My Thoughts; Gladman

When reading Gladman’s “Event Factory”, I can’t help but think of an individual that is lost in an unknown/new space. This individual could be that of a tourist or outsider trying to understand or find meaning of this space or out of this space. Just as the reader is trying to make sense of this complicated text, maybe the individual is a guide of such thoughts of the language, of this text. But in doing so gets further away from the sense, and forgets about the movement. 

Movement and language is, I think, a part of each other, in general and is also big in this text. The traveler is moving through the city, while the reader is moving through the pages of this book, trying in the end, to get through it. Language is a funny thing, it can exist without movement but it may or may not make sense. We as human beings communicate and are social, even if we don’t realize it we look at body language and movement. I am a person who talks with my hand, using hand gestures. It just comes naturally to me. It’s hard to describe but the protagonist in “Event Factory”, is either the actual language/ text being guided and frame by that of the author/ the rules or is something like a robot that can speak perfect but can’t understand gesture or symbols. That being said, in this culture of Ravicka gesture and movement are the way of communication. It all leads back to the beginning when this language tourist gets a dance lesson by the salsa chick and she says, “You can’t do this without movement”. Movement is the body of this text.

Going back to my thoughts I had earlier, on this traveler being the text itself, is captured on pg. 64. This scene is very sexual and could even be considered rape. It has this visual image of hands either typing or writing with a pen, coming up/ creating the text, this text. Especially when someone shouts, “look at what I’m writing”, it so interesting. 

While this text is defiantly an open text, it plays with the rules of writing as it is writing. This text has many levels to it. It is rather engaging and the reader wand to dive in and get lost in the text and eventual coming out feeling lost but an idea is there, it is working, it has been digested. It has been explored.