So this new digital narrative, hypertextuality stuff doesn't rate so high on the bed test, either.... Hayles only mentioned the bathtub test, but I think the real test of a good text is whether you can curl up with a comforter, enfold yourself in the recesses of the couch or the cozy hollows of your bed, and get that I-would-rather-be-doing-nothing-else feeling that you get with a good story and a drizzly day. But at least it is possible to pass the bed test with a laptop (a little dicier in the tub), and I ended up with a sufficient semblance of that good ol' feeling to satisfy me (despite the 12 pounds shifting from my chest to my knees and back, the wheezing accompaniment of fans cooling interior components, and the ever-constant movement of required scrolling.) Having horded the "Daughters of Freya" e-mails to savor in one mass reading, I opened the story, and proceeded to read. It took a bit to get engrossed in the story line, perhaps partially due to the longer time lapse in flipping screens rather than pages, exacerbated by the limits of an epistolary format, but I did finally get hooked. I think that maybe I have a thing for low-brow literature (or else I just loved the fact that I was actually getting to read such a piece on assignment), but I actually did enjoy reading the Daughters of Freya. I definitely think I enjoyed it more, though, because I read it in one sitting, so there was an element of suspense that kept building as I read that I know I never would have gained had I read the story broken by time.

As far as parapluesch and the psychotics go, I really think Beanie Babies missed their market - and I think I need to see a shrink. The guilt I feel everytime I think about Dolly and the electrodes....I thought it was a stethoscope, honest. I am still not sure what to make of the "game," especially since I just read:

Katherine Hayles is right to emphasize how the crucial intervention of the Turing test appears the moment we accept its basic dispositif, i.e. the loss of a stable embodiment, the disjunction between actually enacted and represented bodies: an irreducible gap is introduced between the "real" flesh-and-blood body behind the screen and its representation in the symbols that flicker on the computer screen. Such a disjunction is co-substantial with "humanity" itself: the moment a living being starts to speak, the medium of its speech (say, voice) is minimally disembodied, in the sense that it seems to originate not in the material reality of the body that we see, but in some invisible "interiority" - a spoken work is always minimally the voice of a ventriloquist, a spectral dimension always reverberates in it" (Zizek On Belief 43, 44).

I apologize for the long quote, but after I went back to the parapleusch site, one of the many things that intrigued/disturbed me, was the hideous voice of the completely absent narrator. Who is he? What is he? And what role does he play in my interaction and understanding of the text? The whole site is fascinating when pondered through Zizek's ideas - for I never made the assumption that I was interacting with any stable embodiment or another person behind the screen, yet in a mutated way isn't that exactly what I am doing? I am interacting with the construct of another human being, with the symbolic order of codes and programs that he has constructed, yet is disembodied from himself. There are so many layers of mediation or disembodiment in the game - starting with the unseen, unknown, unheard creators, and then going to the voice, which is a complete disjunction from the creator, a disembodied narrator telling the tale of the eye-less, soul-less creature on the screen, a creature that is representative of the whole of humanity or consumer society, yet is singular and disjunctioned in his lonely soullessness. The voice seems very much like that of a ventriloquist, and the whole game exudes a spectral quality - from the silent voicings of the nurse (why can she be heard only in cartoon bubbles?), the background howling of the wind upon arrival at the psychiatric center, the inarticulable cluckings of the therapy puppet, not to even mention the fact that we are attempting to treat an object that is unreal and untreatable in all possible dimensions. Like I said, it's just about enough to send me to an analyst....

~ Please-forgive-me-croc-Cassie