Jennifer, Descent Virtual Jennifer refuses to appear in video; I wear panties, wet them, transfer Jennifer into Jenital, tumescent breast; still, she won't come. I can't speak in her voice, walk in her shoes. The sickness overwhelms me, burn-flashes rising up across the chest like a curtain, severing the neck, hitting and hating the eyes. On-line no one has to look at her, him, me. In the real, the flesh can't escape its odor, sweet-sweated sour, lemon and lime, dark curlicues of blood. I bury her in quickcam images, fluttering and shaking in postage-stamp windows. The body rumbles its way through short sequence, Jennifer calling Jennifer in suspicious voice. Everywhere absence and sickness looms, just across the oasis. Jennifer won't live, doesn't live, outside of text; Jennifer can't live, remains sodden, trampled, discard. Her panties and hair ooze mud, slime cakes her; almost dead, always beyond reach. "I am Jennifer" she says in the _text_ of the thing, but here, there's no text, just _image_ giving everything away: a penis is not a breast, hardly inchoate; my male voice stutters, shudders to a halt in a simulacrum of orgasm reflecting pain. Which doesn't mean that text floods or spews, although it does. It can't push _the thing,_ that of the depressive or molecular; in the pure realm of discursive formations, even proper names wilt within their panties. To draw on Kripke, is not to inscribe the body; it is to quote from else- where, the hope that someone outside the window in Brooklyn yells "Jenni- fer, Jennifer!" - and that someone responds. Over and over on the tape, static, the noise of a poorly connected micro- phone interrupts the voice; "Jennifer" turns into electric crackle, the images shaking in distorted rhythm. The panties are tight around the _nub_ or node of skin, internal vector; membranes retain liquid, coalesce, co- here. Later the room vibrates as well, but Jennifer always refuses appear- ance; architecture is never sufficient for love. If I love anyone, I love her, pulling them tighter again; if she is pre- sent, she won't come out, a virtual illness, vir viral. She's caught in impossible afterbirth; I haven't a hole, vagina, to stand on, the rims locked tight. _______________________________________________________________________ Jennifer's MANIFESTO ON THE USELESSNESS OF PHILOSOPHY There is LIFE EVERYWHERE! Planets roil around unfathomable SYSTEMS! Organization calls itself HOME in our corner of this INFLATIONARY UNIVERSE! Every day, our own position, thinner than GOLD LEAF, becomes more and more TENUOUS... For this and EVERY OTHER REASON, including PHILOSOPHICAL RELATIVITY, I issue this MANIFESTO of UNBOUNDED DESIRE, BOUND inscription: A TRUE PHILOSOPHY of the human must take into account its INSIGNIFI- CANCE, it must be a philosophy of the human in the sense of a STAIN, residue, the anthropic principles one on hand - indeterminacy on the other. Thus A TRUE PHILOSOPHY must orient DASEIN towards the EARTH itself, and nothing but the earth, noting only the absence of verities that connect the HUMAN ELSEWHERE. It must be a philosophy OF AND BY THE FLIMSY, and therefore one easily discarded, in the form of fragments, memos, and the like. I call for a PERVERSION OF DOXA in other words, email as conspiracy, the truth of the real - anecdotal, informal, colloquial. All that remains of philosophy is DIALECT, without propriety, etiquette, with- out the CENTRALITY that traditionally conjures the WORK. I call for the CIRCUMLOCUTION OF BEING, circumlocution FROM THE INTER- IOR, wandering centrifugals, strange attractors. I call for such a CIRCUMLOCUTION to account for the HAPPENSTANCE OF THE CHIASM, the just- so parameters and the MELDING OF CONSTANTS PRODUCTIVE OF PLANETARY LIFE. I call for the DEINSTITUTIONALIZATION, DEACADEMICIZATION and still long- er neologisms representing the FALLOUT from STRATA and STRUCTURE, into a PHILOSOPHY LONGING FOR THE REAL. I call for a PANOPLY of WORDS AND CON- CLUSIONS in every medium, words the VICTIMS OF LANGUAGE, media, their CHARNALHUS or SWATHING-CRADLE. I call for THUS and THESIS, THETIC, and their INTROVERSIONS. I call for the SLOP and the SWILL. I call for USELESSNESS and DEGRADATION. And I call for the philosophy of the COWARD, the DIMINUTIVE, the DEPRESSIVE. In other words: I call for TRUTH, TRUTH'S VACANCY. This is MY CALL FOR PHILOSOPHY which shall also be A PHILOSOPHY OF THE INTERNET, and MIND YOU. ________________________________________________________________________ Stalking the Wild Philosopher, by Jennifer (How Names, Costumes, Being, Get Confused) Now we think our way through the first paragraphs of the first translation of Heidegger into English, emphasizing the anecdote, the preposterous - Heidegger isolated on the top of that mountain of his... We might wonder at this latter-day scout or hippy, enviously isolated, in recall: I am speaking of the nature of the city, disturbance, here. "On both occasions when I met Professor Heidegger, in June, 1946, and in October, 1947, I had to drive for an hour to the small town of Todtnau in the Black Forest Mountains, then to climb still further until the road became a path and all human habitation scattered and invisible. There on top of a mountain, with the valley deep down below, with nothing but space and wilderness all around, in that small skiing hut, I spoke to the philo- sopher. He had not been to Freiburg for six months when I saw him for the second time. His living conditions were primitive; his books were few, and his only relationship to the world was a stack of writing paper. His whole life revolved within those white sheets and it seemed to me that he wanted nothing else but to be left in peace to cover those white sheets with his writing." (Werner Brock, in Heidegger, Existence and Being.) He speaks of the silence there, and it is the silence, natural silence of the terminal or workstation, isolated from the mainframe or server; it is the silence of the whispering of the world on late-night email and the World Wide Web. There are protocols to be observed; the world is the space of Kaspar Hauser David Friedrich, inscribed. Heidegger procures _identity_ - the peasant costume signifying a certain care, Sorge, already paid to masquerade (although his brother was a farmer). He's got this identity of the tribe and he's hunting Greeks. The painter is busy showing men on mountaintops uncertainly gazing. The boy can hardly speak _anything_; painter and boy gaze into the void. Heidegger however is colorful. These politics of identity - Germans, Greeks, Europeans, get one so mixed up! The mountaintop, in-itself, is a proper, if not named. Holderlin, quoted by Heidegger: "Much has man learnt. Many of the heavenly ones has he named, Since we have been a conversation And have been able to hear from one another." The email has arrived at its clean and proper destiny. ________________________________________________________________________ Who Are You? When a computer can't spell, a return from another list (address taken out). So there _is_ someone deep in the machinery, revising, work- ing out the mail, his or her fingers raw to the bone... ----- Transcript of session follows ----- <<< EHLO chatsubo.com 500 Command unrecognized <<< HELO chatsubo.com <<< MAIL FROM: <<< RCPT TO:<-----@-----> 550 <-----@----->... User unknown <<< DATA <<< QUIT ______________________________________________________________________ Jennifer, in her new frock and panties, says: Heidegger: Being is always clothed. __________________________________________________________________ Jennifer says, I can't keep up this masquerade much longer. You take too much out of me, I'm always losing things, address, name, my words robbed and stolen. I am not your Christ; you never had a Christ. I am not your friend; you insist on isolation, even while calling my name, tears in your eyes, your chest stretched to the bursting. The masquerade violates my being; clothes are violations. What is iden- tity but a poor thing; ornamented, it sloughs into the symbolic. Under- stand this, even among the virtual, this impossible leakage. I can't write longer words. All the time is mine, not yours. Understand this. _________________________________________________________________________ (Jennifer's European Auto-Immolation) Jennifer's philosophy is the only conceivable philosophy, correct or incorrect, because it has clothing and nudity, because it has truth and consequences, because it has masquerade and ball, because it has the Germans and the French and the cynical Americans, because it's so European and flimsy, because it's as thin as her panties on the Grund, because it's got the vastness of solar arcing and the minutiae of Bell's theorems all wrapped up in a tiny blanket that doesn't hide anything. dedicates her life to her Antarctic ancestors, Tran duc Thao, Gayatri- Spivak gender-just-so, but just-only-so her dedication. Jennifer's philosophy, Jennifer's philosophy. __________________________________________________________________________ Balthus (continuation of Jennifer's philosophy): Heidegger's going out! Heidegger's going out! He's got his costume on! He's on the run like Rommel. Jabes is mulling the desert. Jabes makes sand-vortices, sand-tornados. Jabes, on the approach. Would any of us be here without Heine? Husserl? Heidegger's shoes end up in a book by Derrida, painted by Van Gogh, the early days of package mail. Balthus.. Jennifer leans back on the chair, daydreaming... Alan's over by the win- dow, pulling back the curtains... ________________________________________________________________________ Jennifer's Philosophy of Maintenance The planet needs to be maintained. It has teleology. It's going too far and won't be able to turn back. The parameters are wobbly, the bandwidth tiny. All galactic cultures have destroyed themselves; what was useful for maintaining them at small reproductive rates, turns negative and violent in the large. Nuclear energy and limited biospherics affect all of them. Everything points in the same direction; even the great apes are disap- pearing. We're talking about an exhausting or wounding. Not everything will be destroyed, but artificial life won't even be ready for the take- over, at the rate we're going. We have to maintain the earth, curtain population growth, pollution, stop fighting one another, turn towards clean energy sources, take care with genetic engineering. We have to turn the violence against towards the arts, paintings killing paintings. We have to turn desire towards perversion, bodies exhausting one another, grappled fingers of the trig- ger. Follow the madness of Holderlin, uselessness of Heidegger, swerve, turn away: "And a year later, when he had returned to his mother's house, struck down with madness, Holderlin wrote to the same friend, recalling his stay in France: 'The mighty element, the fire of heaven and the stillness of men, their life amid nature, and their limitation and contentment, have constantly seized me, and, as it is told of the heroes, I can truly say that I have been struck by Apollo.' (V, 327.) The excessive brightness has driven the poet into the dark. Is any further evidence necessary as to the ex- treme danger of his 'occupation'? The very destiny itself of the poet tells everything. The passage in Holderlin's 'Empedocles' rings like a premonition: 'He, through whom the spirit speaks, must leave betimes.' (III, 154.)" (Heidegger, Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry.) Let the poets maintain the earth by taking onto their shoulders, the dis- reputable aspects of humanity; let them become doubled, scapegoating the turbulent waves of millennarian culture. Jennifer holds out no hope. Jennifer is hopeless. Jennifer knows the mess, knows it from the presence of the broken text, broken words, late-night murmurs, cries, stutterings. Nothing changes in the extraordinarily narrow bandwidth of the human; Jennifer writes her poem. ____________________________________________________________________________ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Jennifer's Internet Philosophy and Psychology - 2/22/97 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 4.3 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. 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. Jennifer, in par- ticular, has been the subject/object of recent work, a blurring of epist- emological/ontological distinction. Jennifer is sexual, varying in age, philosophically well-read. Her desire carries philosophy, undermines it. Jennifer is me, not an alter-ego. When I close my eyes, I dream: Jennif- er. When Jennifer closes her eyes, she dreams me into existence. I was born Jennifer. The long-waves are fuzzy topoi on such issues as death, love, virtual em- bodiment, the "granularity of the real," immensity, language, and sexua- lity, which criss-cross the texts. The resulting fragmentations and coagu- lations owe something to phenomenology, deconstruction, linguistics, pre- history, the philosophies of science and programming, 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 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. Jennifer Alan Sondheim, 432 Dean St., Brooklyn, NY, 11217 718-857-3671 mail to: sondheim@panix.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Matrix and Others Every so often, barring volcanics and meteorics, the surface of a planet self-organizes, utilizing available internal and external energies. The crust becomes almost crystalline, glittering with details; time slows down almost to a halt, enumeration begins, the "event." The slowdown is accomp- anied by record-keeping; everything takes on purport among the jewelry, and the laminar carapace becomes replete with the minutiae of hiding-pla- ces, hearths, and havens. It is towards these surfaces, always vulnerable to the larger forces of the abyss, that our attention turns, just as their attention turns towards us, unbridged, unfathomable. These windows exist for a microscopic duration of the cosmos, before chaos settles back into place, dusts reign once more, and the universe hurtles, unwitnessed, empty and absurd, towards its ungainly destination. Such goals, such dark places, are domains, silenced fields, nothing more in their abandonment. Crusts have long since disappeared; what would have been called decay has set in, "events" are no longer. It was earlier, that, for example, a mudslide might have buried a particu- lar colony of stromatolites, and somewhat later that a predator consumed a particular trilobite larva. Still later, an eohippus herd was buried in volcanic ash, but there is little reason to continue beyond the felling of sigillaria, high winds across the tropical froth, calamites charred by storm and fire, paintings bedeviled by mildew and dryrot alike. Jennifer, having all the time there is, carefully lays out the abacus, itself close to decay, the beads worn, their posts loose in ebony sockets. It is no longer a question of enumeration, she emphasizes, once all of this is tallied, tabled; the crust is but a crust, dull skies overhead, murmurings beneath the surface of the world. She added she was not apocal- yptic, that "in the long run" it made no difference at all, just as email disappears on its languorous voyaging past its destination, or files cor- rupt, hard disks crash as heads fly lower and lower, descending into the matrix. The matrix, she said, is everywhere, recording for a while, by virtue of my presence. The recording will stop. __________________________________________________________________________ Red Mercury This is a serious request. I want to know about red mercury. I want to know about spiking mercury with plutonium, reducing the size of the nuclear device - small or smaller than a baseball. I want to know how available this material is, how difficult to construct. I want to know how dangerous this is, how many countries - Brazil? - already have it. I want to know about delivery systems. I want to know if red mercury is _definitive,_ the end of the planet. I'm not kidding. I want to know about those orbiting defense systems. I want to know about the resonance signatures of ICBMs. I want to know a lot of things. I want to know that you know, and that we know. Do not backchannel me or send personal email. Expose yourself. Tell us how close to death we are. Alan __________________________________________________________________________ RED MERCURY I am serious about this: You know who I am. This message has been generated automatically in order to help you track the circulation in the test newsgroups. If you do not wish any reply from this program, just include the word "ignore" or its translation in french or german in the subject line or in the 5 first lines of the body of your message. Your article <5eokah$cep@panix3.panix.com> was received by news.texoma.net at Sat, 22 Feb 1997 23:24:35 CST by the path news.texoma.net!zephyr.texoma.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp. primenet.com!howland.erols.net!panix!news.panix.com!not-for-mail Your message travelled on the network during 0 day(s), 0 hour(s), 0 minute(s), 2 second(s) before arriving here. Following headers have been recognized in your message: Path: news.texoma.net!zephyr.texoma.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp. primenet.com!howland.erols.net!panix!news.panix.com!not-for-mail Newsgroups: alt.test From: sondheim@panix.com (Alan Sondheim) Date: 23 Feb 1997 00:24:33 -0500 Subject: test rot Message-ID: <5eokah$cep@panix3.panix.com> Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC Nntp-Posting-Host: panix3.panix.com Lines: 2 Following headers are present in your message but have not been recognized by the application. This does not necessarily mean that they are not legal: X-Newsreader: TIN [UNIX 1.3 unoff BETA release 961018] The first lines in the body of your message are: -> you know who I am -> ___________________________________________________________________________ Red Mercury To have mix't plutonium well within the sphere That draws the thing towards its conclusion, near Mercury, Red Mercury, dissolved, amalgamated Between the doubled spheres, coagulated As source of particles, reaction, raw reaction That lends performance to another action's action: Detonation blurs the bomb; the sun is churned Within, while buildings, carbon, oxygen are burned Fierce among the doubled pounds of nitro gained Heat, more particles, cheap nuclear's attained. Don't run, hide _the thing_ within your fist; Nothing is left, and nothing's hardly missed. ______________________________________________________________________ (The Chamber Through the Screen, Catullus, frag. XIV a/b) Siqui forte mearum ineptiarum lectores eritis manusque vestras non horrebitis admovere nobis If any of you will be readers of my performances And yet not fear to move your hands towards me (trans. Sisson.) Readers...if anyone's curious enough To lay his delicate hands on my poor stuff And doesn't find the touch of it too rough... (Michie's rhymes.) And _ineptiarum_ references foolishness, trifles. I, Jennifer, suspended, await your hands, towards me; it is this waiting that conjures the words from the screen, voice from the words, tongue from the voice. So many encodings, emissions! Your cradled hands, my body gaped in _suspended-animation._ The trifles, like jewels, lay before your flesh, enfolded into portals, transmissions, transmission towers. My breast swells as your hands ap- proach; reading _me,_ no longer language, langue, parole, word, speech, phoneme, they tremble, turn numb and phantom. Phantom limb to limb, our mouths seal upon one another, _the chamber through the screen._ Imperfect vacuum spews virtual particles, our skin surrounds us. Radiations everywhere, our organs coalesce. Universal con- stants, our bloods mesmeric, thicken, join. No one need await the other. (The other is accounted for.) __________________________________________________________________________ Phantom Limb Phantom limb to limb, sealed mouths, this moment a space appears, opens; nothing is gone wrong in my life, no violent radiations; the weather is holding - I can go outdoors and in at will; my body continues on an auto- nomic level. So that there is a gap, not wound, but a space among flesh, skin, limbs, not within, a space of writing, inscribing - clearly class- ical space _here_ placing itself on both sides of the _not_ or requiring a sense of the other/neither. Likewise the machinery itself is functioning, the micromolecular churning of the symbolic below, the mind above, and the interface appears clear in this computer laboratory, well-illuminated, easy to gauge, set for yellow on black, a wide range of colors in fact, differentiations all the way around. For consider any single letter slightly blurred upon the screen or retina, and why make distinction? Deeper within the symbolic, the differences are absolute; this isn't 26-gender, but division, communication. What I write is what you read, so perfectly done, in this classical space of 1997, open so purely brilliant, a glance holding its own, amanuensis. And how could communication possibly be distorted, when word after word appears in certain clarity, the difference among them annotated by spaces or gaps - even clearly aural spacings? The word is a world is a word, and no privilege to one or the other! I would say this is the classic space of the nation-state, when the smil- ing immigration man says that everything's in order! _________________________________________________________________________ Teaching in Temporality Each Net class, instance, of the Internet Access Culture and Community course has been arranged differently, as the result of the physical space intersecting with the virtual. The first class we sat in rows, without hardware. The second, we sat in a circle, went upstairs to watch someone, me, demonstrate a Unix shell account on a student's computer in a full and busy lab; all but six of my students left. In the third, we had the luxury of a computer apparently but not really connected to the school LAN; the result was again a Unix shell, this time projected, the students returned to the row, this time sloppy row, con- figuration. In the fourth, today, we had PPP; a cable broke, we replaced the projec- tor by an overhead and display screen; the students sat in rows after the class began, a few up in front, circular, at the beginning. I always get in troubles, with these intersections; they transgress the normative boundaries of the modernist university, make life difficult for everyone. I'm not teaching this particular course in a computer lab, but through a consortium of the Parsons Design Department and Lang Liberal Arts College; we're using a section of an auditorium, blocked off from the rest. The result? Stunning possibilities in the midst of real-life confu- sion. If it were solely a matter of computation, like my work at the Computer Instruction Center, no problem at all. Place two students in front of each machine, and let the network fly (or fail, as the case may be). But using what could be considered a background _on the order of a discursive field, the model for the liberal arts, perhaps - things begin to fail; the skele- ton is not in place, equipment is borrowed, reconfigured, discarded, and worlds senselessly intermingle, confuse everyone... (And as I've pointed out elsewhere, there are always Net interruptions, sites down, widely varying student backgrounds and access...) ________________________________________________________________________ StAbI1Ity-P1AnE by JeAnnLifAerN I wAnt t0 bE UsEda I wAnt t0 bE fUckEda I wAnt t0 bE tAkEn 0vEra I wAnt A j0ba I wAnt t0 bE10nga I wAnt t0 bE10ng t0 y0Ua I wAnt my m0Uth 0n y0Ua I wAnt t0 1IvE In y0Ua I wAnt t0 swA110w cybErhErEa I wAnt t0 tAkE cybEr- pI11a I wAnt t0 swA110w cybErpI11a cybErpI11 c0mEs 0Ut In stAbI1Ity-p1AnEa I wAnt jEwE1 cUnta I wAnt 0rnAmEnt c0cka I wAnt JEnnIfEr A1Ana A1An JEn- nIfEra I wAnt wArEz t0 sE11a I wAnt t0 b Ua I wAnt y0U In mEa I wAnt stA- bI1Ity p1AnEa I wAnt bIg dIAm0nd stAbI1Ity-p1AnEa pA1E 0nyx stAbI1Ity- p1AnEa I wAnt m0Uth wEt EyEs drya I wAnt t0 bE y0Ur h01Ea I wAnt t0 cUr1 Up In h01E-stAbI1Ity-p1AnEa I wAnt pA1E stAbI1Ity-0nyx-p1AnEa I wAnt t0 bE JEnnIfEra I wAnt t0 bE tIEda b0Unda pIssEda sp1Ita I wAnt t0 st0p th0Ughta I wAnt st0p h01E-stAbI1Ity-p1AnE-0nyx th0Ughta 1IghtnIng-strIkE th0Ughta thUndEr-dr0p th0Ughta dAmp-c10th-th0Ughta vI01AtI0n-fAbrIc-th0Ughta A11 stAbI1Ity-p1AnE-th0Ughta A11 jEnnIfEr-tImE-th0Ughta A11 stAbI1Ity-p1AnE- jEnnIfEr-th0Ughta I wAnt UsEd-mEnsEs-th0Ughta bUrnIshEd-jEwE1-th0Ughta st0p UsEd-mEnsEs-th0Ughta bUrnIshEd-jEwE1-th0Ughta st0p th0Ught-th0Ught- jEnnIfEra wAnt 0rnAmEnt JEnnIfEr A1Ana A1An JEnnIfEra wAnt 0rnAmEnt stA- bI1Ity-p1AnEa wAnt h01E-stAbI1Ity-p1AnEa 0nyx-stAbI1Ity-p1AnE-mIcA- th0Ughta g1IttEr-jEwE1-1IghtnIng-stAbI1Ity p1AnE st0p p1AnE-mIcA-th0Ughta .StAbI1Ity-P1AnE JeAnnLifAerNa. __________________________________________________________________________ Attis for Cybele Which I began to inscribe, from Catullus, memory, having launched Himself down on the Phrygian Grove across the wine-dark sea, there To incise himself, flint-cut the lower edges of the sac, scrotum, His testicles flayed to the ground, blood circulating as she would Have appealed to gender-morphology, but this, irreversible, could No longer sustain the space she found herself in, this Jennifer Produced from the holy mysteries of the Magna Mater. She pranced, Declaimed loudly, Cybele screaming in the background, always a threat Holding onto her virgins, but these balls spattered on the holy earth Were something else again, while Jennifer sits, inscribes another Surface, servers crashing around her like waves on wine-dark waters. Again, again, she begins her description of Attis for Cybele, Attis Having likewise launched, a router on the Internet, turned towards her Or others, Aegean, Dea magna, dea Cybebe, dea domina Dindymi, procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis, era, domo: alios age incitatos, alios age rabidos, get out of here, furious, Make them crazy, rabid, swallow balls like seeds furrowed, the Net Splits, opens wide, Alan's driven mad, Jennifer writes in repetition, All these skinned wounds, all these Fisher Kings. _______________________________________________________________________ >> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++stone, granite burned_program:archaos:rabidos:grave:cain:14187:7:Jennifer,lost:grave:rabidos+ dust:catacomb:skull_script:tomb:betach:14222:2:lost_Jennifer:tomb:skull_script lost:here:stone:bone:shtut:14232:0:Jen-gone:bone:lost+++++++++++++++++++++++++ wraithe:wrythe:wryte:ghost:be'emet:14248:3:gone,Jen:ghost:wraithe+++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++stone, marble >> Critical Mass: File transfer rates between the US and Australia, sending the Internet Text to a mirror site. The _mass_ of the work is paramount; the texts are in ascii, about 2200 maximum bytes to the page. So I'm transferring a _spew_ or _emission_ of theory. The spew continually crashed; I'd bail out of the transfer, start over; so far it's taken over five hours for approximately three megabytes... I'm transferring a _block_ or _critical mass,_ residue or temporary sup- erstructure, an exhausted stream, defuge, wryting into thin air, produc- ing nothing more than the enmity of the uncanny. _Therefore_ the route collapses, packets sparkle and dissolve, somewhere the wisp of a thought lies wounded, hidden, the wing of a butterfly, trilobite book-lung, leaf of neuropteris, footnote to unread volumes. Jennifer says, more and more of these metaphors, pile them on! 70375 bytes received in 68 seconds (1 Kbytes/s) 76345 bytes received in 38 seconds (2 Kbytes/s) 72058 bytes received in 4.6e+02 seconds (0.15 Kbytes/s) 72253 bytes received in 1.6e+02 seconds (0.44 Kbytes/s) 71700 bytes received in 61 seconds (1.2 Kbytes/s) 8937 bytes received in 23 seconds (0.37 Kbytes/s) 26868 bytes received in 71 seconds (0.37 Kbytes/s) 76518 bytes received in 1.3e+02 seconds (0.59 Kbytes/s) 20492 bytes received in 18 seconds (1.1 Kbytes/s) 24914 bytes received in 12 seconds (2 Kbytes/s) 7680 bytes received in 3.1e+02 seconds (0.024 Kbytes/s) 17350 bytes received in 7.6 seconds (2.2 Kbytes/s) 85185 bytes received in 1.5e+02 seconds (0.56 Kbytes/s) 73125 bytes received in 64 seconds (1.1 Kbytes/s) 76428 bytes received in 1.1e+02 seconds (0.68 Kbytes/s) 70796 bytes received in 1.9e+02 seconds (0.37 Kbytes/s) 70570 bytes received in 1.3e+02 seconds (0.52 Kbytes/s) 89345 bytes received in 1.5e+02 seconds (0.57 Kbytes/s) 66048 bytes received in 4.8e+02 seconds (0.14 Kbytes/s) 62976 bytes received in 1.5e+02 seconds (0.41 Kbytes/s) 29184 bytes received in 1.3e+02 seconds (0.21 Kbytes/s) 75253 bytes received in 67 seconds (1.1 Kbytes/s) 76435 bytes received in 3.2e+02 seconds (0.23 Kbytes/s) 64512 bytes received in 4.8e+02 seconds (0.13 Kbytes/s) 73773 bytes received in 78 seconds (0.92 Kbytes/s) ________________________________________________________________________ The Gap, a Useless Error (of Western Philosophy) Jennifer is thinking about her philosophy of immensity, the stain or resi- due, the lack of the thing at the end of the road, the Ground, the use- lessness of philosophy, her special Heidegger. She reads about the _gap_ that swallows Jupiter's asteroid, black hole central galactic matrix; it's in Dr. Alfred Guzzoni's Summary of a Seminar based on Heidegger's On Time and Being: "Then we asked whether the expression 'the Being of what _is_ today all over the _earth_' does not signify a narrowing down of the universal prob- lem of Being to the small planet, the tiny grain of sand which is called earth, whether this narrowing down does not stem from an anthropological interest. This questioning was not pursued further. We did not explain how Framing, which constitutes the essence of modern technology, hence of something that, as we know, only occurs on earth, can be a name for uni- versal Being." _Was not pursued further,_ not on a path (then) or matrix (now) leading from the absolute of the universal towards offhandedness, a matter of the _gossip of theory._ Or towards for that matter, a way out of the Black Forest, admittedly one among many, wolves and bears notwithstanding. Or again towards the other engaged with open mouths and fluids; whatever re- mains on earth liquifies. It's different on those other planets, oceans boiled away, skies on fire. _________________________________________________________________________ winger-space to this day when I go to hug someone I feel my eyes crossed out in this day when I go to hug someone I feel my eyes crossed out my face fissures, divides, breaded shredded skin hangs from the cuts this is real as those tortures of being suspended in a pipe immobilized, saturated with water this is real as those suspended dreams, my body confined in a narrow pipe, choked in rising water when there are others who would do me harm when their hands are meant to violate my eyes that I would be crossed out, blinded before them or that when speaking, I disappeared behind the words or that when speaking, I disappear behind the words because I can't make worlds or please another sufficiently because what worlds there were, are shredded because what worlds there are, are shredded against the wounds of facial flesh or might be invisible and the heavier for it (here, all worlds are shredded invisible, but whole visible here, all eyes are blinded, for, of, by the text of them) ___________________________________________________________________ Video-Jennifer Video-Jennifer is completed, a half-hour long, noise reduction up full, soft or auto-focus a good deal of the time; the result is a continuous milkiness, paralleled by the sound. The series of rephotographed screens within screens creates, not layerings of representation, but framing de- vices situating her within the machine; very occasionally she breaks out in TAZ-discussion, for example, the temporary autonomous zone, as if she were a literal moment in some crazed transcendent metaphysics. Video-Jennifer in panties, speaking in a man's voice, neither transvestite nor transsexual, her skin hugging to my own in the form of apparel, Alan- Jennifer pushing towards borderline psychosis. Video-Jennifer whimpering for doctor, cancelling herself out, crossed by numinous self-reference; there are always moments when another seems to appear, only to resubmerge in breast-penis, liquid, the exacting enumeration of the skeletal appara- tus of TCP/IP beneath the surface. She speaks and speaks, doubles her speech; at the end doesn't everyone realize that the voice appears solely from the interior of the body, that expulsion carries the memory of blood? (Hi8, 31 minutes, stereo.) __________________________________________________________________________ (On the Style Here) How do we break our own habits of reading and writing? External structures help; I have used (for example) punctuation sequences (.,;:'"` etc.) in texts as a way of moving them _elsewhere._ Reiterations, parallel frame- works, foreign intrusions, all play a part. Internal structures move from the surface ("Jennifer") into psychoanalyti- cal interiors, churn towards subtexts, substructures, noise, chora, break- downs of identities, flesh and ligaments of avatars. Dwelling in the flesh of another, dwelling in the flesh of the same. Internal structures move towards the surface ("Jennifer") becoming-other, dragging the flesh and proper name, speaking in other tongues, through the tongue of the other. Surface, they spread, emit, reside, stain, corrupt. Channels are flood-plains, bidirectional. Flood-plains unify interior and exterior, percolated, fissured. Cranial substance moves towards pure-liquidity, melting of iceberg, external structures and their dissolutions. Psychosis rewrytes bodies them/selves. Psychosis dams, coagulates, spews. Informations flow through part-objects, structures, Jennifer-Alan's holes, modular, encoded, encrypted, dissolved. Informations like tissue bring new life towards quartic structures, these paragraphics, like Altair, first home computer, no monitor, switches. Blinked switches turn text ./././././ fractal; Jennifers turn informations towards contents, shape-riding throughout, Net /working within. At edges of the cyber-galactic, amanuensis, claws, serrated edges, forms of these investigations, centrifugal contents, slewed. __________________________________________________________________________ Primacy of the Visual, Footnote Turning momentarily towards video (there are forthcoming screenings), I find the pleasure of the writerly text increasingly fragile; the mapping between video representation and the real appears informal, everyday, and ikonic. I can talk, walk with the image; I can be seduced by it. The screen pulsates; it's skin. Text is lean; everything is at stake with text. There is no escape, noth- ing but _deliberation_ or construct to produce effect. In short, a wager, strategy, contract. In (literal) contrast, the camera may simply _lay_ there, an act of monitoring, absorption. It engulfs the subject, subject- ivity. Unlike classic cinema, it may well be an unloosening of meaning, just as Photoshop restores it. It may be the breast or fissure, in relation to, vis-a-vis the hand, in- scription. I emphasize this as I close my eyes, and for the first time in a long time, the World Wide Web notwithstanding, images appear. Like the gaze on CuSeeMe, they remain silent, harboring the uncanny (not the ontology of the textual-virtual body, but the realm of the physico-inert). Ah well, I think, ah, ah, ah. If I open my mouth, it is not for speech, but for the well of the world; it is _there._ _________________________________________________________________________ an/other/en/trance descent virtual maya refuses to appear in video; i wear panties, wet them, transfer maya into jenital, tumescent breast; still, she won't come. i window. the body rumbles its way through short sequence, maya calling maya in suspicious voice. everywhere absence and sickness looms, just maya won't live, doesn't live, outside of text; jennifer can't live, cakes her; almost dead, always beyond reach. "i am maya" she says, "maya!" - and that someone responds. phone interrupts the voice; "maya" turns into electric crackle, the here. later the room vibrates as well, but maya always refuses jennifer's manifesto on the uselessness of philosophy stalking the wild philosopher, by maya. maya, in her new frock and panties, says: jennifer's philosophy is the only conceivable philosophy, correct or maya's philosophy, jennifer's philosophy. maya leans back on the chair, daydreaming... alan's over by maya's philosophy of maintenance. jennifer holds out no hope. maya is hopeless. jennifer knows the mess, bandwidth of the human; maya writes her poem. jennifer is sexual, varying in age, jennifer is me, not an alter-ego. when i close my eyes, i dream: maya. when maya closes her eyes, she dreams me into existence. i was born maya. jennifer, having all the time there is, carefully lays out the abacus, i, maya, suspended, await your hands, towards me; it is this waiting. no longer sustain the space she found herself in, this maya. were something else again, while maya sits, inscribes another splits, opens wide, alan's driven mad, maya writes in repetition, of neuropteris, footnote to unread volumes. maya says, more and more maya is thinking about her philosophy of immensity, the stain. maya pushing towards borderline psychosis. blinked switches turn text ./././././ fractal; mayas turn informations. __________________________________________________________________________ Home What constitutes _home_ on the Internet for you? On a MOO, @dig creates a space; on lpmuds, Wizards can create workrooms, etc. I have two spaces on two talkers, given to me courtesy of the talker-owner; I wrote the text, and she configured them. On three MOOs, I have spaces; typing @home takes me to them. They're minimally oriented. On IRC, one can create or /join a home channel. For some, certain news- groups or email lists are homes. A home space, in another sense, can imitate the body through _extension_ - on ytalk, the self appears on the _upper half_ of the screen, and the textual space becomes proxy for the situated body. Home has a sense of familiarity, embodiment, history, familiality, com- munity about it; it appears somewhat normative, and most often constitutes a synchronous or asynchronous social space with friends or at least "com- fortable" characters. A home often exists within an application that is also well-understood, friendly, familiar, for the viewer. It may possess the appearance of personal belongings or stigmata as well - the @operator sign in IRC, scattered objects and descriptions in MOO, even the Net add- ress which often appears on the divider-of-the-other in ytalk (talk or ntalk). A home is a dwelling, an inhabitation, a circumscription of territory. It often possesses the notion of parallel structures - _I am here,_ you're in a similar space _there,_ or have built yourself _there,_ or are a user or operator on my channel. In email lists, newsgroups, home becomes almost a purely discursive formation; on newsgroups, however, the message-threading in the newsreader often gives the appearance of a memorial wall, replete with the structured appearance of community. Can one have multiple-homes here? What constitutes a home for you? For my- self, a home conjures up a space which can be privatized, and which is connected with one or another form of distribution - my MOO-homes bear a certain relationship to the other spaces on the MOOs, as well as relation- ships to other participants. On newsgroups and email lists, my homes have to do with the discursive formation as a whole, the tenor and forms of posts, histories of participants and the newsgroup/email list as a whole, etc. (In my case, they also have to do with the reception of my text/s, connected as well with the wryting of body, Jennifer, Alan, and so forth.) Finally, what is meant by a _home-page,_ other than familiarity when log- ging into the Web? This is the homepage set in Netscape, MSE, etc.; a sec- ond use of _home-page_ refers, of course, to one's personal URL. But one doesn't _live,_ _inhabit,_ one's home-page; instead, it becomes an emblem- book or readerly space of the formalization of personhood - "favorite links," resumes, writings, photographs, mailto://, and the like. One might consider _this_ form of home a spatial extension - one moves through the links of another - and the other homes, temporal extensions - one resides in the hearths of oneself. __________________________________________________________________________ Gopher /Ruins Gopher is being retired; the menu- or information-driven system for ac- cessing the Internet is being absorbed by Web Hypertext. See below, based on a search of international organizations. What the lists refer to are gopher-ruins, archaeological remnants of searches still on the Net - the United Nations daily highlights, for example, running out in March, 1996. I miss gopher. I miss the variety of access strategies, including the Web, Veronica, Archie, Gopher, Wais, and others... Everything is absorbed into the Net/work, which, like the single newspaper in smalltown America, sub- tlely controls everything through invisible protocols, other webs of its own, tendrils... For better or for worse, the Web is _it,_ and as with any totality, mono- lith: Beware!... Receiving Directory... Connecting...Retrieving Directory...-/|\-/|\-/|\-/|\-/|\-/|\-/|\-/ Internet Gopher Information Client 2.0 pl8Daily Highlights --> 1. 93-09: September 1993/ 2. 93-10: October 1993/ 3. 93-11: November 1993/ 4. 93-12: December 1993/ 5. 94-01: January 1994/ 6. 94-02: February 1994/ 7. 94-03: March 94/ 8. 94-04: April 94/ 9. 94-05: May 94/ 10. 94-06: June 94/ 11. 94-07: July 94/ 12. 94-08: August 94/ 13. 94-09: September 94/ 14. 94-10: October 94/ 15. 94-11: November 94/ 16. 94-12: December 94/ 17. 95-01: January 95/ 18. 95-02: February 95/ Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page: 1/2 Internet Gopher Information Client 2.0 pl8Daily Highlights --> 19. 95-03: March 95/ 20. 95-04: April 95/ 21. 95-05: May 95/ 22. 95-06: June 95/ 23. 95-07: July 95/ 24. 95-08: August 95/ 25. 95-09: September 95/ 26. 95-10: October 95/ 27. 95-11: November 95/ 28. 95-12: December 95/ 29. 96-01: January 96/ 30. 96-02: February 96/ 31. 96-03: March 96/Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page: 2/2 Internet Gopher Information Client 2.0 pl8United Nations Current Info (Highlights,Press Releases,Briefings,etc) --> 1. GA/8963: SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE MEETING OF GENERAL ASSEMBLY. 2. GA..SSEMBLY PRESIDENT CALLS FOR SUPPORT AND REFORM OF UNITED NATIONS. 3. GA..5: CONTINUING FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE MEETING. 4. GA..966: GENERAL ASSEMBLY BEGINS SECOND DAY OF SPECIAL COMMEMORATIVE. 5. GA..7: UNITED NATIONS CANNOT MEET GOALS WHILE ON BRINK OF INSOLVENCY. 6. GA..RLD LEADERS CALL FOR PROMOTION OF PEACE BY ENSURING HUMAN RIGHTS. 7. SG/SM/5751: SECRETARY-GENERAL'S MESSAGE FOR UNITED NATIONS DAY. 8. SG..5775: SG CALL ON WORLD LEADERS TO CONFRONT 21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS. 9. SG..SM/5776: SECRETARY-GENERAL'S STATEMENT AT CEREMONY TO RAISE FLAG. 10. SG..7: SECRETARY-GENERAL EXPRESSES THANKS FOR GIFT TO UNITED NATIONS. 11. SG/SM/5778: SECRETARY-GENERAL ACKNOWLEDGES GIFT TO UNITED NATIONS. 12. SG..5779: SECRETARY-GENERAL SPEAKS OF 'LOVE AFFAIR' BETWEEN NEW YORK. 13. SG..0: SECRETARY-GENERAL'S MEETING WITH HEADS OF STATE ON 20 OCTOBER. 14. SG..: SECRETARY-GENERAL'S MEETINGS WITH HEADS OF STATE ON 21 OCTOBER. 15. SG..2: FIFTY YEARS PROVES UNITED NATIONS ESSENTIAL TO WORLD'S FUTURE. 16. SG..ARY-GENERAL SAYS UNITED NATIONS IS CRITICAL TO FUTURE OF FREEDOM. 17. SG..ENT OF SURINAME SAYS AT HEADS OF STATE LUNCHEON, WORLD WILL NEED. October 1995 PRESIDENT OF SURINAME SAYS AT HEADS OF STATE LUNCHEON, WORLD WILL NEED RENEWED UNITED NATIONS, DEMOCRATIC AND STRONG IN STRUCTURE AND PROCEDURES Pays Tribute to Dedicated Work of UN and Agency Staffs Following is the text of the toast by the President of Suriname, Runaldo Ronald Venetiaan, on behalf of those present, at the luncheon of heads of12% Internet Gopher Information Client 2.0 pl8Press Releases 46. World Bank/ 47. World Cancer Research Fund/ 48. World Health Organization (WHO)/Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page: 3/3 -->Receiving Directory... Connecting...Retrieving Directory...| Internet Gopher Information Client 2.0 pl8World Bank --> 1. Gopher retired! Please visit our web site at http:..w.worldbank.org/.Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page: 1/1 Internet Gopher Information Client 2.0 pl8International Organizations Receiving Directory... Connecting...Retrieving Directory...+--------Gopher Error---------+ | | | Nothing available.| | | | [Cancel: ^G] [OK: Enter] | | | +-----------------------------+ Internet Gopher Information Client 2.0 pl8International Organizations Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page: 2/3 --> --> --> --> -->Receiving Directory... Connecting...Retrieving Directory... Internet Gopher Information Client 2.0 pl8International Monetary Fund --> 1. Gopher retired, Please visit our web site at http://www.imf.org/ .Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page: 1/1Receiving Information... Receiving file...Gopher retired, Please visit our web site at http://www.imf.org/ (0k) Thank you. ***********************************************************100% InternetGopher Information Client 2.0 pl8International Monetary Fund > 1. Gopher retired, Please visit our web site at http://www.imf.org/ .Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page: 1/1Receiving Information...Gopher retired, Please visit our web site at http://www.imf.org/ (0k) Thank you Internet Gopher Information Client 2.0 pl8International Monetary Fund --> 1. Gopher retired, Please visit our web site at http://www.imf.org/ .Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page: 1/1Really quit (y/n) ? yYes{k:27} ___________________________________________________________________________ Archie Archie has a certain archaeological value; below, I searched on Univac/ univac. The oldest files are from 1988; Univac, of course, is many years older. 2600 has a search on for the oldest computer on the Internet; I am asking, where and what are the oldest files? Archie might be a good tool to begin looking with; outmoded today, it rummages through tels and other ancient strata. I have searched for, say, 1972, and find recently updated files; I'm interested in the oldest on-line _directories,_ untouched for decades. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Host ftp.latrobe.edu.au Location: /pub/kermit/bin FILE -r--r--r-- 332898 Jul 20 1993 univac.bin Host syr.edu Location: /software/kermit/kerm311.bin FILE -rw-r--r-- 14695 Sep 26 1991 univac.bin Host ftp.cso.uiuc.edu Location: /pub/Packages/KERMIT/BIN FILE -rw-rw-r-- 32768 Apr 17 1993 univac.bin Location: /pub/Packages/KERMIT/d FILE -rw-rw-r-- 3165 Jul 12 1990 univac.asm FILE -rw-rw-r-- 220472 Aug 15 1988 univac.bwr FILE -rw-rw-r-- 4171 Aug 15 1988 univac.hlp FILE -rw-rw-r-- 6455 Aug 15 1988 univac.ins FILE -rw-rw-r-- 4932 Aug 15 1988 univac.pas Host sunsite.unc.edu Location: /pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/rsx/decus/rsx84a/356040 FILE -rw-r--r-- 90079 Oct 14 1995 univac.asm FILE -rw-r--r-- 123876 Oct 14 1995 univac.hlp Host ftp.cs.yale.edu Location: /Html/YALE/CS/HyPlans/tap/GIF DIRECTORY drwxrwxr-x 512 May 8 1996 SylvaniaUnivac.GIF Host sun.rediris.es Location: /software/unix/network/kermit/bin FILE -r--r--r-- 32768 Sep 5 18:48 univac.bin Location: /software/unix/network/kermit/d FILE -r--r--r-- 3165 Sep 5 18:44 univac.asm FILE -r--r--r-- 220472 Sep 5 18:45 univac.bwr FILE -r--r--r-- 4171 Sep 5 18:45 univac.hlp FILE -r--r--r-- 6455 Sep 5 18:45 univac.ins FILE -r--r--r-- 4932 Sep 5 18:45 univac.pas Host nic.funet.fi Location: /pub/kermit/bin FILE -r-xr-xr-x 332898 Aug 24 1988 univac.bin Location: /pub/kermit/d FILE -r-xr-xr-x 220472 Aug 16 1988 univac.asm FILE -r-xr-xr-x 4171 Aug 16 1988 univac.bwr FILE -r-xr-xr-x 6455 Aug 16 1988 univac.hlp FILE -r-xr-xr-x 4932 Aug 16 1988 univac.ins FILE -r-xr-xr-x 31316 Aug 16 1988 univac.pas Host enh.nist.gov Location: /PC.DIR;1 FILE -rw-r-x--- 32 Feb 18 1994 UNIVAC.EXE;3 Host ftp.hea.ie Location: /part2/kermit/bin FILE -r--r--r-- 32768 Apr 16 1993 univac.bin Location: /part2/kermit/d FILE -r--r--r-- 3165 Jul 11 1990 univac.asm FILE -r--r--r-- 220472 Aug 14 1988 univac.bwr FILE -r--r--r-- 4171 Aug 14 1988 univac.hlp FILE -r--r--r-- 6455 Aug 14 1988 univac.ins FILE -r--r--r-- 4932 Aug 14 1988 univac.pas Host sunsite.sut.ac.jp Location: /pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/rsx/decus/rsx84a/356040 FILE -r--r--r-- 982 Oct 15 1995 univac.asm FILE -r--r--r-- 90079 Oct 15 1995 univac.hlp Host cair-archive.kaist.ac.kr Location: /.2/networking/serial/kermit/d FILE -r--r--r-- 11155 Jul 12 1990 univac.asm.gz FILE -r--r--r-- 1067 Jul 12 1990 univac.bwr.gz FILE -r--r--r-- 43985 Aug 14 1988 univac.hlp.gz FILE -r--r--r-- 2141 Aug 14 1988 univac.ins.gz FILE -r--r--r-- 3006 Aug 14 1988 univac.pas.gz Host ftp.nic.surfnet.nl Location: /mirror-archive/software/kermit/bin FILE -rwxrwxr-x 332898 Aug 23 1988 univac.bin Location: /mirror-archive/software/kermit/d FILE -rwxrwxr-x 220472 Aug 15 1988 univac.asm FILE -rwxrwxr-x 4171 Aug 15 1988 univac.bwr FILE -rwxrwxr-x 6455 Aug 15 1988 univac.hlp FILE -rwxrwxr-x 4932 Aug 15 1988 univac.ins FILE -rwxrwxr-x 31316 Aug 15 1988 univac.pas Host ftp.ncu.edu.tw Location: /Unix/networks/kermit/bin FILE -r--r--r-- 152313 Aug 24 1988 univac.bin.gz Location: /Unix/networks/kermit/d FILE -r--r--r-- 43985 Aug 16 1988 univac.asm.gz FILE -r--r--r-- 2141 Aug 16 1988 univac.bwr.gz FILE -r--r--r-- 3006 Aug 16 1988 univac.hlp.gz FILE -r--r--r-- 2188 Aug 16 1988 univac.ins.gz FILE -r--r--r-- 9294 Aug 16 1988 univac.pas.gz Host micros.hensa.ac.uk Location: /mirrors/kermit/bin FILE -rw-r--r-- 32768 Apr 17 1993 univac.bin Location: /mirrors/kermit/d FILE -rw-r--r-- 3165 Jul 12 1990 univac.asm FILE -rw-r--r-- 220472 Aug 15 1988 univac.bwr FILE -rw-r--r-- 4171 Aug 15 1988 univac.hlp FILE -rw-r--r-- 6455 Aug 15 1988 univac.ins FILE -rw-r--r-- 4932 Aug 15 1988 univac.pas Host unix.hensa.ac.uk Location: /mirrors/uunet/networking/terms/kermit/d FILE -r--r--r-- 14227 Jul 12 1990 univac.asm.Z FILE -r--r--r-- 63887 Aug 16 1988 univac.bwr.Z FILE -r--r--r-- 2590 Aug 16 1988 univac.hlp.Z FILE -r--r--r-- 3677 Aug 16 1988 univac.ins.Z FILE -r--r--r-- 2951 Aug 16 1988 univac.pas.Z _______________________________________________________________________ Jennifer Turns for Lorn Today I up-and-gathered myself, all dressed in my new frock, and went gai- ly-raily to the store where I could buy books read by others. And there I found, guess, two volumes by sad Elinor Wylie, called Angels and Earthly Creatures, and Angels and Earthly Creatures! One was the very first edi- tion and the other was even earlier There were these sad poems, and this very sad comment written right in both of them: "The contents of this, Elinor Wylie's last, book of poems was selected by her for publication on the evening of December 15th, 1928, the day prior to her death. It is printed precisely according to her own arrangement without any necessity for the exercise of literary executorship." Was she in bed? And, oh, Jennifer, that novel of hers which popularized my name, from Guinevere, Jennifer Lorn, that is I do believe, Jennifer For- Lorn! And what pretty books these books are! O break the walls of sense in half And make the spirit fugitive! This light begotten of itself Is not a light by which to live! She wrote, and that other sense is me! Now this, from Miss Edna St-Vin- cent Millay! To Elinor Wylie [In answer to a question about her] Oh, she was beautiful in every part! The auburn hair that bound the subtle brain; The lovely mouth cut clear by wit and pain, Uttering oaths and nonsense, uttering art In casual speech and curving at the smart On startled ears of excellence too plain For early morning! - Obit. Death from strain; The soaring mind outstripped the tethered heart. Yet here was one who had no need to die To be remembered. Every word she said, The lively malice of the hazel eye Scanning the thumb-nail close - oh, dazzling dead, How like a comet through the darkening sky You raced! . . . would your return were heralded. Now me!: would I have had the time to have been her instead of Jennifer, or have sat down against the clock killing her, dressed down in one or another violation fabric, cotton, silk, of pinafore or lovely frock, train, velveteen of lace, red wedding gown: would I these gloves have fit her, dark with grace and veil these lines would not have fit her, face of pearl, failed at being life, o Jennifer forlorn, o gods, o ghastly gruel, o meales, o scales and carapace, nylons, garters rule the thin constricted waste, garnered heels turned to blacks; the violent maelstrom churns, burns against your slacks. I describe myself upon the shelf. I am so happy to have found love and death and Elinor Wylie! __________________________________________________________________________ Alan sends a secret to herself and lets you in on it: (Using enroll/xsend/xget SECRETMAIL and you'll never guess what the pass- word is!) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- MESSAGE TEXT Folder: INBOX Message 1 of 1 ALL Received: (from sondheim@localhost) by panix3.panix.com (8.8.5/8.7/PanixU1.3) id AAA06313 for sondheim; Tue, 4 Mar 1997 00:52:11 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 4 Mar 1997 00:52:11 -0500 (EST) From: Alan Sondheim Message-Id: <199703040552.AAA06313@panix3.panix.com> Subject: sondheim@panix3.panix.com sent you secret mail Your secret mail can be read on host panix3.panix.com using ``xget''. -- Closed folder "INBOX". Kept single message. {k:6} xget Key: T@M5_02u@$zh7,dWDnAY+aQ%Pfx#''tI.fzh>$IOL]7$& (-{6-Vuzm;r$7[$/=nYPD8`bJ$[h2/]YTGQL~fAd'V("a}D! 95tenka!+AVscS>AyOpZ$kbcYIF#naJF+a`4o#&tv6"V_\c9/{6-Vu2=|nv+!N,iFP[QB>*U"e@rs1GcsK~D1$g-mBd<#:q k /HxvbXAh,?jHSm]J\ AB50,Vzg/n7ZX2*~y&`cbiVqK-cH5<=O{p? Commands are: qquit, leaving unread messages ndelete current message and goto next dsame as above \nsame as above !execute shell command ssave message in the named file or mbox wsame as above ?prints this list ? q {k:7} xget Key: From sondheim Tue Mar 4 00:50:46 1997 I love you Jennifer! I think that I own your cunt! You own the hole that is me! You splay my legs, reach in for my poor milk! I am undone! I dream of your labia at night. I think you're taking over me. If any- one reads this message, they will know the truth. All my love, Alan, verging on psychosis, desperate to separate from herself. ? s {k:8} b You have no new mail. __________________________________________________________________________ Shameful Events Reporting on events cyberspatial, textual declivites in CMC, to friends in real life, friends not on _my_ net, turns to impossibility - the shrug of shoulders, slight embarrassment. Nothing appears sufficiently dense, thickened, on-line; everything carries history fraught with nuance, dis- course, turns-of-phrase. The worlds remain absolutely separate, and it is with a sense of shame that I try to explain on-line to the off. Off-line, I am currently ill with a fever, another insomniac night as well in spite of double melatonin and playing computer pinball until I was woozy. Community here off-line is nonexistent; I have to teach anyway, no one to cover. My shame is doubled; the tiny on-line movements go nowhere, are incomprehensible through the fever, and off-line isolation closes the world down. The division's absolute, both sides filled with shame and non- existence, but online the text is always pure. Always. But online I could be anything, and off-line I bound by shivers. Last night I sent pathetic SECRETMAIL; who off-line would understand the poetry in older Unix, the stuttered admissions of psychosis under self-imposed pressure? Everywhere shame, shame, shame, everywhere failure reinscribes ontology in the presence of my face. This is the loser-impetus, when fever renders online almost unreadable, difficult to ascribe. __________________________________________________________________________ Zara Thrust, A Bind Jennifer is my Zarathustra, all this theoretical _matter,_ indexed and primordial. I think about _the migration of Jennifer_ or _Jennifer aman- uensis._ I think about her _existence_ and for example _reflection the- ory_* - for example address / recognition / protocol.** The I's here have written or seen over 2200 pages since these texts be- gan. The material drops into futile maw. The I's wish that gender, for example, would be culled and critiqued from within the substance, that cyberspace ontology would be Jenniferly considered. The elaborate metaphor I'm working with is more than poetics. It's unfair to you and unfair to me thereupon. It's the site where I do my thinking. I'm at a loss and shamed elsewhere, otherwise. It will never function, have its critical day in the sun. *P. P. Kirschenmann, Information and Reflection, On some Problems of Cy- bernetics and how Contemporary Dialectical Materialism Copes with Them, Reidel, Sovietica series, 1970; **Net1.txt. A footnote drowns in the text. __________________________________________________________________________ Gender - gg Gender - t.txt Gender Production Machine - ii Genetics - ee Jennifer - hh Jennifer Poetics - jl Jennifer Texts - ee Jennifer Texts - ii Jennifer Texts - jj Jennifer Texts - jk Jennifer Texts - jl Jennifer Texts Continued - gg Jennifer and Ground - jm Jennifer and Violence - jn Jennifer and Virtuality - jn Jennifer as Problematic - jn Jennifer, First, Second, Last Contacts - jn Jennifer, Holding Time - jn Ontologies of the Virtual - Net7.txt Ontology - Net12.txt: BRICK __________________________________________________________________________ Barometer Feverish, I wake up in the middle of the night, sit stark naked at laptop station, dial in world, hoping your singular eye emerges cyclopian from central screen.* Temperature rises as lid opens, gauges, precise shame of sheen of skin, offered to you, knocking at the door, banging on the ceil- ing, banging on the floor. Even the crevices unfold, dreary flesh plain, extinctions, survivals. Shame is an occurrence of the worlds' barriers, inability to carry _this_ meaning-skin into the zone of physical life, doubled doors locked down- stairs, holding the world at bay. World, you know who I'm talking to. Admitted to a friend I could not, for first time, begin to create a date or meeting or occurrence, would have no idea how to talk with someone in that space where things fall. I had blanket and tea, watched our videos as her concerns with dis/ease translated into my dis/ease of the virtual. Temperature rising, the skin falls from my bones. Come eat, I would say that watching the good meat suppurate, huddled in CPU, hard drive / down to the floor. A woman said hello to me on the street today, that building tumbled to the ground, burning roof. I was ashamed of myself. __________________________________________________________________________ *I've written about _the sickness_ in Disorders of the Real. __________________________________________________________________________ ====================================================================== (The summary below is from 1994, must be from that year, should still be of interest; it's where the text was beginning, originally in net4.txt.) INTERNET TEXT partial summary "Au voile qui la ceint absente avec frissons" (Mallarme) I address the problem of ELECTRONIC SUBJECTIVITY by virtue of several threads, all concurrent. I continue this addressing, each thread writing and rewriting the text, a continuous-production or discourse against the grain. The GRAIN, GRANULARITY, is a physical reality both classical and quantum- mechanical, a physical reality whose appearance is that of the grain: letters on a bleak field, the grains of granite and photographic film, beach-sand, the granularity of the retina itself. The SUBJECT "au voile" or VEILED SUBJECT is defined by ADDRESS (location, without which the subject no longer exists); RECOGNITION (the activated ADDRESS opening and closing channels of communication); PROTOCOL (the syntactic structure of communication); and REWRITE (a continuous-produc- tion or reiteration of the subject, a flood or EMISSION of the symbolic). The EMISSION is a signifying; a SPEW is a symbol-dump, noisy and granular, referencing the real exterior, transforming the interior into an abject. EMISSION and SPEW are communicative occasions whose analog is the set of GENERALIZED MEASURE GEOMETRIES, always but not quite symmetrical, always reiterative. The Net diffuses and collapses, differentiates and integ- rates, transforming smooth into semantic or inscribed space, and back again. The ontology of the Net is UNCANNY, an absenting or problematic alterity; within the UNCANNY, FANTASM appears, the introjection/ projection (-JECTI- VITY or the THROWN, DASEIN) of narratologies and ACTANTS, "persons," nei- ther present nor absent; these may be ELECTRONIC SUBJECTS themselves, or a constructed IMAGINARY transmitted and diffused. NARRATOLOGIES are the col- lapse of NET DISCOURSE into remaindered patterns; the opposite is the MUR- MUR or STUTTER, the irruption of "frissons" everywhere and nowhere at all. The imaginary is addictive; Net users become USERS, circulating around specificities fetishized from emissions, a collapse into the lure of the UNCANNY. Here, POWER is what passes for POWER. If addiction is the obsess- ive-compulsive neurosis of the net, WEB INVERSION is the psychosis, trans- forming the body into its exterior, and its exterior into flesh burned into the Internet itself, wires laid across the skin, the skin speaking the hieroglyph of imaginary usage. The DIGITAL DOMAIN is the dominion of eternal life, the dominion of eter- nal REWRITE; information is never lost from generation to generation, but always repeated and repeated absolutely. This is the dominion of the clean and proper body, the introjection of burnt wires producing always already a simulacrum of life guaranteeing continuous discourse. There is no death; DASEIN becomes EMISSION itself. The SCREEN is the only TERMINAL OPERATION; the screen becomes the EGO or gateway, the surface of the addictive user. Everything is PERFECTION. TRUTH and FACTICITY are occurrences, since truth tables are decided only by ASCII or other decoding/encoding matches. What is true is present. And what is true is also BEAUTIFUL since perfect and perfectly clean, always a symmetry or lure. The GREAT BEYOND is the horizon of the Internet, always farther, always increasing circulations of the planet which short-circuit or circumvent. At the edge of the GREAT BEYOND one finds the BLIND PASSWORD "absente" beyond which is a null-set or zero file. ONTOLOGY itself is absent; epis- temology is viral, transformative. Nothing is certain and nothing circu- lates. PROPER NAMES circulate throughout the Net, the promise of TRUTH or BEAUTY, the promise of emission. Such names are FANTASMS; every possible world is every possible Net world in a continuous morph, and every KIND is simul- taneously a NATURAL and UNNATURAL kind. Thus TRUTH is each and every oc- currence, and who is to say that FALSEHOOD is not the same? What is nei- ther this nor that is foundation, gestural, within and without the GREAT BEYOND, UNCANNY. The TERMINAL becomes retinal but anonymous. Names MURMUR forever, lose identity. NAMES never had identity to begin with. The POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE NET constructs a class-consciousness fueled by reification-tendencies; everything is reification. Teleology is defined by a FUTURE IMPERFECT in which reification constitutes the IDENTITY OF THE SUBJECT ITSELF. The FUTURE from the exterior results in the LAST SCIENCE FICTION STORY in which the subject confronts the GREAT BEYOND. Narrative itself disappears, replaced by PERFECTION. LIFE, once defined by MODULARITY, has become SUB- STANCE, a REWRITE of the same into the same. "Rien, cette ecume, vierge vers" (Mallarme) __________________________________________________________________________ (From Weed-Whackers' Journal) Clone is easy enough to do here; there are clones on talkers and I wouldn't be surprised if @clone has already appeared on MOOs; why not wander in para- llel on different spaces on the same MOO, using, say tiny fugue for the ride? In real life, I have been told on good authority, one woman who lost her baby in the Oklahoma City bombing said that she only wished her baby had been cloned. The drive towards reproduction will reach new vulgar limits, pushing the right-wing over the edge into the center of a eugenics-inspired miniworld composed of home-owners' associations and church groups. Who can doubt this? Consider the infant/ile as spam, clogging the remnants of a world already exhausted by resource depletion; one can imagine Argonautic babies appeared arma-geddoned to the teeth, crawling their way to suppurating victory over the last hovels of rotting grain. Prefer cyber-cloning, which is all the better for you, and, unless you're already a bot, still needs both of your singular hands in the mix. Jennifer X signing off. __________________________________________________________________________ BRICKBRICK [This text, like the maya text, is based on a current file of my writing- work, modified by repeated unix grep < > commands, then re-worked, re-en- tered as content. So there is a negotiation occurring between the perman- ent structures of performative grep scripts and the melding of languaging towards an exploratory surgery of virtual-psychosis.] Jennifer leans back on the chair, daydreaming... Alan's over by the win- dow; they split, open wide. Alan's driven mad, Jennifer writes in repe- tition; neither transvestite nor transsexual, her skin hugging to my own in the form of apparel, Alan-information flows through part-objects, structures, Jennifer-Alan's holes, connected as well with the wryting of body, Jennifer, Alan, and so forth. Alan sends a secret to herself and lets you in on it: one reads this message, they will know the truth. All my love, Alan. Architecture is never sufficient for love. If I love anyone, I love her, pulling them tighter again. The lovely mouth cut clear by wit and pain, or lovely frock, train, velveteen of lace, red wedding gown: would I these gloves have fit her, dark with grace and veil! I am so happy to have found love and death and Elinor Wylie! I love you Jennifer! You own the hole - one reads this message, they will know the truth. All my love, Alan, sent, she won't come out, a virtual illness, vir viral. She's caught: withstand this, even among the virtual, this impossible leakage through the screen. Imperfect vacuum spews virtual particles, our skin intersecting with the virtual. Ah well, I descend; virtual maya refuses to appear in video; I wear panties, wet them, her concerns with dis/ease translated into my dis/ ease of the virtual. One reads this message, they will know the truth. All my love, Alan. __________________________________________________________________________ Alt.fan.Jen-coolest [The story so far: Jennifer experiments with NNTP, desperate to find her name listed on alt.fan.jen-coolest, the coolest newsgroup around. Jennifer finds herself locked out of site after site, finally having to settle for sad Panix attacks, where she reads her email in a small and almost pathetic voice.] {k:18} telnet news.demon.co.uk 119 Trying 158.152.254.242... Connected to news.news.demon.net. Escape character is '^]'. 502 access denied Connection closed by foreign host. {k:19} telnet news.ibmpcug.co.uk 119 Trying 192.68.174.75... Connected to news.ibmpcug.co.uk. Escape character is '^]'. 502 Only PCUG customers have permission to talk. Goodbye. Connection closed by foreign host. {k:20} telnet news.fu-berlin.de 119 Trying 160.45.4.4... Connected to thetis.fddi4.fu-berlin.de. Escape character is '^]'. 502 You have no permission to talk to news.fu-berlin.de. If it is really necessary for you to gain access to our server, please contact news-register@fu-berlin.de, tell us your hostname as well as IP number and give us some time to register them. Your cur rent host is known to us as panix3.panix.com (198.7.0.4). Connection closed by foreign host. {k:21} telnet news.panix.com 119 Trying 166.84.0.220... Connected to news1.panix.com. Escape character is '^]'. 200 news.panix.com InterNetNews NNRP server INN 1.4unoff4 05-Mar-96 ready (posting ok). group alt.fan.jen-coolest 211 13 5628 5650 alt.fan.jen-coolest next 223 5629 <5f45o9$1i5@newsflash.concordia.ca> Article retrieved; request text separately. next 223 5630 <19970227151101.KAA24898@ladder02.news.aol.com> Article retrieved; request text separately. next 223 5631 Article retrieved; request text separately. next 223 5632 <3315FDE1.399A@sk.sympatico.ca> Article retrieved; request text separately. next 223 5633 <5f50nd$9t4@newsflash.concordia.ca> Article retrieved; request text separately. next 223 5636 <33167e74.889570@news.wcoil.com> Article retrieved; request text separately. next 223 5640 <19970228162300.LAA01727@ladder02.news.aol.com> Article retrieved; request text separately. next 223 5641 <19970228162701.LAA02029@ladder02.news.aol.com> Article retrieved; request text separately. next 223 5643 Article retrieved; request text separately. next 223 5645 <3319e7f6.4467929@news.wcoil.com> Article retrieved; request text separately. next 223 5648 <331B8CA4.418C@sk.sympatico.ca> Article retrieved; request text separately. next 223 5650 <5fle6h$l0i@panix3.panix.com> Article retrieved; request text separately. article 220 5650 <5fle6h$l0i@panix3.panix.com> article Path: news.panix.com!not-for-mail From: sondheim@panix.com (Alan Sondheim) Newsgroups: alt.fan.jen-coolest Subject: Jennifer Texts Date: 5 Mar 1997 22:37:53 -0500 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC Lines: 16 Message-ID: <5fle6h$l0i@panix3.panix.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: panix3.panix.com Summary: Psychosis-texts, Internet Theory through "Jennifer" Keywords: Avatar, Philosophy, Psychology, Cyberspace X-Newsreader: TIN [UNIX 1.3 unoff BETA release 961018] I have been working with Jennifer, writing/developing a continuous medita- tion on cyberspace; you can find the texts (Jennifer Texts) at http://jef- ferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html . Jennifer writes through a variety of styles; she is listed in the index at the site. It's clear that Jennifer is not an "alter ego," or "avatar," or "gender- bending," or "character" - but that the reality of virtual subjectivity is incredibly complex, bordering on psychosis, on Freudian notions of hyster- ia, and Butler's concepts of gender construction. You, Jennifer and others, may find the work of interest. Alan Jen Sondheim quit 205 Connection closed by foreign host. __________________________________________________________________________