E-mail Trouble: Love and Addiction @ the Matrix

by S. Paige Baty

Book Overview

"This is about a society of isolates who all communicate with one another from terminal sites. This is about being disembodied, distanced, distinct, and that sort of boundary-thing. It is not about being present. It is not about being there. It is not about a shared history, or a shared meal, or a shared story, or any kind of mutuality. It is about contact between virtual strangers. . . . It happens when you feel that you are so alone that you...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0292708645
• ISBN13: 9780292708648
• Release Date: February 1999
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Length: 167 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant, beautiful, thought provoking and heart breaking

e-mail trouble: love and addiction @ the matrix, is a miraculous missive from the late S. Paige Baty. Part autobiography, part fiction, part theory, this book is unlike any other. I should note that I am not only a reader and reviewer of e-mail trouble, I am also a character: Sitting in a bar in Northern California, Paige and I began to write a comic book. Where previously we had played at being Maggie and Hopey of Love and Rockets, we re-invented ourselves as Dr. Rocket and Fly-bi-nightly in a world of our own. E-mail trouble is about trying to live, to love, to be in the world. The book is a love letter to Paige's many friends, but it is also an important theoretical work, one that draws on Camus as well as Foucault, on Kierkegaard and Norman O'Brown, Emerson and Pynchon, Louisa May Alcott and bell hooks, Kerouac and Plato. In addition to illuminating the work of past thinkers, she also sheds light on our tired and wired culture, the difficulty of inhabiting a female body, the importance of time and place, of communication and community. Paige was truly an original thinker, a gifted teacher, and one of the best writers I've ever read. Reading e-mail trouble made me laugh, cry and realize how much Paige is a part of me--and how wonderful that is. There is no one I know to whom I would not give this book, I can think of few gifts as great. Paige and I often spoke of addiction--we tried to define it, understand it, conquer it. It often seemed that we came to different conclusions, and we often pursued different paths, but we continued to talk, and to love. I miss my friend. This book is a posthumous present, a tangible reminder of Paige for those that knew her, but also a gift to those that never had the chance. I only wish that there were more picnics in the future.