Johannah Rodgers is a brilliantly witty, protean experimental author/artist and culture critic. Please take the time to visit her web site (click on her name) and marvel at some of the work on display there. See especially her little book 10 Things You Need To Know About Writing, her drawings of places, her word drawings, and her provocative and idiosyncratic “Highly Subjective Recommended Reading Lists.” Rodgers is the author of the book, sentences, a collection of short stories, essays, and drawings, published by Red Dust, the chapbooks, “The Coop Articles: Dispatches from the Park Slope Food Coop 2004-2007” and “necessary fictions,” published by Sona Books, and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, which have appeared in Fence, Bookforum, Fiction, CHAIN Arts, Tantalum, Pierogi Press, and The Brooklyn Rail, where she is a contributing editor. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches writing and literature courses at The City University of New York, where she is an Assistant Professor in English at The New York City College of Technology.
The excerpt here published is from her futuristic, hypertext novel DNA.
dg
from DNA
By Johannah Rodgers
“For does not society modify Man, according to the conditions in which he lives and acts, into men as manifold as the species in Zoology?”
— Honore de Balzac, Introduction to the Comedie Humaine
February __, 2075
I have identified four individuals in a ten block radius with whom I share the same genetic code. I will begin profiling each based on the information collected to date, as well as through direct observation to determine which are the best candidates for complete identity theft.
February __, 2075
I can’t say that I completely dislike myself, but there are times when I wonder whether I shouldn’t be something more than I am. These moments then lead me to speculate that it is not what I’ve done, but who I am that is the problem. And, based on the statistical overview of those in my common gene pool, i.e., all of those individuals conceived from sperm A51326 and egg C84327, I am, in all five categories of comparison—total net worth, happiness index, number of children, square feet of living space, professional recognition—clearly well below average. Why this would be when we share 99.9 percent of the same biochemistry can only be attributed to non-biological factors. In other words, “nurture” issues, i.e., how we were raised, which has led to some slight differential in the various choices that each one of us has made over time, resulting in, ultimately, who we are now. What all of this means is that it is purely for reasons of chance that I am who I am today, as opposed to, someone else, i.e., one of those who are, to borrow from the clinic-approved language, my “code partners.”
