Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.44.0201251133450.18622-100000@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>,
"WRYTING-L : Writing and Theory across Disciplines" <WRYTING-L@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject: altering (responding to a text)^2
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 11:34:28 -0500 (EST)
- altering (responding to a text)^2 the ruins of buildings. i can't write from anything else. tonight, the water stopped in our apartment. the apartment ran dry. there are sounds of struggle in the pipes. following a sentence in the possessive and possession of characters, a gap or hiatus. wayward or contrary characters. of the harshness of daily politics. of the real and virtual jennifer, julu, alan, nikuko. of the real and virtual honey, travis, tiffany. jennifer years ago started off as about 12 in the early stuff then moved to 20s-something; nikuko i imagine in her 30s; julu 24. i keep wanting to kill them off. i killed off jennifer a long time ago, she had a bier and everything, then returned. before that, travis, honey, and tiffany all disappeared. i can't write dialog for males, it's not that i can write it for females, i can't at all, but with males it devours me from inside. it's a distrust of males, of male authority. it's built-in, a bad engine. males are bad engines. males absorb, i write from the debris, effluvia, of absorption. alan is a character but alan is also a stain or residue, almost always disappearing by the end of the show if he were there in the first place. alan wants to disappear but engrave in stone. alan wants to engrave everything in stone and then rails against totality and writes dubious philosophy. that doesn't make sense. it's almost as if alan wishes that nikuko speaks through alan, both of them in a ring: jennifer on the east, julu on the west. north and south are unguarded; they always are, the cold-spots of the ring of Aphra Behn's desire. there are disappearances. as one might say, there are disappearances and disappearances. they follow this odd desire. they generate an inchoate politics reaching up through the surface like the hand in Carrie. the texts come from dreams (of the real or virtual dreams) (of careful considerations and the clarity of thought), go back in and mess with them. nothing comes out but different, not therapy or recuperation or balance, but a mess that takes off on its own: alan with the 9 millimeter, nikuko listening as if entranced. Alan writing in a trance or entrance. Nikuko listening in departure. they occupy an aspect ratio. alan thinks: better to return to coding, code-work made obvious (although Traum came out of a rewrite of the emacs doctor program) - better returning to abstraction or scaffolding, rather than the mud on the rungs as one climbs, impossibly, among the ruins of buildings in the east, in the west. not of buildings in the cold, northern and southern poles: where the writing originates. frozen, immobilized. writing from magnesis, magnetic poles, hysteresis looped. from Alan, never from dreams _