my body — a Wunderkammer

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Description (in English): 

The author and artist Shelley Jackson has produced a corpus of work in print and electronic media that takes as its central focus the relationship between human identity and the body's constituent organs, fluids, connective tissues, and other parts. While her well-known Storyspace hypertext Patchwork Girl revisited the Frankenstein story from the viewpoint of a female monster, my body uses the HTML hypertext form to revitalize the memoir genre. As the reader selects elegantly drawn woodcut images of parts of the author's body, meditations and anecdotes associated with each body part are revealed.

(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One)

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In the course of writing these reminiscences, I increasingly began to conceive of my body as a great cabinet of curiosities.

It wasn't a big leap from eating books to sticking them up me, a page at a time. Fine literature in my vagina, pulp fiction up my ass, that was my instinctive decision, that is at first, before I began to question whether the distinction was really so clear.

My vagina had rewritten Joyce. It was then I knew I was going to be a writer.

I am selling small vials of pee, female ejaculate and spit to libraries, collectors and speculative investors. The vials are numbered pee 1-100, spit 1-50, come 1-10, and labelled with the vintage (1997). As pee is the most plentiful fluid it is also the least expensive ($300; spit is $500); however, I have limited the edition to one hundred as shown, so as not to flood the market.

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Patricia Tomaszek