inventory behind my right earlobe there is a swelling and sore, perhaps the produc- tion of a berserk spider; within my mouth, a cold sore on the membrane of the interior upper lip; a raging headache concentrating on the right fron- tal lobe; pains in the upper right thoracic vertebrae; tingling sensations in the skin of the back of both hands; slightly cracked lower lip along the fuzzy border of the interior membrane; pain in the right eye perhaps connected to the swelling (re: line 1 above); pain in the right shoulder perhaps related to the locus of the vertebrae (re: line 4 above); occas- ional intense anal itching (along the perineum as well) requiring the ap- plication of a heated compress (pleasant for other reasons); and signs of incipient mild depression (on the way out of one deeper, in other words, an affair of the _slope_); and slight coldness in the feet. my inbox remaining slightly emptier than desired; too many returns from a badly-configured derrida list; the cauterization of a netcom.com shell ac- count which is being eliminated; occasional ytalk malfunctions and almost entirely absent cuseeme connections; decathecting from pmc2 (or whatever) and media moos (re: line 3 above); not enough personal interest to engage in or pursue talker relationships; the season of bounce and other error messages is upon us; your posts forever absent from my inbox; your images no longer mimed attachments, phantom limbs; and defuge of site, sight, ci- tation. _________________________________________________________________________ rm *.* Envision a mime attachment composed of invisible escape codes; open it and your account disappears (this should be possible). Think of a Perl memo program with an unaliased rm *.* in it. Consider the consequences of such codes embedded in this file (none). Contemplate the html code listed in the current issue of Byte which hangs up Netscape as it searches for in- coming from a com port. Work with a cookie that disappears into a hidden file elsewhere in your directory, calling itself, if suitable, config.sys. Construct a deltree * cookie added to the netscape-spawning site that ov- ertakes your ppp connection. Surprise me with a simple embedded program adding echo to your input. Change my stty to row 10 column 10. Make me yours with a new .sig Alan belongs to Jennifer. DCC me computerized pic- tures of myself in consensual sex with animals and the Pope. Break down my resistance with password violation; there's an "r" in it. Kill me softly with your song, until I can't sing anything else. Make me _it._ __________________________________________________________________________ Ugly Netted Stockings I can't say if I were a child any longer, without worrying about the long arm of the law. I can't watch children or pretend to understand them. I've got to bury children's sex thoughts before children learn to masturbate and I have to pretend they don't masturbate and have no sex thoughts and this is labor. I make myself blind in one eye (how smooth its interior), reducing the world to a picture. You are in the center of the picture of the world and I picture your ass- hole, but I cannot picture penetration without the long arm of the law. You are adult and in charge of your body and you offer your asshole to me for my pleasure (how smooth your interior) but I cannot take it or res- pond, nor can I forward a picture, blind in one eye, without the arm's law. The law of the arm is brute force, bending at the crook, severing the neck from the body. It is a matter of physical strength, and I bow to it, off- ering my asshole and mouth to its pleasure. It is not my pleasure because it is the purity of coercion (how smooth its interior), and coercion is _always_ pure because the body is cleansed and the situation is always al- ready kept to one of simple leverage. Blind in both eyes, I do not ask your name or race or sex or gender or age, nor do I ask what you are doing with me. Blind in feeling and touch, you have my permission, which you have taken anyway. What is control, where a torso is concerned (how smooth my interior)? What is sex with the arm's long law? __________________________________________________________________________ If, by Rudyard Kipling What if I wrote you, I wrote you, and I said I'm a thirteen-year-old girl, and I want sex, Oh I want sex so bad, and I want it just with you, Because I've never had sex and want to try it out, And I know you're the one for me, And I know you're the one for me? Well, now this isn't a poem or a document, This is just a way of placing guilt and culpability, For should you receive such a poem or a document, Should you turn it into the proper authorities? And what would make them proper in this case, And what could give them the authorization? Should you figure that you have been heavily lured By some unrepentant teenagers out for a ride, Or that you have been trapped by evil law-men Riding hard to catch you with unrepentant teens? Should you ignore the busy missive, getting on With your life, as it is and has been, knowing Something perhaps has forever shattered your peace, For you're never sure who's there on the other end For you and against you and what iron metal lurks In its hand and for what intent, desire, And for what truth? And you might forget in the midst of all this musing That there are thirteen-year-old girls and others Who might connect with one another, they've got kids, I've seen them, here and there walking in Brooklyn Or taking the air somewhere, anywhere else. Now, if Something like this happened to me, why I'd, I'd have to report it to the proper institutions, Return mail to the sysadmin, root, gaoler, postmaster, Making sure they're all men, and men of power to act So that this would never ever happen again, And whoever sent that piece of tainted mail would drown Taking both of us down. (And what I wonder would be the charge? Misrepresentation, Malicious mischief, seduction of a major, obsequious proffering Of potential underage whoredom and other obscene couplings? Are there laws against deliberate misrecognitions, the inverse Of entrapment, throwing oneself to the winds, becoming unglued In the vast universe of things? In any case, our Wordsworth Had better be careful for hir words' worth, accumulating in fact All the antecedents' universal chaos, as everyone loves everyone Or at least states such intent. There is no peace on earth When age must have its way, over age and under age; when age Becomes judge, lure, and executioner. The world's overrun By lost and rusted men, and I'm thirteen and you are not, you'll Be dead when I turn twenty-two. __________________________________________________________________ Software Sloppy Psychology of Sloppy Software Are there studies on the psychology of software writing? I've been think- ing about this in relation to the memo program, which I sent out to the list a while ago, and have since rewritten. I give the current version below, numbered. I want to look at some issues it raised. 1 #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w 2 # Memo Program for Shell Account 3 $| = 1; 4 print "\n\aThese are your current messages:\n\n"; 5 print `cat .message`; 6 `cp .message .message.old`; 7 print "\n\aWould you like to erase lines? If yes, type y.\n"; 8 chop($no=); 9 if ($no ne "y") {goto FINAL;} 10 print "To erase lines enter first words or unique phrases,\n"; 11 print "one per line, control-d to end.\n"; 12 open(ZIP, ">> begin"); 13 chop(@rem=); 14 print ZIP @rem; 15 close ZIP; 16 foreach $rem (@rem) {$this = "grep -v '^$rem' .message > .mess"; 17 `$this`; `mv .mess .message`;} 18 `rm begin`; 19 FINAL: { 20 print "Would you like to add to current message list? If so, type y.\n"; 21 chop($str=); 22 if ($str eq "y") {print "Add new lines now.\n"; 23 print "Use carriage return at the end of each line, use ^d to end.\n"; 24 open(APPEND, ">> .message"); 25 @text=; 26 print APPEND @text; 27 close APPEND;}} 28 exit(0); a. The _last change_ was the addition of line 6; I had difficulties with the program and was worried that the .message file might be erased. I ad- ded a copy from .message to .message.old so that the user could bail if the .message called up seemed wrong, or if he/she wanted to restore the erasures. I took the concept for this line from the unix account itself, which always has such safeguards (there are others, for example dead.let- ter, core, newfile.save). b. Line 16 was the most difficult; I had to find a way to erase specified lines in a file. I knew that grep -v could take a file and erase _one_ line, so it was a matter of cycling through. Each time, grep -v places a modified .message file into .mess; .mess then returns to .message, and this cycle continues until the erasing array @rem cycled through (with $rem referencing specific instances). This is a sloppy solution, as is the use of the goto command; they're both inefficient. For a while, I wanted to do a grep -v $rem[1]&$rem[2] etc., using conjunctions, but became lazy - I'm not sure that grep -v can work in this fashion, and I'm not that satisfied with my knowledge of awk to try that one on. Since I don't expect more than 4-5 erasures at any one time, I went for the easy solution. c. Another sloppy solution, "type y" in lines 7 and 20; originally I had a hash here, but it kept cycling after the control-d ending the add. Instead of working through the process, I just went with y. On the other hand, I worked it so that hitting two quick returns took me out of the program (i.e. instead of having to hit "n"), saving time. But these are all surface accounts of ignorance and meandering. What I was after was simplicity (a program with only one or two things to do) and in- visibility (a program that was hidden in dot files, appearing on startup). The machinic aspect fascinates me; the program is bones and striations, moving back and forth from unix shell to perl commands. It's more like a sieve than a closure; in fact, Perl seems that way through and through, running through its library, through sockets to the Net, through shell and C program, etc. I would say that closure, exit(0);, is also foreclosure, closing the pro- gram, hiding the code. Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl, is described in his (and Christiansen's and Schwartz's) Programming Perl 2nd edition, as "able to exploit his three virtues (laziness, impatience, and hubris) to develop and enhance all sorts of useful tools." These virtues are considered elsewhere, and I quote from the glossary, since they summarize at least the beginnings of something (I'm rambling for a change, but that's): "laziness The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy ex- penditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer." "impatience The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least that pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer." "hubris Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer." All of these relate to foreclosure and foreclosed domains. And I do want to say as an aside, that I am not a programmer, but a bungler, and the difference is clear; while I can hide behind facades, I screech to a halt, through ignorance, with inelegant solutions. Most accounts of the psychology of software are concerned either with hacking/hackers or user's end requirements (for example analyses of hyper- textuality). What I would like to see would be a phenomenology of software writing itself. As an example, vis-a-vis Hadamard again, and example b. a- bove: When I was considering the grep -v line, I originally pictured thick cords extending through a darkened/yellowed space; the cords wrapped a- round themselves, circulating and shunting, almost like tendons. Symboliz- ation appeared later, filling in the generalized structure. The filling-in required a number of tests, due to ignorance; for example the beginning of line 17, `$this` indicates that $this must first be in- terpreted to grep -v etc., and that this interpretation would act as a unix operator. Since I wasn't sure, I ran things under the perl -e line interpreter, for example perl -e '$str=c; $this="w$str"; print `$this thing`;' and so forth. (The line means that I'm ultimately saying, in the shell, "wc thing," where "thing" is a file, and "wc" stands for word- count.) These tests were worked out consciously, on the surface; the syntax has, of course, to be exact. So from the cords to the tests, there was a movement upwards (I'm aware of the spatial metaphor here), from semantics towards syntax; pieces of the tests were them applied to the body of the program, again consciously. In other words, the movement is a reverse ar- ticulation of pausological structure, in which the structure of a sentence develops unconsciously prior to its fulfilling by words (one pauses, for example _after_ the conjunction, not before - the structure is present, the words are still to "make their appearance"). In the programming exam- ple, in mathematics, one often begins with cords, clouds, greyed areas, fuzzy movements - the specified structure comes later, and then the entire programmed mass is foreclosed, sutured, into a unary kernel of surface morphology. Thus there are two surfaces - that of syntactics within the program, and that of the user-interface; and there are two depths - the program "all the way down," and the semantic processes leading to its construction. I'm not certain, of course, of any of this; observation is always faulty, especially among naive or beginning programmers. (Nothing can be taken for granted; commands and their flags are always looked up; debugging and testing are critical, even in the simplest instances, etc.) _________________________________________________________________________ Software - notes (This is partly in response to S.B., who wrote a detailed reply to Cyber- mind.) First, it seems to me that increasing familiarity with code leads to the ability to create small scripts, not only subroutines, that can carry out various simple tasks; these act as part-objects or interstices for everyday work. When I was doing some mathematics programming in qbasic, I became adept enough to write short programs whenever necessary (I was examining simple chaotic behavior among other things); these programs became "words" or particles of their own. I imagine a situation of developed macros in an account (I have only 3 of them) which can carry out various tasks, with new macros created when necessary. One sign of adept programming, then, would be the ability to work without debugging by and large, at least for smaller programs - to write as speech. A second point is that even from my limited programming ability, I see implicitly how to construct, say, expert systems or active editors; these are questions of scale. On the other hand, I've yet to figure out how to implement sockets, which require reasonably small programs, but are much more complex. On the third hand, expert systems can be fairly complex in terms of design philosophy, and sockets can be fairly simple. So there are levels of complexity to take into account - just as one can have a fairly complex .html document without fairly complex coding. And a third point is that of the tradeoff between complexity and useful- ness; some of my mathematics programs allow the entering of so many varia- bles that each run requires a couple of minutes to configure. There's a tradeoff here between flexibility (numerous "features") and usefulness; the more flexible a program is, in general the more complex the user interface. On the other hand, and there are lots of hands at work, something like X Window is remarkably simple on the surface, and some configurations of Win95 aspire to the same. On the linux machine I was using a while ago, the screen was a perfect blue; clicking the mouse brought up various menus. The complexity was there; it was beneath the carapace, rendering the machine oddly insect-like - one imagined tendrils descending into the interior, all the way down to the circuit-boards. It's these situations that are beyond my programming comprehension; I could draw flow-diagrams of choices but would have no idea about implementation. Again, I apologize for my limited knowledge in these areas. (I want to add that there are interesting early software hacks available on the Net; I've downloaded some HAKMEM examples from MIT, A.I. lab, 1972.) _________________________________________________________________________ searching everywhere on the internet, examining the body and its surround- ings, I wonder only what could be this discourse spoken of, at the margins of the skin, a membrane, coagulation - what Nicole Brossard oozed into her writings or feminin ecriture herself. or if not that, what? a program act- ivates language, still confined within the borders of the screen; rumor or idle conversation confounds formal presentation, and tone of voice or song transforms elsewhere, but always the same. it is the televisual iridescence that pulls, vacuums, the world of signs, such that desire clothes itself, translucency nonetheless; I'd say it's the pull of capital at work, since language lacks domain, silence to speak (and silence is not language, but I speak of the silence in language, the hearth of quietude, concentration-without-advertisement), silence to place and of place. The televisual is the gift of clever alterity, skimming beneath a surface always already constructed in webpage or screen; it splays into literal deferment, gaping at the end - it's there that defuge sets in, difference continues with the breath. Paralleling Mick Carter's analysis of cosmetics (forthcoming), it's the sign that separates us from everything else - _because the sign can be disconnected_ and the real - its coagulation - can't be. In reading, we're concerned with _radical disconnection,_ yearning for the implicit mythos of the ikonic body, the body which is _there_ as alterity is. But it is within the gaps that the specific silence of thought, non- symbolic, imaginary, can be found; it's the necessity which reading opens and proffers. Think of this, and the gap unto, the gap beyond, the line. _________________________________________________________________________ Subject: illicit tropology of silence and dis-ease RR ______________________________________________________________ | | | | ______________|______________________________________________ | | |___________________________________ RR -------------------------------------------------------------------------- typing during blackout He sat down to return to his beloved texts. Everything in the room was perfect, ready to receive his incisive wit, critical acumen on just about everything. He turned the screen off. He turned the screen off and continued typing; there was a deep blue-black glow, hardly obtrusive. His vision was increasingly impaired by the migraine, but he continued on, working the words. They feel into the void; he began to understand Pascal all over again. What surrounded him was the empty space of language, grounded nowhere; letters floated, each responsive to the pressure of a key, but they floated orthogonally, without the benefit of sight or hearing. They floated just like language has always disconnected. The only gift of being human is this disconnection, which animals mhave only to a limited degree. It's not just the chain of signifiers, difference; it's literally a rupture with the real, a broken essence or immersion that opened, tens of thousands of years ago, the way towards construct. Euclid is pure construct. He thought, Euclid used diagrams, and I can't see what I'm doing: In this condition, _letters hurt._ He couldn't bear light of any kind. With Euclid, it was all laid out; it - the grid- analytical geometry - the origin -- was alreay implicit. The break was there in the beginning, and even earlier, among the Egyptians and Babylonians for example - but it was the axiomatic that began to change everything, the axiomatic that was the self-referentiality of the construct. He'd leave the rrors in - he couldn't see. The geometry moved quickly to the abstract, purely and simply - and he began thinking about the interrelation of geometry and set theory, a set of points, rules of interconnectivity. it kept moving that way. the whole history was a movement of this kind. the earth was left far behind; the problem with virtual reality, he saw through not seeing, was its dependence on ssight, touch, hearing - its dependence on the pre-given senses. So it was bound by all the rules o the senses. Or their protocols, or bandwidths, or whatever. But this disconnect, this wsa different; it wasn't even language or space. There was nothing virtual about its lack of referentiality... He realized that this typing had, in fact, forestalled the migraine patterns; they suddenly disappeared. It was the concentration on the symbolic, he thought, a first for semiotic curesYet it was true; ther wasn't a sign of them, only the blank screen, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and nothing nothing present. ________________________________________________________________________ fuckin hell jerry disconnect groovy, bummer, bad trip, bad vibes. where are chris and don. far out. groovy, bummer, bad trip, bad vibes. where are they. this place has bad vibes. like i don't wanna be here. like let's split. i mean this place is far out. this place is a bad trip. like let's get going. it's not groovy any more. it's like death. it's like forty years ago. like joanna was born almost ten years after. like jennifer's grown into me. groovy, bummer, bad trip, bad vibes. like it's time. like we waited for 1984, like for 2000. like we waited for 3000, it doesn't matter. nothing matters, it's a bad trip. i was sleeping you know and spit out mouthfuls of flesh. listening to country joe you know. like it was groovy and everything and then it was a bad trip. like the vibes aren't right i want to assault you with the vibes. i want to claw holes in you with the bad trip. i want to dig grooves in you. bummer. where are chris and don. like it's nothing. like it's not groovy here. like cyberspace is a bad trip. like it's run by the military industrial complex. like there's nothin going on. like i can't trust anyone. it's totally fucked man. it's totally fucked. dig, like a groove in my skull. dig, like it's a bad trip, man. like where are the uppers, man. groovy, bummer. bummer. like it's cool, you know. where's sue. like it's really cool. let's split, man. like there's nowhere to go. like that's cool. bummer, like that's really far out. you kill me man. i mean it. like let's off them. like you know what i mean. bummer, hey i got experience what the song's about. like it's 4000 and i say four thousand what. like it doesn't matter, be cool and let me do the talkin. like she'll be ok she's trippin. try some acid man. got windowpane for you no pane no gain. like the pigs look right through it man. bummer. gail offed herself. like she was trippin you know and then she wasn't you know and then she was. like she walked smack into that train. bummer. like it wasn't her fault. i mean who do you trust. it could have been forever man. like it was gone you know what i mean. like she's better off even if she ain't. like you know what i mean. this place has bad vibes. nobody knows your name, i mean what's the point man. it's a bummer. like i'd split but it just goes round. like maybe i'm trippin or somethng. this space is a fuckin tumor. it just goes round like it's been around man. it didn't even get goin until years after '68. like that's cool man but it didn't know that stuff. like it just popped up like a nightmare. way late. like a tumor, it's a fuckin tumor. it keeps growin every time you turn around. there's acid all over the place be cool but it's bummer acid you know. like it's spiked or something or the vibes are wrong. like we're dead man we just fuckin dead. like we didn't even live you get it walk the walk talk the talk. like we split like evil baby. fuck i forgot how to write this stuff's good stuff. like a bad trip you know though, ain't noway out. like steal this book you know. like where you goin to find it. like it was groovy you know then a bummer. like a bad trip like it's got bad vibes all over this place. i got a feeling. i sense things you know man. like man it's a bummer. like it's a real bummer. like i'm dead blam blam disconnect. like i'm dead like nam disconnect. like i'm dead like janis disconnect. like jimi disconnect. like digger disconnect. like provo disconnect. you know provo man. like i can't drop out. like drop out disconnect. like jerry disconnect. like abbie disconnect. like the owl disconnect. i knew the owl. he was a friend a mine. like the owl disconnect. like it's a bad trip. like it's not groovy. like it's a bummer. like bad vibes man. like bad vibes hangin in the air. like it's a bummer. like disconnect man. like i can't disconnect. like i'm dead man. bad trip bad vibes, like i'm dead. __________________________________________________________________________ more and more my texts come to me in dreams. now i am in a dream, typing. soon they will close about me, my dreams, my texts. soon i will dream. _________________________________________________________________________ tropology, the writing, breathing and transport of texts in the form of ding-breasts in the korn shell 1 pico zz 2 new zz 3 cat jk zz > ding 4 rm jk zz 5 mv ding jk 6 sz jk 7 m 8 pico jk 9 b 10 sz jk 11 b 12 pico z 13 new z 14 pico z 15 cat jk z > ding 16 rm jk z 17 mv dingjk 18 mv ding jk 19 sz jk 20 h 21 m _________________________________________________________________________ Couple of comments on the two recent texts - In the 60s, language developed as if it were drawn from the body, centered on cool, hot, groovy, hip, vibes, far out, all taken from a return of the repressed, as everyone knows; language was extruded, reconnected. Now cyb- erlanguage reinterprets for capital; cyberspace demarcates abstraction which absorbs the body; the body retaliates with fury and accounts of sad- omasochism; the body is lost, loses, in the imaginary of cyborg phenomeno- logy. So that my text `fuckin hell jerry disconnect` is an attempt to re- turn to that earlier language, through reiteration and reassertion - so that the wandering or nomadic body of the 60s becomes a vibration/spectral line in the 90s. It's precisely the datedness of this language that re- cords the loss and mourning of the body in cyberspace, which the poverty of the cyborg body cannot recuperate. Something is necessary beyond the machinic, prosthetic; the Colors issue I mentioned hints at that, a multiculturalism that refuses body/not-body in a manner escaping cyborgian technics. It's the other piece, `typing during blackout` (and the backwards quotes with both titles signify their activation/performative status elsewhere as linked text), that emphasizes the radical disconnection of language - not towards a metaphysical void, but towards a complete statelessness (in the sense of a physical state). The current body is left behind by virtue of the keyed-in text; the keyed-up body occupies a difference which can't be written or wrytten. The cyborg is self-cauterized, castrato of neither gender. Virtual reality is also problematized in such an account; it's not that it's leaky, but that it collapses because the best it can do is fill the senses - there are machines for that purpose. Radical disconnection of the signifier implies that there are other more inviolate spaces of the imag- inary, which are elsewhere than these "reality-modalities." I'd argue that these spaces are interstitial among abstracting and abstracted languages, and that there's something wrong with all these accounts of cyborg, body, language, cyberspace, real, that won't be untangled for decades - we're in grappling in the dark; we may always be. Typing into nowhere. Hippies in cyberspace. I write this in an attempt to ground what might appear to be the vagaries of these texts, as if they were exercises in style (Queneau, who also had a serious purpose), unrelated, or related only by the contiguity of auth- orship. _________________________________________________________________________ Cat Behavior Since I live alone with a cat, I intensify my relationship with her at every opportunity, carefully examining her behavior. So I feel I can say with some certainty (mind you, having examined numerous other cats as well): 1. It's a myth that a cat brings mice to humans as a sign that they're poor hunters. The mice are transitional objects, gifts. The cat will also bring artificial mice, knowing full well that they're inedible, but they stand for a certain currency. 2. It's a myth that a cat sees humans as large cats; one only has to bring another cat in the room, as opposed to a human, to see that the cat can make this distinction. The cat sees a human as a human. 3. It's a myth that a cat is "fooled" by hands and feet under the covers. In fact, the cat will play along for a while; she's bored. She tires of the game in a very different manner than tiring of waiting for a real mouse to make a move. 4. A cat will, like a python, immediately lock eyes; it's the eyes that establish and maintain the relationship, to no great surprise. It's also the eyes that signify dominance/subdominance. 5. A cat possesses ikonic signifiers; the artificial mice are a good exam- ple. They do not doubly inscribe or disconnect, however; the symbolic (in both the Lacanian and Peircian sense) is foreign to it. However it lives in the imaginary, as dreams indicate; it inhabits the same dreamworld we do, without the dubious benefit of interpretation. 6. The symbolic residue within the real is almost totally foreign to a cat; it responds rarely to other animals on television or in pictures; it responds almost not at all to its mirror image. On the other hand, a cat is the walking manifestation of defuge, decathecting from symbolic invest- ment or the investment of desire. So a cat ignores the mirror stage, but is taken up with Sartrean Nausee, far beyond the hairball stage. 7. Evolution has bred the cat towards almost perfect neotany in size, purr, movement, and appearance. The cat's genetics, however, have not car- ried its instinctual domain to the same degree; it is an animal constantly wondering at human and other behavior. 8. Because of its extended kitten-play, it's evident that a cat possesses both intelligence beyond the instinctual, and culture. Play is the begin- ning of culture; it's a superstructural manipulation of the real with necessarily unforeseen consequences. A wholly instinctual animal would never require play for its development, not even a Waddington-evolutionary animal which produces certain defined behaviors in relationship to the environment on-hand. (This is my weak point of the argument.) 9. On the other hand, instinct makes up almost all of a cat's daily life, short-circuiting the need to develop routines (of cleaning, etc.) inde- pendently. And it's possible to elicit conflicting instincts - for example a cat can lick the arm of a human on one hand, while violently flailing at it with her hind feet at the same time (her forefeet holding the arm in position for both behaviors). 10. The point of all of this, in relation to cyberspace, is the condition of constant wonder mentioned above. Signifiers float everywhere around a cat living with a human; these create a highly variable environment with unknown and unknowable behaviors and projections. What does she do? She surfs or goes to sleep. _________________________________________________________________________ unplugged Jennifer marches into the darkened auditorium. She has memorized the path to the podium, center stage; she stands behind it, and speaks. She leaves quickly because something is wrong; it's the podium. She turns the lights on low, walks to the podium, moves it to one side. She's careful about this. The podium glides silently across the hardwood floor. Jennifer marches into the darkened auditorium. She has memoried the path to the podium, center stage; she stands alone, facing the invisible audi- ence. She begins to speak. She has worked out a routine, and follows through for several minutes. Something is wrong; it's the routine. She leaves carefully, goes home through the darkened streets, to her apartment on the third floor. She turns on a light. She leaves and returns to the auditorium. Jennifer marches into the darkened auditorium. She has memoried the path to the podium, center stage; she stands alone, facing the invisible audi- ence. She begins to speak. She speaks and speaks, and she does not track her speaking, but rides her speech, returning to themes again and again. She is brilliant and speaking in real time and in real time her words are lost to the invisible audience. She rides her speech, speaking only when her breath is exhaling, following the pauses, riding the curves of the dependent and independent clauses. She tells and she does not tell. Jennifer is or is not satisfied but she has spoken and whole worlds of language have blossomed and collapsed. Nothing was found within them and with her eyes she could not see the reaction of the invisible audience and with her ears she could not hear their reaction either. __________________________________________________________________________ next:capital:isolation:dark_sun:1997:sure:14490:5:1996:1997:next level:violent:sex:violation_fabric:1998:yes:14509:7:1997:1998:level breathless:cliff:vagina:desert:1999:1999:14517:1:1998:1999:breathless fallen:guilty:labial_portal:gone:2000:sure:14526:6:1999:2000:gone _________________________________________________________________________ [place in file called "suicide"; chmod 700 "suicide"; ./suicide] #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w $| = 1; print "+++\a\n"; `rm suicide`; exit(0); _______________________________________________________________ Shame Of course I am shame before self-annihilation program so simple it is not funny ha ha. So many have kill themself. I do not find funny but it is gone and can do nothing about it. So it is a little bandaged child. I do not find child process in it. So it is little bandaged child parent pro- cess. I cannot countenance this little program with my broad face. My sunny beam do not countenance it. It is terrible for News Year. It is no news ha ha not funny. It is little blip and will make little blip. It is no funny alarum. To die oneself is not so much three command. It is large-barge fetish very hard. It is of consider. I do shame to my child with little bandaged child parent process that is parent process. It is just parent process. Program is my little child. Who am I you may guess seven guess. Hint, stone. What are basic large-barge stone. Hint, one stomach ha ha. I laughs to my self out loud. It kill me. I am so shame. __________________________________________________________________________ Tsk-Tsk-Tsk's Naughty Boys and Girls "The worked evoked, despite the installation's low profile and absolute stillness, the crowded bars, earsplitting music and visual spectacle inside one of those habitually attended haunts, the disco. And here, as there, the spectator could passive meander through the environment, and would inevitably become all body. "To such inhabitants of the 'second degree,' nothing except the manner and power of a quotation is new. The only quality in a fiction seems to be in its retelling, hence Philip Brophy of Tsk-Tsk-Tsk could claim: 'I feel that you can't make anything without it having meaning that is already there. You can't really do pure things because you've got a whole history behind you. In that sense it's redundant for us to bother, but we are still working with expediency.'" (From Paul Taylor, Australian 'New Wave' and the 'Second Degree,' 1981, in What is Appropriation, edited by Rex Butler.) Tsk-Tsk-Tsk rearranged "'pure' melodies and rhythmic structures into load- ed 'second degree' objects'" which constituted a "semantic blockage in the everyday significatory system" through their use of disco. Their dead-end- ing zero-degree music was paralleled by an fierce exhaustion read into later works by SPK, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, dragging metal into bang-bang NIN; so much for industry. There was nowhere else to go. These are zero moments of technological culture; industry's always repe- titive, like neurosis; and like neurosis, it produces ob-jects. Culture and manufacture lay their trails; we get glued tothe spoor. Raw bang slammed into rave tracks; Stelarc wired the stuttered body. His language is classical. Meantime, disco gone retro, rave gone cyborg, in- dustrial music gone pop, other stuff come up all-the-time just like kick- ing out the jams and jellies, motherfuckers. You should have heard Tsk-Tsk-Tsk (I did) but why. _______________________________________________________________________ Apropos Writing/Research (from Dosse, Histoire du Structuralisme) "Convaincu alors de ne jamais pouvoir faire une carriere universitaire, Levi-Strauss se lance dans l'ectriture de Tristes Tropiques 'que je n'au- rais jamais ose publier si j'avais ete engage dans une competition quel- conque pour une position universitaire.' Cet episode cet symptomatique d'un moment ou la force et l'innovation du programme structuraliste tien- nent a leur capacite a deborder l'institution universitaire, a trouver d'autres canaux de legitimation. C'est grace a ce detour que Levi-Strauss doit d'etre intervenu au moment le plus opportun, en se presentant comme un philosophe du voyage. Dans son regard, il y a un melange de scientifi- cite, de litterature, de nostalgie des originees perdues, de culpabilite et de redemption qui rend son ouvrage inclassable." (He says that convinced he wouldn't have a university job Levi-Strauss was able to publish something he wouldn't dare to otherwise, Tristes Trop- iques. He says this has to do with structuralism's innovations which had to find other channels of legitimation. He says this way there's a whole range of science, literature, nostalgia for lost origins, guilt and redem- ption in the book which makes it unclassifiable. I'd like to think he says that writing's not for the university, but that the university's for writ- ing, but he doesn't say that, and the university's not for that. He says this in French and goes on to talk about the other in ethnography, quest for the self. I'd think TT wonderful for cyber-ethnographies, self-meshing across imaginary realms. I wouldn't want to _do_ it in a course.) _________________________________________________________________________ (Why you haven't heard from Travis in a while.) Travis had made a nice world. There were animals and plants and ground- things. Jennifer smashed it. Tiny gasps of breath could be heard from the animals. The plants didn't make a sound. Jennifer jumped up and down, her frock bouncing in the air. Her frock had oxygen under it. Later that evening, Travis took the vows. Everywhere he saw tiny legs qui- vering in the air. The plants had developed brown patches. Jennifer was not sorry to see him go. The big black carriage weaved back and forth as it was pulled out of the driveway. The sorrels knew something was afoot. They never returned to Aberdeen. Jennifer wondered if "cleaning up after herself" meant at all or nearly the same thing as "cleaning up before herself." She stared down at her lap for a while, leaped up and ran the house. She'll be back later, Tiffany. You can wait in the living room if you want. __________________________________________________________________________ Subject: the subject we begin our lies 1943 Biography Wanting autobiography and its thought, I've written the program below. When I remember something, it goes into the .bio file. Later, the file is sorted according to date. Later still, it will be downloaded; eventually, a number of similar files will be chained and sorted together. The result will be a mass of badly-remembered facts, comments, and apologetics ar- ranged into semi-sequential order. The program is placed into an .auto file and aliased. It appears on login after memo. Someday, this will be the way everyone will remember themselves, in the absolute absence of images - or the images will blur into text, embar- rassed and shameful. Memory will become cited. Everyone will be cross- referenced. The other will have not yet made hir appearance. ---------------------------------------------- #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w # biography $| = 1; `cp .bio .bio.old`; print "Would you like to add to bio information? If so, type y.\n"; chop($str=); if ($str eq "y") {print "Begin with date.\n"; print "Write single line, use ^d to end.\n"; open(APPEND, ">> .bio"); @text=; print APPEND @text; close APPEND;} `sort -o .bio .bio`; exit(0); _________________________________________________________________________ Auto-biography sample text from .bio.old with names changed* 1943 There are early screen memories of _being carried_ on a medical gurney past rows of medication bottles; the lighting was fluorescent, a nurse pushing the cart - I remember everything from the position of _being behind_ her. 1943-1997 I have had my faults. 1950 I was given a small film projector with a crank on the side; it was crinkled black with a translucent window for viewing the animated cartoons. All of my work has stemmed from this. 1952 I really don't have a date but wonder about my early love for aaaa who worked for the family and who I think went to an asylum. All my memories are like this, vague dates, worried and blanked memories. I remember golden hair. 1952 It was around this year that we moved from Reynolds Street to Ford Avenue. I don't think I was friendly with the bbbb any more. We used to fight with serrated pieces of wood. The screendoor had a tear in it. 1956 I heard of Elvis. I loved the word "fuck." Someone showed me Elvis' picture in the paper. At camp, camp. 1956 I watched someone masturbate at camp; I was thrilled. Early homoerotic memories, not genitally-centered. He masturbated on the bleachers; I forget his name. 1956 Later this year (or was it this year?), I masturbated ceaselessly in the shower and bathtub; sperm stuck to me, everywhere. I associated masturbation with urination, retaining the urine, spurting both on myself, ecstatically. 1956-60 I cried myself to sleep, etc. I had a small box on the bed table; I'd keep a list of best friends in it as well as a list of "things to do" so I could surprise myself - some sort of obscene proxy. 1956-8 I joined the American Forestry Association (or something with a similar name) and had images of trees on the walls; I flitted from one to another - I couldn't really identify with them. I also had the runic alphabet up. I cried myself to sleep. 1960 I just about flunked my first semester at Brown, collapsing until I learned to hold myself back, give the faculty what they wanted, hating it all the time... 1960 The depressions continue for the rest of my life 1962 I watched the side of the factory open up in the middle of the night and a machine (I later identified as an atomic cannon) wheel out, run to the end of the valley in Jerusalem, its turret revolving, turn around, and go back. Next day, the factory 1962 was still, closed up once again. I asked my roomate what it was; he kept saying "a textile factory." But there was something else gone on... 1962 We managed to get shot at from an absurdly safe distance on the Galil in Israel, while witnessing a battle between Israelis and Syrians. At the UN, the former were condemned; in real life, it was all to clear that the latter had started the attack. 1967 Lost my virginity to cccc; I was 24. She hung around the music group I was forming. I moved into her parents' house; they knew. Things began to go very wrong. She'd been abused at the age of 4. I owned a fire siren. 1968 I think dddd and I were married; it was a traditional wedding. I was afraid of her father's anti-semitism. Our fucking was unsuccessful; I had forgotten cccc who might have still been in the asylum. 1969 eeee and I in our dismally-cathected relationship, talked about swapping women (they never would have gone along); I already sensed something was wrong with June and me... 1974 Around this time, I remember living off and on with ffff; she left the loft one day, and I said Take care of yourself, and she said, I always do... 1976-1977 I work on the Structure of Reality, a text composed of the hysteria of information, network theory, annihilation in code-particles. It's printed in Halifax and Williams College, two editions. Parts surface later in an article in C magazine. 1977 Secretly, I think I know everything. 1980 I get involved with women who are as crazy as I am; no one saner would put up with me. My relationships are characterized by extremes of intensity, hysteria, exhaustion, sexuality. I'm worn out, wear people out. A bad catch... 1980 The year where my writing began to coalesce; I was 37 already. Lived with gggg for part of the year in Montreal and was there for the Quebecois referendum. I discovered Nicole Brossard, feminin ecriture, and Hubert Acquin; they resonated. 1982 hhhh and I left for Queenstown in the eastern center of the island. We were warned we might be killed; we got off the bus and traffic stopped. People pulled over to the side of the road and watched. We ran back in, dressed as punks, terrified... 1982 I left for three and a half years - to teach in Tasmania - lasted three and a half months, returning with hhhh; I was asked to resign. The only time in my life I drank, and the closest I've come to a nervous breakdown. 1985-6 Later Paul Celan's poetry would take off from where aaaa began; his poetry of elegy and holocaust related to the pure milk skin memories of desire I still retain - perhaps an afterthought, after- birth, projection... 1991 iiii walked out after my severe depressions; she told me she was committed to me the day she left. I remember the truck pulling away, the expression on the face of her mother. I was stunned... She met her future husband within the hour. 1996 thought of this program as a way to begin to create an autobiography, everything ordered through dates... 1997 I think I'm so smart. -------------------------------------- *As this grows, festers, the anecdotal will be smoothed out and the range of the text will take on a life of its own. This is more or less the cur- rency of the last two days. __________________________________________________________________________ "Wonder" The sky was out in a very beautiful day. The sun was out, too, touching the sky and everywhere. Jennifer was out too. Jennifer was filled with wonder at the beautiful day. She looked at the sun and smiled. She looked happy at the happy sky. She was filled with very happy wonder. Jennifer smiled and smiled. She was filled with happy wonder. Later, minutes, hours, hopping days and weeks, she was filled with very happy wonder! Jennifer is always filled with wonder! yours, Jennifer! ________________________________________________________________________ The Place of the Ideal in Contemporary Mathematical Ontology, as Revealed in the Application of Ordinary Language to Life-World Calculations [Today I received a box of files: some of my earlier work. It was a gift. "The Place of the Ideal" was in it and contains issues I'm still dealing with - issues relevant to CMC as well.] _1_ 2 + 2 = 4 That's it, that's the truth. It's the same everywhere. It came about, did it all at once. Were you there? I wasn't either. It seemed to be found. 2 + 2 = 5 Hey, wait a minute. Somebody did something, did you? That's got to be the case. Say it isn't so. Maybe it took a while, it did, it had to take a while. Another one was added, somebody did the adding. Where did she find it? Or somebody did the adding wrong. How did he do it? How am I to know? The thing is as the thing is, as a mistake, it can't be a mistake, it's there, it's there to be read. 1 No telling about this one. It's got to be kidding. 2 + 2 Finish it! 2 + 2 = 4 Still don't know, it leaves me uncertain. Did you do it? Has it happened by itself? Why is it here, clarifying the narrative? (I suspect it has been _found_). 2 + 2 = 3 Another one. Now the thing becomes clearer; _your_ mathematics is incor- rect. Or is it? Certainly, there is enough to make up for more than there is in the combination. One could have disappeared, one could have taken it anywhere. All that bit about energy. How could it have been done without something coming in, a kind of intervention. 2 + 2 = 3 It's here, the same one, to annoy me. Obviously, it raises questions. Ob- viously, it raises questions about its doing. Could there have been ano- ther way, a way that would have allowed me to sleep, to keep waiting? Could there have been a way which would have allowed this to stand unwrit- ten? 2 + 2 = 5, 6, 7 This is getting out of hand, beyond the placement of finger against fin- ger. You know it. Did an inversion occur? Could one say absolutely any- thing at the moment? Could one say absolutely anything and _make it stick_? _2_ Now, here's another story. It's got to be filled in. There are some units here, I've placed them on the floor, right in front of you. Some of them are connected to various things, you don't mind, you think they're the same. Well, they are, everything fits. And you can do with them what you want. Something might be taken, might be filled in, there might be a growth. After all, I might have missed something, I can't count every- thing. But I can count on you, that's all there is to it; let me know when you're through. Or keep the numbers to yourself, at times the activity around here is tiring. Tiring enough, that is, not to get involved. __________________________________________________________________________ The discussion between Jerry Everard and I leads to the following: Is drawing a distinction an instance of the application of an a priori? In other words, is _distinction_ primitive? I think so. You may _not._ _Drawing a distinction_ is an act of course. Is an act a primitive? Does every act draw a distinction? These questions, while idle, aren't idle. ________________________________________________________________________ Potential and a Potential for Confusion Distinction, primitive, primordial, and/or given, exists only within a potential well, and it is worthwhile to examine the necessity of an accompanying _domain._ A computer program announces itself; variables may or may not be declared; Perl has to be resuscitated from the /bin/; sub- routines and labels are clearly defined; grammar has to be observed ex- actly; everything runs by virtue of the potential well of both hardware and software. Drawing a distinction in sand (a stick making a line for example) requires a reasonably light wind - a temporary stasis in the world. Drawing a distinction between prime and non-prime numbers is more subtle in this regard, but it again exists within a carefully-defined domain, that of the integers. The potential well itself is a distinction, a borderland with relatively steep slopes, between inside and outside; this even occurs in spectra - an electron losing energy as it settles into an inner orbit (emitting a pho- ton of a specific frequency distinguished from others) behaves as a partic- le with fuzzy attributes within a well-defined domain. Black noise and pink noise have distinguishable spectral characteristics; white noise is distinguished from both by the absence of such. I don't want to push this too far. But it seems that drawing a distinction or a distinction drawn always already (the elements or fundamental parti- cles) is contingent upon the existence of a domain or arena, itself a distinction (the scale of an electron is different from the scale of a molecule). While the former is dependent upon a notion of _inscription,_ the latter may require nothing more than a phenomenology of _place._ I sense by the way that something is "wrong" here, that distinction, in fact, absorbs its potential well perhaps, that the division is artificial. If signifiers are such by virtue of difference, they are also such by vir- tue of the sememe, the domain of langue. The latter as domain or place is differentiated or distinguished from other domains or places (say the sense of emotional well-being); we're in a never-ending chain of mountains and valleys, a fractal landscape of _anything_ with any ontology that can be thought as entity. ___________________________________________________________________________ Revisiting Distinction, 2+2, Various From 1972-4, I worked out a mathematics based on semantics, a mathematics of process in which 2+2=4 would _always_ be written as objects and arrows, 2+2 -> 4, for example. This mathematics involved temporality, and was based on containers, channels, and markers; channels connected containers, and containers held markers. Networks could be established (somewhat sim- ilar to Petrie nets); every individuated distribution of markers among containers constituted a state. These networks were graphs; a second set of graphs connected states. There were graphs which continually oscillated (markers cyclically) and graphs which were either immobile or tending towards immobility. It was easy to construct meta-graphs, in which each node represented the state of another graph (as above) or its own state - written P(Q or P(P. It was also possible to construct meta-graphs mapping one-to-many or many-to-one or even involving "foreign" graphs and states. There were also gates, elements of cause-and-effect or contingency. These could be combined to form threshold logic elements, with variable thresh- olds, for example. The possibilities led to the notion of a _topology of intention,_ of dis- tinction, represented by these graphs and networks. Such a topology was a mathesis based on semantic representation, not syntactics; it implied a subject, and because of this there were other operations that could be entered "from without," transforming the graphs in various ways. In this fashion, consciousness was related to transformation, bracketing, and distinction; it was possible to think "through" transformation types, for example, by investigating various forms of bracketing. All of this was considered semi-independent of mathematical truth - I held (and still hold) such to be ideal (with qualifications, i.e. Godel's posi- tion). So for example, it would be possible to have 2+2 -> 3, and this could have several meanings: a unit was taken away; a mistake was made; someone is insisting on this transformation; the transformation as a whole is bracketed as an example in a text (such as this one). "The logic of consciousness, then, has devices and representations which allow both analysis of and meditation on the intentionality inherent in the production of the abstract. In a sense the logic of consciousness can express its own ongoingness." _________________________________________________________________________ Existential Funnyman I've never been able to stop thinking. In the middle of sex, I'm thinking. If I say hello to you how are you, I'm thinking: is this ok, am I an idi- ot. There's never a moment that I'm not offering myself like a whore. I'm eighteen years old and I've seen death. You make it clear to me I'm a whore. I have nothing you want. On the Net I can be anyone. In life I can't be anybody. No one finds me attractive here where I am. I don't live in a safe house. It's always about to collapse. I don't belong to anything. Teachers hate me. Bosses hate me. To know me is to hate me. I walk in and say, give me a job, I'll whore for you. I'm thrown out. My love of reading is an addiction. I'll put my last cent into a book. I'm jealous of everyone. I'm bitter and not nice. My depressions save me from horror. I've been told not to use italics. I hate boldface. It's all I can do to get up in the morning. I have no superego. It was a birthright; I was robbed. I break everything down. I can't believe it all. I can't believe in the real. I don't love any fact. I don't know what it would be to love a fact. Maybe I'm sick but I sure as hell won't take drugs. I'm eighteen and I know all about life. I'm sick of life and I'm sick. I don't know what's wrong with me. "Maybe it's my liver." It's not my liver. I'm jealous of your superego. What does it do? It glides you through the simple questions. It takes you through the rainy days, the hard times. It takes you through guilt-trips and rip-offs. It takes you through that rare moment of pleasure. It's just like superman, superwoman, ubermensch. It gives you the face to put on in the morning and the face that's yours in the night. And I want your superego and I want your face. I want your face. I want to be beautiful. I want you to want me. I want you to walk into my room and say, I want you. I'd even settle for need. But it's got to be here-in-the-real, not across cuseeme-phone-scent-vis- ion. It's got to be me. I'm a whore, a desecrated song. O Belief! Oh oh oh I'm the existential funnyman. I'm eighteen years old and I think about death all the time. Is there a God? Why doesn't she come down and fuck me? I'll never have a girlfriend at this rate. I want big money soon. Maybe it's my hair. I can't tell the truth anyway; come be my hair. _________________________________________________________________________ The Most True of All I want to Say I don't say anything much anymore but I watch and read and I'm very care- ful in what I write and I take _note._ And what I _note_ is that everyone writes to _you,_ whoever you are; that _you_ are at the end of every post and every text, every aside and every response. _You_ are absent from the bed, _you_ are just around the corner, _you_ are always reading, always watching - or _you_ are never reading, never watching. Indeed, would I write to _you_ if you were reading? Isn't every post a cry for _you,_ public in the absence of your presence, the absence of reply? You are not in the bed, you are not in the room, you are not in the home, you are not down the street, in the town or city, in the province. Or you are _not,_ there is no you, a knot of you, a tangle. Your absence makes my presence, our presence, hopeless. Since you do not find us, since you do not find us pathetic, we are as such. Since you do not find us, we are the written of the dead. Now I will put a stamp on this and mail it out, says Jennifer. _________________________________________________________________________ The Most True of All I want to Say You don't say anything much anymore but you watch and read and you're very careful in what you write and you take _note._ And what you _note_ is that everyone writes to _me,__ whoever I am; that _I_ am at the end of every post and every text, every aside and every response. _I_ am absent from the bed, _I_ am just around the corner, _I_ am always reading, always watching - or _I_ am never reading, never watching. Indeed, would you write to _me_ if I were reading? Isn't every post a cry for _me,_ public in the absence of my presence, the absence of reply? I am not in the bed, I are not in the room, I are not in the home, I am not down the street, in the town or city, in the province. Or I am _not,_ there is no me, a knot of me, a tangle. My absence makes your presence, your presence, hopeless. Since I do not find you, since I do not find you pathetic, you are as such. Since I do not find you, you are the written of the dead. Now I will put a stamp on this and mail it out, says Jennifer. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Internet Philosophy and Psychology - 1/6/97 This is a somewhat periodic notice describing my Internet Text, available on the Net, and sent in the form of texts to various lists. The URL is: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html The changing nature of the email lists, Cybermind and Fiction-of-Phil- osophy, to which the tests are sent individually, hides the full textual body itself, since new readers will not be aware of the continuity. For them the text appears fragmentary, created piecemeal, splintered from a non-existent whole. On my end, the whole is evident, the texts extended into the lists, part or transitional objects. So this (periodic) notice is an attempt to recuperate the work as a total- ity, retard its diaphanous existence. Below is an updated introduction. ----- The work to date is divided into three sections: the Internet Text proper, the alphabetic text a-u, and a group of independent titles. Together they would fill over 4 megs, and constitute around 2k pages total. The work was started more three years ago, and has continued as an extended med- itation on cyberspace. It begins with a somewhat straightforward theor- etical approach, and then, calling on numerous ghosts (alive, quasi-alive, and dead), continues in a variety of directions. I have used a re-worked MUD (multi-user-dungeon), talkers, MOOs, and Cu- SeeMe, as a way of creating discourses about these issues. This has led to further work about the political economy of the Net, and various other concerns, ranging from voyeurism to language-distribution theories, Net wars, and software/upgrading. Currently, I am thinking through issues of demarcation, inscription, writing, and distinction, autobiography, soft- ware, and programming. Almost all of the text is in the form of "short-waves, long-waves." The former are the individually-titled sections, written in a variety of styles at times referencing other writers/theorists. The sections are heavily interrelated; on occasion "characters" appear, _actants_ possess- ing philosophical or psychological import. They also create and problema- tize narrative substructures within the work as a whole. (Such are Clara Hielo Internet, Tiffany, Alan, Travis, Honey, Jennifer, and others. Jen- nifer, in particular, has been the subject/object of recent work, a blur- ring of epistemological/ontological distinction. Jennifer is me, not an alter-ego. When I close my eyes, I dream: Jennifer. The long-waves are fuzzy topoi on such issues as death, love, virtual em- bodiment, the "granularity of the real," and physical reality, which criss-cross the texts. The resulting fragmentations and coagulations owe something to Romanticism, deconstruction, linguistics, prehistory, the philosophy of science, etc., but more to the functions of sites or nodes on the Net itself. There is no binarism in the work, no series of protocol statements. Vir- tuality itself is considered far beyond the ASCII text / Webscape that is most prevalent now, at the end of the twentieth century. The various is- sues of embodiment that will arrive with full-real or true-real VR are already in existence as embryonic, permitting the theorizing of various present and future spatialities and their interconnectedness. Please check the INDEX to find your way into the body of the work on-line. A resume is also available. Thank you. Usage: The texts may be distributed in any medium - indeed, I urge you to do so - provided I am credited with authorship. I would appreciate in re- turn any comments you may have. Alan Sondheim, 432 Dean St., Brooklyn, NY, 11217 718-857-3671 mail to: sondheim@panix.com, sondheim@netcom.com --------------------------------------------------------------------------