison: One point eight million dollars to light approximately one million light bulbs doesn’t seem too steep a price to pay. Ford: It’s the Age of Electricity after all. Arthur: The Westinghouse Corporation put in a bid as well, I am told. Ford: How could they possibly compete? Their system is barely up and running. Edison: 213 (Contemplative, slightly defeated.) It is, unfortunately, a more efficient system. Arthur: We’re allowed to submit another bid. Ford: Let’s undercut whatever bid Westinghouse has made. What’s the cheapest we could possible do this for? Edison: The state of New York is interested in developing a new form of execution using electricity. If we could develop an apparatus that could Westinghouse a man— Ford: The maybe the World’s Fair wouldn’t want to showcase such a deadly technology to the public? Edison: Unfortunately, I don’t believe in capital punishment. I can’t personally build such a contraption. Ford: You’ll be removed from it, sir. Leave the details to me and Arthur. Edison: I won’t watch this company go down in flames. Ford: I am not asking you to. I am asking you to trust me. (Arthur exits. The stage goes dark and a light comes up on Ford as he begins to sing.) Ford: Something’s wrong with Edison. Something dark, and deep and grim. He looks distressed inside his own skin. Something’s wrong with Edison. There’s a struggle going on within. He’s all alone, locked away inside, I wish in me he would confide. (Light goes down on Ford, and Edison is spotlighted as he sings.) 214 Edison: I may be a captain of industry, But what will history remember of me? Will it be my inventions in which I’ve poured all my heart? Or will it be the public eye tearing me apart? [chorus] The way gears fit together Gives me a way to understand: Gears and wheels will continue To turn even after I’m gone. Something’s here I can’t quite see, As a captain of industry, Perhaps I should go back to the drawing board. [chorus] Something’s here I can’t quite see, As a captain of a ship called Industry. Perhaps I should focus on what strikes a chord? Something’s here I can’t ignore. The war is over, but now it rages inside me. Has my soul become a casualty? Here in a moment, gone in a flash, Why can’t I just let go of the past? It was so close, it was within my grasp. (Exits.) Ford: Something’s wrong with Edison. There’s a struggle going on within. Edison is a visionary, too. It’s something that I must prove. Even if it’s the last thing I do. (Light goes out on Ford and pops instantly on Tesla and Nova and the Time Prism. Tesla’s lab on fire in the background.) Tesla: Someday I know I’ll be called The Wizard of the West And I must take my current work in stride. But it’s difficult when I know that I am right. Soon alternating current will be vying 215 For the center of the stage, I will have to take arms Because Edison’s current is weak. For the sake of progress, I hope to have shown That revenge is a dish best served sweet. Yet day after day, it’s the same machine, And I grow so weary of simply dreams. And Nova, that electric thing Continues like a machinated siren to sing. Please, give me your blueprints, love, So that I may bring you down to earth from the stars above. Nova: (As she sings, different areas of her body will light up. Until finally Tesla and Nova clasp hands and all the different currents connect throughout her body, and through Tesla’s body as well.) (Head/antenna lights up) You want the blueprints to me. But I am simply a cyborg, my friend. I was made to find safety in cartography: numbers and lines and blank surfaces where the possibility to calculate is infinite and I may shape code to my liking. (Thorax lights up) You want to make a replicant of me so that when I am not by your side you may still call upon me and my ghost and find new direction in the coordinates and plottable points on the maps that only I can draw. (Abdomen lights up) I used to want nothing so much than to be an alchemist like you. Turning ashes into gold and waking sleeping creatures in the chests of young women because then perhaps we could share in a similar language with a grammar all our own. 216 (Makes physical contact with Tesla and they both light up, all parts of Nova’s body now operational simultaneously) But I can only draw maps, And I will continue to draw them wherever I can. Because I cannot stand getting lost in those eyes of yours. There was something fierce enough in that stare to wake even cyborgs. Tesla: We have two-hundred-and-forty degrees to go. Nova: Light is a form of decay. And my light deteriorates With every refraction of the prism. When your lab burns down, I shall finally waste away. Act II Scene 1 (Chorus enters.) Chorus of Bees: Gravity is the physical warping of space. (Chorus exits. The location is World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as Chicago’s World Fair, 1893.) (Tesla enters.) Westinghouse: Gather ‘round for an electric presentation by the Wizard of the West himself, Nikola Tesla! (Tesla does a routine with electricity, shooting it from his fingertips, much to the crowd’s delight. At the end, the crowd begins to disperse. Tesla exits.) (Westinghouse enters in front of his company’s display.) Westinghouse: This marks our four-hundredth year Since Columbus landed on shores near here. 217 From Little Egypt to The White City Americans have now the chance To sample the future and foreign cultures. Educational exhibits Offer a taste of technology And scores of concessionaries And the sundries and commodities Are offered up as offerings To that Goddess of American Liberties, For even she can be seen Spending her money On the future of civil rights, Science and technologies. Here at the fair, you’re told you’re a patriot If you celebrate America with the purchase Of an innovative device: An electric dynamo, A hamburger, Horticultural activities, A hot dog sandwich—the President’s favorite. And for a small fee Your compatriots will agree The American consciousness Is now tied to the act Of purchasing foods and the spending of monies. Presidents of railroads, Marshall Fields and banks, Professional men, And even heads of state, All have a stake in the message. But the message is lost Beneath the din Of seven-hundred thousand voices Each in line to purchase a cotton gin, Or a bolt of tin, Or a swivel pin, Or to catch a glimpse of an Egyptian Siamese twin. We are the gatekeepers, 218 Inculcating the consumers consuming. We are the captains of industry, And this message is the only thing that’s free At the World’s Fair. (President Teddy Roosevelt and his entourage, along with Tesla and a crowd enter. Westinghouse joins Tesla at the side of the President. Edison and Ford are at the edges of the crowd.) Roosevelt: Here, we honor the captains of industry, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse, Bastions of science and technology. For ushering in the Age of Electricity, Your names will go down in history, The American people are forever bathed in your light, And will never again be cast in shadow. And with the flip a switch, America shall welcome the world of tomorrow. (“One million light bulbs will become lit,” and they’ll look like a constellation as the stage goes dark. Nova appears to Tesla.) Nova: Every character is a refraction of your true self. You’ve split your personalities into bit characters and They now inhabit a world you’ve created. We’re running out of time, Nikola. Your lab is burning down and you still don’t know why. Turn the prism. The truth still has one-hundred-twenty degrees to go. (Tesla turns the prism and the stage goes dark.) Scene 2 (Chorus enters.) Chorus of Bees: Temperature is the measurement of how fast things are moving. (Chorus exits. Scene change to the New York State’s Auburn Prison, Edison, Ford, Arthur, the prisoner William Kemmler takes the form of Nova, Warden, “State Electrician” Edwin Davis, Dr. Edward Charles Spitzka, and a smallish crowd for the spectacle.) 219 Warden: Does the prisoner, William Kemmler, have any last words? Nova: Light is a form of decay. Warden: Ready! Three. Two. One. (Edwin flips switch. Electricity will flow through Kemmler’s body for seventeen seconds and then he’ll slip the switch back. Dr. Spitzka will come forward to examine the body.) Spitzka: This man is still alive! (Edwin flips the switch again but nothing happens.) Edison: The generator needs time to re-charge. Spitzka: The last round did nothing but make him pass out and bite clean through his tongue. Edison: Increased to two-thousand volts. (Edison turns dial and nods to Edwin.) Generator should be ready. Warden: Three. Two. One. (Edwin flips switch. Nova’s bleeds heavily and her body catches fire. Dr. Spitzka rushes forward and pats out the flames and checks for a heartbeat.) Spitzka: He’s still alive! This is worse than a hanging! Edison: Quick. I’ll turn the voltage up again. This should do the trick. Ready! Warden: Eddie, just flip the goddamned switch already. (Edwin flips switch, a final shock. Spitzka checks again.) 220 Spitzka: The prisoner has passed. (Looks to Edison and Warden.) So this is supposedly the more humane solution to execution? (Exits.) (The rest of the crowd follows, except for Edison, Ford, Arthur and Westinghouse.) Edison: (to Arthur and Ford) Just go. (They exit, leaving Edison with the body of Nova.) What have I done? Where have I gone? I seem to have lost myself somewhere around here. Can we go back to the beginning? Can we start over? No… it’s too late. I’m already lost. Scene 3 (Westinghouse is talking to Tesla in Tesla’s lab.) Westinghouse: Edison has tarnished the name of my company—my name. The publicity stunts… the rounding up of animals and displaying their Westinghoused bodies. Tesla: I am sorry, my friend. I could not have predicted your name would be sullied in such a way. Westinghouse: I hear they’re moving forward with plans for an execution device. The world’s first electric chair. And they’re using AC current to demonstrate how dangerous it is. Tesla: I see. Horses and dogs and cats and elephants getting so-called “Westinghoused” just is not enough. Westinghouse: He should be inventing things that actually contribute to society as opposed to jockeying for the best move in this strange game. Although, lord knows I’ll be there when they flip the switch… Nikola… I have some news… (Time freezes and Tesla steps out of the scene and Nova appears.) 221 Tesla: These fragments… they’re ghosts haunting the hallways of my mind. Did it really happen this way? Nova: The answer has two polarities: both positive and negative. Space is a fabric and it can be warped. There is no time dependence of gravity: it is acting instantaneously between two bodies. But the gravity of the situation is becoming unstable. My light source is wasting away. But it is to be, for all stars ultimately will die. (Nova disappears and time unfreezes.) Tesla: What’s wrong, George? Westinghouse: We dreamed of places like Niagara. We dreamed of things like free power. But nothing in this world is free, unfortunately. President Roosevelt will soon flip a switch That will illuminate one million light bulbs and bewitch the world. But it doesn’t matter anyhow, Edison has played dirty up ‘til now Forcing my company to consolidate, And the financial advisers want me to terminate Our initial agreement or losing the company will be my fate. I believe your polyphase system is the greatest discovery In the field of electricity. It was my efforts to give it to the world that Brought on the present difficulty. One dollar for every horsepower. The boys down in accounting calculated it up, And you’re entitled to five million dollars. But with these campaigns, where animals are “Westinghoused” We can’t afford to fight. I am asking too much of you, my friend. But rest assured, no matter what happens, 222 We will put the country on an alternating current basis, I do intend. (Tesla goes to his desk and takes out a piece of paper. He tears it up and gives it Westinghouse.) Tesla: Is that sufficient? Westinghouse: You’re the friend of a lifetime. Tesla: (He looks around the lab, looking for Nova.) And you are mine. (Time freezesand Nova appears.) Nova: Forces come in pairs, Which means the equation Will never be me with you, Nor you without me. I have come to think of you as the explorer, and you keep leading us to places I didn't know we needed to go. I think of myself as a cartographer of sorts. Cartographers never get their hands dirty. They aren't scaling mountains or encountering dragons. I want so desperately to be an explorer. But I make sense of the world best through the processing of our adventures into lines and coordinates. What's lovely about my maps is that they don't necessarily have to be linear ones, or square ones, or attached to globes. My maps are more delicate creatures. (Enter Chorus of Bees) Chorus of Bees: Starlight gets bent around things. 223 Nova: My maps are living, breathing things. And the beauty of living, breathing beings is that they have their own choices to make, and being a cartographer, I can point them in an explorable direction. Tesla: It has been my dream to harness the power of Niagara, But is this simply a fantasy? A modern-day fairy-tale for the transition Between the city of Buffalo and the Industrial Revolution And the Age of Electricity? Could it be a source of power Enough to keep you from going supernova? (As Nova sings, she transports them to Niagara Falls and to show him the future. The falls will light up and a thread of light, a constellation if you will, connects the waters to the city of Buffalo—like an airplane view, and all these pinpoints of light will turn on and look like a galaxy, and Niagara Falls the star that powers the universe.) Nova: I've inherited your storyline stories stored in me, :|: ghosts in the machine. You've left me with your gravity I now warp space and time: :|: taking up space enough rendering me hyper in/visible :|:can you feel the pull as light bends around me? I've crossed the threshold and it's too far now :|: starlight I'm sinking — the weight of these stories is spiraling creating a bar and spiral galaxy with the weight of four-and-a-half-million daughters 224 (Nova begins to fade away.) :|: locate me with your telescope, please. :|: when i become :|: starlight — :|: for my super nova :|: will surely be :|: something :|: to see Tesla: Nova! (Nova explodes in a blast of light, setting fire to Tesla’s lab.) Scene 4 (Chorus enters.) Chorus of Bees: Gravity is the physical warping of space. (Chorus exits. The scene is the burned out ruins of Tesla’s lab.) Edison: Did Mr. Tesla survive? Ford: I actually don’t know. No one has heard form Tesla in days. Edison: How did the fire start? Ford: They don’t know the cause as of yet. Edison: Such a pity. Ford: The lab held all his work over the last several years. Who knows much work he lost. Edison: The bright side is this might give us valuable time to catch up. Perhaps reclaim some ground in certain areas. 225 Ford: Not as much ground as we’d like, unfortunately. Last night we got word of some bad news. The International Niagara Commission informed all applicants that The Westinghouse Company was awarded the contract and they’ll be harnessing the power of Niagara. Edison: I see. (Sees a blackened baseball in the rubble and picks it up.) Tell me what I’m thinking isn’t true. Ford: What are you thinking, Tom? Edison: Don’t play games with me, Henry, you will lose. Ford: Will I? I don’t think that’s an accurate statement. When was the last time you won anything? Edison: Is that why you’ve done this? Ford: Done what? Edison: This! Ford! You burned down this man’s laboratory. When did I ever ask for such a gift? Ford: Only you would think of Tesla’s lab burning down as a gift. Edison: I never wanted this to happen. Ford: Neither did I! But you asked for it the day we lost our first contract to Tesla and Westinghouse. Edison: What gives you the right to play god? To cast fires down from your Mount Olympus on South Fifth Avenue? 226 Ford: You have been so much more to me than a mentor. You have been the friend of my life. Edison: How could I have not seen the change in you? Ford: Edison, color me the villain all you like. But I had nothin’ to do with this fire. No matter how much you secretly wish I had. Edison: A man could have been killed. Ford: I quit, sir. Edison: Go back to Michigan, Henry. Ford: I’m sorry. It was an honor, sir. (Exits.) Edison: The war is over, but now it rages inside me. Has my soul become a casualty? Here in a moment, gone in a flash, Why can’t I just let go of the past? I may be a captain of industry, But what will history remember of me? Will it be my inventions in which I’ve poured all my heart? Or will it be the lives I’ve torn apart? The way gears fit together Gives me a way to understand: Gears and wheels will continue To turn even after I’m gone. It was so close, it was within my grasp. I should have known it never could last. I will be chasing Tesla all my life, I can’t help but wonder if it’s worth all this strife. The way gears fit together 227 Gives me a way to understand: Gears and wheels will continue To turn even after Tesla’s gone. Scene 7 (Chorus enters.) Chorus of Bees: When the universe began, there was hydrogen and helium and a little bit of lithium. (Chorus exits. The scene is Niagara Falls.) Tesla: Nova, I am your haunted house. And you are my ghost, Lingering my halls And secret passageways, Refusing to leave—a living memory— Thank God, For to leave means Moving on And as long as you’re here, Safe as houses, So shall I be A home to your lives Living, Remembering, So linger on my stairwell As long as we both shall be. My little soul, a lingering Piece of star light and dust, May we find peace, In our symmetry. For what is a house Without a ghost? (Tesla flips a switch and a trail of electricity begins to light up points in the distance, the City of Buffalo is now powered by electricity. The light resurrects Nova in an act that replicates the beginning of the story, the power simultaneously spawns her to life and creates the Time Prism.) (Tesla and Nova, together.) You turn living into a dance With graceful placement 228 Of the souls of your feet Stepping in time With life. Tesla: It is always me stepping on toes. Nova: Tripping. Tumbling. Tesla: You catch me before a hard fall. Nova: Your love is patience And a strong, guiding glide Across the ballroom floor Of the sky. Tesla: You smile to me That it is the mistakes That make this life Worth living. Tesla and Nova: You make love in a look That Venus would envy But I greedily drink up Every last drop As we waltz together In the afterglow Of a song Gone horribly Wrong. (The final act is Tesla and Nova walking into the night sky together and disappearing in an explosion of star dust.) 229 usagi’s cookbook Thursday, June 3, 1999 I ♥ Musicals I hate musicals. I hate them all, except Mary Poppins and The Wizard of Oz. I didn't use to hate them. In fact, I used to enjoy them once upon a time. I don't know why I enjoyed them, though. I must have been hopped up on the magic juju beans, or just exceptionally bored (remember, I live in the boonies). I have re-watched some of them, and they're downright stupid. West Side Story, in particular, rubs me the wrong way. I get that back in 1958 it was revolutionary because of the subject matter and the choreography and how it ushered musicals into the modern era. But whatever. "I Feel Pretty" makes me want to kick someone in the balls. Another one that annoys me is My Fair Lady. Eliza Doolittle's voice is so obnoxious, I often feel inwardly glad that Audrey Hepburn's own voice was so horrendous that the director was forced to hire some unknown singer voice-over Audrey in the final cut. It makes me glad to know that the director didn't even warn Audrey of this fact before the premiere, so that she was utterly horrified—not to mention "robbed" of an Oscar (Grace Kelly deserved it that year far more than Audrey did anyway). Furthermore, when Eliza changes her voice to something pretentious and, if possible, even more obnoxious, Audrey Hepburn's whole tiny-waisted, doe-eyed, classy mystical balloon is completely deflated for me. She becomes a kind of horrible monster whose beauty is meant to carry the movie. Also, her beauty just makes the men in the film fall in love for her for no other reason than they want to get a handful. And what about the final freakin' line in the movie, when Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) says, "Fetch me my slippers!" I hate that this film is inherently chauvinistic and misogynistic. That just makes me want to kick another person in the jimmy. I hate all things Andrew Lloyd Webber. You name it, if he wrote it, it disgusts me. Evita: boring. Starlight Express: my brain feels like it's going to melt—what's with the roller skates! Jesus Christ Superstar: bleech. If there was any justice in the world, Andrew Lloyd Weber would have to refund every sorry fool who purchased tickets and mistakenly sat through his emotional pandering sentimental garbage. "The Music of the Night" is one of the worst songs ever written. It reads like a broody high schooler wrote it in a fit of romantic depression (oh, wait, aren't I a broody high schooler? Hey, at least I'm not an adult masquerading as one). I know that Rodgers & Hammerstein are the institution of musicals, but I never liked Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I or The Sound of Music. They're all too cutesy in the end. Except maybe Carousel. I mean, the father is French white trash, is murdered, and comes back to somehow help his daughter, but ends up slapping her instead. It’s something that I can relate to. It's awesome. It was awesome precisely because it wasn't perfect and gleaming and happy, but ultimately the storyline ends up really boring. The last musical I'll rail against is Grease. Why is it that every single girl I know wants to be Olivia Newton-John? But they never dress like her when she was sweet, they always choose the trashy version at the end of the movie. Which leads me to why I hate Grease almost as much as I hate 230 Andrew Lloyd Webber: the only way Olivia Newton-John could get John Travolta to be interested in her again was to dress like a slut. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:53 PM 6 comments Dirje said... Fetch me my masculinity, Doll Face. Nick said... Guys and Dolls is good for a laugh. The songs aren't really all that catchy though. It's more like Frasier, on stage, with an audience, with musical numbers. little rabbit arisu said... Are you in Guys and Dolls? You’re the only person who I’d cough down a musical for. Jessica said... I actually enjoyed Evita. (Only ever saw the movie, though.) The Spanish language connection is probably what lured me in. (Was I the only person who spoke Spanish at our school??) Anyway, "Another Suitcase in Another Hall" was one of my favorite songs when I was 16. little rabbit arisu said... And now you’re probably one of the only people who speaks Spanish for reals in the entire state of Michigan. ;) Jessica said... You know me: an attention whore. Friday, June 4, 1999 Blair Witch Project I want to see this movie. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:41 PM 6 comments Dirje said... All the hype around it is interesting. But I can’t decide it’s getting old or not. That website is being circulated like there’s no tomorrow. 231 *~*lindsidawn*~* said... i’ll go with! i want to see that! Nick said... To answer your previous question: yes. But thank GOD I don’t have a singing part. Enough of the cast sounds like they’re sucking on donkey balls. They don’t need me adding to it. *~*lindsidawn*~* said... so what’s the point of being in a musical then? little rabbit arisu said... The spectacle, my dear. The spectacle of it all. Nick said... True dat. Monday, June 7, 1999 Purpose I might as well say it out loud. I’m failing English 103. But I’m acing my desktop publishing class. Mr. Trout says I have an eye for design. So Mrs. Platt said that I could do this blog for extra credit. As long as I keep an entry every school day, she’ll pass me. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:47 PM 8 comments 232 Jessica said... You’re failing?? little rabbit arisu said... *cough* Yes. Jessica said... Shit. little rabbit arisu said... Yeah. Dirje said... I could tutor you if you want. *~*lindsidawn*~* said... what’s a blgo? little rabbit arisu said... You’re looking at the blog, toots. It’s just a webpage. Except with the added bonus of my daily thoughts online instead of secreted away in a journal. Dirje said... So it’s really just a vanity site, then? Tuesday, June 8, 1999 You’re so vain, you probably think this post is about you… I am trying to be honest in all aspects of my life. So I’ll just say it: I’m vain. I didn’t realize that until recently, but I am—and not in that Gaston from Beauty and the Beast sort of way, where one finds empowerment in their source of vanity. Contrary to what I was taught as a child, and 233 contrary to what society attempts to paradoxically sell to me: vanity is not necessarily a bad thing (isn’t it strange that capitalism relies on people being vain but then society chastises vanity as a vice? But that’s a whole ‘nother post altogether). So if you’re going to try to hurt me by calling me vain or trashing my site as a vanity site: too late. I already know. And I’m damn proud of it. Hell, it’s gonna help me pass fuckin’ English. Your words will not haunt me. That’s because I no longer buy what you or my parents or society is sellin’. So you know? Just. Whatever. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:38 PM 3 comments Jessica said... “Hell, it’s gonna help me pass fuckin’ English.” No wonder you failing, girl! Ha! little rabbit arisu said... We can’t all be English majors. Jessica said... Point taken. Wednesday, June 9, 1999 Hell Hath a Name and It’s Name is Badminton I have nothing else to say, so I’m going to complain about the P.E. class I’ve been taking this semester to fill my P.E. requirement. I’m taking Badminton and here’s what the rules for the class say: GRADING METHOD: P/F • You must wear appropriate attire to participate. Appropriate attire for this class is coordinated according to the school colors, which includes: white court or athletic shoes and black shorts/Tshirt/sweats with a red t-shirt, preferably with EDHS logo. Street clothes (including jeans) or shoes are not permissible. • NOTE: You must attempt to participate in every activity. So they enforce school spirit, now? Grrrreat. Besides, it’s freakin’ Badminton! How sweaty are we gonna get? (Not very, let me tell you.) Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:21 PM 5 comments 234 Dirje said... I saw a movie today that reminded me of you. 10 Things I Hate About You. little rabbit arisu said... I swear. You are this (….) close to getting your I.P. banned. Jessica said... Oh my god. I saw that when it first came out in March! She’s totally Kat Stratford! *~*lindsidawn*~* said... omg! totlly! Nick said... Haha! Yeah! I see it! Thursday, June 10, 1999 I Hate You All Y’all can suck it. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:11 PM Comment Privileges Revoked For This Post Friday, June 11, 1999 The World is Lookin’ Aces I believe I aced my calc test. I’ve never been able to say that about anything school related. Ever. It’s about time! Math just makes more sense in my brain. When I turned in my test, Mr. Schmidt looked over it and then looked up and said, “Very good job!” It is possible that to get better than 100% because there was an extra credit question at the end worth 7 points that I know I nailed. Rarely does riding the bus home ever amuse me, but I have to say, today was a hoot. 235 Posted by little rabbit arisu at 7:39 PM 6 comments Jessica said... Does this mean you forgive us? little rabbit arisu said... Not really. But I don’t wanna fail English, yo. *~*lindsidawn*~* said... i know! the ride home was fun. we were actually singing today. Dirje said... What were you singing? little rabbit arisu said... We were singing Pretty Woman like Bill Murray in Stripes. Complete with: “A-left. A-left. A-left-right-left. A-left. A-left. A-left-right-left.” *~*lindsidawn*~* said... doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo! Monday, June 14, 1999 “Damn, it feels good to be gangsta.” Today has been the best day! It’s almost the end of the semester and so we started play-offs today, and badminton was so much fun this morning. I’ve decided to give everyone Badminton Hustler names. We’re still playing “triples” which isn’t technically correct for play-offs, but the class is overly full, so we have to play 3 on 3 (I guess we were all excited about the prospect of not actually sweating while in a P.E. class for once). 236 My team consists of: Spike Harvey (because she likes to spike the birdie at peoples’ heads) *~*lindsidawn*~* (whom I haven’t figured out what to call yet) and Killer (L named me that). And on the other teams that we faced today: Bullet McGee (who is deceptively good at Badminton), and the two Jennifers: Tennessee Jen (cuz she has a southern accent, except I have never bothered to ask where she was from) and Red Jennifer—I named the Jennifer we hate Red Jen because her face gets red when she loses. And she lost today. A lot. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:19 PM 4 comments Nick said... We saw the girls playing badminton as we did laps around the courts. You guys looked hot! little rabbit arisu said... Yeah, I actually did sweat today. I wanna win this damn thing. Nick said... That’s not what I meant. ;) *~*lindsidawn*~* said... did u see red jen’s face when u called her red jen 2 her face? soooo funny! Tuesday, June 15, 1999 “Do you take a plight on my tongue like lead?” I’m only going to school for math and Badminton, because afterwards, L and I ditched and went on a spontaneous trip to Arden Fair Mall. I actually went into a Hallmark store, which I usually try to avoid, but L was looking for a card for her boyfriend. I ended up checking out the clearance section and I saw a bunch of cool stuff for 75% off–now I usually would never say that about a Hallmark store–but I was able to find Mr. Trout a 1999 calendar, because I’m in his office for an hour and a half every Thursday and the man is living with a 1998 calendar. So for $2.95, I bought him a pretty American landscapes calendar, because looking at the 1998 calendar is driving me insane. Then we went to Target, because the one in Folsom is on our way home. But Target must have been going through a huge clearance thing, because everything was red-tagged! So I bought of pair of new sweatpants for $3, and those really fancy pens that Target tries to sell for $8 or $9, marked all the way down to $1.48, so I bought a few for the Artists’ Guild as prizes and some drawing pads, too. 237 But then I mistakenly went down the candle aisle, and I was so good! I didn’t buy any of the yummy-smelling candles that were all on clearance. I swear clearance is my weakness. Bonus points if you know where the title of the post comes from. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 11:44 PM 6 comments Nick said... Is it from an Eve 6 song? little rabbit arisu said... Nope. Jessica said... Doesn’t Mrs. Platt read this thing? Shouldn’t you, I don’t know, have a little more discretion? little rabbit arisu said... Nah. She makes me print it out and she just checks off to see if I’ve written an entry for each day. She doesn’t read it. That would be silly! soul_of_shadows said... It’s from a Lisa Loeb song. She’s not really my cup of tea, but if you’re into a kind of intellectual grrl power, then she’s right up your alley. little rabbit arisu said... Lucky for me. Could be worse. I could like the Spice Girls. Wednesday, June 16, 1999 Possibilities I wonder if I could be a math major. I’ve pretty much always known that I wanted to be a mortician. Or maybe an animator. Or a comic book illustrator. I like working with my hands, maybe a mechanic, even. But then I decided to keep my college options open and went and took a calc class. If I continued in math, maybe I could be a marine biologist–primarily a shark biologist. I’ve wanted to do that since fifth grade. Or maybe I could end up being a computer animator after all. In sixth grade, I really wanted to work at Pixar (this would have been around 1992-93). My dad even bought me a computer animation program, and I was always feverishly working on that. Of course, it was on an Amiga (the bigger brother of the Commodore 64 and Commodore 128). But 238 everyone always told me that if you wanted to be a computer animator, you had to be good at math, and I had always struggled with math, and so I figured that my chances were shot. But I don’t know. All of a sudden, this math thing is clicking. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:51 PM 4 comments Jessica said... I saw that your last post was made at night. Does that mean your family finally bought a computer that could last until the next century? little rabbit arisu said... Yeah, they bought an Acer at Wal-Mart. I’m not allowed to touch it unless they’re not looking… Dirje said... You want to be a mortician? Seriously? little rabbit arisu said... The way I figure it, it wouldn’t be that much different from the existence I’m living now. Thursday, June 17, 1999 “I haven’t got a bank full but I’m thankful to say, I’ve got a fortune in dreams put away, I’ve got a fortune in dreams.” I don’t really have anything to say. Just trying to get my entry done for the day. I rock at Badminton. But it’s a whole lot more fun to play Extreme Badminton–that’s where you have two shuttlecocks and four players on the court slapping haphazardly trying to get the birdies over the net in any way possible, we made it up on today, and by we, I mean me. Ms. Goddard says we have way too much fun playing Badminton. Thursday’s Pop Quiz: What song is the title of this post from? Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:45 PM 7 comments *~*lindsidawn*~* said... we’re totally pissing her off. soul_of_shadows said... 239 I’ve only ever heard that song at the end of the credits for Dream for an Insomniac. It’s sung Frank Sinatra, Jr. He’s got a good voice. Not nearly as good as his dad, but, ya know how it goes… Talent skips a generation. little rabbit arisu said... How did you do that? soul_of_shadows said... Magic, my dear. little rabbit arisu said... Yeah, but… how did you even get here? Do I know you? soul_of_shadows said... Your blog is linked to a friend of mine. What can I say? There’s no accounting for taste… *grin* little rabbit arisu said... Flattery will get you everywhere. Friday, June 18, 1999 Blah I would just like to say, that if I had a cock, this is where I would tell the Artists’ Guild to suck it. Jess will remember the student group I started last year, since she was part of it and all, but, it hasn’t turned out the way I had hoped at all. The inspiration for the organization came from a really awesome watercolor class I took that year, and the whole class, well, it seemed like we had this collective energy and interest in helping each other to create better work. It was invigorating. And I wanted to share that energy with more students at school. But apparently most members suck. I live an hour away from school (two hours if you’re counting by the bus route that drops me off every day), so I honestly don’t have any way to attend the smaller group meetings face-to-face on a weekly basis—my parents refuse to pick me up, and no one in the Artists’ Guild lives relatively near me. As far as officer involvement is concerned, I’ve slowly been ousted from my own student group. I’ve been left out of meetings and decisions among officers of the group—officers I had to beg to be in the group just so we could get a budget from the school. We’re having a really cool event in next week, bringing in artists from Sacramento to speak about the art world–but I wasn’t “allowed” to contact and invite any of the speakers. On top of that, the only responsibility I’m usually left with is creating flyers (since I’m “so good at graphic design”) and then all us officers help distribute the flyers. But after I created the flyers for the event, and got them approved to be put up around school last week, I never saw copies in our 240 mailbox at school, so I couldn’t hang any flyers up. So I didn’t. I’ve spent a lot of my own money on prizes and snacks and copies of flyers for the Artists’ Guild that I will never get reimbursed for, and frankly I didn’t want to spend more money on more flyers out of my own pocket. So I didn’t. Then the vice president posts on our discussion board website that maybe he and his girlfriend should be in charge of the things, like running the organization and posting flyers from now on, so, ya know, it doesn’t get messed up anymore–even though he forgot to put a free 30 word ad in the student newspaper announcing our event on Monday. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:53 PM 4 comments Jessica said... Don’t worry. You can still put it on your college applications. It looks great that you started a student organization. Means that you’ll be an active and productive member of the academic community. little rabbit arisu said... Somehow that does not make me feel better. Jessica said... Look. You can’t just have a pity party for yourself and expect everyone to come. little rabbit arisu said... Yes I can. I can also ban your I.P. address from posting comments. And I just did. Monday, June 21, 1999 Not the Worst Part Jess: what I didn’t say was that his girlfriend is Red Jennifer. I just realized I didn’t include that in my previous post. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:41 PM 2 comments Jessica said... Ew! Dirje said... What’s so bad about Jennifer? She always seemed nice to me. 241 Tuesday, June 22, 1999 Why We Hate Red Vile Jennifer 1. She wears clothes from the Gap. 2. She dyes her hair—not blue or purple or pink, but blonde. 3. With red highlights. 4. And she talks about her hair as if it’s something to be proud of. 5. I’ve known her since seventh grade, and she was vile even then. 6. She would call Jess, “Chiquita Banana.” 7. She would call Jess, “Chiquita Banana,” and then demand that Chiquita Banana dance on the tables. 8. When we told the vice principal, she wouldn’t believe us. 9. Because Red Jennifer’s mom was a teacher’s aide at the school. 10. She’s had two abortions and she’s only 16. 11. She drives a Geo Metro GTI like it’s a Mazda Miata. 12. And it’s construction yellow. 13. She put a dead trout in my locker. 14. She started a rumor that I’m sleeping with Mr. Trout. 15. Red Jennifer’s name really should be Vile Jennifer. 16. And thus, it was so. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:47 PM 7 comments soul_of_shadows said... Those seem like valid reasons to hate someone. Dirje said... Are you sleeping with Mr. Trout? little rabbit arisu said... Uh. No. I don’t even like guys? *~*lindsidawn*~* said... gross! we sleep in the same bed when u come over! little rabbit arisu said... 242 It’s not like that! Jessica said... How is it then?? Nick said... Haha! You’re a dyke! Girl on girl action is hot. Wednesday, June 23, 1999 Duck, Duck, Goose I have a crush on Tilda Swinton. It started with Orlando. The eye contact. Those lips. The weird hair. I loved it all. My first crush, though, was on Justine Bateman from Family Ties. Whenever we watched TV, my dad used to weirdly tease me about liking guys. He would screech at me that I was in loooooove with MacGyver or Michael J. Fox. He said that I wanted to have sex with them. I was six years old and didn’t understand what sex was, but I knew enough to be embarrassed. But I’d take the teasing because I didn’t like Michael J. Fox at all. Justine Bateman was totally cuter. I also remember my mom steering me towards boys. For instance, in second grade, she asked me once if there was anyone I liked, and I remember saying a girl’s name–Carrie, I think, and my mom said, “No. Are there any boys you like?” And I said, “No. The girls are prettier.” Looking back on those moments, I wonder if my parents picked up on the fact that I wasn’t liking boys “the way I was supposed to” and were consciously trying to steer me toward them. As if the teasing or the questions would make me want to like a gender more than the other. A year ago, I found Tilda Swinton and I’ve been livin’ off Orlando ever since. I heard she’s gonna be The Beach next year with Leonardo DiCaprio. Yes!!!11! Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:58 PM 12 comments *~*lindsidawn*~* said... but u don’t have a crush on ne one at school, right? 243 little rabbit arisu said... You’re safe, L. I don’t like you that way. I was afraid to even say anything. Remember that time when we were in Wal-Mart looking for Romeo+Juliet posters with Leonardo Di Caprio and Claire Danes? *~*lindsidawn*~* said... hey yeah! u bought a Leonardo di caprio poster. you’re not going to hell! little rabbit arisu said... Actually, I had a crush on Claire Danes from Romeo + Juliet. I was specifically looking for a poster of Claire Danes but all they had was a poster of Leonardo DiCaprio. I didn’t tell you that I wanted a poster of a girl in my room because at the time you were way into the Orthodox Christian thing, complete with the idea of courting before marriage instead of dating–this was before you met Ted, remember? *~*lindsidawn*~* said... yeah. u r still going to hell. but i luv u ne way. But not like THAT! *gigglez* Dirje said... Do you even like guys at all? little rabbit arisu said... Tilda Swinton. :P:::: I have had way more girl crushes than boy crushes growing up–and this resulted in my dad telling me that if I ever became gay he would kill me. But recently, I asked my mom how would she feel if it turned out that her daughter was gay, and my mom just said that she would be sad that I would never know the joy of having children of my own. As for guys, though, I don’t know. I kinda like Jude Law. He was cute in that movie Music From Another Room. But I like Angelina Jolie more. I even like her in the interviews I’ve read. Dirje said... Yeah, but, if a guy asked you out, would you say yes? soul_of_shadows said... It’s hard to compete with the Swinton, you have to admit that. little rabbit arisu said... I want to say that if we had a soulful connection, gender wouldn’t matter. soul_of_shadows said... That sounds like a challenge... *grin* Thursday, June 24, 1999 A Prayer For the Wild At Heart 244 As a child, I was called Little Rabbit. I had a fondness for rabbits. Soft fur. Wet eyes. The unexpected presence of claws. I kept my first rabbit in a cage made of chicken wire and wood pallets. We had a lot of wood pallets on our property. My dad stole dozens of pallets from behind Lucky’s and Grocery Outlet. He said that the recycling plant would pay five dollars a pallet, but the recycling plant only bought two, and we were left with the rest. So he tried his hand at recycling the pallets. He built a fence for the chickens, but the chickens squeezed between the slats and ran around the yard. He built a deck for the house out of the pallets, but after my little sister broke her leg after slipping through the wooden slats, my mother forbade us from ever walking on the deck again. She didn’t tear it down, though. She waited for Dad to that. And she waited. And she waited. My mother slaughters rabbits for a living. I used to watch her sometimes, and I would watch the way she snapped their necks. I practiced on my first rabbit. He was downy and grey. His brown eyes watery with life. I remembered the way I had seen my mother crack the spines. I pulled on both legs until the rabbit went straight and twitching. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 4:27 PM 5 comments Dirje said... I don’t think you really killed a rabbit. little rabbit arisu said... You only think that because you have a crush on me. Dirje said... What was his name? little rabbit arisu said... Rex Harrison. *~*lindsidawn*~* said... true story. 245 Friday, June 25, 1999 Kept In Cages I have formaldehyde in my closet. Twelve jars of amber liquid. My clothes are on the floor to make room for the jars. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 8:02 AM 5 comments Dirje said... So what’s in these jars? *~*lindsidawn*~* said... her room smells like ass. lol! little rabbit arisu said... What would I do without you, L? *~*lindsidawn*~* said... prolly a happy little dance! lol! little rabbit arisu said... Nah, that’s probably what I’d do without Vile Jennifer. Heh. Monday, June 28, 1999 12 Kinds of Lagomorphs My mother works at a rabbitry. As a child, I thought my mother worked at a Rabbit Tree. I envisioned my mother collecting rabbits like apples, where small baby bunnies would bud on the limbs of green trees, with my mother plucking the ones that were perfect and ripe. 246 White rabbits are the most profitable to raise for slaughter because every part can be used and sold for profit. Parts dyed to match. The pelt is skinned. Rabbit fur coats. The feet are clipped. Lucky key fobs. The ears are snipped. Delicate dog treats. The meat is carved. Restaurant menu fresh. The intestines are spilled. Ground up and fed to worms. The leftover parts of the rabbits are fed to a wood chipper, and the rabbits are chopped into fine mulch and are spread amongst the long, low planters that house the nightcrawlers. The worms grow fat on the bodies of recently living rabbits. One Styrofoam cup of nightcrawlers can fetch five dollars at the general store. When my mother would grab one for breaking, some of the rabbits would kick ferociously. Usually it was the mama rabbits being grabbed away from their litter of bunnies, too old to suckle, not old enough for profit. But those mama rabbits kicked like they knew what was comin’. As if they had dreamt about this day inside their cages. Do rabbits dream? Blood is surprisingly thick in rabbits, my mother says. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 5:23 PM 2 comments soul_of_shadows said... *poke* little rabbit arisu said... Ow. That hurts. Tuesday, June 29, 1999 Happy Bamboo I bought a “lucky bamboo” on Saturday. *~*lindsidawn*~* and I drove down to the Target in Folsom (she’s redecorating her bedroom and wanted a new comforter). I read online that the “lucky bamboo” on the market today is not really bamboo, but just a plant that looks and grows like bamboo. Either way, I needed a hearty little plant that could survive without much sunlight, as my room at home doesn’t get “direct sunlight.” I was willing to compromise not having real bamboo, like the kind I had grown up with back home in California, for a “lucky bamboo” that would mark the beginning of a spiritual transformation that was sparked by my Badminton class. It used to be that I dreaded every time I left my house, because it always felt like I was fighting to survive. Whether it was on the bus—I have never encountered such dangerous driving conditions in my life (the bus driver is psy-cho!) or just walking home from the General Store (it’s the closest bus stop to my house) two miles down my road—where stares from strangers always remind me of the way coyotes circle their prey. 247 I allowed the apathy to grow in my soul as I saw our property fill up with pallets that my dad stole from behind the Lucky’s, Raley’s and Grocery Outlet in Placerville. I knew I had to somehow stop allowing my surroundings dictate the way I felt, but I also felt powerless to do so. I was stagnant in a state of self-paralysis, and I admit, I was quite content to let the world take the blame for how I felt. It’s usually easier to place the blame somewhere else, rather than owning my actions. However, in the Badminton, I have own my actions. I have to be one with the racket. I decide how and where my body will move. Badminton has forced me to take charge of myself, which is a seemingly obvious aspect of the exercise, but for me it was a revelation to a new way of thinking. At the moment, yes, my “lucky bamboo” is a little on the stubby side. It’s nothing like the tall and majestic bamboo I’ve seen in National Geographic magazines at the dentist’s office. Even though my little baby “lucky bamboo” isn’t tall and isn’t majestic, I believe that I have more in common with this plant than I would with those kind of bamboo. It’s not as graceful or as pliable as the twelve-foot shoots in pictures. But it’s just a sapling, and so it’s okay if it’s not as flexible right now. It must build itself a sturdy base before it learns how to bend; it needs to grow before it can stretch. In this way, I feel strangely akin to this little green plant. I, too, must learn to root myself in the ground before I can allow my body to move with fluidity. If I am to continue growing in the future, I must learn how to embrace my environment, without allowing it to affect my mood. I must be the one in control of my growth. I plan look to my “lucky bamboo” to serve as a reminder of the physical, emotional and spiritual growth that is possible. The bamboo bends and gives with the grey storm and returns again still. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 11:23 PM 2 comments soul_of_shadows said... Did you win the playoffs? little rabbit arisu said... We sure did. Wednesday, June 30, 1999 Death in My Yard 248 I like looking at dead things. I am curious about death, and looking at an animal with lifeless doll eyes makes me feel better about it. I can understand death when I’m looking at something dead. When I look away, I forget again. Death is the blue jay on a summer day. Jack, our neighbor, shoots blue jays. I thought it was cruel, not to shoot the birds necessarily, but to shoot them as they flew. How horrible it must be to feel the ground lift away beneath your feet only to meet it again because an idiot, who has no appreciation for freedom, has shot you through the chest with his jealousy. How cruel not to shoot the bird in the head, I thought. At least in the head death would be instant. But through the chest, the bullet rips through the torso with the elegance of a razorblade. One clean line for blood to drip through, and life seeps through that opening like an hourglass. I carried the blue jay that fell in our yard. I wrapped its wound with gauze and medical tape. The blue jay didn’t snap at me. It didn’t try to fight. It looked cute, wrapped up in white mesh. Hopeful. But soon, it’s rapid breathing slowed, and I prayed. I prayed that the little blue jay went to heaven. I prayed that it got the chance to fly again. I prayed that Jack would stop shooting the birds. I prayed that I wouldn’t have to pray again. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 5:26 PM 9 comments Dirje said... I’ve never seen an animal die before. I’m not allowed to have pets. But I did see my mom die. Yeah, probably not like the blue jay. little rabbit arisu said... Sumimasen. I didn’t know your mom died. I’m so sorry… Maybe my blog isn’t, ya know, the best place for you to be… ya know, considering… Dirje said... Doomo. No, it’s entirely okay. It happened when I was young, and my mom died of cancer. It wasn’t something traumatic and sudden like a car crash or a shooting. little rabbit arisu said... I don’t know. Still seems traumatic enough. Jessica said... Still taking Japanese, I see. Will you ever learn? You should take Spanish, then we can be the only people who speak Spanish in Michigan together. little rabbit arisu said... Baby, I am Japanese. When are you coming home, anyway? It’s freaking July. 249 Jessica said... It’s called summer school. I need to take a differential equations class if I stick with Chem Eng. little rabbit arisu said... Who wants to be in Chemical Engineering anyway? Jessica said... It makes bank. Thursday, July 1, 1999 This Concludes Our Broadcast Day The semester is over. I don’t have to keep this blog anymore. And besides, I won’t have easy access to posting anymore, since I’m not allowed to touch my dad’s computer. It’s not like I was enjoying this compulsory activity everyday. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 5:26 PM 7 comments soul_of_shadows said... But who will keep me entertained all the way over here in Henderson, NV? little rabbit arisu said... http://www.hamsterdance.com soul_of_shadows said... I’ll miss you and your goofy sexuality. little rabbit arisu said... Even if I don’t keep the blog, that doesn’t mean we can’t e-mail. Jessica said... Did you fail English 103? 250 And how I am supposed to keep updated will the inner workings of the town I left behind? little rabbit arisu said... I got a C-. soul_of_shadows said... I don’t have your e-mail. But you have mine from the admin side of commenting, I see. Saturday, July 17, 1999 Day at the Movies I spent the day with *~*lindsidawn*~*—we saw The Blair Witch Project. As soon as it was over, *~*lindsidawn*~* said: “That was dumb.” I’ve heard you either love the movie or hate the movie. Clearly, L is in the latter category. As for me, I’m not sure how I feel about it. I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it either. I don’t think I could watch it over and over—not like some horror movies, like Jaws. Blair Witch, it’s kinda, I don’t know… disturbing. And not disturbing in A Nightmare On Elm Street sort of way. When I was little, my dad made me watch horror movies, so I’ve seen it all: Night of the Living Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Chuckie, Puppet Master, Pumpkinhead, Gremlins (Select Video mistakenly categorizes that movie in the Children/Family section of the store, and I complain all the time that it’s a horror film. Just wait until some unsuspecting newbie mom rents it for her three-year-old thinking, “Hey! I remember Gizmo! He was cute!” Then Select Video will be sah-ah-ha-ree), as well as some of the more obscure horror flicks like Return of the Living Dead, which, in addition to Jaws and A Nightmare On Elm Street were the three movies I watched over and over and over again as a child, albeit for completely different reasons: Jaws: Spawned my unhealthy obsession with sharks. I’ve seen every Discovery Channel shark week since I was 10 (we don’t have cable, but my Obaasan—that’s grandmother in Japanese ya’ll—does and she tapes it for me every year), after which I hand-made flyers about saving sharks espousing the danger of eating shark fin soup and not cutting the links of plastic in six-packs of soda. I always root for the shark, man. Always. Return of the Living Dead: This came out in the early 80s and I remember sitting and watching it with my dad. It’s an unofficial, if, at times, comical, sequel to the original Night of the Living Dead—did you know that George A. Romero originally titled the 1968 version Night of the Flesheaters? But the studio thought the title was too gory, so they changed it to Living Dead, and when they changed it, the copyright mark was lost, and thus, George lost the copyright to the entire franchise. So yeah, anyone can make a Living Dead movie and George gets no residuals. Why did I watch it over and over again? It had this medical supplies factory where the medical supplies that used to be alive, like a split dog so you can see what the insides look like, come to life after exposed to a certain kind of gas. I kinda always liked the split dog kicking it’s legs and barking like those toy dogs that you wind up and they bark like outside Kay-Bee-Toy Store. A Nightmare On Elm Street: Spawned my father’s unhealthy obsession with terrifying me. Freddy Krueger was the one bad guy—aside from Chuckie—that really scared the bejeezus out of me because no matter where you were: you weren’t safe. If he crept into 251 your dreams, you might accidentally pull him into real life. And for a kid who had exceptionally vivid dreams, this was a horrifying prospect. In 1988, Toys ‘R Us sold the Freddy Krueger razor blade glove. My dad eventually bought two—the first one’s blades got bent by my little sister nibbling on them—and would cast Freddy Kruger Razor Blade Shadows on my walls at night, and when I’d scream and run down the hall, he’d laugh and laugh. In 1988, Toys ‘R Us also sold Freddy Krueger dolls—not action figures, not dolls the size of Barbies, but freakin’ huge dolls. The kind of doll that looks like it could open its own box and crawl out no problem. Fuckin’ Toys ‘R Us, fuckin’ ruined my life… Posted by little rabbit arisu at 1:26 AM 7 comments soul_of_shadows said... Personally, I prefer a good musical. ;) little rabbit arisu said... Have I not been traumatized enough? soul_of_shadows said... Oh, of course. How could I forget the post that got me hooked on you. little rabbit arisu said... Don’t you mean my blog? soul_of_shadows said... If that helps you. Jessica said... Some friends I went and saw it. That is one messed up movie. Monday, August 16, 1999 252 Go See Cal I saw my first Cal Worthington commercial in at least a decade. For those of you who are not native Southern Californians (and really, we can’t all be as fabulous as myself), then you may not know who Cal is, and I suggest you go here. The best footage is a link at the bottom of the page that says, “The best of Cal.” That way you’ll get to hear the famous Cal Worthington theme song. I grew up with Cal peddling me Chevrolets and Dodge trucks. He would stand on his head just to get my business. He’d ride an armadillo just to get my business. He featured lions, tigers and bears in his catchy commercials as, “Go see Cal! Go see Cal! Go see Cal!” played in the background. But don’t forget his dog, Spot. Which brings me to why Cal Worthington is the subject of this post. When my family moved from San Diego to Mt. Aukum when I was in first grade, I never saw another Cal commercial. We only have TV reception out here on clear days, which is to say we don’t have many clear days. And satellite is too expensive. My mom makes six dollars an hour and my dad spends his Naval stipend on god knows what. I was at school, like I am now, except I wasn’t in the computer lab writing or doing research. I was in the career counselor’s office when I heard the music queue up, and I got filled with that little girl excitement that used to fill up inside my chest like a balloon filling with helium whenever I heard his theme song. I always came running into the room when I heard Cal’s commercials on television. I don’t think I ever saw the same one twice. No matter how bad it got at home, I still had Cal. My dad could push me into the ceiling by my shoulders and drop me free-fall style, but then Cal’s commercial would sing to me in the background. His voice and music like a twisted soundtrack to my own personal movie. Cal’s face was unchanging, but his antics always did. But I saw Cal tonight. Actually this morning. About 14 minutes ago. The Price Is Right was on in the office. And he’s old. He’s so old. My nose started to tingle, the way it tingles right before I start to cry. I don’t know why, but it was so awful to see Cal, at 81 years old, wrinkled, trying to be enthusiastic—and with a lisp now. Did he have a stroke? Is his face half paralyzed? Is able to stand on his head anymore? And suddenly I wondered how many Spots have there been since Spot the First? Cal Worthington will die. And so will I. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 11:21 AM 6 comments soul_of_shadows said... No one should have to go through what you’re going through right now. Don’t shut us out, A. 253 *~*lindsidawn*~* said... *huggles* Jessica said... There a lot of old people in Michigan. Were there ever this many old people in Cali? *~*lindsidawn*~* said... we hide the old fogies away in old fogies homes. doncha member the all those places in pville? Jessica said... How many are there? little rabbit arisu said... At least three. Wednesday, August 18, 1999 My Celluloid Life We didn’t always live here. We’ve lived in a city once. For all of third grade and part of fourth grade, I lived in Roseville (which is a suburb of Sacramento). Brentwood Road was like every other road in Roseville: one-story houses painted in the least offensive array of beiges, blues and greens. Their lawns were neatly kept and groomed emerald. Except for ours. Instead of mowing the lawn, my dad made stop-motion movies using me and my sisters as props, silently and magically scooting around the yard. I hated summer vacation that year because I was constantly starring in my dad’s movies. And these movies took hours to shoot. The first movie had us scooting around the front yard, stop-motion style. There’s one where I’m the only one scooting around the backyard. There’s another one where I’m scooting around the side patio on the concrete—that was the most painful movie, actually. Concrete is fine for handball, but isn’t comfortable for long periods of sitting. After a while, my dad got tired of the stop-motion shorts that demonstrated, well, nothing, and he moved on to narrative, silent film. 254 Of course, that meant horror movies. There was the one with the vampire father and I became the bitten, adopted, undead vampire daughter. There was the one that was a dream within a dream within a dream where Freddy Krueger killed me in the bathroom and I woke up, and then he killed me in my bed and I woke up and there was a shadow of Freddy Krueger on the wall and then the film goes black. Then there was the one where my Boglin came to life and attacked my sister, Julie, and after I was able to pry it off her slightly-moving corpse (after she was visibly “dead” her arm spastically juts straight in the air), I throw the Boglin into the microwave, turn the dial and watch it cook and then explode. Any other day, my dad would have re-shot the scene where Julie’s arm screws up the continuity, but he was using Super8mm film, and he only had enough to finish that movie. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 12:07 PM 3 comments Jessica said... I remember Boglins. I had Dwork. We could have had a Boglin empire. Dirje said... Hey, I thought you were from San Diego! little rabbit arisu said... I’ve lived all ovah, dah-ling. It’s one of the perks of being a Navy brat. Thursday, August 19, 1999 Ye Olde, Ye Olde School started up this week, and that means Vile Jennifer is back to her old tricks. There were maxi-pads stuck all over my locker, and each one read: Dykes Don’t Have Periods Posted by little rabbit arisu at 2:07 PM 1 comments Dirje said... Maybe you should be careful about the stuff you post on here. 255 Monday, August 23, 1999 Lies I came to school today with a black eye. My homeroom teacher asked me if I was okay, and I nodded yes. I did not speak because I did not trust my voice to lie. I knew I would say the truth. On my way to the bus this morning, I slung my backpack over my shoulder and my mother grabbed my shoulders and turned me around, her grey and yellow teeth in my face, hot cigarette breath in my nostrils. “If you tell, they will take you away. They will take you away from me. They’ll take Julie.” I can’t leave my mother here. I can’t leave my sister here. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 10:22 AM 12 comments *~*lindsidawn*~* said... omg. r u ok? little rabbit arisu said... I’m okay. I can’t live like this anymore, though. *~*lindsidawn*~* said... you can come stay @ my house? little rabbit arisu said... Thanks. But I can’t leave them here with him. Dirje said... …you need to tell someone… little rabbit arisu said... 256 Thanks. But my family tried that already… NSA investigated him once and he made my mom write a retraction to everything she said in the original statement. I doubt NSA would ever take us seriously again. soul_of_shadows said... Could you whisper in my ear The things you wanna feel I'll give you anything To feel it comin' Do you wake up on your own And wonder where you are You live with all your faults I wanna wake up where you are I won't say anything at all So why don't you slide Tuesday, August 24, 1999 Here Be Dragons I can’t handle this right now. You don’t know me. We have poetry. We even have a song on the radio that reminds us of one another. But you’re in Nevada. That might as well be in China for all the good it does me. I need some time. I need some space. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 10:42 AM 1 comments soul_of_shadows said... I’m not going to give up just because you’re afraid. Friday, September 10, 1999 That Time at K-Mart I stole from K-Mart once. I never told anybody until now. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 4:01 PM 13 comments *~*lindsidawn*~* said... we got cot tho1 257 little rabbit arisu said... I’m not talking about that time we got caught, L. We didn’t actually end up stealing anything because we got caught. *~*lindsidawn*~* said... lol i remember we were so scared1 what did u steal? little rabbit arisu said... I’m not talking about that time we got caught, L. We didn’t actually end up stealing anything because we got caught. I ‘spose we shouldn’t have been messing around in the toy section setting off all the Tickle Me Elmo dolls in the aisle. Drew too much attention to ourselves. I went back. Dirje said... Remember when we heard some people from school had been caught stealing from Raley’s? Was that you guys? little rabbit arisu said... No. I stole a lipstick. *~*lindsidawn*~* said... we were soooo stupid. u dont wear lipstick even! little rabbit arisu said... I thought I might if I had one. soul_of_shadows said... Hmmm… little rabbit arisu said... Now you know what kind of person I am. 258 soul_of_shadows said... What color was it? little rabbit arisu said... The kind of blood red it’s almost purple. soul_of_shadows said... I can deal with that… Monday, September 13, 1999 Jar Number Two The second jar has the skin my snake shed. It was an albino rubber boa. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 4:01 PM 8 comments Dirje said... The first bowl on the earth the second bowl on the sea the third bowl on the rivers the fourth bowl on the sun the fifth bowl on the beast the sixth bowl on the stars the seventh bowl on the air And the earth turned grey sea turned black The rivers turned red The sun turned cold The beast turned pale The stars turned fast The air turned to poison little rabbit arisu said... Enigma: The Voice and the Snake. Don’t try to pass that off like you wrote it… You ain’t that clever. Dirje said... Yeah? Well, soul_of_shadows didn’t write that poem in that other post, either. But you’re not calling him out on it. little rabbit arisu said... David: I have a radio. And that song has… significance between us. 259 Dirje said... It does? :) little rabbit arisu said... Uh... Maybe I misspoke myself. I meant the Goo Goo Dolls has significance between me and S. soul_of_shadows said... Be still my heart. Jessica said... Is David still a dork? Oy. Nothing changes even when you go away to college. Sunday, October 3, 1999 What It Must Be Like to Be a Rock Star I can’t seem to think today. I just listen to the music and hum and sing along every once in a while. I wonder what it’s like to be a rock star. Do you suppose they ever forget the words to their own songs? Posted by little rabbit arisu at 9:50 AM 1 comments Dirje said... If you were a rock star, you’d forget the words. And the little people. Tuesday, October 5, 1999 Some Kind of Fairytale So, yeah, I’m writing a short story. I’m a writer now, peepz! Deal! *** The Goat Man brought Olivia to his backyard where a line of chicken coops sprawled along a fence. He unlatched a decrepit wooden door and grabbed the hen by the feet and hung her upside down. She became quiet and still, with her wings outstretched and akimbo. As he stepped out of the coop, he tied the chicken's legs together and went over to a log round. He then made a loop around its neck and tied it down to end of the round, and the feet to the other side. The hen 260 was reawakened, and started scrabbling on the log, trying to break free. He picked up a maul. One of the chicken's feet got loose, and was scratching, scratching, scratching. The Goat Man flipped the heavy wedge towards him, and pointed the blade towards the log. As the iron struck the fleshy length of neck, the dull, wet thud of the axe-head on the maul severed the head from the spine. The chicken's head fell into the mud below. The iron blade of the maul protruded from the neck of the chicken, the blade embedded in the log. A thin trail of steam floated from the neck, and blood leaked down the side of the log round, staining the yellow age rings brown, darkening to black. The rest was silence. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 1:33 AM 7comments *~*lindsidawn*~* said... she is so totlly the goatman! her backyard is totlly made up of chicken coops! Dirje said... I thought so! She thinks she can be all sly and get away with this obviously transparent story. Geez, Alice… little rabbit arisu said... Uh. You mean Arisu. ARISU. Dirje said... Nope. I mean Alice. Alice. Alice. Alice Vaughn. little rabbit arisu said... Fuck. I really need to start screening the comments first. soul_of_shadows said... You’re not Japanese? 261 little rabbit arisu said... Arisu is the Japanese version of my name. Wednesday, October 6, 1999 The Jig, As They Say, Is Up I’m not Japanese. Not even remotely. In second grade, I told people I was born in Japan, but that was a lie, too. I never meant to hurt anyone. I’m sorry if I did. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 12:22 AM 1 comments *~*lindsidawn*~* said... i 4give u. :) Thursday, October 7, 1999 Masks Can you feel my heartbeat? It shouldn’t even be a question. I refuse to let it be a question, because I know that you can. You can even hear the music I listen to, just like that night when you knew it was Slide I was singing to myself, with me over here and you all the way over in China. Tell me how it is possible that you know when I am crying when I’m alone in my room. Tell me how it is possible that I knew the moment your heart was breaking. Now tell me why I couldn’t call you to apologize… Posted by little rabbit arisu at 10:58 AM 4 comments little rabbit arisu said... It’s because you won’t give me your phone number. I could type out sigh and sigh out loud. *sigh* There. Now I’m a total nerd. soul_of_shadows said... I’m sorry. But know that you didn’t hurt me, love. I never really pictured you Japanese anyway. ;) Well, maybe I pictured you like an anime character, Japanese on the inside and American on the outside (in particular, I pictured you as Sailor Mars). 262 But my parents felt safer thinking you were Japanese. Now, who knows, you could be anyone. Ya know? I can’t betray my parents. We’re still in high school. They own our lives ‘til graduation. *~*lindsidawn*~* said... she could be a guy! little rabbit arisu said... true story. Friday, October 8, 1999 Breathing is Hard I feel like that talking Barbie doll that pissed everyone off: math is hard. So is breathing. All day I have had this crushing feeing of pain, it’s making it hard to breathe. I’ve kept my inhaler close to me at all times. I miss you. I hope you know that. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 1:51 AM 2 comments *~*lindsidawn*~* said... you just saw me on friday! haha1 little rabbit arisu said... Don’t I know it. Saturday, October 9, 1999 Some Kind of Fairytale, Cont’d Naked from the waist down, were the goat legs of the Goat Man. He was coated in light brown fur, but his heart girth was the widest part of his belly, and it was pink and stretched taut. The stifle joints in his legs were thin, and the knees above his cannon bones were knobbly, and bent 263 awkwardly as his legs supported the uncomfortable bulk of his human torso. Even the legs were coated in a thin, delicate auburn brown hide. But his knees, his knees were bulbous. Where the Goat Man’s feet should have been, were hooves, which were sunk deep into the mud. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 4:07 PM 5 comments soul_of_shadows said... Obviously, I can’t stay away. I will. I must. But I must tell you one more time. I do love nothing in the world so well as you. There. I have said it and now everyone knows. Move on, as must we both, but I shall be back… when my parents aren’t freaked out by the fact that I’ve fallen in love over the Internet. little rabbit arisu said... It’s true love in the digital age. Tell them to get with the program. *~*lindsidawn*~* said... sweetie, no one sez get with the program anymo. soul_of_shadows said... They won’t even let me check my e-mail anymore. I can only get away with visiting webpages. So please, don’t stop updating. But, also, please, be on the lookout for Angelina. little rabbit arisu said... How could she compare now that I know you are in the world? Monday, October 11, 1999 Promise You’ve made your points clear. I will keep my eyes open for someone else, but I make no promises. Before I knew you, I did look, and I didn’t find anyone. Except Angelina Jolie. And even then, she was only in my fantasies. You were real. 264 I mean sure, at first there was the not minding the “getting to know someone” stage, but once I would get to know a person: bleech. No one ever understood me. And who am I kidding? I didn’t want to understand them either. I’m just a dark and little person in the world. But I understand if we can’t be together. If it came down between me and your parents, I wouldn’t want you to betray your parents just to talk to me. You made life different for a while. I wasn’t such a dark person, even when the dark things would happen to me. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 10:54 PM 2 comments soul_of_shadows said... Want to try again? little rabbit arisu said... I haven’t smiled in days until now. Tuesday, October 12, 1999 Some Kind of Fairytale, Act Seven Then the Goat Man told his story. “Once upon a time, there was a gnarled black oak tree in this town, with limbs tightly curled and ribbed like the horns of a ram. The tree itself was nearly split in half, from a time when men sought to chop the tree down and carve it into houses and barns. But as the saws sawed through the meat of the tree, and axes chopped away at the massive trunk, a black residue began to ooze forth like a seeping wound, coating the men in black pitch. “As the years passed, the men had children of their own, and the children were born with the stink of pitch on their bodies, and soon these men and their deformed families were ostracized from town. It was bad luck to allow these men and their children to live within the village limits. A plague could curse them all. The village forced the men who had helped build the town to abandon their homes in search of seclusion, far from the prying eyes of those whose skin was clean. But one man, who had at one time raised an axe against the tree, stayed behind, intending to guard the tree that had tainted them all. He would never allow another soul to cut the tree down, and be cursed the way he and his fellows had been. “I was one of those men, who attempted to cut down the tree. My legs were covered in pitch, and soon my legs began to rot away. I would have given anything to be able to walk again,” the Goat Man paused, “So I made a deal with the cursed tree. If it would give me new legs, I would guard it with my life. The tree granted me my wish, it gave me new legs, and now I live to protect the tree in return.” Posted by little rabbit arisu at 3:54 PM 5 comments 265 soul_of_shadows said... Let’s say that if neither of us is married by 2009…. little rabbit arisu said... That would give us ten whole years to find someone else. That’d kinda be abiding by your parents’ decree, right? soul_of_shadows said... Absolutely. They want me to date girls in Henderson, or, on my side of China, as the ‘Little A’s say—not over the Internet. They want me to be a normal teenager. little rabbit arisu said... Who wants to be normal? You know, that’s one of the things I hate about the girls on Charmed. They’re always complaining about wanting a normal life. One without their magical powers. But geez. Who would rather be normal when you can have magic in your life? soul_of_shadows said... This is why I love you. Thursday, October 14, 1999 Some Kind of Fairytale, End As the Goat Man told his story, he and Olivia found themselves behind her family’s property, and a stench was in the air. On the table, stark still and eyes closed, was Oliver. His skin was cooked green, the color of a poisonous twilight. Aunt May and Uncle Junior were standing over him, already carving up his body. Oliver’s finger was on Aunt May’s fork. Olivia howled. 266 From deep within her belly, she howled her sorrow and rage. She could feel her teeth lengthen there, in the daylight. Her hands grew claws, and she lunged at her aunt. Olivia scrambled up her aunt's fatty body, her claws digging into the superfluous flesh around her aunt’s arms for a better grip. Olivia found May's neck and bit down hard. Olivia's teeth went through skin, muscle and a layer of fatty tissue as she thrashed her head from side to side. Her aunt collapsed across the table, a gaping hole in the place where her neck met her shoulders. Her eyes unstaring as blood leaked out from her wound, and slowly soaked through the white tablecloth. The Goat Man fought off Uncle Junior, using the strong, goat muscles along his stifle joints to kick him through a window. Uncle Junior ran down the porch and into the field, and Olivia sprinted after him on all fours. The pads in her clawed feet were soft against the fire-torn ground. As she ran, Olivia smelled coyotes and deer running beside her, the sweet smell of sweat beneath their fur, and Uncle Junior was never seen again. That night, a wolf made her way back to the house where her brother’s body laid. The wolf nudged the grey-green body, curled up beside it. Blood drenched the wolf’s muzzle; even in the dry air the wolf’s fur glistened red and brown. The Goat Man approached the wolf, and looked the wolf in her blue eyes, blazing, and he picked up the body of her brother and began to walk. The wolf walked behind the Goat Man. Her new limbs were longer, leaner and more agile. Her shoulders seemed to move independently. In a small clearing, a sliver of moonlight illuminated a gnarled black oak tree, which looked as if it had been split in half at one time. The Goat Man laid Oliver’s body on the ground, and knelt beside him. The wolf curled up next to them both and cried, a lonely, solitary howl in the night. As the wolf’s lupine tears touched her brother’s body, the body began to float above the tree. In the silver moonlight, against the cascade of stars in the sky, Oliver turned into an acorn. The wolf dug a hole near the tree that had granted her only wish. She dug quickly and fervently with her newly shaped paws until the hole was just deep enough to nestle the acorn inside. She covered her brother with the fertile earth in which she knew he could be firmly rooted, and then she curled herself on top of the seed to keep it safe. The wolf turned to the Goat Man and tried to speak, but found the words uncomfortable in her jaws. She realized she had no need of words any longer. The wolf realized, then, when she was with her brother, she had never really needed words at all. For S, Happy Birthday Posted by little rabbit arisu at 12:03 AM 5 comments soul_of_shadows said... We need a date in 2009. little rabbit arisu said... I’m really bad at remembering dates. Especially birthdays. Like, one of my posts was on *~*lindsidawn*~*’s birthday and I didn’t say, “Happy Birthday!” and she got all pissy with me at school. 267 soul_of_shadows said... How about 12/25/2009? little rabbit arisu said... I kinda always hated Christmas. In 2009, I’ll have a reason to like it. *~*lindsidawn*~* said... my birthday was August 19th! Grrrr! Tuesday, October 19, 1999 “Talking About Love Is Like Dancing About Architecture” Who has seen Playing By Heart? Posted by little rabbit arisu at 12:03 AM 3 comments soul_of_shadows said... Um… I haven’t. Oops? little rabbit arisu said... I miss you a lot. Just thought I should say that if it isn’t already obvious. But I am wrestling with the fact that we’re still communicating. I don’t want going behind your parent’s back just to talk to me. Maybe I shouldn’t update this anymore… It’s just… Already, I’m betraying your trust. I’m not looking for anyone else over here. My heart is yours. I already know I’ll never find someone like you. soul_of_shadows said... Not even Tilda or Angelina? Saturday, October 24, 1999 268 The Birds I was sitting outside earlier today, and there were 13 robins bouncing around our lawn. And I say bouncing because it looked like they all had their own little trampoline beneath them with the way they were hopping around. And there was one little robin that hopped away from the rest, and suddenly all 12 of her buddies flew away. She turned around and I could almost see her shrug her little robin shoulders. Then she continued on her hopping and scouting for food. Eventually, her friends all flew back, yet, still, this little robin continued about her own business. Alone. That’s how I feel sometimes. Except without the instinctive hunger for worm meat. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 1:13 AM 4 comments soul_of_shadows said... I love you. Even if you ate worms. little rabbit arisu said... I never want to stop saying I love you. I never want to stifle those urges. But at the same time, I’m struggling with this. I want nothing more than for you to be happy and getting better and being comfortable with girls over there in China. But… I’m starting to think the only way that can happen is if I’m not in the picture. Which is why your parents forbade you to have contact with me. soul_of_shadows said... Just because I can’t find anyone worth talking to at home doesn’t mean I’m socially awkward. little rabbit arisu said... That’s not what I meant. Sunday, October 25, 1999 Someday We’ll Know What we’re doing is wrong. Posting these messages for you to read later. It’s cheating. And I don’t want you to cheat and someday resent me for it. I’ll go cold turkey if that means you’ll be happier and free of guilt. But at the same time, I’m being selfish and want to tell you how I’m feeling. I leave this up to you. I won’t expect a message for a while, so please don’t feel pressured or anything. And until I know exactly how you feel about all this, I won’t post, okay? Because if you 269 do feel guilty, and I keep posting and stuff while you’re trying to decide, that is extremely unfair of me because it might influence your decision. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 1:13 AM 0 comments Monday, November 7, 1999 Lab We are supposed to create a laboratory experiment, complete with working hypothesis and conclusion, for Biology. My proposal is an experiment trying to find the perfect poison for garden use. One that will eradicate unwanted pests (rats), but not harm the valuable insects (praying mantids). Called exterminators today. Only uses catch and release traps. Suggested pharmacy. Will investigate further. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 5:02 PM 0 comments 270 Saturday, November 19, 1999 Willow They shot my dog Willow yesterday. I was looking for praying mantid egg foams, and she was digging at a gopher. She was ten feet away from me. I didn’t see where the shot came from. The bullet went through her chest and came out the other side. A clean wound. Her chest filled with blood, and she drowned from the blood in her lungs. My mom actually called the cops. When the two cops on duty in all of El Dorado county came moseying onto our property, they looked as if we were wasting their time reporting a canine murder. They tried to treat us all ‘tard like, talking slow and eeee-nun-see-ate-ing their words real clear-like. I know the shot came from Jennifer’s house. She’s always complaining on the bus about how Willow keeps her up at night with the barking. But Willow never barked. It was the other neighbors’ dog that’s annoying. She was so good and quiet. She only barked when people drive up in our driveway like a guard dog. She knew how to fetch and sit and roll over. I never even had to teach her these things. And the neighbor’s dog still barks. Posted by little rabbit arisu at 11:17 PM 2 comments Anonymous said... hi, thanks for paying me a visit and mentioning me etc :D My site is severely in need of a good deweed and replant because I have not had time (working 135 hrs in 2 weeks, moving to a different country every year, moving house every 3 months) and resources (no internet at home) but cheers for the mention, you’re welcome, keep it up. /jerry soul_of_shadows said... I love you. Even now. 271 Bibliography Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkley: University of California Press, 2006. Arata, Stephen. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies 33:4 Summer 1990: 621-45. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. 217-251. Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Rivkin 900-911. Chobits. Prod. TBS, Chobits Partnership. DVD. FX, 2005. Chon-ny. “Not For Feminists And Not For Kids Under 13, But Still Good.” Rev. of Chobits: V.1 Persocom + artbox (DVD), by Morio Asaka. Amazon.ca 20 July 2003. <http://www.amazon.ca/gp/cdp/member reviews/A3DM6UGX44NJ9K?ie=UTF8&display=public&page=2>. Craft, Christopher. “’Kiss me with those red lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations 8 1984: 107-133. Creed, Barbara. “Freud’s Worst Nightmare: Dining with Dr. Hannibal Lecter.” Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare. Ed. Steven Jay Schneider. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 196-200. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York, Routledge, 2006. 272 Crossen, Carys. “’Would You Please Stop Trying to Take Your Clothes Off?’ Abstinence and Impotence of Male Vampires in Contemporary Horror Fiction and Film.” The Monster Imagined: Humanity’s Re-Creation of Monsters and Monstrosity. Eds. Laura K. Davis and Cristina Santos. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010. 111-124. Doane, Mary Ann. “Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine.” The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. Eds. Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward, Fiona Hovenden. Routledge: London, 2000. 110-121. Donovan, John. “Atomic Age Monsters: Radioactivity and Horror during the Early Cold War.” The Monster Imagined: Humanity’s Re-Creation of Monsters and Monstrosity. Eds. Laura K. Davis and Cristina Santos. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2010. 11-124. Friere, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary. New York: Continuum, 2000. 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Cambridge, MA: Mediawork/MIT Press, 2002. Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl by Mary/Shelley and herself. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995. CD-ROM. Kirkman, Robert, and Charlie Adlard, Cliff Rathburn. The Walking Dead #1-#24. Berkeley: Image Comics, 2004-2005. Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop. Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Lambert, Joe. Digital Storytelling Cookbook and Traveling Companion. Berkeley: Digital Diner Press, 2003. Lykke, Nina. “Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs.” The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. Eds. Gill Kirkup, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward, Fiona Hovenden. Routledge: London, 2000. 74-85. Mack, David. Kabuki Volume 1: Circle of Blood. Orange: Image Comics, 2001. Mack, David. Kabuki Volume 2: Dreams. Orange: Image Comics, 2000. Mack, David. Kabuki Volume 3: Masks of the Noh. Fullerton: Image Comics, 2000. Mack, David. Kabuki Volume 4: Skin Deep. Orange: Image Comics, 2004. Mack, David. 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Abstract (if available)

Abstract I constructed, photographed, and then animated a dollhouse in Adobe Flash Professional 5.5 in order to create a space in which my writing haunts: as one explores the rooms of the house, my writing is conjured as apparitions. In this way, my project investigates the concept of hauntedness, revealing the ways in which domestic spaces and New Media technologies similarly function as forms of gendered monstrous embodiment. However, through the use of a theory I am terming “narrative transmography,” I maintain that the definition of monstrosity, and the metaphor of the cyborg in particular, can be extended to narrative forms and constructions, using gender and technology as focal points, while simultaneously being the incarnation of the theory in practice.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Burcar, Jillian (author)

Core Title The cyborg in the basement: hauntedness and narrative transmography

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 07/06/2014

Defense Date 05/08/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag adobe flash,alice in wonderland,angela carter,battlestar galactica,blog,bram stoker,Britain,chobits,comic books,cyborg,david mack,design elements,dollhouse,donna haraway,dracula,gender,ghost,gothic,haunt,haunted house,haunting,hybridity,intertextuality,jane austen,john polidori,Kabuki,liminality,madwoman in the attic,mary shelley,mina harker,narrative,new media,nikola tesla,novel,OAI-PMH Harvest,opera,patchwork girl,patience worth,Photography,posthuman,reanimation,Regeneration,sexuality,shelley jackson,sky doll,spatial,Technology,the vampyre,the walking dead,thomas edison,transmography,vampire,victorian,visual,witch,zombie

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Bender, Aimee (committee chair), Dane, Joseph A. (committee member), Gambrell, Alice (committee member), Kun, Joshua D. (committee member), McCabe, Susan (committee member)

Creator Email burcar@usc.edu,cognitivesystems@reprogrammablegirl.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-53709

Unique identifier UC11289392

Identifier usctheses-c3-53709 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-BurcarJill-920.pdf

Dmrecord 53709

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Burcar, Jillian

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA