Shelley Jackson - Quotes

I like disgression and interruptions and the clash of styles and voices. I like weirdo devices.
Jackson, Shelley.

The body is the original magnetic object: it has both a bumptious physicality and a metaphoric life.
Jackson, Shelley.

Patchwork girl is a brilliant hypertext parable of writing and identity that generates both its theme and techniques from the kind of collage-writing intrinsic to hypertext.
Georges Landow.

Jackson focuses on the fluids and connective issues that shapes the body relations to the world.
Megan Lynch on The Anatomy of Melancholy.

Intelligent, often hysterically funny, and intensely creepy.
Rob Wittig.

I had done three or four anatomical stories ("Sperm," "Foetus," and "Cancer" were some of the earliest) and had ideas for more, but was starting to wonder if I was repeating myself. Then it occurred to me that there was another way to look at this, that the thematic similarites among the stories would resonate together in interesting ways if they were bound in one volume. Thinking of the project as a whole, too, I felt I could give myself more permission to play, since a piece that was frivolous would be dignified by its somber neighbors, and the more narrative pieces would rescue the ones that indulged in language to the detriment of plot (and vice versa). So, ironically, this "all-encompassing idea" actually made the collection more various: I stopped feeling that each new story had to sum up all my attitudes toward the body or toward narration.
Jackson, Shelley, Gavin J. Grant (Interview). Shelley Jackson: Anatomist Extraordinaire. Booksense.

This kinship between body and text seems to me to work both ways: the book is a kind of body, and the way we feel toward it is a bit like how we feel about people. (I remember once noticing, as an easily embarrassed teenager, that it felt strange to undress in front of an open book.) My book is divided into humours to make it even more like a body, but a body that, like the body in medieval science, is in collusion with texts of all sorts.
Jackson, Shelley, Gavin J. Grant (Interview). Shelley Jackson: Anatomist Extraordinaire. Booksense.

I've been writing some vaguely anatomical songs, with the perverse and humiliating idea of performing them at my readings, despite the fact that I can't really sing or play guitar.
Jackson, Shelley, Gavin J. Grant (Interview). Shelley Jackson: Anatomist Extraordinaire. Booksense.

Contusions and confusions. Half-mourning and melancholia. Twilight and adolescence, home decorators and homosexuals. Drag queen hair, cheap swag, braggadocio. Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley (that “monstrous orchid,” said Wilde). Orchids, especially Cattleya labiata. All things orchidaceous, including the word “orchidaceous.” Prose just shy of purple. According to Nabokov, time itself.
Jackson, Shelley. "Mauve" in: Cabinet Magazine. Winter 2007-2008.

Mauve, the color of disappointment. But, “strangely beautiful,” thinks the chemist, and dips some silk in it, finds the color takes. He sends a sample to a Scottish dyer, who sees possibilities. The color lasts like no natural purple. And the ladies seem to like it.
Jackson, Shelley. "Mauve" in: Cabinet Magazine. Winter 2007-2008.

Mauve, the color of opportunity.
Jackson, Shelley. "Mauve" in: Cabinet Magazine. Winter 2007-2008.

One does not necessarily think of a color as a commodity. Colors, the ancients reasoned, are qualities of objects, or our eyes’ subjective response to those objects, not entities in themselves. They tinge and dapple and pass on. Nonetheless, some ancients paid high prices for one color: purple.
Jackson, Shelley. "Mauve" in: Cabinet Magazine. Winter 2007-2008.

Mauve collapses in the mouth like a chocolate truffle. Like a truffle, it tastes expensive, decadent, imported. The word is to American English as the color is to American clothes. It enters one’s vocabulary late if at all, an adult word, with a tinge of the boudoir, and so it signals sophistication and a possibly unhealthy attention to aesthetics.
Jackson, Shelley. "Mauve" in: Cabinet Magazine. Winter 2007-2008.

Mauve signifies over-refinement, the exhaustion of potency in the making of ever-finer discriminations; that’s why “Code Mauve” is the stuff of stand-up.
Jackson, Shelley. "Mauve" in: Cabinet Magazine. Winter 2007-2008.

This ambivalence is characteristic. Mauve is the color of suspended choice and uncertain boundaries. One of the few colors permitted to women in half-mourning, the period of transition between black crêpe and the full spectrum, mauve signals the transition from despair to reconciliation.
Jackson, Shelley. "Mauve" in: Cabinet Magazine. Winter 2007-2008.

The color of now became the color of then ... Mauve is the past; the future is mauve.
Jackson, Shelley. "Mauve" in: Cabinet Magazine. Winter 2007-2008.

When you hear the echo before you hear your own voice, you might figure you're living backwards. But it could be that your voice is just the echo's echo. We're all hollow inside.
Jackson, Shelley. "The Long Relay" a long-distance collaborative writing project for London's Serpentine Gallery. October 14, 2007.

On a boat inside a ship sat Olivia, with a boat inside a ship inside her mind ... It was possible that Olivia was also dead and did not know it. In the dark alive is just the place where one kind of nothing rubs up against another one.
Jackson, Shelley. "The Long Relay" a long-distance collaborative writing project for London's Serpentine Gallery. October 14, 2007.

Olivia sat, rocking, turning the ring on her thumb. If she could talk to the brother inside her, her voice would sound huge. Hollow. Like an echo of something that hadn't been said yet. He might think he was living backwards, going terribly home, back to the old war. He might think he was his echo's echo, that he was just a hollow throwing back a memory of something someone else had said. Or he might just curl up and listen and let her tell him a story, a story that didn't go back or forward but went in.
Jackson, Shelley. "The Long Relay" a long-distance collaborative writing project for London's Serpentine Gallery. October 14, 2007.

But there is always a residue of the material thing left behind: a tuft of hair, a shard of bone. I was fascinated by that residue, which seems to sulk inside a nimbus of strangeness, both resisting it and making it possible. I wanted to write stories that exaggerated the resistance as well as the collusion.
Jackson, Shelley, Megan Lynch (Interview). A conversation with Shelley Jackson. 5/12. May 2002.

The body is the original magnetic object: it has both a bumptious physicality and a metaphoric life, but usually we move easily between the two and think nothing of it. So I thought of my friend's sperm story, and the way its peculiarities of scale make visible what is comical and unnerving about sperm, and I thought, that's what I have to do. If I separate sperm from its usual context but still draw on all the feelings associated with it, maybe I can write a story that while absurd and fantastical is also strangely heart-felt, like a dream, or a love letter written in a code to which you've lost the key.
Jackson, Shelley, Megan Lynch (Interview). A conversation with Shelley Jackson. 5/12. May 2002.

That tension makes both more interesting to me, takes the sentimentality out of tragedy, invests the cartoonish with mortal implications.
Jackson, Shelley, Megan Lynch (Interview). A conversation with Shelley Jackson. 5/12. May 2002.

My mind doesn't travel in a straight line, and neither do my stories. I like digression and interruption and the clash of styles and voices.
Jackson, Shelley, Megan Lynch (Interview). A conversation with Shelley Jackson. 5/12. May 2002.

When I was an art student a professor took me aside and told me I had better make up my mind whether or not I was serious about art, because there was only one way to succeed: focus. I have completely ignored this advice. Sometimes this means shuttling manically between art and writing and other, more unmentionable obsessions. More and more, though, and partly because of the ease of mixing media in electronic work, I've come to see all these projects as interrelated.
Jackson, Shelley, Megan Lynch (Interview). A conversation with Shelley Jackson. 5/12. May 2002.

The body is the original proof that the material world is lovable, and also terrible, and full of news.
Jackson, Shelley, Megan Lynch (Interview). A conversation with Shelley Jackson. 5/12. May 2002.

We are caught up in this awkward love affair between things and ideas. This mismatch that won't split up is the basis of all the art forms: there's all this stuff lying around- tubes of paint, clay, language-that looks inscrutable and meaningless, but the same stuff in a new arrangement can break your heart.
Jackson, Shelley, Megan Lynch (Interview). A conversation with Shelley Jackson. 5/12. May 2002.

In The Melancholy of Anatomy I take a good look at some of the stuff the body sheds or oozes: hair, milk, blood. That unnerving stain on the carpet was once part of your body. Now it's something you should probably clean up. What happened in between?
Jackson, Shelley, Megan Lynch (Interview). A conversation with Shelley Jackson. 5/12. May 2002.

Living on an island was like going insane! I stalked around in the rain and had apocalyptic dreams. I did some good writing, but my sense of humor languished. Turns out zealotry and writing do not go well together, at least not for me.
Jackson, Shelley, Megan Lynch (Interview). A conversation with Shelley Jackson. 5/12. May 2002.

Working in bookstores, and particularly in used bookstores, gave me a sense of a universe of writing and reading that stretched far beyond the current state of the publishing world. I saw books that had been out of print for years and were still loved, collecting gravy stains and bathtub warp; I saw books published with hoopla that burbled and sank from view in a few weeks. Thanks to this time spent on the margins of the publishing world, I have a healthy lack of concern about its fashions. The word abides, one way or another.
Jackson, Shelley, Megan Lynch (Interview). A conversation with Shelley Jackson. 5/12. May 2002.

Our changes are slow and seashell-cautious and symmetrical, a nonviolent rearing, a diffident balustrade, a somber cushioning, a competent, secretive staircase.
Jackson, Shelley. "Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo" in: Conjunction. Vol 22, Spring 1994.

Strangers, we recognized each other, despite our sagging ballgowns. In the thick material light we wove our way through the fizzing mounds from which threads of bubbles rose punctuated by the occasional belched globule.
Jackson, Shelley. "Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo" in: Conjunction. Vol 22, Spring 1994.

Desire was never a feeling, it was a purpose that haunted the shape of what I was.
Jackson, Shelley. "Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo" in: Conjunction. Vol 22, Spring 1994.

The screwdriver doesn't dream of turning the screw, it just works better for that than for clearing a drain or picking a lock.
Jackson, Shelley. "Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo" in: Conjunction. Vol 22, Spring 1994.

My genders are supposed to wax and wane and with them wanders my desiring heart and in between that other stuff: the baggage of dead meat, techniques of butchery, nibble and bore, and wax and polish and scour and suckle clean, hunger and macabre tomfoolery with the emptied skins and a date at the breeding ground on Saturday.
Jackson, Shelley. "Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo" in: Conjunction. Vol 22, Spring 1994.

I was reconciled to my ugliness at this moment when the entire ocean seemed to be passing a thorough, attentive tongue over my stiff vanes, my spines, my horny plates and my spots of loathsome smoothness. My needle teeth stung in my gums, vibrant with messages. I had a mouthful of cat-whiskers tickling, antennae. My sex was a collar loosening. Her small dull eyes were tiny beads sunk in the puckered flesh. They seemed to tighten and pull the skin inward around them. My genital face contracted in sympathy.
Jackson, Shelley. "Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo" in: Conjunction. Vol 22, Spring 1994.

I felt my skull boxing in my brain. I felt my skin bagging my skull. I felt the muscular length of me turning and flexing and I knew all these things were glad collaborators of the machine. I had to attend.
Jackson, Shelley. "Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo" in: Conjunction. Vol 22, Spring 1994.

I was made to extinguish myself in the flesh of another. I was a dab, a mote, a mite.
Jackson, Shelley. "Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo" in: Conjunction. Vol 22, Spring 1994.

It's a strange kind of self-sufficiency I (we) have now. I am happy alone, "alone"; I need no one, not even to make babies (I do that myself, with inner Ned) yet I've always got company I can't talk to or touch but know is here by the very fact I am self-sufficient.
Jackson, Shelley. "Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo" in: Conjunction. Vol 22, Spring 1994.

I wanted to say to him, you, you're trying so hard to bed me. If you wait, you can become me instead.
Jackson, Shelley. "Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo" in: Conjunction. Vol 22, Spring 1994.

What I won through self-denial (abjuring nail-biting and angel-ogling) can never be taken from me. I rove through the ocean and the males, those nail-parings, those carrot-peels, are ripplemarks of my passing. It gets me that what I tried so hard to put behind me (reviling myself, fighting down my own desires) is exactly what I spread myself for.
Jackson, Shelley. "Hagfish, Worm, Kakapo" in: Conjunction. Vol 22, Spring 1994.