Stitch Bitch Response

BANISHED BODY
"It's not what we wish it were."
I'm easily confused by this writing style because the author contradicts what they're saying constantly to prove their arguments. What I took away from this section was that "the body" is something that we wish we could control but in reality have little control over it. It's constantly changing and it is in between being an object and a thought. The author refers to it as "the monkey in the middle" and that makes me envision a struggle between becoming a solid object or becoming a lucid thought. It is easily influenced by what surrounds it and comes in the form of a story or in smell and sight along with happiness and pain. 

"Its face is a collage of stories, borrowed images, superstitions, fantasies. We have no idea what it "really" looks like." This section ends by using the metaphor of a body-bag and how, like most junkyards, it holds the garbage, the stories, that will never be told.

REALITY FICTION
"It's not what it says it is."
Why does reality conquer over fiction? That doesn't seem right. Reality is a type of fiction. It shouldn't overpower it. Fiction can be many different categories and they each have their own standards and laws. 
Reality thinks it "includes" fiction, that fictional works are embedded in reality. It's the boast of a bully. But just "Every fictional world competes with the real one to some extent, but hypertext gives us the chance to sneak up on reality from inside fiction." It can be subtle by including links to non-fictional works which makes hypertext fiction create a separate text of reality in a fictional world. Reality relies on the feeling of security, like home. But as the author argues, "By writing we test the seams, pick out the stitches, trying to stretch the gaps between things to slip out through them into some uncharted space, or to let something spring up in the real that we don't already know, something unfamiliar, not part of the family, a changeling" so writers try to take reality and stretch it, distort it slightly to fit their needs and create realities that we may have never experienced but could encounter some day.