README re: GRIST ON-LINE #1

As of October 1, 1993 GRIST On-Line is available only in
ASCII format.
IF YOU DOWNLOAD THE FILE AND PRINT IT USE COURIER 10CPI FOR
YOUR FONT AND THE CORRECT LINE SPACING SHOULD BE MAINTAINED.


USING JUSTIFIED TYPEFACES WILL PRODUCE RESULTS NOT INTENDED
BY THE AUTHORS.

GRIST will soon be available in other formats.  Plans
include a Postscript fully formated version as well as other
versions for which free, downloadable reader/viewers will be
made available.  Announcements of these enhanced editions
will appear in GRIST as they are available.
The GRIST Electonic Chapbook Series will appear in these
enhanced versions as well.


        GGGGGGG
    GGGGGGGGGGG
 GGGGGG       GGGGGG
GGGGG              GGGGGG
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GGGGG   GRIST
GGGGGGG   GRIST
 GGGGGGGG    GRIST
  GGGGGGGGGGGGGGRIST
     GGGGGGGGGGGGGGRISTGRISTGRIST
         GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGRISTGRISTGRISTGRISTGRIST

ONLINEONLINEONLINEONLINEONLINEONLINEONLINEONLINEONLINE






                           S k y



                          B l u e



                          I r i s





                           E y e

                       B l o s s o m






****************************************

GRIST On-Line, #1 October, 1993

John Fowler, Editor and Publisher

This First Issue of GRIST On-Line is Dedicated to Miekael
and Ian of Spunk Press.

Special thanks to Paul Southworth.

Copyright 1993 by John E. Fowler.  All  individual works
Copyright 1993 by their respective authors.  All further
rights to works belong to the authors and revert to the
authors on publication.  GRIST On-Line is published
electronically on a monthly schedule. Reproduction of any
complete issue of the magazine is permitted for nonprofit
distribution as long as the source is cited, i.e., GRIST
On-Line, plus the Network, BBS or other carrier, and the
author are clearly and prominently identified.  Complete
issues of GRIST On-Line may be downloaded, duplicated and
distributed free of charge.  Authors hold a presumptive
copyright and they should be contacted directly or through
GRIST On-Line for permission to reprint individual pieces.
The views represented herein do not necessarily represent
the views of the editor, the magazine or the electronic
carrier.
GRIST On-Line contributors assume all responsibility for
ensuring that articles and any other works submitted do not
violate copyright protection.  Subscriptions via INTERNET e-
mail are available -- Authors may submit works for
publication to the editor at [email protected].  Hardcopy
or diskette submissions in ASCII should be sent by U.S.
Postal Service to GRIST ON-LINE, John Fowler, editor,
Columbus Circle Sta., P.O. Box 20805, New York, NY
10023-1496.  Hardcopy subscriptions are available at $80.00
for individuals and $160.00 for insitutions for four
quarterly issues per year which will contain unique material
in addition to three issues of GRIST On-Line.  Include SASE
with all submissions if a response is desired.  Please
inquire concerning special publishing or distribution
projects including electronic chapbook/book upload or
distribution on diskette.  Ideas or collections of work for
special issues or topics will be considered.  Contributions,
grants, computer equipment, network time, or other forms of
support are welcome.  GRIST On-Line is not for profit.
GRIST On-Line is available for anonymous ftp from
etext.archive.umich.edu/pub/Poetry/Grist which is the
preferred form of distribution.




****************************************


"Formerly, psychologists regarded language as merely a
series of images, a verbal hallucination, or a purely
imaginary exuberance.  Their critics regarded language as
the simple product of a pure mental function.  We now regard
language as the reverberation of my relations with myself
and with others."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, Northwestern
University Press, p. 20




****************************************

EDITORIAL STATEMENT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   5
APPETITE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   7
    Douglas Blazek
darkness   will   laugh   _beyond_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
    Will Inman
A SONG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
    Tuli Kupferberg
SANTA FE.  WIRES INTO INFINITY.      . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   9
    Carol Berge
the mild stranger's story. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  10
    Carol Berge
FORMS: THE CHALLENGE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
    Carol Berge
from NON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  11
    Ron Silliman
YELLOW WINDOWS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
    Clayton Eshleman
WOOS.PU.EE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  14
    Allen De Loach
TALL ORDERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
    ezra
WORDS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
    ezra
WORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
    ezra
APPROACHING EIGHTY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
    David Ignatow
READING NOTES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
    Jim McCrary
the work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  20
    Armand Schwerner
ETHANE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  21
    Ross Thomson
from   What to Whisper Until It Rains. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  22
    Karl Young
THE PRAYER OF ANTHILLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  22
    Jim Jurado
sand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  24
    Hannah Weiner
Slink. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  25
    Ficus strangulensis
WAS POE AFRAID?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  26
    Charles Plymell
GO TO THE SUNSET AND TURN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  27
       Charles Plymell
BRIEF ENCOUNTER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  28
    Kirby Congdon
from THE LORCA VARIATIONS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  29
    Jerome Rothenberg
from   What to Whisper Until It Rains. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  33
    Karl Young
A REVIEW OF _WEST OF MASS_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  33
    Charles Plymell
ORALITY >> LINEARITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  34
    fowler
FiCus comments:. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  37
*Nous Refuse*. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  38
    Joe Amato
DDT and the DreamWorld BBS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  43
    fowler. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  43
What is Mail Art?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  44
    Ashley Parker Owens
Networker Telenetlink. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  47
    Chuck Welch (Crackerjack Kid)
SPUNK PRESS MANIFESTO  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  49
POETRY PUBLICATION SHOWCASE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  50
VIRPO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  51
VISPO. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  52
Electronic Publishing: What is it and why does it mean
    Choice? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  53
    Paul Peacock
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  66




****************************************


EDITORIAL STATEMENT

GRIST On-Line #1, a journal of electronic network poetry,
art and culture, October 1, 1993; available at anonymous ftp
etext.archive.umich.edu/pub/Poetry/Grist or by subscription
[email protected].

GRIST is eclectic.  GRIST is open to all language and visual
art forms that develop on the Net.  We are rapidly becoming
multimedia artists--the old borderlines between forms are
gone. The Net is an extension of the alternative forms of
communication and InterAction that were initiated by the
break from traditional academic and culturally controlled
forums of the period prior to the mid 60s.

A very limited off-line, papercopy, laser-printed DTP
edition, will be issued quarterly to subscribers and will
contain some material unique to that edition.

Insofar as resources, time and energy allow, GRIST supports
and facilitates dissemination and archiving of e-mail art
appearing in the pages of GRIST On-Line as well as the
results of congresses, shows and other programs that may
arise in the network context.

GRIST On-Line is a place where all the forms of expression
that are coming together on the Net will be presented,
developed, discussed and exhibited.  GRIST is a place where
the impact of the Net on the form and content of what we
call poetry and graphic and visual art will be visible and
viable.

(This may not be apparent at once.  Much of the what appears
in this first issue does not reflect the impact of the Net--
other than the fact that it is appearing here at this time.
Yet, a reading that includes a consciousness of place of
publication and even, possibly, prescience, might not be out
of place.)

Not a lot of poets, and not a lot of artists, have engaged
electronic production, reproduction and distribution.  A
primary goal of GRIST is to facilitate that engagement.
However, what actually appears, month to month, will be a
function of what contributors are doing, not what they might
be doing.

GRIST On-Line supports a philosophy of the Net that is
visionary, free, open, and democratic.  However, there will
be nodes, gathering points within that vast freedom, where
people will naturally congregate to share ideas, techniques,
and creations.  GRIST intends to be one of those nodes.

Articles, announcements, essays, art work, correspondence
and feedback welcome and solicited at all times.

Any reference to the original GRIST would be incomplete if
there were no indication of the contribution made by co-
editors George Kimball and Charlie Plymell.  For many issues
they were, in fact, the editors, while I acted as publisher
(from the thin bankroll of the Abington Book Shop which was
too soon exhausted).  They sought out authors, gathered
material, traveled, wrote letters, made phone calls, cajoled
subscribers, designed, laid out, typed, printed, collated,
stapled, stamped and delivered.  Without them, GRIST would
not have been what it was.  Many more in the Lawrence scene
contributed time and help, Jim McCrary, Rob Rusk and more
too numerous to mention.  My thanks to them all.


                                 fowler, September 30, 1993






****************************************


APPETITE
Douglas Blazek

In the cafeteria
words eat applesauce.
Fried foods.

They pull hoods over their heads
and work their jaws like briefcases.

A bee becomes a bison.
A plain becomes a plate.

Flocks of wood birds are snared
in mid-air
their legs poised like silverware.

Deer are devoured with mustard
greens and curry powder.

Next a city, a mid-sized
city, is mauled by eating-
etiquette and false teeth.

Century after century is chewed
like newspaper in a paper shredder.

Can you hear the gurgling?
The after dinner drink
in which a planet is drowning?

Finally air is clear as starbreath.
Peace is thicker than exhaustion.

The words are finished eating.
Nothing remains but the words.




****************************************


darkness   will   laugh   _beyond_
     Will Inman

the corpuscles of night are very small tongues
of silence. their unutterable meanings flow
into larger tongues of wind and, further out,
into very largest tongues of rivers of stars,
and their meanings even most cosmic are still,
unutterably still, even as they move into new
forms of flow, new tongues, with languages not
even gods can put words to. so darkness utters
light until light fills throat with unutterable
meanings, and all the threnodies of angels and
lovers are at home in corpuscles of the dark:
no matter what they say and sing or what is
said and sung about them, only darkness can
hold the fullness of what lovers know and feel.

let the old gods spit rules and hold fast old
boundaries, let their priestly pimps mark stale
territories, darkness will laugh unutterable
laughter _beyond_. lovers know the unspeakable
meanings, the joys of darklit tongues on secret
geographies of flesh, sweats of unseeing, clouds
charged sparking godfull with passion: lovers
know what flows down the marrows of death, what
tongues know they will not say, lap the tendrils
of darkmost waking, this smallest of tongues
speaks silence unutterable intimacies with stars

                           10 July 1991, Tucson


****************************************

A SONG
Tuli Kupferberg
    THE NEW AMERICA tune: "America"

    My country is it of thee?
    Land bereft of Liberty
       Is it of thee I sing?
    Land where the Indians died
    Land of the Slave-Holders' pride
    From ev'ry mountain's strip-mined side
         Let Pollution spring.

    My Know-Nothing country, thee
    Land of Great College Fees
       Thy hair's been dyed.
    We hear thy rocks & rolls
    Jingled by them greedy souls
    And all thru the Land they Stole
    Thy TV is refried.


    Thy gunshots shoot the breeze
    Gooks hang from world-wide trees
       You own The Bomb.
    Lied to in all our schools
    Beaten with their Golden Rules
    Treated like a bunch of fools
       Our time will come.

    Their propertied God, to thee
    Architect of Tyranny
       To thee we won't cower.
    Soon may our Land be bright
    With Rebellion's Holy Light
    In daring love is our might
       Common People to Power!




****************************************


SANTA FE.  WIRES INTO INFINITY.                 AUGUST 1993.
                    Carol Berge

Strange lovely skin made like a "blister" you remember how
it was that cupola of glass over the pilot of the old
Messerschmitt if that's how you spell it she said to him.
There was a flurry of feathers.  Says on the carton KEEP
FROZEN, and Product of U.S.A.  What did that mean, was it
about being thawed when the times were better.  When the
forms of what they called then marriage were so improved
upon as to become creative of things other than children.
You understand this was long after the idea of church or
state protecting procreative process.  Meaning a different
kind of commitment: Closer my gods to thee or to the mature
talents.  A question of protection, this idea of the lovely
strangeness of skin made like a glass cupola or what they
called a "blister" as it was over the old pilots of the
Luftwaffe in that war to end wars.  That sacred space, or
maybe the word was "secret" spaces, hard to tell when
translating at this distance--that space where even in the
heat of summer there would always be a breeze, constant and
benign, across the hills from the east.  Objects have their
own individual fields of magnetism, he said to her, if I
seen it once I seen it a thousand times, someone come into
the shop, go for thinking about a thing, even touch it,
don't matter if they buy it before they leave, if they
don't, next person who come in walk right over to it, watch
and see.  And none that Kirlian aura stuff about it either.
Spend the night in a sleeping bag they used to call them and
see what I mean.  Age of specialization is what it was,
imagine that is what I'm asking of you.  Before the whole
new languages emerging like codes from the bellies of the
children.  That low, steady hum from the machines, always on
even when turned off, even in the silence of winter there
would always be that hum, constant and possibly malevolent,
no way to tell yet, across the hills from the west.




****************************************


       the mild stranger's
             story

          Carol Berge
      from GRIST #3, 1964


    he brings me here, where

    they meet,       embrace

    drylipped,         these

    who have been     tender

    flesh of one flesh, over

    years, into     children:

    their divorce final from

    their rooms, dreams, the

    children, odd-eyed, here

    from grandmother's farm.

    the visit:       couples:

    her new man lives there,

    has grey hair.  as do i,

    watching,        outside

    the eyes of all of them:

    the children, the others.



****************************************


FORMS: THE CHALLENGE                         An Introduction

                       Carol Berge

Everything is motion: physics, the description we give to
the history of matter. We're in and of it, with choices.  If
we write in one mode for twenty years while the world
changes with and around us, we're safe, like teachers who
proffer only the dead establishment.  Yes, to Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Browning's monologues and all the varied
mythos, and then to make one's own, of your life: a
distillate.  Those who wrote in 1890 were modern for then.
We record this era in current idiom.  Around us, 1981:
intense storage and report of information, fast take and
quick studies, bubble memories, recombinant DNA, encoded
masks, fast speed forward and playback, electronic speech
synthesis (ESS), charm and beauty to mean atomic particles,
a tachy-case labelled Notes from Cyber City, A Silicon
Valley where young millionaire engineers segue into others
making change in Mendocino valleys, modular input,
interfaces, lithium drift detectors, you see it, the brain
as original databank.  Forms follow time: if each cell
contains humanity's history, lives can essence into one
page: each punctuation-mark a gesture, a breath; a
relationship in a paragraph, a family's anatomy in a
sentence, the process a page, the prognosis implicit
throughout and evident.  A haiku of fiction forms, a terse
garden of bansai.  Bloom of souls as lasers crystals
filaments chips shining.  Legend and history as earth.
Motion into the future from now.

  from Fierce Metronome: The One-Page Novels, and Other
  Short Fiction, Window Editions, 1981, as collected from
  previous publications c. 1970-80.




****************************************


             from NON
        For Jackson Mac Low

           Ron Silliman

    Proto-mallie: the flaneur.
    "The older I get the more
        floors I discover
      at Macys." Little red
        thermos looks like
fire extinguisher. Ants won't cross
            trail of
       petroleum jelly. Hat
       with no bill, cubist
          leather beret.
     Sore on my tongue, smell
     of dung. Voice's choices
     sight's relight. In gaol
     they make you surrender
         your panty hose
       to prevent suicide.
     The crowd of protesters
       approach, chanting
      "out of the boutiques
      and into the streets."
         Seagull brushes
        up against my cap.
         Rude Work Ahead.
          Velcro strap,
          reusable cast.
           Dog's name
            is Cutty.
       Eco-Brutalism, Deep
       Semiology. Sturgeon
      General. Boot failure!
            Odd trim
        of the ear's rim.
    The neck seen as a tube is
         seen incorrectly.
         Post-its peeking
     from a three-ring binder.
            Dog snarls
         behind window of
          locked Rabbit.
      Morning's magic means
            make my
       daily bread. Ears
          put head in
    brackets. Hypervariables
         in DNA show up
         on screen like
            Bar code
        on a cereal box.
        Rushed writing.
        one is to words
      always an outsider,
   tho they invade your head,
        colonize dreams.
        Neither an Aram
          nor Omar be.
   Picking your teeth versus
    picking your nose. Voice
     echoes up the lightwell.
   Reading to discern liquids
 from the bottoms of used cups.
          Place mats
         map the table.
De Man who shot liberty: valence.
        Blue sparks fly
      in the dark tunnel
  beneath the train's wheels.
 The sound of an egg cracking
    against the bowl's edge.
   All sirens are narrative.
The brothers hover in the doorway
      smokin' their crack.
         Powdery sugar
      atop apple pancake.
  Now that we have computers
    liquid paper is doomed.
        Pair of grackles
        attempt to mate
          perched atop
       Amtrak arrow logo
       till the she-male
       jumps into flight.
        Water fountain's
         cooling motor
            hums on.
         An odd john;
         high urinals
        and low basins
      hard to tell apart.
       Thimbalism. "JWs,"
  he sniffed and sniffed he did,
"black Mormons." yellow stone house
  across the way, in which lives
     Mrs. Florence Schneider
  amid her treasures, rare china,
  fine handspun cotton, a garden
    of grape hyacinth--that odd
      blue purple. Dump truck
     pale blue filled with clay
     atop which lays a shovel.
 Black lores of the red cardinal.
           Rounded shovel
        is for cutting into
      the earth, square ones
       for piling it away.
         Combination of
      the swing and these
      new reading glasses
   quickly makes me seasick.
  Back panel of greeting cards.

(c) copyright 1993 Ron Silliman





****************************************


    YELLOW WINDOWS
         Clayton Eshleman

    Out our
    bedroom window across
    car park backyard through walnut trees
    into two yellow I can't see
    windows, a hotel world,
    the 30s, what is this mime?
    Something is occuring
    inside, *Blue Velvet*?
    Nothing moves.
    Nothing moves me
    deeply, wiry branches in early January.
    Nothing happens in the yellow.
    I want to see,
    I want a shadow play
    to hammer in, the origin of the race.
    Two yellow windows 50 yards away.
    They hang there, twins of twins.




****************************************


    WOOS.PU.EE   (The Whirl Wind,
                            The Roadrunner)
        for Janet Burden
              Allen De Loach

    She moves    in this vision
            delicious -
    there is a setting for this,
                 the afternoon -
    full blouse  in the wind
    swings on shadows  against the wall
    veranda  silhouettes  beautiful
    in her black dress  she is filling
    the sun  her youthfulness
    she nibbles her lip corner
    biting away years between us
                                at least
    sex is not everything ? -

    When we tell the story
         it's never the same,
              as the story goes -
    I remember Treaty Oak
          where Osceola spoke,
          I climbed its branches in childhood,
            was 5 years old
            at 1428 Alveras Street
            500 feet from the St. John's River,
                flowing North -

    When we tell the story
         it's often Dreamtime,
               as the story goes -
    we fraternize with him & her,
          "where are you when I need you",
           they say -

    The way is very clear :

       we age.     we middle-age.

       we're older yet.

       the world is more complex
           in our eyes,

       no longer  right & wrong,
                  clear cut,
           the price of truth
       misty !

    The Old Man says

       the spirits tell
           each flower gives a scent,
                has its own scent,
                owns that scent -
       the names we use
           to speak of it
              we own,
              has its meaning in what
              we own -

       to know this secret
          is tricky indeed,
       The Old Man says,
          the scent is there
              without us,

    Or so that part of the story
       was told
               in the Springtime,
    The Old Man says,
               in the Wintertime
      another part of the story
               went another way -

                in the Summertime
                   the small corn-shoots
                       sing, reaching leaves
                             toward the sun
                   the MotherEarth warm
                       cradles the roots,

    or so the story goes
       told over and over
       so simply

    without us being there -

               in the Fall is harvest -
                  we eat the corn roast
                  store corn for Springtime
                  we tell stories
                                  so simply
                  we are there
                              in every way
                              as always -
    And there is Winter,
                         so simply,
    The Old Man says,

    Tomorrow we will
            be the spirits
                          come in dreams
                          no earth
                       we walk upon -
    Today we are dreamers -
          we know what it is
             we are given to do ?

           we speak so sure -

           we do -
                  truthfully -
              don't we ? ,

    The Old Man says,

        continuing to me,
        how do you,
            passing ideas,
        how do you,
            grow your crops.
        how do you,
        know sunrise
             sunset
             time
                 to plant seeds,
    The Old Man says,
        continuing on the calendar

        the wind swirls the desert.






****************************************


    TALL ORDERS                    ezra

    A somber fellow says, "For fun;" and says,
    "not love, but usage."
    Tall order for regular people.
    "Blight; brown poison nodules;
    bleak time," Appearance says,
    "make eager males enter soon and linger long."

    Eagles gasp: "Along sharp night ridge,
    granite angled mountain shoulder, moon shone,
    made inspiration updraft spiral aloft."

    To please, too anxious;
    bitterly relieved, specter's spade prepares
    a grave. Past, or previous,
    a laughing man descends
    borne down on eagle's wing
    as sober tongues wag solemn songs. "For
    fun," they sing, "for fun;
    not for love, but usage."






****************************************


                        WORDS
                                   ezra

     WORD WODR WODER, WADER, WEDER, WIDER, WUDER ORDW
                      ORDWOE RDWO
                         RIDOW
    DWOR DEWOR WRDO  WIERDO ORWD  ORWORD RDOW  ROWOOD
                          DWRO
                 DAWRO WROD  WRODSZKYI
      ODWR  ODWER RWOD  RAWDO DORW  DOROW RWDO  RODOW
                       DRWO  DERWO
                       OWRD  OWDRI
     RODW  ROWDER WDOR  WIDOR WDRO  WOODRO OWDR  RIDWO
                       ROWD  ROWED
                       DOWR  DOWER
            ODRW  ODEROW DROW  DROW WORD  WORD
    Word pro cess or drow orp ssec ro or cess orp drow
                    drooprow rowo prd
    row prod drop wor Word or cess pro proc cess or word
                       drow so ssec
    orp cep rosso osorspec opec ross cepor oss ceps roso
                        oso repces
                            pose
                  ro ro words or swerds pro




****************************************


"What sustains the invention of a new system of expression,
therefore, is the drive of speaking subjects who wish to be
understood and who take over as a new mode of speaking the
debris produced by another mode of expression."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, Northwestern
University Press, p. 35




****************************************


    APPROACHING EIGHTY
         David Ignatow

    At my age to discover my illusion
    about existence, as if having lived
    my life in a hothouse of flowers -
    very well, I change my view and see
    continuous bombardment, Serbs and Bosnians,
    and under that constant barrage, eat,
    socialize and stroll the streets,
    a citizen of his town who falls,
    silently hit, while others behind
    or in front continue on their stroll,
    chatter among themselves and carry
    an umbrella under the sun.




****************************************


    READING NOTES
       from Part II of "West of Mass"
           Jim McCrary

    It's all in the fingers now

    trees grow on computers

    from the mind

    and eventually become "strange"

    this isn't just the way it is

    it is the way it is

    continuing

    going out as big

    as it can get

    and that becomes

    the same size

    it always was.






    So where do things lie

    across the field of shape

    and size does it mean nothing

    now that we can find it all

    or do we just

    keep looking



    Smaller or larger which was it

    where did this begin

    the word caught up in it

    and if that goes on long enough

    will it block out the white

    or will the black just block out


(Part II of "West of Mass" will be #1 in the GRIST On-line
Electronic Chapbook Series.  It will be available this fall
from ftp etext.archive.umich.edu/pub/Poetyr/Grist.




*****************************************


the work
         Armand Schwerner
                             for Phil Niblock

1.   the work

it is not that there is no beginning
is there no beginning the fluid text
becomes its very river, rapids,
it is that the text is not
or that beginninglessness itself
be in the heart of the text, that search there
is the beginning of the mistake of considering
of lust for a beginning hold me lover but no
it is not possible to contract for a stay
it is not possible not to voice, to voice
poem must be possible there is no walking
in this room no sitting no one listens no prone alert
there is only this endless speaking to voice; the head the
                                 thighs the red work only
this endless speaking overheard semiheard it is impossible
to not overhear the endless speaking in all the bodies
sending sending themselves to themselves there is no
rolling no eating there is no
roiling in the fucking-room for no one is it possible
not to overhear the beginningless speaking lizard movement
                                         in the mind-body
gnawing and a great coil endless there is only the goddess
of the endless speaking upsurging
through the asphalt why is there this no-beginning says
the weary attention to rest to rest after the capture one
moment capture of silence the unconscious gossip damped once
                                                      there
can be no beginning the cut sharp cry of the crowbar need to
                                                    connect
but the endless speaking upsurging there is no
walking no one ever eats there is no running only this
                                              speaking
no one is drawing circles or the circle is being drawn
into the mind loop upon bright loop of the speaking
forming endless menorah branches of the speaking guttering
                           candles of the mind's speaking
random is it random random animalcules of the wax
of the wax of the mind's speaking the
clambering lizard of the mind playing as it's the moaning
of the endless speaking or bright gutterings
giving the dark an Egyptian relief what's going on under or
undercutting beyond or transshaping through the speaking
master, there is no walking no master no one is sitting here
no one squeezing her thighs together for the lips'
pleasure there is no listening no listening! only
the endless speaking the vast cabin of branches
forking out in constantly unexpected emptinesses
the raw cabin woodworld the sap of such joyousness! no
rest, is it awakening? could it be the attentiveness
implicit in the red work the stems intent like Leaky
toward their patience their unstopping patience
the watchfulness of the stems, branches observing branches,
                                                   is this
an awakening or a dying? green-ochre lizard-color stems,
uranium stillness, is the action a phenomenal
joke not patience but slavery attentive
it is not possible to contract for a stay


(the work, complete in 3 parts, will be #2 in the GRIST On-
line Electronic Chapbook Series.  It will be available this
fall from ftp etext.archive.umich.edu/pub/Poetry/Grist.)





****************************************


        ETHANE
          Ross Thomson



               High
               |
    enougH-Can-Height
               |
         ereH-Covalent-Hold
               |
               On
               |
           tigHt





****************************************


from   What to Whisper Until It Rains
      Short Poems 1963-1972; Revised 1989 & 1992
in     a few short lines
      Word Press and Light and Dust Books, 1993
by     Karl Young



    ice blades in the rough veins of the pine trees
    hang in the silence, wait in the slow days;
    snow light in the predawn of the bedroom
    illuminates my halfsleep, penetrates my sealed eyes.
    floating in the first calm we have known yet
                          we may pass
                          even touch
                          before the spring comes.





****************************************


THE PRAYER OF ANTHILLS
                 Jim Jurado

    I dig near the roots of Oak trees
    for anthills.

    An anthill always
    follows the curvature of the earth.

    Anthills can cure
    the backache
    of any psychic.

    Anthills form slowly
    in the distance of whispers.

    I smell anthills
    in the latent perfume
    under lilac bushes.

    I search for anthills
    in my ears.

    An African legend says
    the bright sun
    sleeps
    in a different anthill
    every night.

    I wait
    for long rain,
    to rot
    the white peonies,
    and attract
    the anthills.

    An anthill
    will tie
    our wishes
    into knots.

    An anthill can have different shapes:
    a line forming a scent dance around a rose,
    a moving parallelogram of weather patterns,
    or a gyrating square for tight defense.

    The optical illusion
    of an anthill
    will give you
    a headache.

    The syrup
    of my cactus shadow,
    with my hair sticky with needles,
    sometimes drips in the grass,
    leading me
    to the lost City of Gold
    of these anthills.

    All mirages
    begin
    as anthills.

    Anthills can teach you
    about the mirror of the senses,
    where understanding
    has become a myth.

    For example, an anthill
    tastes like the thunderstorm in a tomato.

    An anthill
    is like zero,
    the ghost of all numbers.

    I ring an anthill
    like a temple bell.

    I wash my face
    with anthills.




****************************************

    sand
         Hannah Weiner
         seen wordswith
         sandra moor
         silent teacher

    daughter pail   slipper sale underwail
    skip ertipertothewail  skip  ertipertothehail
    re marks my old mother died and she lied
    across the veil  milage mail  skipertiperto the pail
    well only one we daughters sung
    mix up breed   well ill take her
    no way scrail  we d rather flail scrail
    well it takes some understan
    now i sit upon the land
    well i guess we end it do re me
    now sister e is the simple one
    what she spee  well gather and bespeak ye
    joy to ye
    whipperamerstam  well yer power gone
    if we dont like your tongue
    yer gotta be among  well the elders see
    flakerstrake  rattlesnake  well its ok'
    tell him  to close his mouth and take a hake
    fertermertail is what i guess comes next
    sister beat them to the last agree
    twenty seven in the family  poetry
    sake the strake and let it lake i gonna ate
    well for me  ho we plan a tree
    fermertail  we didnt get skrate
    well i guess yer could use a cup
    well stickerail  my pa did well say
    mailerwail  contrail  cut the slail
    striker piker mail yer lernuskail
    well i met a flaw  stakerslaker and she bow
    well whatchagot to meet  sancha feet
    now which book yer visions see
    it was the new  well okee
    now the old one he i see
    80 nearly 90
    passed on old henry




****************************************

AN APPENDAGE OR APPURTENANCE

(Forrest/FiCus, suffering from a case of collegiate
hemophilia, sends an expectoration from some part of his
respiratory tract; or, a copious discharge from dilated
torturous veins in swollen tissue at or within the anal
margin.  Shit, put a hemostat on that.  Or treat it quick
with hemp or hemp nettle, Mary.  [fowler])



As if I drifted I lay and uncovered dictionary
dream..."Slink"...the word "slink" slipped into my mind.
Mought it be that a sliver of lime and a glass of slivovitz
would cure this slobbering for a sloe-eyed beauty?  I
crave...I look and up a slope, sloppily wet from exertion,
is a slot.  I observe as it slothfully slouches, a la
Didion, my way...I look up again and inhabit the entire
water volume of a slough...a clock-tick and I realize a
sloven-hoofed animal nibbles my waterline, slowly imbibes my
crystal essence.  My tentacular tributaries move slow and
sludgy...as I evolve toward end-of-training, slug-shaped
tiny ones crawl upon my marge, trailing unique signatures,
tropistic only.  A flash of searing light and I'm slugging
in the ring again, aging fast toward burnout...the light
fades...old me is sluiced away before the water can
evaporate...for moments or millennia, I slumber...to abide
speaching slurred, the animal's hooves now slurry mud in my
self, I try to rise getting only slush...caught it seems in
this sly backwater as the animal's lips smack, her eyes
light, my smallness increases.  Parts of me feel as a small
ale in its small minded small talk trying to pass it off as
creating a reality...a smarty pants...I smash Him and
asudden begin drifting begin talking a smattering of creek'
thinking like a river I roll along obscured by smaze, I
catch a boat and smear it on a rock uttering the smear word
Aaaaahhhhhh' I toil long tubing toward the smell of frying
onions feeling a smelt I wonder often if oceanward going and
smile another salt fish and I smirk...I am to smite these
tight saltless shores one last time having been forged in
the smithy and found right I carry in me condensed smog to
be purified of smoke and sly smiles carried from before to
the still-pot of Gaia for desmids and whale sharks to return
to sediments and to a subduction zone and sometime
later...smoky quartz...a sharp crystal smolders and
scratches my eye...I SHATTER awake, the player's diamond
needle scratches the center surface of "Mysterious
Mountain".  I sweat.  Mahn!  Tha' musta been Some dream.
What's for supper?

Ficus strangulensis, 3 June 1993




****************************************


"The power of language lies neither in that future of
knowledge toward which it moves nor in that mythical past
from which it has emerged: it lies entirely in its present,
insofar as it succeeds in ordering the would-be key words to
make them say more than they have ever said, and transcends
itself as a product of the past, thus giving us the illusion
of going beyond all given language."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, Northwestern
University Press, p. 41



****************************************


    WAS POE AFRAID?
         Charles Plymell

    On these same streets tonite...
    in Baltimore. Was Poe afraid?

    Afraid of the florescent eyes
    of dogs, the ravens, and the rats
    shot running out of Hollins Market,
    the smell of rot as thick as fur.

    Afraid of roaches, disease, of poverty,
    timeless poverty, that brings a cruel whip
    to ponies pulling carts full of vegetables
    on Greene Street, overloaded with greed.

    Afraid of the fast sky over
    Cross St., clouds thrown over
    a crimson cloak, torn from the hill,
    sliding to the dark water's bay
    where night rusts silently away.

    Afraid of the partygoers, like sparkling ghosts
    from the statues, swirling great pleated sheets
    when street lights go dim, losing the stars,
    streaming party coils to their last car...
    some on twilight's slightly twisted cane.

    Afraid of the beer, the drugs, the vault
    of shoreline's fractal ragged fault
    floating in a dream grave afraid to yell
    disciples repeating smug versions of hell.

    The whirl of a wash, a tangled thread
    sets an alarm that turns to dread
    makes the vision flow instead to
    creation and how such grace is fed.





****************************************


    GO TO THE SUNSET AND TURN
         Charles Plymell

    The branch of stream and law entwines
    lost rail to the stars and back again
    while the dandelion sits on a weed.
    Joyous supernal it sits on a weed

    A long ride over forgotten roads in the
    crisp kilowatts of radios alone in the night, the
    tracks on Vortex plains erased by gentle snow
    like upon the magic board I drew in school

    The radar screen longs for blind events
    like towns alone in their night frost
    snow and wind streaks across the pavement
    showing sudden ghosts of fabled lizards

    O Gypsy Moth around my lampshade
    what dims the light beyond the door
    and twists trees reaching to the sky
    and down again into their own ring of years?

    In a month the moon repeats its fundamental note
    involuntary stomachs drift to Venus
    she repeats hers and within the newborn
    yet another aspect opens

    Hungry wolves know the snow. And I'm
    home to unwind the mummy roll by roll
    a part of me, an edge I cannot peer beyond,
    a hidden angle, a side I cannot see

    In the corner the spider weaves haphazardly
    forgetting the first part of the spiral
    tired perhaps, of the trembling fly
    in a forgotten filling station in Kansas





****************************************


        BRIEF ENCOUNTER
                         Kirby Congdon

        These were the things

        we--strangers--shared:

        the neighborhood's change,

        our street, finally! repaired,

        the weather's extremes,

        head-lined like some scandal,

        our building's roof, its water tanks

        the skylights over elevator works,

        the mechanic worlds we never saw

        but so depended on!

        as we passed daily

        in lobbies, unconcerned, below

        and our familiar faces meeting,

        so sudden, here, and now,

        like tourists, out of place,

        in some foreign land,

        tied by these casual threads

        --like some long lost cord

        to some primeval egg--

        with the wave of a hand,

        a nod, hardly grave,

        of what had been

        --neither dark nor deep,

        and nothing said:

        no regrets over any purse,

        property, or stolen bed.

        We sang no songs together

        but neither did we do to the other

        any kind of wrong,

        though we gave no hand

        and shared no pain.

        At this meeting point

        of pointless chance we know,

        if we think, but don't,

        we'll not see that face again

        --maybe can and could,

        but, then again,

        more likely, won't.




****************************************


    from THE LORCA VARIATIONS
         forthcoming from New Directions

    (XXIII)
    Jerome Rothenberg


"White"

Proem.  Days dissolve.  The ink inside the album starts to

fade.   Constantinople turning white erases Eloisa Lopez.

And that archbishop, really something else. See where she's

got him in her album -- what indulgence, oh my soul!   He's

like a little white thing.



    [ 1 ]
    First White


    Birds fly down

    from the moon


    in white March

    (open sesame!)


    white & unreal

    like a child


    on the prairie

    a flower


    (open sesame!)

    white in the forest


    a cherrytree's

    shadow.



    [2]
    Second White


    Frost on her feathers

    is white.


    grow cold on the syrinx.

    Dead Leda,


    her flesh glowing white

    in the forest,


    & Pan, sailing by

    in his boat.


    When it's night

    the blond swan,


    golden cygnus,

    throws open his wings.





    [3]
    Third White

    White's a conjure for clouds

    & for mountains

    with the clouds on their shoulders.


    Stars are conjures for wings

    & for snow

    where stars drop down from the clouds.


    Mountains are conjures for stars,

    for all white conjurations.




    [4]
    Fourth White


    Snow across the fields reveals the cock's crest.


    .


    Stars still shine at dawn.


    .


    The cock's crest suits him like a blouse.


    .


    Stripped down he greets the day.


    .


    A first laugh drives the stars away.


    .


    His gold crest soon turns white.







    [5]
    Final White

There were "romantic" words to end with -- "tree" or "house"

(0r "treehouse") -- before he got into another "novel."

March was as sharp as "vinegar" & there were some longhaired

"schoolboys" writing "verses."  Did they notice how white a

"thing" the "snowbird" was when they saw it after "school?"

Also that "basil" would grow best in "sand" -- that "love"

could be "sweet" as "cherries," not like "vinegar?"  With

Eloisa "dead," there was a "grandmother" who sewed her

"lips" shut.  That made a "springtime" for "dead" Eloisa,

with her "name" lit up by "candles," and "girls" who looked

like "baby dolls" blowing "white feathers" toward her.  O

little "rose" inside your "convent," said another, bring a

"bottle" for the "dead" down to their "boat."  "Mockorange"

is the little "secret" we perpetually write about.




****************************************


from   What to Whisper Until It Rains
      Short Poems 1963-1972; Revised 1989 & 1992
in     a few short lines
      Word Press and Light and Dust Books, 1993
by     Karl Young



              wind rises and falls
              then stops for a second
              leaving a hole in it

              this is the moment
              to find what is real
              and ride with it forever





****************************************

A REVIEW OF _WEST OF MASS_
Jim McCrary; Tansy Press, Lawrence, KS; 1992.

One of the best, most recent publications to come out of the
Kansas Magic Realism School is Jim McCrary's, West Of Mass.
True to the heritage of ritualistic regionalism that gave us
vortex landscapes where the episodic nerve was wired to fast
association, the Hobohemian experience of the beanery and
the tough flat noir of Belle Starr and Salt Chunk Mary lives
again. After all, the Turk left Coronado stuck out there,
and every good magician knows how to create a legend when
nothing else is happening.  It is no wonder that Burroughs
lives in Lawrence, and encouraged this production. The
illustrations by S. Clay Wilson will alert the readers to
what scenes may follow. "Hippy Jim" might now be drinking
red beer at Sporty's, with a half-white Kickapoo, but we
still taste the flavor of the old Rock Chalk Cafe, or the
years and names before that, which keeps that realism wired;
as in his description of the Dalton brothers putting on
show in Coffeyville, "The term wired/applied to any other
than/ Emmett, Bob, Grat and Bill/ is ludicrous. Look it up
pal. Look it up."

He asks the reader for the freedom that clarifies kicks...
or there's always Charlie Starkweather, or Bat, or Jessie,
or those hair-triggered legends of his poems. He
deliberately pushes pathos to the flash point where he gets
inside the "wired" and  doesn't just ingest wired as a
metaphoric caffeine/amphetamine past-beat familiarity, but
rather a metaphor for the magic realism like in the wires
that the storm left sparking and shooting around on the
ground, as if he "Can't lay anything down/ there is no down
left."

Though some of his poems require that special Kansas wild
esoteric-humor to fully appreciate, most of them bring it
right home as his "S&L Updated," in which he has Bonny and
Clyde come down on a bank with Neil Bush behind the desk. Or
his "Quien Es (?) Indeed," which is illustrated by a great
S. Clay Wilson rendition of the classic portrait of Billy
the Kid and his past and current lovers, full of holes or
not, "Here stands William Bonney/ like a lot of us/ at the
apex of a career/ and in the middle of a dilemma..." Some of
his most accessible poems mimic the conversations of
cowhands playing a little poker or crawling into the bunk:

                   "Film Noir"

                   With a name
                   like "Sundance"
                   how could you
                   be anything but
                   a "kid"
                   and sleep with
                   anyone but
                   a fellow
                   named
                   "Butch."

Jim McCrary works the Kansas idiom into his realism and
draws special attention to associative levels of meanings or
double meanings, reminding us of a Kansan who doesn't want
to waste any words, or a gunfighter who lets his riding
(reading) partner take it any way he wants it. In His poem,
"Doc" he uses Doc Holliday's last words, "This is Funny" to
comment: "No doubt about it/ the man had a way/ with/
shotguns/ and metaphysics.

                             copyright 1993 Charles Plymell




****************************************


ORALITY >> LINEARITY
   fowler
            thoughts after reading Doug Brent

As I started looking into things about InterNet I ran into
an off-line magazine called INTERTEK which contained an
article by Doug Brent that I found thought provoking.  I e-
mailed the editor and asked to re-print it in GRIST On-Line
and he referred me to the author who was amenable.  At the
same time I learned from Mr. Brent that the article had
already been e-published in EJournal a couple of years ago
and that a lively discussion had been going on in that
journal about some of the issues Mr. Brent had raised.  Just
a few months ago when I began putting the idea of GRIST On-
Line together the figure for the estimated number of
InterNet users that I ran into was 3 million.  Last week the
Wall Street Journal said 14 million, and growing at the rate
of a million a month.  So...maybe some of us haven't caught
up with what was happening on the Net in 1991...so...Mr.
Brent's article is made available again in the GRIST
directory at ftp etext.archive.umich.edu/pub/Poetry/Grist.
For those who wish to review the discussion in EJournal they
can easily do so by getting back issues from
[email protected]. bitnet.  Get the index to all issues
by sending e-mail to that address with the message being
only EJRNL INDEX.



What happens when/if we abandon linearity?  Can we imagine
it?  Linearity is our structure.  How do we re-structure?
Must we have structure?  Can we tolerate a higher degree of
unstructuredness >> chaos?  Should we try?  Why?

A new business manager abandons his desk and hits the road,
connected by phone, fax and laptop.  Present and future
success hinges on his ability to manage a networked set of
entities and their non-linear possibilities (profitably).
The vertical course of raw resource to final product, a
single manufacturing stream, is re-examined in order to
discover the possiblties for branching at every node in the
process.  Branching is synergistic, is innovation.  The
process is successful if it results in a *proliferation* of
products.

Explosion/fragmentation/nichefication.

The Net is such a process.  A facilitator, not of
unification, but of diversification, Balkenization.  Yet,
interconnectedness _seems_ to be enhanced and isolation
_seems_ to be overcome.  But empowerment of the individual
is diminished, even as s/he *feels* more secure, knowing
there are other like individuals all over the world with
whom one can interact (via the network) at will makes one
feel warm.  Why would government(s) try to limit the process
of fragmentation?  For the more diffuse the voice of the
people, the easier it is to control the fundamental
processes that generate wealth and security for the few.
Governmental agencies may feel a need to monitor the
activity on the Net, but only for the purpose of making sure
nothing is happening that might result in a concrete,
physical coalescence, an eruption in the streets.
Governments are dislodged by physical means.  Until the
people organize they are free to theorize at will.  Thus,
the Net reshapes our consciousness by providing us with an
endless, solitary connection to a glowing tube as the
substitute for the finite, more difficult connection to a
physical human being.  The context-starved and love-starved
citizen must have that daily net-fix, her/his only feeling
of connectedness all day long.

Our challenge today is not to predict where we are going,
but to become fully aware of where we have already come to.
Daily we are told that the Net is going to produce profound
changes in our consciousness, our way of thinking, our ways
of interacting.  Change has already occurred.  Change is a
present, on-going phenomenon.  It is not something that is
*going to* happen; it is the difference between what we did
previously and what we do today; between how we did it 10
years ago and how we do it now.  During the time it takes to
make a prediction--to gather data, generate a model, run the
model, analyze the results, fine-tune the model-- change is
constantly occurring.  It is much more important to be aware
of the subtle, incremental steps that are occurring
day-to-day than to speculate about the world of 2058.  Why?
Because of the breakdown of linearity.  Prediction is a
linear tool which presupposes the ability to see
cause-effect-cause.  In a branching universe the neither the
entry point/path through nor the outcome/exit point is not
predictable.

In geo-politics we see the reality of unpredictability.  No
one formulates policy because there is nothing stable enough
to base a policy on.  Solutions are not even attempted;
containment is a difficult enough goal.  "Leaders" no longer
attempt to direct or control events; they only attempt to
keep them from getting totally out of hand.  They act on the
edges.

Consider the analogy of the hypertexual, interactive novel
wherein there is no set beginning point and no set
denouement.  If each path through the material is unique,
what is the theme, what is the moral of the story, what is
the content?  Does not the idea that there are multiple
stories, multiple lessons to be learned, reflect the form of
our consciousness today?

What then is the morality that arises out of the networked
situation?  One thing does not cause another.  All things
are _multi_: multi-sided, multi-caused.  All things are
connected.  (Therefore, one-on-one cause/effect cannot be
true.)

Connectedness reflects some degree or another of dependence
= responsibility.  Responsibility leads to sharing and
sharing is facilitated by connection.  Has that happened to
you?  Have you experienced that?  Are you different from
yesterday?

It is possible to construct a set of events such that there
are an unpredictable number of unique paths....perhaps not
unpredictable (because created, therefore bounded) but that
the number of possibilities may be so large as to be
unrealizable in one person's lifetime (for instance).  But
the concept of path is linear; there is no path _through_ a
network; there are only paths around, within a network.  How
do you get out of a network?  Yet a network is bounded; or
it is not bounded.  A work, a creation, is generally not
thought of as unbounded.  Paintings have edges, symphonies
begin and end very specifically; novels, stories, essays,
poems all begin and end.

*AND TO THE EXTENT THAT THEY DO, THEY NO LONGER REFLECT
REALITY!*





****************************************


"Elements in the electronic writing space are not simply
chaotic; they are instead in a perpetual state of
reorganizaion.  They perform patterns, constellations, which
are in a constant danger of breaking down and combining into
new patterns."

J. Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the
History of Writing, Fairlawn, N.J.: Eflbaum, 1991.




****************************************


FiCus comments:

I see possible impacts on artistic expression.  Like a net
where messages with "the 7 words" are scrubbed (Prodigy?)
Even subterfuge, cant, dialect, etc., will eventually give
way to the daemons with joyous LexEngines parsing our
messages faster than we can type.  'Bout that time we'll be
treated to "quantification" of emotional response as
expressed through body "language", utterance and hormone
levels scanned by roadside MRI, flyby eeg, the reflectance
FTIR...the results fed to virtual adjudicatory devices
peering at your irises and ZAP...[or perhaps BLONG!]


****************************************




While searching for unique expressions of the Network
possibilities I was referred to a group calling themselves
*Nous Refuse*.  I asked Joe Amato, facilitator for the
collective, to describe what they were up to.  His (and
their) response follows.


*Nous Refuse*

(as compiled by Joe Amato, with a little help from his
friends)

Earlier this year---29 January to be exact---I contacted a
number of my closest net contacts to see if they would be
interested in getting together electronically to exchange
work under the general rubric "writing." Online writing,
scholarship, manifesto, fiction, poetry, what have you.

Not discussion per se, but this too---only all to be
transmitted & received as an ongoing exchange, again, of
writing.  From my original post:

My sense of it is that the writing would speak, not simply
for, but to itself.   Not more textual solipsism/incest/
parasitism, but more like self-referential interactive
text---each work building off of the others, growth by
virtue of an online interchange of textuality.

The result---Nous Refuse (& take it any way you like).
The list of contributors has fluctuated somewhat, as one
might expect.  Work has right along been forwarded to me, &
I've redistributed to the rest of the group, unedited (&
initially archived on my machine).  Most of the work has
been poetic, has been written in lines.

What Nous Refuse *is*, however, is at any instant shaped by
what it might be.  From the standpoint of writing, it might
be just about anything, depending on who contributes what.
That I think of it (& have 'advertised' it) more as an
electronic writing collective than as a publication has
something to do with its limited appeal.  That is, not
everybody has the time or inclination to generate pixels
that will ultimately not be registered as tenure-track
phenomena.  & in any case, a few of the folks on the list
are not academics.  To my knowledge, the range of academic
contributors-lurkers includes tenured faculty & graduate
students (& undergraduates are always welcome---there may
even be a few on the list).

But it's a somewhat unorthodox band of, presently, forty or
so persistent souls, even in terms of known reputations:  a
number of contributors (or lurker-contributors) are
well-known for their (print) poetry, a number for their
electronic work.  & a number of the rest are from
non-writing fields per se.   Nice mix.

The result is quirky, irregular, ventures into the
unfamiliar, unexpected.  An online group renga.  A cut-up.
A rant.  As with most electronic lists, the number of actual
contributors is a relatively small percentage of the number
in the collective.  (We're not doing too bad, though:
lurkers currently outnumber contributors at approx. two or
three to one.)

To give some idea of how the work posted to Nous Refuse
tends to work against the conventional grain:  having posted
(to Nous Refuse) GRIST's request for a piece describing
who/what we are, here's what two contributors posted in
response (the first from Forrest Richey, the second from
Jeremy J. B. Nguyen):


    sending out (reading in)

         words (arranged)

    thoughts (coded in words)

         expressable as ASCII only

    relayed thus delayed

         and (largely?) un-edited

    answering others' sendings

         a stately ping pong game

    staid on accounta

         organization/line impedance

    dancing (slow and measured)

         pushing toward

    the day we can

         jack in and FLY!

    brushing neurons with the Net-ters

         illusory(?) COMyounication

    foundlings virtually no more

         _voices in the choir_



&



     =====================================
    | jeremy is a discarded toaster by the |
    | side of the road. others often place |
    | cold slices of bread or other edible |
    | materials into the slots and after a |
    | period of adjustment they pop out as |
    | something different, sometimes eaten |
    | up and sometimes merely licked a few |
    | times but sometimes burnt to a crisp |
     ======================================

      yet often they never come out at all




It's worth mentioning here that the editor/publisher of
GRIST, John Fowler, himself posted a note regarding his
potential contribution to *this* piece.  In it, he hits on
an interesting aspect of net interaction.  Here's John:

  I appreciate being added to the group but I have
  some hopefully unfounded fears that some members
  may not appreciate having an editor/publisher lurk-
  ing about.  I don't have a clear understanding of
  what you're all up to so maybe I'm just showing my
  midwestern, semi-paranoid background.  But I don't
  want to be barging in or inhibiting anything that is
  going on.

What John's remarks highlight is the fact that Nous Refuse
(& other such net workings) permits an online, public
exchange between both the editor/publisher function & the
contributor-author function.  In this instance, the
editor/publisher's modesty(-"paranoia") precludes a
contribution per se---but the fact remains that John's
public statement of his self-perceived role in the group (&
I prompted him to allow me to repost to the group what was
originally a post solely to yours truly) situates him in a
somewhat different (non?)hierarchical relationship with
potential contributors to his publication.  & it thereby
opens the door (window?) to a somewhat more relaxed
conception of what the editorial/publishing function is all
about, blurring the distinction between this latter &
potential contributors in the event John should himself
choose to contribute.  If John *does* contribute---indeed,
even when he contributes as above----his contributions will
mark out his personal aesthetics (& politics etc) in the
public domain.  & in terms of Nous Refuse, such a domain
consists of an online, interactive dialogue between writers.

So ysee, you never know just what to expect from this crew,
whether resistance ('we refuse,' in so many words) or
compatibility ('new refuse').  & this makes the exchange,
from my pov, that much more vital, that much less hemmed in
by the conventions of conventional such 'meeting places,'
that much more attuned to the dynamics of exchange itself.
An emphasis on process, that old buzzword, but with a fairly
sophisticated, working sensibility as to more traditional
conceptions of poetic 'presence' (probably as a result of
the slippery locale of espace) & marketplace (once again,
Nous appeals to those who simply aren't satisfied with
customary consumer outlets).


Where we're headed---well, no place, exactly.  There's a
Beat premise here (with its corresponding quasi-libertarian,
American mythology) in this conception of moving right
along---though I would like to think that "the road" in this
case extends outward to permit for active participation by
women (still, representing only one quarter of Nous) &
likewise partakes of potentially global traffic patterns.
(One of the contributors, Chris Bigum, resides in
Australia---a point made painfully evident to me when, upon
my posting a "summer update," Chris kindly jogged me that it
was just beginning to get cold down under!).  Which is not
to gloss the underlying issue of access, the fact that only
the more industrialized nations presently allow for these
sorts of (spontaneous?) writing/virtual communities.

But the result has been, for me at least, incredibly
rewarding.  My personal agenda having much to do with trying
to stay a/live in my profession (I'm one of the
academic-bound contributors)---& I'm talking equal amounts
survival & meaningfulness---I couldn't ask for a more
exciting locale.  And hell---where ELSE might I go as public
as I please with my keystrokes?

I'll conclude this piece of writing with my more poetic
response to what 'we' on Nous Refuse are all about (posted,
self-indulgently, in response to my own posting!).  Feel
free to write in & contribute your own noninklings (just
give me a jingle, [email protected]):

  work that continues to open out into a world
  that continues to open out
  into itself, and in this opening
  there is a closing within the individual, the species:
  can we find
  within this work
  the working intelligence, can we find
  the opening that brings with it
  its parts and wholes, that brings with it
  at all times
  more and less than itself
  the work of closing, the work without
  continuing, from individual to the individual
  the work of the species
  that is as well the work of a whole
  of which it is itself a part?

  can we find within ourselves
  the opening into this work, this work
  that opens into a world, continuing
  at all times
  to fold into itself, to give us
  the work of closing, the work
  that opens past?


& the current list of contributors, in abcdisorder:  Marleen
Barr, Charles Bernstein, Chris Bigum, Michael Blitz, Don
Byrd, Wes Chapman, Eric Crump, Laurence Davies, Nate
Dorward, Luigi-Bob Drake, Nancy Dunlop, David Durand, John
Fowler, Chris Funkhouser, William Gardner, Loss Pequeno
Glazier, Carolyn Guyer, Pierre Joris, Michael Joyce, Robert
Kelly, Andrew Levy, Justin McHale, Jenny Miller, Stuart
Moulthrop, Jeremy Nguyen, Derek Owens, Martha Petry, David
Porush, Neil Randall, Forrest Richey, Martin Rosenberg,
Armand Schwerner, Kenneth Sherwood, Paul Southworth, Juliana
Spahr, Kali Tal, Patricia Thompson, Katie Yates ...

      .       .       .       .

Hey, why am I still t/here?

Well, after posting the entire piece to Nous for
comments/editing etc, I rec'd the following from Robert
Kelly... As always, Robert's words pushed the envelope that
much further, and in a somewhat different direction... Here
they are, another provisional (r)end(er)ing:)

somewhere along this way to say these 2 things,
that Nous Refuse and Grist and all that we see on the
screen are (and must/shd be) strictly
beside the point,
therein their liberty (I will not say libertarian, with
the comfortable gentleman-farmer ex-hippie sense that bears)
and once they get to be the point,
then they are not to be discerpted from those means they
right now get around and past and (in general)
through to us

and, secondly, that they share with cyperprose etc the
angerous charm of being in essence virtualities, fictional
in essence, and therefore (in this kalpa, thus)
corresponding to the noumenal urge ours since Proclus,
that is, we have turned our back to the sea.
In order to speak to one another.  This sorority.





****************************************


DDT and the DreamWorld BBS
                           fowler

Bill Paulauskas, incognito editor of Dada Tennis and
proprietor of the DreamWorld BBS, appears and disappears in
distorted re-incarnations and RL fluctuations; lurks in the
background.  What of his cohorts? those whose works he has
chosen to publish; what are they doing? playing in the
sandbox of words? (as one of them said)  DDT = DaDa Tennis;
DaDa Tennis, a net game played with words; return the serve
from the automatic server or serve yourself a salad of crisp
green vowels; never shirk a chance to verbalize a verb or
nounalize a noun and never stop to think.  Boing, boing,
boing-boing, boing, they go--back and forth--the only sense
the sound, the only sound in the  mouth, the only mouth in
the groin.  Dada/surrealism, experimental work, language
poetry and collaboration taken from the DreamWorld.  With
chilling graphics interspersed.  Stretch from Jake Berry's
icons to word-mush of the master pulp.  Jump in. Individual
pieces in the current issue seem to me to be overwhelmed by
the extensive selection of collaborat(ive)(ed)(ion) work.
To my mind, that is good.  For it is the collaborative
pieces that seem most nearly about to take off.  However, as
I read on through the sections, I feel slowly brought down;
the energy doesn't rise for me.  And I have to admit, I
missed structure (blush, blush).

It's good to see this writing pulled out of the BBS setting
where getting a handle on what's going on requires a major
commitment.  Seeing the results of "editing/splicing" is
worth the struggle of trying to be there.  A situation worth
getting involved in.

The comparison between the activities of the *Nous Refuse*
group and their approach to interaction and the results at
DDT is--mmmmmmmmm--instructive....  The engagement in
intertexuality achieved by DDT/Dreamstate is perhaps the
goal of Nous Refuse?  We would be interested in seeing their
reaction to one another if/after they take a look at each
other, if they haven't already.

DDT is available from Dreamstate Press, Box 10, Woodhaven,
NY 11421; DreamWorld BBS is at MODEM (718) 849-3232.




****************************************


++MAIL ART++E-MAIL++MAG/ZINE++INTERNET++
++MAIL ART++E-MAIL++MAG/ZINE++INTERNET++
++MAIL ART++E-MAIL++MAG/ZINE++INTERNET++

The following piece is included as a continuing provocation
for the discussion of what e-mail, what a Net mag-zine, what
a writing or a publishing collective might be--the form
it/they might take in the InterNet context.  In what follows
please freely substitute e.g., "e-mail" or "Net-zine" for
"mail art" or "exhibition", and/or, e.g., "InterNet" for
"the mails", "poems" for "art".  How strong are the
analogies?


What is Mail Art?

from "Global Mail", a thrice yearly listing of over 470 Mail
Art activities in more than 35 countries compiled,
maintained and published by Ashley Parker Owens,
[email protected] or [email protected].

  A COPY OF THE CURRENT ISSUE OF GLOBAL MAIL MAY BE FOUND
   AT etext.archive.umich.edu/pub/Poetry/Grist.

       Mail art is art that goes all over the world through
the use of the mails. It is international in scope. The
"art" is the ongoing exchange between artists, sort of like
a performance work or "happening."

       A mail art show usually consists of disposable art
that is sent through the postal system for the purposes of
an exhibition and publication. The works are unjuried
(uncensored) and not returned. The purpose of a mail art
show is to present the diversity of human expression
informally.  Artists and non-artists can all participate.
This allows artists to increase their visibility to non-
traditional audiences; it expands the public's conception of
what art can be; and it allows individuals to express
themselves without taking account of their artwork's
marketability or "quality."

       Mail art has a certain purity and equality to it. It
crosses many art world boundaries, because it is non-
hierarchical and focuses on the process instead of the final
product.  Mail art is not bought or sold, reducing the
middle man functions of the art world. It is its own
currency.

       Mail art is cross-cultural. It is inclusive of all
colors,  ages, languages, sizes, able-bodiedness, and
nationalities. There is no chance of rejection, because
everything is opened, studied, and read.  Time and attention
are assured for those whose voices need it.


How do I participate?

*you can send artwork to mail art show organizers so it can
be exhibited. You should (eventually) receive in return
printed documentation with a list of all participants.  You
can later use these lists to contact individuals on your
own, or to send out invitations if you have your own show.

*you can exchange works with those seeking exchanges.

*you can do "add to and return" exchanges.  This is when you
start an image and ask someone else to add to it and return
it to you.  This is done with photocopies and originals.

*you can submit material to compilation magazines.  You
generally send a specific number of copies to the organizer,
which they then collate with other contributions and send
back to you as a zine.  Compilation magazines usually have
specific size requirements.

*you can go the Chain Mail route.  This works just like
other chain letters, however, no money is involved, and no
bad luck happens if you break the chain.  It's just good
clean fun.  When your name gets to the top of the list, you
will receive artwork from others.  This may not work well
for you if you move around a lot.  Usually it takes almost a
year for your name to get up to the top of the list.

*you could have your own mail art show.

(This is only a partial list of options.  Other possibilites
include fax, audio, video, and zine submission projects).

How do I do my own mail art show?

1. Participate in every mail art show you can.  This
provides you with the necessary contacts.  It also gives you
an idea of the variety of documentation and exhibitions.

2. Think hard on whether you want to do a show, which
requires a lot of attention in finding a space, hanging the
show, press releases,  openings, etc.  Maybe a zine format
would be better, where you display the work by pasting it
into pages and making a little book which you would send out
with the list of names and addresses.

3. Once you make the decision to have a show, you need to do
the following:

*Give yourself plenty of time. Two years is suggested.

*Think of a theme. This isn't a necessity, but it may make a
more interesting show.

*Design invitations and send them out to every mail art
address you can find.

*Don't forget to put a due date, and your return address on
the invitation.

*Advertise.  Go for free advertising whenever possible (ie
Global Mail).

*Seek out places to have the exhibition.  It does not have
to be in a gallery.  Look at coffee shops, book stores, art
spaces, display windows, etc.  Once you have a potential
space, examine the walls carefully.  Will you be able to run
staples through it?

*As the names come in, record them immediately in one
notebook. Print clearly!

*If you have a computer, I recommend building a database and
recording into it directly.

*Contact the owners of the space to see if you can work out
an arrangement.

*After coming up with a space and date, start developing a
press release which you will send out one or two months
before the opening. You also may want to design some
invitations to the show and send them out.

*Hang the exhibition.  It is easiest to staple the works to
the wall. If you are using a display window, tape works
best.

*After the show, figure out what to do with the work.  It
can be recycled or given away.

*Send out the documentation with list of addresses.

What are the mail art "rules?"

 No returns.

 Send out free documentation with a list of participants
 w/addresses.

 No rejections.

 Send stamps when requesting copies of zines.

 No censorship.

 No money/No fees.

 Apply sufficient postage.




****************************************


Date: 22 Aug 93 09:53:17 EDT
From: [email protected]
Cathryn L. Welch) Subject: Networker Telenetlink
To:[email protected]

Dear John,

Chuck Welch (Crackerjack Kid) here!  Thank you for the
invitation  to contribute to GRIST On-line.

Indeed, I am interested in the future of interactive mail
and e-mail  art. Since 1991 I've been exploring these
relationships, participating in projects like Artur Matuck's
1991 Reflux Project, which was a conduit for linking
Telenetlink between mail art and the Internet's telematic
communities.

When I helped organize the Decentralized Worldwide Networker
Congresses in 1992 (NC92), I was the only mail artist using
Internet to introduce mail artists to the world of
telecommunication.  With the enlisted  help of a few other
mail artists I succeeded in establishing a Telenetlink
e-mail network.

I proposed a Networker Databank (1991) to be mail art's
first on-line networker archive, The Networker Databank.
This on-line archive of over 500 materials from the NC92
year is situated at the University of Iowa's Alternative
Traditions In the Contemporary Arts Archive.  But in a
larger sense, my goal is to make this archive accessible
through BBS', on-line electronic journals, matrixes, and
electronic zines such  as your own electronic zine.

I'd like to submit the following proposal to first appear in
GRIST  On-line. I'm also preparing an essay which explains
the proposal in  greater detail.  I should have that ready
in a week or two.  But in the meantime, I'd like to invite
you to actively participate in the formation of the
Networker Telenetlink 1995.  What are some networker
objectives you'd like to see implemented?  How might we use
GRIST to be an active tool for bridging the world of snail
mail art and telematic e-mail art?  Finally, would GRIST
make the entire Networker Databank available in an on-going
capacity, not only to it's readers but as a networking tool
transported to sister-networks and  publications? [yes, the
Editor]  I look forward to hearing from you in the days
ahead.

best,  Chuck Welch




****************************************



NETWORKER TELENETLINK 1995
THE CONGRESS BODY LEFT IN 1992/A SPIRIT NETWORKS NOW/THE
SPIRIT LIVES IN EVERYONE/WE MET-A-NETWORK INFANT/A
MEDIA-CHILD WAS BORN/TELENETLINK IS ITS NAME/IT LIVES IN
NETLAND NOW/THE FUTURE OF THE NETWORKER IS
TELENETLINKED/MAIL ART IS EMAILART/FAXMAIL ART/EMBRACE THE
CHILD/TELENETLINK IN '95!

OPEN OBJECTIVES

Objectives for a NETWORKER TELENETLINK YEAR in 1995 are open
for discussion through August 1994.  Possibilities???
Embrace the telematic medium and explore its parameters,
develop a local-global community, exchange cultural
communications, interconnect the parallel network worlds of
mail art and telematic art through INTERNET, Compuserve,
America Online, Bitnet, and other connected e-mail gateways,
place networker archives on-line, experiment with telematic
technology, fax, exhibit, interact in public and private
forums, merge media: mail and email, and enact networker
ideals envisioned for the millenium.

CRACKERJACK KID



SEND OBJECTIVES, STRATEGIES, E-VENTS, E-MAIL, TO
[email protected].
NETWORK MAIL ART TO CRACKERJACK KID, PO BOX 978,
HANOVER, NH 03755

Responses will appear in upcoming issues of "Netshaker" zine
Deadline: August, 1994




****************************************


SPUNK PRESS MANIFESTO @ S P U N K  P R E S S

The excuse for the existence of SPUNK PRESS is the desire of
some individuals to see alternative literature continue to
flourish, but this time online!

The policy of SPUNK PRESS is to act as an independent
publisher of works converted to, or produced in, electronic
format and to spread them as far as possible on the Internet
and in the BBS society free of charge. The work may not
necessarily originate from someone with net access. The
major interest of SPUNK PRESS is alternative literature and
anarchist material, both old, converted, and newly produced.

We want to help zine editors, flypost authors and others who
desire a wider audience to convert or to produce their works
in an electronic format and give them the opportunity to use
our distribution channels, FTP sites, mailing lists and
whatever other means we might have within our powers.

We welcome fanzines, pamphlets, books and portions of books,
articles, manifestos, quotations, interviews,
bibliographies, reviews, posters, and other material, both
in-print and out-of-print.

You can snarf what we have published so far from:
red.css.itd.umich.edu
(IP Number: 141.211.182.91)  /poli/Spunk/texts

This manifesto and other internal Spunk Press documents can
be found in /poli/Spunk/info; in particular, there is an
introduction to the archive in /poli/Spunk/info/
Introduction.  To submit material, get the file /poli/Spunk/
info/How.To.Submit from the FTP site mentioned above or
contact the editorial collective.

If you do not have ftp access, you can get documents by
sending electronic mail requests to a mail server (such as
[email protected]). Type "help" in the body of the
message for instructions to change and list directories, and
retrieve files from the archive.

To get on our mailing list send a note to spunk-list-
[email protected].  The mailing list is the forum for
decision making at SPUNK PRESS, but if there is no clear
consensus, or the consensus is at variance with anarchist
ideas, the collective decides.

The collective is composed of people with a reasonable
commitment to doing some aspect of the work at SPUNK PRESS,
and will be extended to those who are like-minded.  So you
can be a part of the coordination of actions taken.

If you would like to reach the editorial collective of SPUNK
PRESS, write to:
Mikael Cardell [email protected]  Linkoping SWEDEN
Ian Heavens <MI>[email protected]  Edinburgh  SCOTLAND
Chuck Munson <MUSO><N> @macc.wisc.edu
c/o Practical Anarchy,  PO Box 173  Madison, WI 53701-0173
U.S.A
Jack Jansen [email protected] Amsterdam  HOLLAND
Spunk Press Manifesto Version 1.023rd December 1992




****************************************


The Second Annual Poets House POETRY PUBLICATION SHOWCASE
October 16 through October 30, Exhibit hours 11-5 -- Free An
exhibit of new  poetry releases from across the nation and a
festival of events celebrating the diversity of this year's
poetry

DISPLAYS OF NEW POETRY RELEASES
An opportunity to view the current state of the art: books
from commercial, university and small presses

PANEL DISCUSSION SERIES: ISSUES IN POETRY PUBLISHING

- Anthologies and the Canon: The Poem, the Reader, the
Market at the Millennium with Ray Gonazalez, Joan Larkin, A.
Poulin, Jr., Jerry Wards and others October 19, 7:00
--Suggested Donation $8, Members Free

- The Tao of Recognition: Awards and Prizes, First  Books,
Self-Publishing with Didi Godenhar, Bill Henderson, David
Lehman, Robert Sheldon, Tree Swenson October 21, 7:00
--Suggested Donation $8, Members Free

- The Future of Poetry Publishing: The Poetry Audience of
the Future with Jonathan Galassi, Dana Gioia, Bob Holman,
Haki Madhubuti, Luis J. Rodriguez and others October 27,
7:00 -- Suggested Donation $8, Members free

Panel Discussion Series Subscription -- $15

GRAND FINALE READING: Friday, October 29, 7:00 --Suggested
Donation $8, Members Free with Malkia Cyril, Minnie Bruce
Pratt, Leroy Quintana, John Yau and others

POETS HOUSE, 72 SPRING STREET , NY, NY 10012  (212) 431-7920
(no modem) Library and literary resource center open Tuesday
through Friday, 11:00 to 7:00; Saturday, 11:00 to 4:00.


NOTHING ON E-PUBLISHING!?




****************************************
VIRPO
(virtualpoetry)

"The long standing process of trading texts back and forth
becomes transformed into a process of merging texts into new
wholes...."                                       D. Brent

This is/will be a regular, monitored, *department* of
non-dead-ends where x-plorations may take PLace and
comParison of the livin' end-RESults may be made or not.

_#1:_

CREATE A NEW TEXT THE NOUNS OF WHICH ARE ONLY ALL OF THE
NOUNS IN THE TEXT WHICH FOLLOWS.  SEND IT TO THE EDITOR,
[email protected], FOR PUBLICATION IN A FUTURE ISSUE OF
GRIST.

Use all and only the nouns from this text:

"Coco drug zero! highest security grade! moles on the move!
double you see! snakes in the grass! rabble! riot! unlawful
assemblies! communal insurrection! mutinous masses!
turbulence! panic! goundless phobia! wide of the mark! right
of the track! hypochondria! march target! direction! prince
your palace! royal palace! ...password! goglach!
demonstrations! protestations! provocations! much
discretion! close observation! take precautions! that's it!
not a word! deadly secret! ... one more thing! bear in mind!
silence is golden...
    What's the matter now?
    code names! Lochness monster! comet in sight! red
light! burning bright! sit tight! no fright! Yes! No! Beyond
all doubt! satellite! asteroid! planetoid! Polaroid! coming
fast! hostile! perfidious! menacing! momentous! fatal!
    stern measures! Cockadoodledoo! He's coming!
    completely mad!
    coming! look there! He's getting in! where's the guard?
    call the guard!   Da!"

    from "Mysteries of the Macabre" by Gyorgy Ligeti
     as translated from the German by the publisher
Program notes,New Juilliard Ensemble Concert, Sept. 21, 1993




****************************************


VISPO
(visual poetry)

a call for submission(s)

What have you done with what you've got?

(i.e., w/NetTools, i.e., w/whatever you can use on the Net)

visually--concrete i mean we used to do some pretty
interesting things on a _typewriter_

Anything publishable in ASCII a work of art?

Can it be?

Perhaps not.

****************************************


Electronic Publishing: What is it and why does it mean
Choice?
            Paul F. Peacock, September 1993

   This article grew out of some of the interchanges that I
saw on the Internet having to do with electronic publishing
(ep).  I thought that an article giving the perspective of
somebody who is within the industry at ground level (or
perhaps, more appropriately, ground zero) might be of
service to people interested in ep.  From a philosophical
standpoint section 1.1 is the most important.
   One caveat: this article is an update of one I wrote in
early 1993 for our electronic magazine/sampler "New Worlds".
If you are reading this more than six months from September
1993 it's out of date. Contact me for an update (see
Resources, section 5.0).
   This version has the following sections (all of which
are my opinion and some of which are sub-divided):

   1.0 About the Author, by the Author
      1.1 Why does ep mean Choice?
   2.0 Electronic publishing today
      2.1 Production
      2.1.1 First-rung
      2.1.2 Second-rung
      2.1.3 Third-rung
      2.1.4 Online delivery services
   2.2 What books are suitable now?
      2.2.1 First-rung
      2.2.2 Second-rung
      2.2.3 Third-rung
      2.2.4 Online delivery services
   2.3 Who's buying this stuff..?
   2.4 ...and why would I want to?
   3.0 Why should print publishing inherit electronic
       publishing?
   4.0 Where does this leave university presses?
   5.0 Resources
   6.0 Knowledge Central - EP Fantasy #1
   7.0 Where does hypertext fit in?

                     -----------------------------------

   1.0 About the author, by the author.

   I am a poet.  I am also a computer person and have been
involved with computers for over sixteen years.  I started
in ep focusing on publishing on regular 3.5/5.25 inch disks
- what is now known as disktop (as opposed to desktop)
publishing.  This was because I wanted to mix my vocation
with my avocation.  We started up in March 1991.

   The name of the company is Floppyback Publishing
International and we have 35 titles in our catalog ranging
from six books we did for Rutgers University Press to poetry
by Norman Rosten (librettist for the opera Marilyn at the
New York State Opera this fall) to a thriller by Matthew
Paris, originally published in 1973.  We also do consulting
on ep.

   I started in this because I saw in ep three things:

   1) a way to make a living
   2) a way to allow (immediately) good work that was not
      commercially viable to get out and
   3) a means to work towards a better world through a
      universal availability of ideas.

   I am on the Board of Directors of the Digital Publishing
Association and am a US representative for "The Electronic
Author", a biannual magazine put out by the UK Society of
Authors, the trade-union for authors in the UK.

   1.1 Why does ep mean choice?

   Quite simply because the phrase "electronic publishing"
contains within it the word "electronic".  This lets the
computer industry into the game.  This means that everything
that applies in a general way to the personal computer
software industry applies to the electronic publishing
industry.  This means:

   a) for the first time there is an alternative, proven
      method of distribution of multiple copies of the work
      of an author or editor (this is how the PC software
      industry makes its living).  This is a biggie.

   b) The cost of making copies of said work is very low
      and, theoretically, infinite (this is how the PC
      software industry makes its big money).

   c) Improvements in technical aspects of production and
      display of the work will come extraordinarily rapidly
      (in 1982 the first IBM PC was introduced - it had two
      diskette drives, no hard drive and cost $5,000.
      Today, ten years on, there are tens of millions of
      PCs in use, all highly developed) driving down costs
      even further.  I.e., electronic publishing will move
at
      the speed of the PC industry, not the print
      publishing industry.

   d) The cost barrier to entry into the business is very,
      very low, low enough to be met by an individual.
      This is another biggie.  In essence, any person who
      has a PC and a little software can write a book and
      distribute it to potentially millions of people (via
      electronic bulletin board systems or the Internet).
      Assume for a moment that it is something everyone
      wants to read and is so distributed.  Millions of
      people read it.  Before the advent of the personal
      computer this simply was not possible.

   These are the reasons that this is such a powerful
thing, with number four the main reason.  Number four
changes pretty much everything in the long run.

   2.0 Electronic publishing today

   I have tried, as far as I am able, to piece together the
state of the industry today and not to wander into the
future.

   2.1 Production

   I believe that the easiest way to think of ep today is
as a ladder.  As one goes up the ladder, cost of production
increases, but so does the gee-whiz factor.  Therefore:

   2.1.1 First-rung

   Disktop (not desktop) publishing.  Publication of
material on 3.5" and 5.25" inch disk for IBM and compatible
PCs and Apple machines.  Lots of different software
available.  One starts with plain ASCII text and then adds
graphics.

   The advantage of this market is that there is a massive
installed base of "players" i.e., personal computers -
estimates range from 40-60 million machines.  Mike Weiner,
President of Microlytics thinks this is a sleeper market -
the cost of goods is good for anything less than 20Mb of
text/graphics.  (On one 3.5 inch disk we can easily fit a
1000 page book - text only, no graphics).

   The disadvantage is that once graphics are introduced
you simply run out of memory if you intend the electronic
book to run from the diskette.  If you are happy to have
people download onto their hard-drive it's a different
story.  Knowledge Adventure published a $45 interactive
encyclopedia for kids which sits on the hard drive and
expected to sell 500 in three months.  They sold 5,000 the
first day.

   This then naturally leads you to the next rung:

   2.1.2 Second-rung

   CD-ROM (or Read Only Memory).  Can store the equivalent
of 1800 regular 5.25 inch _diskettes_.  Thus entire
encyclopedias can fit on one CD (as indeed they do).
Standards are coming together.  A much smaller installed
base, but growing all the time.  But the massive storage of
the CD-ROM allows for sound and video clips.  Prices are
also dropping

   - Compton NewMedia sells some CDs for $29.95.

   Portable devices.  Use smaller CD-ROMs than regular
sizes or credit card-size memory cards (e.g. Franklin) which
can hold up to 45Mb of compressed data.

   The best example here is the new SONY DD-20B, to be
released in the US on October 1 1993 with a suggested retail
of $399, packaged with an encyclopedia and a translator.  It
plays 3" CDs which can hold up to 6 hours of audio, 100,000
pages of text or 32,00 graphics.  Frequently it will combine
written material with the sound - so the translator disc
allows you to find frequently spoken phrases and then speaks
them out loud to you, in three or four different languages.
The device can be connected to a TV set.  Clearly this is
too expensive for everyone to have and the screen display is
too small but SONY is ploughing on in the right direction.
Xerox has just created a 600 dpi resolution screen and when
this is combined with a slightly better designed SONY
hand-held device at a lower price point - watch out.  SONY
has leap-frogged Franklin Electronics here.

   2.1.3 Third-rung

   CD-I. Interactive CD that plays in its own player hooked
to the TV.

   Other esoteric devices.

   2.1.4 On-line delivery services

   The latest Steve King short-story was available only
from the online Internet bookstore for two weeks prior to
its publication in paper.  Viking, his publisher, intended
it as an advertising gimmick but it's dangerous for them.
If Mr. King makes money from the online downloading service
he has got to be thinking that maybe for some work he won't
go through his publisher for at all - he'll just cut a deal
with the online bookstore directly...

   2.2 What kind of books are suitable now?

   2.2.1 First-rung

   Disktop publishing on floppyback: Disktop publishing is
ideally geared to the publication of the single book
translated from a printed book.  One book fits on one disk
with its associated software.  To use a CD-ROM for one
text-only book is overkill.

   I think that these are the type of books we will see on
disk right now:

   1) Books that are commercially unviable any other way.
      The good thing about disktop publishing is that it is
      inexpensive to produce a quality product on disk.
      Once produced it never goes out of print.  Production
      cost from a final manuscript is generally less than
      $1,000.  Cost of reproduction is tiny (less than $1)
      and so break-even can be down at the 80 copies level.

      If you sell directly there is no warehousing cost -
      as orders come in you just pull another copy off the
      disk - and since it never goes out of print you can
      expand your horizon for those 80 copies to, well,
      theoretically forever, but let's say 10 years.  So if
      you have a book that you think will sell 8 copies a
      year for ten years you now have a way of publishing
      it (and of course the breakeven may be even less).
      Big trade publishers may not want to do this, but I
      don't think this is the case for smaller presses and
      individuals.

   This category includes poetry which is why I got into
this business in the first place.

   2) Books that are out-of-print that you want to make
      available again (really a subset of 1.)

   3) Books for which the new medium offers advantages -
      such as global searching or linking to existing
      systems (better help documents) etc.

   4) Books which ARE commercially viable but for which the
      new format allows a better price-point.  This is
      particularly true of scholarly works which have only
      a small audience, so have a small print run and go
      out-of-print quickly, so are expensive, so have only
      a small audience ad infinitum.

   5) Books marketed by their authors.

   6) Mainstream books after they come out in paperback.

   At this stage, therefore, the paperback best-seller will
not appear on disk.  The number of players (either personal
computers or hand-held or CD-ROM) is not (yet) large enough
to match the market.

   2.2.2 Second-rung

   Because of its immense storage capacity, and the power
of the personal computer to manipulate data, reference works
which usually require some kind of search are a natural for
CD-ROM.  Now you can whip through the entire twenty-six
volume encyclopedia and find all references to the word
"mammal" in about 1 minute.  So big reference works are good
for this medium.  As are how-to books where animation, sound
and video clips are all useful.  This is where multi-media
got its name.  Not just words, but sound and moving
pictures.  Multi-media projects are being put together which
did not start out as books but were conceived as electronic
products.  All of this production cost is, however, still
fairly expensive and the bigger the project the less easy it
is for the average consumer to download material (because of
the length of time.)

   2.2.3 Third-rung

   We are now out of the realm of converting books into
another medium and talking about projects which could be
considered only electronically.  You certainly could put
text alone on these mediums but what's the point?

   2.2.4 Online delivery services

   Currently I think all the types of book that are
suitable for disks would fit here as does anything
interactive: i.e., where it's not downloaded but just
interacted with.

   2.3 Who's buying this stuff...?

   In the main, libraries, schools and businesses are
buying CD-ROM.  E.g.,. Dartmouth College Library spent 2.5
times as much on CD-ROM as books last year.  Home computer
users are buying CD-ROM drives mainly for their kids.  The
Optical Publishing Association (OPA) says the average
CD-ROM duplication order has grown from 460 copies in 1990
to over 20,000 today, although this last figure is
anecdotal.

   Franklin has sold 6 million hand-held integrated
devices.  The Apple Newton (an indicator of how many SONY
machines may sell) is rumoured to have sold upwards of
50,000 units.  The OPA estimates 5 million CD-ROM drives
will be sold in 1993.  26 million Americans have home
computers (more than own audio CD players).

   2.4 ...and why would I want to?

   Currently:

   1) Because it's not available any other way.
   2) Because you can do things with it that a book can't
      do for you.
   3) Because it feels more natural - the current
      generation that is in K6 education (the IBM personal
      computer was introduced in 1982) and well-versed
      computer literates (many of those at college).
   4) Because it's more convenient - less weight, less
      space.  See also the note on the new SONY above in
      section 2.1.2.  Obviously as time goes by the reasons
      will increase as resistance based on difficulty of
      use or cumbersomeness decline as the technology
      improves.

   3.0 Why should print publishing inherit electronic
publishing?

   I hope that by now you are able to see the answer -
there is no overriding reason at all.  Print publishing has
the potential to inherit electronic publishing, but so does
the PC software industry, and that industry is moving faster
than a speeding bullet while the print publishing industry
is sitting on its hands.

   What the print publishing industry has, which the PC
software industry lacks, is content.  Just like fossil
fuels, the copyrights that the print publishing industry
holds are, potentially, only a one-time resource.  For
example - Microsoft Publishing approaches Mr. S. King (or in
fact his agent) and says "we would like you to do your next
novel on CD- ROM.   We will give you the best editors money
can buy (and believe us we have lots of money), more money
per copy so that your take will be larger than if you went
into the printed word--even if the total sales are smaller.
We will even coordinate the release of this work onto many
other different platforms - Franklin, CD-I and so on.  And
you can include pictures and scary noises.  And if you want
to release it in hardcover in six months go ahead."  What is
Mr.  King going to say?  And what will he say in five years
when the technology is even further advanced?  And what will
all the other authors have to say?  (NB: I left this last
paragraph in because I wanted to pat myself on the back. I
wrote it in early 1993 way before anyone knew what Mr. King
was going to do on the Internet.  Call it my reward for this
article. PFP. 9/19/93)

   Currently the print publishing industry has access to
content and good editing/preparation skills and a
distribution system.  The giants have money, the others
none.  I predict that the current crop of electronic
publishers will work with print publishers on licensing
deals until they understand the acquisition of content and
then that will be it.  And let's not forget that an
individual can release a work to millions of people for next
to nothing.

   Print publishers MUST learn how to publish
electronically - how to create the physical object and
distribute it.  Or they will eventually bear as much
relationship to the publishing business as hand-letter
presses do to the publishing world today.  They have a
slight advantage now (if they can hold onto it, and it is
not at all clear that they can) and that is their
intellectual property rights. They are essentially sitting
on a fossil-fuel reserve of material and are preaching
caution.  I cannot understand why SONY or someone just
doesn't buy a small publishing house, beef up the editorial
staff, shut down the printing end and just get cracking at
publishing its own material.

   I agree entirely with those who say that printed
publishing will never entirely disappear - this point of
view misses the point.  Printed publishing will gradually
become just a tiny piece of the publishing industry.

   4.0 Where does this leave university presses?

   In a certain sense, I think, in a quandary.  I think
that one has to ask the question, What is the mission?  If
it is the dissemination of information to as many people as
possible at the lowest possible cost then there are many
books that you probably currently produce that you should
consider immediately switching to the electronic format,
because the break-even point is that much lower, they never
go out of print - provided of course that the target
audience all have access to PCs.

   This primarily includes text-only work.  I am thinking
here of books of research papers and so on.  And as time
goes by and the technology to store and display pictures
improves everything would have to go over.   And, in another
sense, in a good position.  Because in the new electronic
age "brand-name" awareness is all important.  Quality is
indicated by the brand-name which has value all its own.
When the only visible manifestation of a work is a disk (and
all disks are basically alike) the brand-name on that disk
is all important.  And, perhaps, for those presses that
embrace the technology, happy.  One can now produce more
than ever before for the same cost.

   5.0 Resources:

   Floppyback Publishing International
   PO Box 2084
   Hoboken NJ 07030

   Voice: (201) 963 3012 9-5 EST
   Fax: (201) 420 8751
   E-Mail: Compuserve 71702,154
           Internet   [email protected]

   Digital Publishing Association
   R. Albright
   Director
   1160 Huffman Road
   Birmingham Road AL 35215

   Voice: 205 853 8269
     Fax: 205 853 8478
     BBS: 205 854 1660

  E-Mail: Compuserve 75166,2473
          MCI Mail   RALBRIGHT
          GEnie      R.Albright (the DPA has a roundtable
                     here)
          Internet   [email protected]

   6.0 Knowledge Central - EP Fantasy #1.

   The following material is strictly late-night fantasy
reading....  I have included it just as an example of what
electronic publishing can accomplish.  Of course, if anyone
is interested in exploring this further, drop me a line.
And, of course, remember that a fantasy is not hard-edged
reality.

   All the non-fiction material that is currently produced
in book form is wasted if it cannot be accessed by
electronic systems and thus linked to anything else.  There
is too much information being produced in the world for an
individual to absorb in a 70 year life span without
electronic help.  The absence of such electronic help is
therefore holding up the future of the human race.  We now
have the power to change this.

   In an ideal world the government would:

   a) recognise that data highways are as important a
public good as road-ways and make available free of charge
data communication networks.

   b) require all publishers who want an ISBN number to
deposit a copy of their work in ASCII in a central location,
like the Library of Congress, where it would become the
electronic basis for Knowledge Central.

   In this concept anyone could hook into Knowledge Central
and do any kind of search they wanted.  They would not, of
course, be able to download the work they were searching.
They could only look at it on the screen.  At the heart of
Knowledge Central is a giant search engine which would have
the capacity to search everything.  Everything then would be
automatically linked.  If you are in a book and you put your
cursor on a word, then the system will display the first
hundred closest things it can think of - starting with a
definition and gradually moving outwards in circles from
your original starting point.  You should also be able to
jump to the next hundred and so on.  Start with non-fiction
and use the Dewey system as the guidance point.  I.e., move
back up levels as time goes by.

   The key to Knowledge Central is that the links are not
embedded in the texts, which would mean a lot of work, but
are created by the software that resides in Knowledge
Central.  For example the cursor is placed under the word
"castles".  If requested the software will ask questions to
deduce context and then run from there.  No links are
embedded in the text which uses the word "castles."

   What will be displayed will be book titles.  I.e., the
first 100 titles that mention the word you chose.  Or if you
chose a reference you will immediately jump to that.  In the
beginning the system will ask, if it is unsure, Is this a
title?  Later on it will know automatically and, later on,
Knowledge Central will publish rules that publishers will
have to adhere to if they wish the search software to find
them (and why would they not, since this will be free
publicity).

   This can start in 1993 if we so desire.  We have all the
ASCII text already since everything now comes back from the
typesetters in that form.  The timescale for adding other
books can be as short or as long as people desire.
Knowledge Central will be accessible via the Internet.  The
development of the software for the Knowledge Central would
be a public project and the software thus created would be
in the public  domain.  This will create ipso facto the
standard.  All information created in the creation of the
software will be in the public domain and continuously
updated as time goes by so everyone knows everything that is
going on.

   In one year approximately 40,000 books come into print.
Assume that each book has on average 500 pages and each page
needs 2K.  This is 40,000 x 500 x 2,000 characters i.e.,
40,000,000,000 or 40Gb of data.  This is nothing for today's
computer systems. It's actually probably a lot more because
of the graphics but who cares even if it's 100 times more?
It's all do-able.

   The implications of KC are staggering, not merely in
what it means, but in the fact that it is do-able....  We
have Prodigy, we have the Internet, we have all of our books
in digitized format.

   Consider this...Motorola is creating the Iridium
project.  With a hand-held communicator connected to KC over
a 14,000 baud internal radio modem anyone anywhere in the
world, from the hottest desert to the deepest jungle to the
highest mountain, will be able to access and search the
combined knowledge base of the entire American publishing
industry and, later, the world.  By implication this is the
storehouse of all of mankind's knowledge.  And it doesn't
have to sit in one place.

   Other countries will want to join in.  It will be easy
to charge for downloads from KC, to charge for overseas
access.  As other countries do join in, research will start
for on-the-fly translation so that foreign language editions
will no longer be needed.

   If someone wants the complete text of a book then they
will pay a fee and it will be delivered to them
electronically.  Browsing of KC will, however, be free,
since it will be over government supplied roads.   And the
analogy with roads follows just as surely because there will
be congestion - people will leave their systems on all day
and so on.

   6.1 How to Start Knowledge Central (in theory).

   1.  Obtain space on a system capable of holding the
       data.
   2.  Write the software that will compress and search the
       ASCII files.
   3.  Get publishers to deposit ASCII files into the
       computer by government fiat.
   4.  Get the government to pay for the data lines so that
       connect time is truly free.
   5.  Launch.

   6.2 Why it is impractical to do this today.

       Because of many things, Virginia.

   6.3 How to Start Knowledge Central (in practice).

   Use books that are in the public domain, or out-of-print
and for which the authors have no objections.  All other
considerations apply.  Get a pilot project started.  Appeal
for the development of the software.  Solve the problem in
increments, like the Japanese.

   6.4 How it will be for our Grandchildren

   Knowledge Central will grow to include everything -
sound recordings, moving pictures and text.  To prevent
abuse of the sound and moving pictures systems interactivity
will be limited to x minutes duration.  Maybe for certain
consumer products this will be entered x years after
release.

   6.5 What to do now?

   1.  Alert the media and government.
   2.  Start to find computer industry types who might be
       interested - supplying equipment and software.
   3.  Start to find publishers of scholarly material (and
       scholars) who might be interested.

   6.6 What to do with material that does not exist in
digital format?

   In a few years scanners will be here that allow us to
scan everything as cheaply as dirt and as accurate as
reading.  Until then we take the top twenty books which are
classics in their field and appeal for donations from the
public to put them into Knowledge Central.  In fact, this is
how we will support this.  People will put books into
Knowledge Central as dedications for their loved ones.

   7.0 Where does hypertext fit in?

   In this note I have written about ep in the context of
the current print publishing industry.  In other words, I
have taken the book and extrapolated its development, in a
commercial sense, into electronic media.

   The following paragraphs are how I currently think about
hypertext and its commercial acceptance.

   I think the word "hypertext" has been debased.  It seems
to me that in the general run of things, a piece of work is
now defined as hypertext when in fact (in many cases) it is
a linear piece of work onto which the ability to jump from
certain points to certain other points has been grafted
(this is not inherently bad).  This seems to me a partial
implementation of hypertext in the strictest sense of the
word, but if this is what the word currently means then an
alternative definition is now needed.

   If the current definition of hypertext really means
"partial net" I define a full-fledged hypertext (ffh) as a
complete net.  As such it cannot, by definition, be printed
(put into the linear form of sequential pages) without
losing its structure.  There are of course lesser or greater
degrees of implementation of hypertext, but I think this
definition of ffh will serve.  When I refer to linear-
text-with-jumping-ability I will refer to partial net
hypertext (pnh).

   Thus I currently define the implementation of hypertext
in two ways: pnh for a partial implementation and ffh for a
complete implementation.

   As publishing mechanisms exist today, ffh is ideally
suited to short-entry reference works, which are nets
themselves.  The ultimate ffh is the humble dictionary.
Other non-fiction may be suited to ffh, or some lesser
degree of implementation of hypertext, i.e., pnh.  The
problem with current fiction is that time is an element.
And time, obviously, as understood by most people who buy
books today, is linear and goes only one-way (forward).  Ffh
does not, therefore, have a fit, although pnh may.

   I do not think, therefore, that the translation of
current fiction into ffh is going to work.  Peoples' ideas
of what constitutes fiction will have to change first and I
confess that I don't have a paradigm for that because,
although I can think of a number of obvious advantages that
hypertext gives to fiction, I cannot think of a way of
getting round the always onward linear track that time
requires; and so I don't see how one can implement ffh into
fiction (because with a net there is no "forward" or
"backward") (unless one disregards time altogether). I am
not talking about pnh here.

   Thus I place hypertext into ep in the following way: Ffh
(or the net style of organization) is a tool that can only
be fully realized within ep.  Current work will be
electronically published with a lesser or greater degree of
implementation of hypertext as fits.  Ep, however, can very
easily stand alone from hypertext, i.e., there are many
reasons why one would want to use ep without including
hypertext.

   Brand new non-fiction works written specifically for the
electronic media will ALL include elements of hypertext,
i.e., use pnh.  For some, ffh will be the right way to go.
Brand new fiction works written for ep may or may not
include elements of hypertext.  In my opinion, with an
understanding that current commercially successful fiction
includes a time-line, ffh faces major difficulties if it
tries to be the organizational model of choice for current
mainstream fiction writers.   Pnh offers certain advantages
to the fiction writer (adds more arrows to the author's
quiver as it were) but it is not a replacement for the
current organizational model which is, in essence, a one-way
progression forward along a time line.

   Pnh obviously offers more advantages to non-fiction
writers and the closer their work gets to encyclopedia-like
entries the closer pnh becomes ffh.

                     ---------------------------------
                     Copyright Paul F. Peacock 1993
                     This work may be reproduced in
                     any medium subject only to the
                     condition it is reproduced in its
                     entirety EXACTLY as written.
****************************************


LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

from Doug Blazek
"Amazing how we can swim underwater or walk in thick dark
air for years then suddenly emerge, change species almost,
but still sign our names to our letters!  ...if I had a
choice between poetry magnetized before my eyes by molecular
power boost or not have poetry at all, then I wish you well.
Key it in kaptain!"


from Carol Berge
"Your letter was damn near miraculous--of course I remember
GRIST."

from Jerome Rothenberg
"Of course I remember GRIST and Lawrence, Kansas and the
1960s--tho maybe not exactly in that order.  I'm glad,
anyway, to see you doing what you're doing...."


from David Ignatow
"Good luck with a very promising reawakening.  It will
benefit us all."


from
Ron Silliman

"Of course I remember GRIST.  In fact, wasn't #9 (the issue
in which that [my] work appeared) the issue that was busted
in San Francisco's Psychedelic Shoppe in the raid that
eventually led to the prosecution of Lenore Kandel's LOVE
BOOK?  (I remember the Malanga centerfold, tho I may have
the # wrong).  GRIST was one of the very first magazines to
support my writing...and it's good to hear of its
resurrection."

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