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Volume II
Issue I
~~~````''''~~~
CORE is an electronic journal of poetry, fiction, essays,
and criticsm. Back issues are available via anonymous
ftp from ftp.eff.org from the /pub/journals directory
They are also available on CompuServe from Library 5 of
EFFSIG.
Please feel free to reproduce CORE in its entirety only
throughout Cyberspace. To reproduce articles individually,
please contact the author.
Questions, submissions, and subscription requests should be
sent to
[email protected].
~~~````''''~~~
Flavors of the month:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
MARK SCHORR .................. A POINT OF ORIGIN
.................. COBOL ODE
FIONA WEBSTER ................ INTRODUCING MAMA LANSDALE'S
YOUNGEST BOY
_____________________________________________________________________
Rita Rouvalis, Editor
[email protected]
I had ventured into real life for a reading of the Merrimack Anthology.
One of the readers, Mark Schorr, caught my ear when he mentioned working
for "a large computer firm in Littleton". I thought to myself, "he
works for DEC; I'll bet he has an enet address and I can con him into
submitting something to CORE." (Editors are always on the make for new
material.)
Mark not only let me have a couple of his poems, but he also told me
about a project he is working on to to distribute, display and promote
poetry in Cyberspace. The "Kiosks" are After Dark (R) slide shows
created by using an illustration and a screen capture program. I've put
three of the Kiosks in the CORE directory on ftp.eff.org as
PoetryKiosks.sea.bin.
You'll need a Macintosh and the After Dark program to view them.
1. Download PoetryKiosks.sea.bin to your Macintosh.
2. I've stuffed them using a self-extracting program, so just double
click on the icon.
3. Choose one of the folders, and drag all the slides in it to your
Slide Show folder, which will be located in your After Dark folder
(probably in your system folder).
4. Start up the After Dark control panel, and choose Slide Show for
the display.
The idea is copyleft; use it and create your own Kiosks. If you do, let
both Mark and me know about it -- especially if you do it under other
hardware platforms. If I can collect enough of them, I'll set up
special directory for them here. The text for two of the poems follows.
The third Kiosk is of CORE1.03.
_____________________________________________________________________
Mark Schorr
[email protected]
A POINT OF ORIGIN
In memory of Robert Ross
Making my way
from a land
that can never
measure up
Past safe harbors
and beach roses
and the rotting hulls
of nuke subs
Past nineteenth century visitors
who measured New England
as so many miles
of rivers and poems
These days
my thoughts run simpler
to foreign friends
or family members
met or missed
to journeys made
sometimes with you,
sometimes not
or sometimes not made at all
Or run to others who
are only signatures
where sky and sea align
or run along different line
Caught up with each other
until they too
retrace your eddied light
and herbal banks
To get their bearings
with reverse immigration
reciting every maiden name
back to where we came
Until there in that garden isle
we simply are
beyond all land or sea
a point of origin.
______________ ~~~````''''~~~ _________________
COBOL ODE
In memory of Adm. Grace Hopper
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
Your larger outlines
would drive us mad
if we were in the
business of the past
or common oriented
business
aboard some
mother courage carrier
that shells the straits
of Lebanon
that depends on you
to perform
perform well down
to the lowest level
a figurative constant
or some LIFE-like
picture clause.
But instead you satisfy
some inner need for order,
some need
to situate ourselves
for you are nothing
if not
a place,
a structure,
or a map
we can invoke at will
Even in the absurdity of
Sunday afternoon traffic,
we sense the bold outlines
of El Salvador
across your sodden sky,
and from the terminal grid
even the most
mundane designs,
begin a process
we don't even have
the sense to know
until what *ONCE WAS*
a pilgrimage is now
a People Express
that checks,
"BAD PEOPLE RECORDS"
in packed decimal
in so many coding squares
of so many
paragraphs,
statements,
clauses.
INPUT/OUTPUT
Observe the order of a pack of
cards
that say
"DO NOT FOLD OR MUTILATE"
for the pleasure
mere pleasure
of folding cards.
But by all means
fold the cards
to fit them
in your pocket.
Everything we have built
Should have some art or use
Else build it better.
DATA DIVISION.
Provence.
When I think of the way we
rushed through Arles
observing the inscriptions
on every row and column
in the metropolis of time,
then your graphic
asterisks seem closer.
On the high bluffs opposite
the River Rhone
we waited for fireworks
to reflect how small the state
to reflect how small we
feel at a time like this.
When they finally explode,
there are eight obscure points
and hundreds of asterisks.
Picture the way we hate
watching the kill
in the arena of Arles.
EXIT PROVENCE.
PROCEDURE DIVISION
COBOL-ODE.
Crowbar.
O! I had a little chicken
who wouldn't lay an egg
so I laid a crowbar
down on his head.
O! the little chicken cried
and the little chicken begged
but the crowbar laid
a hard boiled egg.
UNTIL NO-MORE-COBOL-ODE
OR NO-MORE-CROWBAR.
PERFORM TERMINATION.
EXIT-COBOL-ODE.
STOP RUN.
Initialization.
I am talking to you
people who
shift lock CAPS on subway walls.
graffiti figurative clauses
under a proscenium
words upon a public telephone
spray paint constants
on a public convenience
or who asterisk comments
around a square.
And I am talking to you
people who work, meet, live
in the fourth subbasement
or on the fourteenth floor
but who leave the
business of living
to some Common Business
Oriented Language
that works below the
surface of your lives.
And I am telling you to write
the number
on corner
of your electric bill
and also
on the corner
of your check
And I am not telling you
about the legendary
figurative constant that...
TERMINATION.
When all the files are closed,
there is no system on earth,
no pyramid of data
that can do to us
what we would not do
to ourselves
or, not doing,
what we would do.
_____________________________________________________________________
Fiona Webster
[email protected]
INTRODUCING MAMA LANSDALE'S YOUNGEST BOY
Joe R. Lansdale. Let's talk about Joe R. Lansdale. Life-long
resident of East Texas, one of the weirder corners of this planet, by
anyone's estimation.
Joe Lansdale is a writer who doesn't get compared to anyone else, who
doesn't fit into the pre-arranged categories residing in the minds of
literary agents and publishers. I don't mean just the genre
categories--although he does range widely through westerns, mystery,
science fiction, thriller, crime, and horror--often all in the same
book--but also those other, more insidious categories, about what sort
of social commentary is allowed in an entertainment rag, or what sort
of plotline a successful story should follow. So he's had a hard time
making it. (I'd bet good money you haven't heard of him.) But if you
approach a dedicated horror maven--not your casual King or Koontz
reader, or your trendy splatterpunk reader, but someone who's been
patiently panning the stream for a long, long time to find those few
chunks of gold that make it all worthwhile--and you ask, "Who's
original? who's brilliant?" you will hear about the man from East
Texas.
Now, as usual when I'm recommending horror fiction to people I think
of as discriminating readers, I feel the need to issue caveats.
Horror is a literature _in_extremis_, and as such, it's not terribly
refined. Maybe it's because of the intensity of emotion evoked by the
extreme situations being portrayed--what other genre is labeled not
for a type of story, but for the specific *emotion* it aims to provoke
in the reader? Maybe it's because the field, despite having roots
going all the way back to Shakespeare and Beowulf, is very young. The
pioneers of the contemporary horror tale--Richard Matheson, and of
course, Stephen King--are still alive and writing. Whatever the
reason, as things stand now, you have to cut a horror writer some
slack, and accept a certain simplicity of theme. You should also bear
in mind that if sometimes the language is crude, that's because the
story is chopped from the author's heart, rather than processed
through their head.
What you should not tolerate in a horror writer, though, is lack of
originality. If you find yourself thinking, as you read, "This is
just another haunted house tale, vampire/werewolf tale, psycho-killer
tale, sigh..." you should put down the book and look elsewhere. And
that's why I'm trying to drum this one name--Joe R. Lansdale--into
your head.
What makes him special? Former manual laborer and good ol' boy that
he is, Lansdale might find it odd that I'm applying this word to his
work, but this man has an *aesthetic.* His fictional world is firmly
placed amidst the piney woods and chicken plants and hard-bitten
characters and tall tales and bigotry of his home state, but also
mixed in is a dumbfounded fascination with the tawdry imagery of pop
culture. Neon lights and garish decor. Cheap paperbacks with glossy
red-and-black covers. Spiritual concepts straight out of
_Weekly_World_News_. Clint Eastwood movies. Roger Corman's dyed-red
"blood popcorn." It all co-mingles in Lansdale's highly visual
aesthetic sense, and what comes out is not these images _per_se_--
Lansdale is sparing in his use of quotations from the media--but
utterly new word-pictures. Such as a man wearing nothing but cowboy
hat and boots, who floats, adrift, through a starry sky where '57
Cadillacs and Mexican whores beckon to him--a strange recasting of
the figures in the cyclone, beckoning to Dorothy.
But it's not all about beauty: you're not in a stylish and yet
desiccated post-modern landscape, when you're in a Joe Lansdale story.
This man writes with soul. He writes unflinchingly about the racism,
the ignorance, the often callous disregard for values that he sees in
the people he grew up with. His stories have been turned down
because they're too graphic, but more often because they make a blunt
social statement that makes editors so uncomfortable, they simply
shudder and then try to forget. Lansdale is funny, bleak, and
truthful--in the sense of presenting basic truths about the human
condition--and the result is an unsettling brew that doesn't always
leave you smiling.
So what should you read? Well, if you asked that hypothetical horror
maven, "What's the best horror short story of the past twenty-five
years," you just *might* hear them say, "Guess I'd have to pick 'Night
They Missed the Horror Show.'" In fact, if you don't check out Joe
Lansdale for any other reason, do so for "Night They Missed the Horror
Show." For this reason, and also because his novels go out of print
quickly and are darn hard to find, I recommend his anthology of
shorts, _By_Bizarre_Hands_. The Avon edition is still on bookstore
shelves, and the cover features a lovely illustration by J. K. Potter
(one of horror's best artists).
I suggest you read "By Bizarre Hands" and "The Fat Man and the
Elephant"--and perhaps "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with
Dead Folks"--to ease yourself into Lansdale's world, and then head
straight for "Night They Missed the Horror Show." It's a ride you
won't forget.
**This piece originally appeared in _The Reading Edge: An Unpretentious
Newsletter for Readers_, edited by Sherry Mann (
[email protected]).**
_______________________________________________________________________
CORE is not a publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and its
contents, unless specifically indicated as such, should not be mistaken
for the opinions of either the organization or the editor.
//>> November 1992 <<\\
