En Garde, Harriet!

A couple of weeks ago, Harriet posted about Vanessa Place’s Twitter project, for which she’s tweeting all of Gone with the Wind, and compared it to Simon Morris’s Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head, for which he typed up On the Road, but backwards. Now, in a review of Morris’s book, Place responds directly to Harriet and makes a clear conceptual distinction between the two works:

Harriet characterizes both works as moves in conceptualism from “reframing to rebuilding,” the rebuilding allowing for consideration of “the microstructure” of the original texts in question…Harriet here…misses a bit of the metaphor involved in each instantiation by focusing on production as production over production as product. Whereas GIJKH, as noted by its handle, is an originary quest, both in terms of its overt aim to better understand the Master and to better read and reproduce the work, finding out along the way that Kerouac loved the rush and roadstripe of the hyphen and the free-wheeling force of repetition, my GWTW Twitter project is a project of purposeful erosion.

Furthermore, she goes on to detail other aspects of her Gone with the Wind project, which, apparently, is not limited to the Twitter feed:

Because I find GWTW a problematic text, I have engaged in a series of textual obliterations and aggravations: composing a prose piece of all of the sections of GWTW in which “nigger” features prominently (hoping to be sued for their return);vii reproducing the “I don’t know nothing bout bringing babies” speech by Prissy (the unserving servant) in Miltonic sonnet form; an erasure performance (a white-out) of the last part of the last chapter, and Twittering the entire text—literally casting it to the interweb winds.