Interesting dialog in last week's open forum with Leslie Jamison, author of the Atlantic Monthly feature on Second Life, on her depiction of two SL users and the challenges they each face in real life. NWN contributor Cajsa Lilliehook suggests that a thematic focus on pain in Leslie's writing is reflected in how she writes about them:
[It] seems you have a fascination with brokenness, with loss, loneliness, alienation, illness, and suicide. An empathetic writer, it seems you seek out brokenness. I also know that our own experiences, biases, and fascination effect how we synthesize the information we take in, so my question is whether your own fascination with brokenness leads you to see brokenness among people who are not broken. I suggested you talk to Gidge because she is hilarious and because she is the opposite of the trope of "special needs" mothers. She does not feel sanctified by her challenges or see autism as a blessing that transforms the family into a morality play. But she sure is not broken. She is coal under pressure, a diamond that finds joy and laughter in her life. She is smart, funny, and frank and realistic. She doesn't pretend she loves changing diapers on teenagers, but she doesn't let it break her, ever.
You misread Alicia, too. Since you expressed interest in how people find community, I thought she was a great representative of the family community. She is also not broken. She can't have children in her first life but found a way to find joy and family in SL. That's not broken. That is taking the lemons life handed her and adding some salt and tequila and making a party.
So that's my question. How much did your own fascination with brokenness influence how you perceived the strengths of people with challenges as fractures?
Leslie's reply:
I take your point, absolutely--and to your larger point, I think you're absolutely right: Our fascinations drive our seeking, and certainly inform what we find. I would describe my own fascinations slightly differently than you do, above--I think I'm interested in pain, certainly, but also in the possibilities of community and empathy, the species of resilience, the strange and unexpected forms of intimacy that arrive in our lives--so yes, the facets of alienation and loneliness, but also the ways we find solace for those things, or find ourselves generatively reshaped by them.
But the central point remains, and you make it so eloquently: where we come from, what we've lived, what we're fascinated by--all these things inflect how we see the world. I try to confess that process of skew and influence whenever possible, rather than pretending it doesn't happen.As to your point about how I portray some of my particular subjects in this piece--specifically Gidge and Alicia--I certainly didn't want to portray anyone as wholly "broken," and hope I didn't, though of course--as with most acts of thinking, encounter, and interpretation--how someone might characterize the nature of my portraits is--as you point out yourself--somewhat subjective. (Many readers I've heard from certainly didn't read Gidge and Alicia as broken, for example.) I wanted to honor the ways pain and difficulty live alongside intimacy and generative creativity; and that's why the piece lands where it does--with the idea that what many people might call escapism is actually part of what it might mean to inhabit experience authentically.
Thanks for writing to me, here, though--it's an interesting question and helped me think about/interrogate my own process a bit. I appreciate that, and--as I did in our talk--your intelligence and sensitivity to nuance.
Count me among the readers who didn't interpret Gidge or Alicia (whose SL family I wrote about last year) as being broken, so much as using Second Life to help transcend that pain.
Wow, I don't know Cajsa but she is one articulate and very smart woman. Glad she identified this and she writes with an eloquence that is often missing these days. Spot on from my perspective.
Posted by: Oobleck | Monday, November 20, 2017 at 02:03 PM
I read the piece--in print!--as I prefer to do when I want to mull something over. It was neither shallow nor judgmental, though she pitched it clearly to readers who did not know SL. I found her writing sympathetic to the needs of the SLers she interviewed.
The piece left me thinking she was covering how folks are empowered by their experiences in SL, and how that form of contact is magical for them, even as the world itself is too perfect.
If there's a barb in the article, it's for SL's culture of celebrity-level trappings: the yachts, the hardbody avatars, the dream homes, the supercars, the lavish weddings. That was never the magic of the world for me. I preferred the Hobo camp at Calleta or anywhere that clever builders like Arcadia Asylum gathered just to give stuff away.
The most fun I had in SL was having my conman/criminal RP avatar tossed in jail by a capricious queen and her daughter, then made to compose anthems for the kingdom until I wrote one that sufficiently flattered the royal court. It took weeks to con my way out of the clink. You don't get that in a video game!
Posted by: Iggy 1.0 | Tuesday, November 21, 2017 at 08:02 PM