In Place of Future Gone-By

Notes Toward Material Language

Preliminary work goes on incessantly. —Vertov

by
XXXXX XXXXXXX

551-13-9201, 01/27, female, NM, CA, IO, ND, MN, hotwind, MFA, 97645-8, frenchenglishirishgermancherokee, 2182368233, 5'2", Brown,
Sparky Pickles, Nick, NicNak, Pennies or Dimes, contacts (disposable), codeine, poetry, philosophy, kites, bongos,
parents deceased, what kind of word is that: de- (down, away) cedere (to go) also cede (to yield) parents
gone down and away they have yielded they have GIVEN WAY (I will) (I will be) (I will be them)





A page with potholes. A page with fissures and ditches. Different backgrounds sliding in and out of view, via that trick, I think, in Flash, where the viewer can click on the picture behind the picture and cause it to move? But we no longer believe in a picture behind the picture. Metaphysics is dead. So this would be a picture—not behind or beyond or before the picture. Rather OF the picture. Of possibilities. Lurking.

Snakes, letters, tiny lights pour or flow or slitherout?

A page which looks like wood <link>. A page which looks like cream <link>.

A page written as a rundle, a parabola, a ratchet, a snag. <link><link><link><link>.

Image of a human body filled with ink <link>.

A human body bleeding words <link>. A human body as a page <link>.

A page just like this one, the one I'm writing, with images that want to be more than images, words that want to be more than words, and never are. 'Nt.

I picture a type of book, each page containing a page, an image of a page, an image of text which has been touched, toyed with, plundered, pleasured. It will be a book of pages which look like pages, but the text will be read as visual art. Nothing at all new about that—concrete poetry and visual art using language have been around for centuries, and just recently through the 1990s, of course, all sorts of electronic language experiments have been underway [profuse examples and quotes]. In this case, the book perhaps would be about the border between traditional page-reading and the possibilities of new reading in radically mixed genres, modes, and media. About looking-ahead itself. Even as some pages present themselves as standard spaces of words to be read left to right and top to bottom, they will at the same time present themselves as self-referencing MATERIAL, and specifically material which has been wrecked, violated, revised, mind-mauled, heart-humped.

Hurting the thing
reveals the thing's
THINGNESS.

*

When I do any sort of concrete language-like writing, I go back to my first encounters with letters. (Do you know your numbers and colors? Do you know your Fucking Letters?) A kid's first encounter with them is VISCERAL. She shapes them on grainy paper with imposing black lines. She uses her fingers to measure spaces and distances. The marks begin to unroll across the paper. They hike, trot, slither, slide, march, melt and mean. It was a blast. And it was why, I think, I once took Ancient Greek for a semester or two in my thirties. The pure pleasure of learning a new alphabet. Re-marking the page. All in a distant, long-gone language we have to reconstruct through diligence, intelligent guesswork, dignified play. Whose oral component is truly an imagined thing. And I believe we are, right now, as a society, via the nutty and nearly overwhelming possibilities of new media, rediscovering the early childhood love of language as material. We are relatively hairless, upright mammals again, screwing around with stuff in the cave when we're not otherwise hungry or horny or afraid.

It's exciting—though wouldn't it be funny if the new writing amounted to almost nothing. All of the recent theorizing about new media since at least McLuhan = zip. Old world, same premises. More junk.

One of the great thrills of what is occurring is imminence. We don't know

where we are going/what is coming.

Something in the works. Anticipation in the current climate is virtually (no pun) the point. Even if utopian or otherwise inflated visions of future writing never transpire, we certainly live in an era and aura of expectation.

*

The future in fact comes and goes so fast these days, commentary upon it cannot keep up. Future of scholarship as nothing but NOTES? (Brooks). No tedious, positivist arguments; only sketches of arguments. In the Arts and in Theory,
only samples, samplers, and samplings.

Not to disparage thorough, sustained, necessary argument and research! I'm poor, poor; I just want a peek in the dirty bag of unacceptable notions. I'm scrounging for how they refract, how they weigh and emit, how they fit in the personal, political, and artistic palm.

*

Other ideas for items in the book:

             

Pages with gashes and flesh-colored wounds.

In other words: a book, a collection of ideas, a sampler, somewhat after Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera. An exploration of everything that can be done, or thought of, in the new medium, and in a way which ties the new medium to everyday life, the life of people, the worker, technology, the word, the page, survival, . And its editing will be self-conscious and visible, just as it is in the Vertov film of film itself being edited, of the editor herself at work.

*

When I refer to the "materiality" of the text, I don't necessarily mean what others sometimes do. I don't necessarily mean the social circumstances and means of production & consumption, although those are incredibly important.

What I mean is:

a page which is this very screen, being scrolled down and down and down and down. I like that. I like to scroll. I hear
"stroll" in the word "scroll." When in history did people last read scrolls? THIS is a Dead C Scroll. How I remember the "C" in learning to write my own name. That open Oh. A way of pointing without pointing.. Signification by omission, signification as omission. In- (verb-formative) dicate (to point). Learning to write our own names; has anyone theorized that? In conjunction with the study of visual and concrete language studies? Big issues of identity, property, psychology, culture, language, duh, authority, aesthetics, gaze.

 

C C
C       C
C  C
C  C

C backwards, italicized, and blinking. C with strikeout, underlined, all caps, upsidedown, in gradient color, in 300 fonts from Lucinda Console to Palatino Linotype in Bold, Courier to Ariel to Batang, in lower case, with stripes, warped, dripping, blurry, fragmented, pixilated, sharpened, sheered, polarized, solarized, protruded, extruded, embossed, reticulated, posterized, pointalized. Breath. Take one. Breathe. Rasterized, vectorized, watermarked, interlaced, scaled, skewed, lassoed, frescoed, cropped, copied, pasted, cut and      healed. (actually a word/tool from fotoshop!)

*

*

All letters may be O.

O may be all letters.

*

Some say that people prefer to read the web in chunks, in single screen portions. But I find it annoying at times to read a block of material then STOP, thunk, (think), and click on a hotlink at the end of the screen. Everything feels so

<square in shape of a square here
square in shape of a square here
square in shape of a square here
square in shape of a square here
square in shape of a square here>

square.

I prefer the feeling instead of uninterrupted ride, of moving smoothly (not necessarily logically) along, sailing on a strip, cruising a margin, stumbling down, while the surface I'm writing to of course remains perfectly still. And I don't feel, writing in this "linear" scrolling space, that orderly thought is necessarily encouraged or honored over other kinds of thought. If anything, I have the feeling that I'm thinking in and on and through something SLIPPERY. A luminescent, slithery surface upon which thought keeps sliding down, up and then back down…Or here's a slightly different take:  I'm trying to write upon the very face of a cliff I'm falling from. I'm trying to freeze-write thought while thinking; articulate presence even as I blur without a whisper by… Oh oh oh oh oh. That's not quite right. My falling self and the cliff face are more ENMESHED than that. I have the feeling that I'm thinking in and on and through something SLIPPERY. A luminescent, slithery surface upon which thought keeps sliding down, up and then back down…

The dictionary def. for "scroll" is interesting: "—v.i. 8. to move a cursor smoothly, vertically or sideways, gradually causing new data to replace old on the display screen of a computer." (Random House Webster's.)

Smooth. Gradual. New. Replaces. Old.

"Scroll down and follow your bliss, baby." (Joseph Campbell)

When it scrolls, the electronic page seems more like skin: fast. Nerves and skin, however constructed and linguistic and noncoincident, feel immediate. Continuous. Hypertext links from screen to screen sometimes feel like the herky-jerky steps of someone so cerebral and geeky and physically repressed she has forgotten how to use her own limbs. (I.e., me.) I know that we are, more than ever, cyborgized, our bodies intimate with, enmeshed with, and increasingly conceived as machines. But I think it's conversely ok to conceive of machines as body. Neither body nor machine, after all, exists autonomously and absolutely, apart from or a priori to the other. There is no reason why one (the body) must be understood exclusively in terms of the other (the machine), even in a Digital Age. And saying that I want machines understood in terms of body does not mean that I'm envisioning humanoid robots, machines which look literally like people. I want warmly imagined machines which are pleasing to my eyes, my skin, my mind, my tendons, my mouth, my pulse. Or which will seem to account for, recognize and respect, my body. (I don't know what forms these better machines would take; maybe like something out of Cronenberg's eXistenZ, the assorted fleshy tools and fatty or bony gizmos there…)

 

*

When I'm scrolling I feel that I'm some place, without, at the same time, feeling closed or static or unitary. I'm in a river, the river of beingbecoming. I get to theorize lyricism, which is a paradox. YES!

 

*

Web scroll, leading edge always open. But framed enough to make a thing, a volume. I add to my notes as I investigate a subject, and this record of investigation becomes the work. If it is honest at all, of course it will never claim to be finished. Many writers' books are really very continuous; what if their work were shifted to a medium which allows for true continuousness? Webscroll as continuous, luminescent script. Searching for the trail, I leave a trail, there is no other trail.

The scroll is open and dynamic and therefore commentary upon my scroll leads to immediate changes or additions I make in the scroll and therefore what you say is at all times a part of the scroll. So watch out what you say.

Tread lightly because you tread on my dreams.

*

What if signification could somehow be SPED UP? What if a sign could point continuously at itself in an endless loop so seemingly FAST as to become so seemingly NEAR that it erases the infernal gap altogether between itself and itself and thus achieves, or feels like, transparency? naturalness? A concrete poem does that. Roethko here and there does that. Long distance travel, however slow, is some kind of version of that.

And sex. Because passion is me saying you saying me with such accelerating concentric attention or something that meaning, mediation, text itself burns up, if not entirely away.

What's the Post-Theory New Pragmatic line on intense wet hungry fucking?

*

I look at the rushing river and think stillness.

 *

  I want a new mind.

I want the body

to re-

mind

me.

*

*

I have the feeling that what is appearing in many online creative new media journals right now are mostly experiments with WHAT CAN BE DONE. I think this DEMONSTRATION is everywhere at this moment on the web. Nothing radically fabulous, much of the time—but fun. Very much like Surrealism fucking with the psyche early on just because it could; like that very early moving picture which DISPLAYED nothing but a horse in motion—because it could. All pure demonstration. Pure pleasure of display. I just got Jud Morrissey and Lori Talley's CD, My Name Is Captain, Captain, and it's wonderful and evocative with its crazily moving words. I really do enjoy it, the random or semi-random phrases are more interesting than what I've seen in some other electronic works, and it certainly warrants re-reading. At first glance, though, it (still) (just) seems like an experiment with what can/might be done—another testing of the space, time, and dimensional boundaries we now have at our disposal.

"Without this ridiculous vanity that takes the form of self-display, and is part of everything and everyone, we would see nothing, and nothing would exist." —Porchia

Hey look—I can make a letter DO THIS. I can make a letter DO THAT. I can make a letter go.

A word which droops, pops, shivers. A sentence which glissades.

A page which is gooey.  crispy.  metallic.  hairy.

        and so on.

 

*

What is a river?

Watershed.

*

What is a book?

Mindshed.

*

What is a river?

In some places, the life story of a river is water-going-to-earth. A river, that is, over a very long time slows down, starts winding and bending, forms "oxbows" which fill up with silt, eventually, to make meadows. But in the Upper Plains, or so I've read, Ice Age melt-off once formed an enormous lake, Lake Agassiz, and the land here is absolutely weirdly flat because it used to be the floor of all that water. The lake is gone now of course. But the place keeps trying to be a lake. Consequently, the Red River often doesn't act like a river. In spring, it creeps up and up and over its banks, and spreads out flatly for a very good distance, like a huge hot train in slow motion, melting off its tracks.

I don't know the whole story of water, but I know that it's continuous and circular and likewise full of circles and we don't always know which way the circles are moving.

*

"Concrete poetry"
=
the word
which is necessarily in and of time, always helplessly about time, with its constant pointing, constant deferral, anticipation…

+
the image
which speaks only for itself and seems to make time go blooey. The image seems static or "inward" because it signifies only itself and because, of course, it is continually deferred, continually deferred by itself, it wraps onto itself, its "movement" seems to be around and around or in and in. . .

 

So concrete poetry tends in two directions simultaneously: the WORD in a visual poem signifies in an "outward" manner and pulls our attention on and on through time, while the IMAGE of the poem signifies in an "inward" manner and pulls our attention down and down into fullness and stasis.

And the result, when the two intersect in the common space of a page, is ________________.

*

 

 

*

 

*

 

                                      

*

Passage forthcoming here on ekphrasis. Oophrasis. Ahphrasis.

Also forthcoming: something about Victoria Nelson's ideas about the historical displacement of our Platonic, transcendental impulses into inanimate matter, idols, mummies, puppets, Frankensteins, voodoo dolls and religious icons.

Also forthcoming: something about Victoria Nelson's ideas about the contemporary displacement of our Platonic, transcendental impulses into computer screens, futuristic landscapes, cloned humans, robots, and cyborgs.

Also forthcoming: my own ideas about the relationship between that transcendental impulse and material language.

Also forthcoming: something about file size. Mundane file size. The inability of our machinery to withstand the forthcoming. We keep imagining more than our machines can currently handle. We are like the Handsomest Drowned Man in the world, or the guy in Edson's poem about the teeny tiny cottage. Our creations cannot hold us.

*

For Nietzsche, because "the extent of what is known is too great," we simply cannot grasp it all, and it only gets worse the further forward into time we go. Or, if we do manage such a feat, it is always too late. In other words, we might finally attain some all-encompassing knowledge—but only when we're too old or deranged or otherwise damaged to cope with it meaningfully. Or, if we are able to grasp all there is to know RIGHT NOW, we only do so by growing "a thousand antennae" and losing "the great pathos," "the good, the subtle conscience." We become dilettante philosophers, in other words. What he also called "actor philosophers." Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997, Pierre Klossowski, trans. Daniel W. Smith.

Interesting idea--actor philosophers. Theory as theater. Exploration of ideas as exploration of personae. Ideas do not exist apart from the people who utter them. Surely this must be what Bakhtin means in his discussions of Dosoevky's dialogic novel.

*

How I despise the tight little positivist academic mind. Articulate only what you actually and firmly know. Do not speculate—out loud. Starve out and strangulate. Scholarship as fortress. Argument as armor. Such thinking must take place in some very concealed, private, terrified dank hole of the mind… rubbing their precious ring…We're all creatures of the mud, sure, but I want to be a creature of the mud out in the sunshine and the moonlight and the weather. Under trees and skyscrapers, stooping over gum wrappers and sand grains, scrambling up mountains, lying down with men, looking around. Raptures of imperfection and all that. I can't keep my ideas to myself. My self is where they die.

swirling into stasis, silence

*

List of websites having to do with accelerated time/future shock:

<list several hundred-thousand sites here, all in excruciatingly tiny letters>

*

List of web sites having to do with conjunctions of the visual and the verbal:

Vispo: Langu(im)age
UBUWeb
Visual Thesarus
Visual Rhetoric Web
Text and Image: Selective Annotated Bibliography
Words of Art
David Blakesley's Visual Rhetoric
Ekphrasis
Iowa Review Web
Beehive
Drunken Boat

<list several hundred-thousand more sites here, all in excruciatingly tiny letters>

*

List of websites having to do with product placement:

<list several hundred-thousand sites here…>

*

List of websites having to do with questions of the linguistic vs. the social vs. the metaphysical (Deconstruction vs. Marxism vs. Idealism):

<list several hundred-thousand…>

*

Ah and of course I think of Whitman. Whitman and his lists. Whitman and his lusts. The list as expression of love and also A WAY to love. A way to hate: Nixon's Enemy. 50s Black. Catalogue as a way to contain without closing. Database as lyric poem! The database as a way to ARRIVE and HAVE while going nowhere and owning nothing. How unamerican. Database as sweet, pragmatic, ontological, paradoxical toy. Database as body.

*

               I'm here. Information is over there. Ergo: The Search Engine.

Search engine as sex.
Search engine as poem.
Search engine as dream.

Dream as search engine.
Poem as search engine.
Sex as search engine.

*

Graphic from a paper on SOMs (Self-Organizing Maps):

 

*

Not to mention Screengrabs.

Ode to the Screengrab

Make my Own Screengrabs

1)
2)
3)

Screengrab Theory

Cult of Screengrab

Screengrabs and Concrete Poetry

Screengrabs and Mexican Cooking

Dada Screengrabs

Entire essay in screengrabs (title: "Death, Desire, and Small Tacky Pictures")

*

Not to mention: "The thing that really drew me into computer production was the 'undo' button which I came across around 1978. Digitalization, in combination with the undo button, provides a whole new perspective on how you can represent the world". —George Legrady interview.

 

 

*

Not to mention thumbnails, web logs, wingdings, nav bars, bookmarks, instant massages and other web stuff.
I.e., so many interesting things which, page after fluid, scrolling page, can be thought.

*

We invent something. It sits there.
We handle it, pick it up, toss it around.
We can't figure out what it does.
Eventually we realize:
it is a thing that gets handled, picked up, tossed around.

*

List of websites having to do with the New Pragmatism:

<list several hundred-thousand more sites here, all in excruciatingly tiny letters>

*

I have a tendency to do that. Think metaphysically. Maybe my choice of  eye, hourglass, and water  icons early in this scroll comes from my own persistent belief in something behind language, and from my sense of archetype. Right now, however, I'm thinking of the eye, hourglass, and water as embedded flatly into the page, as making up PART OF the page. . . Not as archetypal entities existing prior to the page, prior to consciousness or the individual psyche.

On the other hand, maybe I do believe in "the archetype" of a sort—the archetype as special moment or location in a text. Archetype as a hotspot, a hypertextual link in the cultural text!!! Archetypes are where TEXT opens out to an OTHER—whether that other is mysteriously non-text, or just more language. They are moments of concentrated urge toward connection, iconic instances of cultural stories in collision. They are knotholes in the tree where the tree has been wounded, the records of wounds while the tree goes on growing. They are the hot points from which Text emanates or the cool points into which Text condenses. Perhaps that is why we continually refer to certain language as "resonant"; there is this THING happening in the language moment.

What are archetypes, however, if we think of Text as chain of deferral? They are moments or places in the chain— in "writing"— where certain ever-deferred signifieds collide, or defer endlessly toward collision. Where certain STICKY meanings or signifieds incline together…though of course they never quite touch or connect…never arrive…

So archetypes are spirals. Meanings which are attracted to one another and start chasing their own, and each other's, tails. They function in our psyches, in our "reading" mechanisms, the way both Image and Word function in a concrete poem, moving in two different directions or in two fundamentally different ways—simultaneously.

Thus:
the concrete poem is akin to the archetype. It is archetype UNSTANDARDIZED.
( yes, yes, a contradiction. I don't care)

*

Am I getting too bloody weird here? Too abstract in a piece about MATERIAL?? I am merely reporting what my body seems to tell me, even if "body" itself is "told" to "me" by "me."

*

*

Poetry in HTML:

<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<p><b>About</b></p>
<p>Facts about the iris<br>
Do not make the iris<br>
Open. Open your eyes.<br>
It's tomorrow. Call out for someone.<br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&#151; Galvin</p>
</body>
</html>

 

*

Unadvertise.
De- or re-
saturate.

*

    Pressing this button accomplishes nothing.

  Pressing this button also accomplishes nothing.

  Pressing this button will likewise get you nowhere and produce nothing.

   Pressing this button, you guessed it:  nada.
  
  Pressing this button, what else.

  Yeah yeah.

 

*

Nonchoice 1 Nonchoice 2 Nonchoice 3 Nonchoice 4 Nonchoice 5 More nonchoices More nonways to access nonchoices

                   

*

Reader: below are some boxes and buttons which you are free to check. Checking them is meaningless and selects nothing whatsoever. However, checking them at no time obligates you to make a purchase.

 

*

"That's all I have to say about that."

*

         

*

How about a list which scrolls sideways? How would that feel? How would it work?

"…melt in your mouth, not in your hands." "…the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." "Golly, Beav." "Make him an offer he can't refuse." "Nuke the Whales." "It's a small world after all." "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." "Livin' la vida loca." "Coke is It." "Oooooh shiiiiiiiiiiit!!!!" "Nicotine delivery system." "Here's looking at you, kid." "One small step for man…" "They're grrrrrrrrreaAT!!!!" "May the force be with you." "Are you a good witch, or a wicked witch?" "A day that will live in infamy." "Is that a gun in your pocket, or…" "ETcetera ETcetera ETcetera." "Let my people go." "I did not have sex with that woman…" "A line in the sand." "One shot." "I could've been somebody. I could've been a contender." "Just do it." "Axis of evil." "I've been to the mountaintop." Tricky Dicky." "…more famous that Jesus." "Where's Gilroy?" "How about THAT Mr. Fong." "What do women want?" "Four score and seven years ago…" "I could've been at a barbecue!" "Cute ass." "Hack the planet." "The truth is out there." "Where's the beef?" "I did it my way." "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again." "SHOW ME THE MONEY." "It's not the heat, it's the humidity." "…thy kingdom come, thy will be done…"Fresh Roasted." "Size doesn't matter." "What did he know, and when did he know it?" "Who's the best pilot you ever saw?" "Make my day." "Superkalafragilisticexpeealadotious." "Win one for the Gipper." "Not." "Long Dong Silver." "Where's Waldo?" "Viewer discretion advised." "I'll be back." "666." "Terrified, mortified, petrified, stupefied, by you." "ET phone home." "It's not the heat, it's the stupidity." "To boldly go where no man has gone before." "Elvis has left the building."

*

One feature of the electronic reading experience these days is GLITCH TOLERANCE. Glitcherance. That is, when I read an experimental or even not-so-experimental online work, I give the writer/artist a lot of attitude; my reading experience comes necessarily bolstered by 1) tolerance of problems and 2) patience and willingness to imagine the writer's project DESPITE the problems. I often encounter some sort of tech glitch—slow connection speed, file size issues, a bug in the program I'm witnessing, etc.—which I have to ignore or otherwise get around to fully appreciate the item I've reading/viewing. Maybe the glitch is on my end, maybe it's in the work I'm reading-viewing, maybe it's in the server or the venue which is otherwise publishing and posting the document. The document may operate FABULOUSLY on my home system, then as soon as I attempt to show someone the piece on a different system somewhere—-it freezes, it's full of broken links, yadda yadda. I know that someone will say, "These problems will eventually disappear as the technology is refined." But since a built-in feature of this technology seems to be OPEN POTENTIAL for NONSTOP DEVELOPMENT, it seems possible that we will ALWAYS have to approach certain vanguard e-work with special tolerance. I certainly have friends who are interested enough in e-writing, but won't hang around a given work when problems ensue. Unlike reading a book, reading e-lit means that the MATERIALS AT HAND are unstable and sometimes unfriendly. The dyslexia in this case is not in us; it's in the technology of the electronic page itself.

The materials of e-poetry are full of VAST, PHENOMENAL, MIND-BLOWING PROMISE, even as they are tentative, twitchy, precarious.  Immune deficient.

*

 

      

*

Time has always gone too fast. Our flailing in the river is nothing new.
"It's tomorrow. Call out for someone." —Galvin

*

Sometimes,
we just get tired.

Even samples
are too much.

"Instant gratification takes too long."
—Meryl Streep's character in Postcards From the Edge

*

*

I'm not real pleased with the "Click Here" piece above. So much more could be done. I can see an entire "Click Here" book, in fact.

*

 

 

*

Dis-1  "privative, negative, or reversing force relative to the base noun"

ply2    1. a thickness or layer   5. bent, bias or inclination"

 

To display = to undo, shed, deprive of: thickness and layers, as well as bias and perspective.

Laying out without cover, for all to PLAINLY see.

So perspective actually vanishes? Because a true, single, self-evident perspective is revealed? But that of course is not possible. Some relative perspective is always assumed. We observe from a place and a time, a context, a layer. We cannot take away perspective. Cannot take away thickness. There is no pure display. No pure thing to be displayed.

In our effort to display what is beneath all layers, we only display more layers. Our struggle to display something true continually displays only our inability to display something true.

Poetry enacts the impossibility of revelation. Of course, that very statement is a revelation. I can only conclude that poetry itself is impossible, even while it nonetheless exists. Given such a conclusion, I will settle for happiness.

*

 

It's 2002 or whenever and we are infants; we are mouths. We want to suck. We wish to speak. We love to breath. Don't worry about it. After all the airy abstraction of deconstruction and the disavowal of presence—how wonderful to slosh back into the body.

 

 

 

 

 

Afterthought

E-writing—it's certainly tactile and physical insofar as we get to goop up letters and words on a screen, re-experience language as pliant material. It allows us, in its invitation to freely alter any image, to experience all material as surface, all surface as creative material. If the world is text, as repeatedly argued over the last half century, then the personal computer allows us interesting means of exploring texts AS INFINITELY MALLEABLE. And with the ability to project e-work now from a computer onto a whole room, to make enormous billboards and other computer-generated artifacts, that physicality may be developed increasingly outside of the cramped little monitor-keyboard-processor set-up, which many people disdain.

On the other hand, e-writing is very disassociational. We seem "further" from the physical when writing onto or reading from a screen. I realize that writing on a piece of paper with a pencil is still technological, that the materials of the pencil, lead, paper, and so on are fully artificial. But typing onto a screen is more indirect and, I want to say, bloodless. The "page" of the monitor is farther from my fingers, seems both bottomless depth and shifty, superficial light. The words I type sink into depthlessness. I don't quite know where or what the "page" is. Readers report missing the tactile qualities of the book, the rustle of pages, the smell of a brand new lacquered tome with its loudly cracking spine, the feel of a floppy, soft, busted up volume retrieved from some dim shelf and leaden with its own musty thingness. Sure, we play with "paint" in fotoshop, and it's all incredible visual TEXTURE, very like the literal thing and very like a wonderful NEW thing. But, still. Some key senses are neglected. Smell. Taste. The electronic is still very visual & cerebral (idea = to SEE).

On the other hand, maybe writing on or to a shifty, physically duplicitous or paradoxical "page" has its pleasures. Additionally, has anyone yet reported on the desirable tactile qualities of computers and computing? The tap music of keyboard, the glow of monitor, the heat of monitor, the hum or outright groan of central processor cooling fan? The assorted disk drives noisily sticking out their tongues, over and over, like ungainly baby birds, all sloppy with obvious anticipation, begging to be fed?

*