________________________________________________________________________________ Water-shedding Shedding water / holding it back / in abeyance / closing the loopholes. For the past two weeks I have been burning cdroms of my work of the past six years; I began with the version I did for a group in Atlanta (that I abandoned) - con/text/sub 1.0. This has led to sub/con/text - the current and final title - versions 2.01, 2.02, 2.03, 2.04, 2.05, 2.06, 2.2, and 2.3. The earlier ones were organizations and reorganizations; the later - 2.2 and 2.3 are the result of opening up other, older, computers I have here, and re-editing a number of texts and files. The directory structure - for such it is - is a tree structure, which has remained pretty coherent through most of the history of computing; the root leads to /cdrom/ - at which point, the directory tree and file trees are reproduced; the various directories are given; there is a readme first text; and there is an index.html opening file if one is entering through a browser. Most of the time, all of this has had to be tuned and retuned; in other words, I have been tuning and retuning six years' worth of work - as well as another 20 or so essays from the 1980s and early 90s. There are some parts of the Internet Text as well (found within the /cdrom/network directory) that go back to the late sixties. I worry that all of this is a tomb, in a way; it contains most of my work I've considered valuable over the past few decades. Odd things such as my Structure of Reality - with its numerous diagrams and ruminations on threshold logics - aren't reproduced, but there are descriptions of them in the Internet Text as well. The three older records (two of which were reissued as cds) aren't included; the films aren't included; and only very recent video segments are found on it. None of the work from my post-industrial group Damaged Life is on it. But the writing is there, in all fullness, and in the /cdrom/program directory are numerous programs exploring some of the fractal measure-geometries I discovered (I'm sure not originally), for anyone with qbasic.exe installed to play with. And there is _some_ music, including electric guitar, which has been a major interest for years, and shakuhachi, which I have been working intensely with, for the past few. Meanwhile, there are all those graphics - the /cdrom/image directory alone has close to 380 - which form a universe by themselves, resonating with the texts, wrapping themselves around each other and the viewer as well. All of which is to say, the watershed. I've been relieved that my work stands a chance of surviving - the disks holds a great deal of work that is not on line for example - in one or another form, that it might be rediscovered sometime in the future. It's oddly supported now - I haven't done a "real" book since Station Hill took me on in 1984 (Disorders of the Real, 1988) - only magazine and book anthologies, e-venues, etc. So I hope that the electronic venue of the cdrom will hold for at least twenty years or so, at least on antique computers, and that I will, or someone will, be able to update the materials, reconfigure them, in the latest incarnation of mass storage devices. There are issues for me of the phenomenology of the disk; the latest copies have a colored label on the disk itself, instead of bleak black and white - and somehow the whole seems more permanent. And a fair number of them, in one or another version, have been distributed. Nonetheless, a lot of people I would want to have them just haven't been interested - and I ascribe this to - no matter how much the opposite is claimed - an intransigent attachment to the _book_ - something I also feel. It's as if the cdrom can only be a _project,_ or _resource_ - but nothing that carries the weight or intimacy of the book - nothing, in short, that is _desirable,_ in terms of personal ownership. The relationships and gaps between computer and language are still labeled as "experimental," in spite of years of development (my own first computer works were from 1971 for example). I know the value of my work; I hold onto it like a hungry ghost that's forbidden sleep or recompense, that wanders, devours everywhere. I get nourishment back-channel which keeps me going, and I'm happy that those people who do want the disks are world- wide (in spite of the postage). But there are times I'm overwhelmed by the massivity, by a theory-thicket so large that it literally borders on substance. I've noted with relief that people tend to find the disks easy to navigate and explore (which is what I intended), and I've thought that this might lead further to the idea that there are language/image worlds opening up through this - that a kind of intimacy may result after all. But the activity is very different; like hypertext, it asks a lot of a reader, a kind of mobility he or she might not be comfortable with. It's odd to roam across the six years. They cover periods of intense depression, of my mother's death, of my successes and failures as list moderator, as a writer inspired by such disparate sources as Donald Knuth, old Akkadian, linux, contemporary Japan, and Jabes. Nikuko, Jennifer, Doctor Leopold Konninger, Travis, Clara, Honey, Alan, and Julu come and go; there are explorations of MOOs, netsex, protocols, and the very early history of the Net. Different venues (editing an issue of New Observations on Cultures of Internet, and the Lusitania Book, Being on Line; putting together the chapbooks for the parables and The Case of the Real; etc.) produce warps into the fabric, texts tending towards momentary completions (36 new parables for example), images carried to extremes and exhaustion (work with Blender for example). I tried all through the work to keep up both intensity and resonance, as if each piece were my last (which is something always haunting me, dreams of death without recompense or memory). I think for the most part I succeeded, sometimes too well; there are sections of the diary and the Internet Text that I can read only with difficulty at this point. I wonder if this comes through, hoping that resonance will carry through (each text, as if within Indra's net, resonating with, and signaling, every other). And all this fits on a single, distributable disk, finally reaching a plateau of organization that _makes sense_ to me, carries a certain weight. I find myself less able to sleep, feeling more physically ill, but as if something were taken care of, taken account of - as if something unaccountable and unaccounted for, were, nonetheless, subject to a form of tally. So that my writings now, in a sense, are "beyond the disk," oddly cooled, in a period of hiatus, as I wonder if the disk will be understood, if that even matters, and as I work on distribution. (There are copies still available, of the newer 2.2 and 2.3, through Alan Sondheim, 432 Dean St., Brooklyn, NY, 11217, $14 in any form. End of advertisement.) I find myself spending more time within the languorous temporality of the burner, napping between finished disks popping out on this slow machine. I've burned three copies of music cds as well - The Blue Humans, and the two old LPs that were reissued a few years ago as cds - for backup. I've backed up all my usual miscellaneous files and programs and teaching materials. It's as if I could close up shop. It's as if a kind of work is completed. It's a watershed and water shed - somewhere I'm beneath or elsewhere than all of this, protocols splashing from my body; I'm down deep, inviolate; I'm vulnerable, always in league with death. Internet Text at http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt Partial at http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html Trace Projects at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm cdrom of collected work 1994-2000/1 available: write sondheim@panix.com >>>> >>>> >>>> what **** Command 'what' not recognized. >>>> >>>> >>>> why **** Command 'why' not recognized. >>>> >>>> ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 2000 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. post to the list: mailto:inbox@rolux.org. more information: mailto:minordomo@rolux.org, no subject line, message body: info rolux. further questions: mailto:rolux-owner@rolux.org. home: http://rolux.org/lists - archive: http://rolux.org/archive