Writing habits
When I write, sooner or later the piece seems finished to me; it then is
placed at the end of an ongoing 'collection' file that is placed on
http://www.alansondheim.org ; the most recent is 'pr.txt.' I work on
additions to these collections until they total anywhere from 80k - 100k,
at which point the next in the series is started. I began with Net0.TXT,
Net1.TXT, etc., for about 10; then there were several named files.
Finally, the alphabet was used. The result is an irregular marking system
which has settled down in an orderly fashion for the past 100 or so
collections; 'pr.txt' follows 'pq.txt' and will precede 'ps.txt.' There
can be between 20 and 80 individual pieces in one of these collections.
The individual segments generally follow whatever line of inquiry I'm
working on at the moment, with numerous exceptions. At one point I spoke
of 'long waves' and 'short waves' to indicate thematic movement through
the mass of collections. A long wave might be Nikuko or defuge; a short
wave might be a particular Access Grid resonance configuration which is
exploited for a while.
These texts are heavily edited and spell-checked with ispell; unfortuna-
tely, errors inevitably creep in. In my last text, I wrote 'my' instead of
'may,' 'scholar' instead of 'scholarship,' and had a misplaced dash, the
result of re-justifying after some corrections. I hope these errors aren't
misleading, but are understood only as slips of the tongue leading nowhere
at all. They're not caught by ispell, and they're not caught by me.
I try to keep the average individual piece length to 43 lines, although it
may range from 10 to 300 or so. I send these out once a day at least; this
is my compulsion, and if I don't feel I've completed work for the day -
and completed work at that - I find myself, like now, unable to sleep,
cursing myself for being human so to speak.
The compulsion has to be be coupled with necessity, the 'natural' contin-
uation of a series. I attempt to balance practical/production works with
theoretical ones; sometimes the two accompany each other, and sometimes
they're simply contiguous, as with the recent series of butterflies mating
which I found fascinating; I hadn't seen this particular ritual before.
The texts are almost always written, as this one is, online at panix.com
in the Pico editor in a shell account; the font is mono-spaced courier.
There's a sense of urgency for me in this accountancy which is maintained
only by a live connection; as I've written before, I recognize the server
load and panix community which is almost always present in the background
and accessed through the 'w' or 'who' or various other commands.
Once written, the file is sent from my home directory to my Pine email, as
well as added to the current large text file. The file is almost always
named 'zz' which places it at the end of a sorting; sometimes it's moved
to 'ww' if I'm afraid it will be accidentally erased. If I'm processing
the file, I move between 'zz' and 'yy.' If I'm working in the midst of a
long file, I use 'zzzzz' for a bookmark. When the file is completed, I do
an edit, an ispell, and a 'wc' word/line/character count before it's sent
out through Pine.
The style varies from one text to another; one major characteristic is the
presence or absence of capital letters. If the text is to be 'breathed' as
if spoken with the words run together, or presented as flow or emission
itself, I'll use small letters only. If the text is traditional or
genre-oriented, capitals are employed, as they are in a number of common
poetic forms. Sections of the text may be energized by capitals as well.
All of this seems inconsistent, aggravated by no common rule for quotation
marks (single or double).
If the text is generated with the Google wsdl etc., I'll usually remove
numbers in order to create an effect of 'orality' to the finished result.
I'll check for upper ascii characters with the more command, take them out
with the 'strings' command. I may eliminate punctuation, etc.; for all of
this, I use 'sed' in various forms as well as 'tr.' At times I may begin a
text by culling from the internet text as a whole; the command I generally
use is 'grep -h X *.txt' which produces a file without giving the file
source of the individual lines. Most of the time, if I'm modifying a text
in this way, I'll use various perl programs, scripts, etc. in combination,
working to 'shape' the text to my satisfaction.
I'm not interested in writing a generated text that appears meaningless;
I'll shape it until it 'tends towards' I want, or the meaning I might find
hidden within it. This is of course a dialectical process and aesthetic
choice; for me the justification of a text lies, not in the conceptual
apparatus that produced it, but in the complex resonances between the text
and its reading, and the confluent generatings of meaning that occur in
the process.
Periodically, collections like 'pr.txt' are uploaded to my webpage, which
is of course nothing more than a directory; one can read the most recent
collection, complete or incomplete, in conjunction with the image, sound,
or video files that are referenced within it. The collection is also a
guide to them. After a while, these files may be removed to make room for
others; there are, however, 'core' files which remain in place because
they seem to me to have particular significance over a longer period of
time. Sometimes a reader will write to me, asking for a file that has been
taken down; I generally put it back up for one or two days, then take it
down again.
This is the process that's carried out, day in and day out. (I think I
once went for 6 days without producing anything - in 15 years.) suffer
from depression, poor eyesight getting poorer, minor 'twitches' in my left
frontal lobe, and severe insomnia; it's the last that governs when I write
and perhaps how I go about it. I write at all hours of the day or night; I
need to have a complete and final thought that could always be a conclu-
sion if I should happen to die at the time; death in fact haunts the text
at one end, and sex on the other, with the struggling of the inscribed
body in their midst. I want every text to resonate with every other, every
text to carry a totality whispered among all of them. If I don't achieve
this, what I produce feels more like an 'instance' or 'advertisement,'
something on a path which is yet incomplete - and my nightmares turn
furious...
3:19AM
USER
cbpp jdecarlo simona geoff src pyro rcliff jzk bitty rain jhava argent src
jkurck rcpj hud aahz karsten seligman snefru pciszek steved librik
sondheim dagger rmc jtabron bord rkarow bord bord bord aahz thor bord omar
rmc bord checker mhoram basit eskwired ayana alexis basit omar rpmohn
dangelo checker ayana tss rbf jsm mcooper ggold emmanuel snefru
Sun Jun 8 03:20:24 EDT 2008
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====================================================================
seduction of the world
Are you dressed as a range of scalar values submerging the screen, there's
something dear julu that must be beyond or in the midst of the other side
of the tree, surely the use of values better written point to newer
sources? Is a range of scalar values submerging the screen, there's
something dear julu that must be beyond or in the midst of the other side
of the tree, surely the use of values better written point to newer
sources dressed as you?
Are you in your thing, are you in your flesh, ah don't answer...
Is Julu wearing your ... , are you wearing your thing?
I love your feelings, a range of scalar values submerging the screen,
there's something dear julu that must be beyond or in the midst of the
other side of the tree, surely the use of values better written point to
newer sources ...
Your breasts call me to them...
love oozes me beyond your thing!
What do you call your sedate thing?
My yes yes yes yes yes is yours...
should there be such a moment or singsong as these, nouns and
adjectives, genitives and genitals crawling across or throughout the body,
dearest julu, the body of text, or what should i say about ourselves, if
not something used once and neither more nor less makes me thoughtful
should there be such a moment or singsong as these, nouns and
adjectives, genitives and genitals crawling across or throughout the body,
dearest julu, the body of text, or what should i say about ourselves, if
not something used once and neither more nor less calls forth pure womb,
eating, excreting memory.
accompanying the edgy, should there be such a moment or singsong as
these, nouns and adjectives, genitives and genitals crawling across or
throughout the body, dearest julu, the body of text, or what should i say
about ourselves, if not something used once and neither more nor less is ,
edgy, there's always a question or query of these sources, to be sure? or
a listing of lines or striations among queries or something of that sort,
dear julu, now i will be very very wet when i am writing in my panties
boohoo dear jennifer dearest jennifer and nothing else?
... womb is is this where i say the end with my wettest panties, dearest
nikuko, or just the slightest bit just a slightest bit and further on, we
are traveling wet and hands are pulling panties, are they not dearest
jennifer here, it's womb?
Are you becoming close to Jennifer's should there be such a moment or
singsong as these, nouns and adjectives, genitives and genitals
crawling across or throughout the body, dearest julu, the body of text, or
what should i say about ourselves, if not something used once and neither
more nor less?
You melt into Julu's skin forever...
... cotton should there be such a moment or singsong as these, nouns
and adjectives, genitives and genitals crawling across or throughout the
body, dearest julu, the body of text, or what should i say about
ourselves, if not something used once and neither more nor less 20854 is
Julu's gift to you ...
the object itself, leaves as well.::chests of connections and cylinders
in time. but everything is still-born; i leave the site and the citation,
- a move from topography to topology that seems critical at this point
of a certain sort in place of either the machinic or the organic
'cylinder,' 'node,' and 'avatar,' which at least presents connectivity
and i don't even know the people. i've been writing with characters
news around here isn't good, there are closeups of autopsies on television
i've been too busy with avatar bodies that can't hold a stick to you. the
of the past, bones, skeletons, dust, death, hunger.:i forgot you jennifer
release, haunted - oh i cried when i found it, this delicate index
was awarded a certificate of merit; i have that certificate, untethered,
of worlds - just so my writings falter at the gate. in 1841 someone
to temporal balance, feedback. what can be said of this, of the fragility
are organized in a skein of representations - they're so fragile, so tied
which happened quickly, in the matter of days. all my belongings and works
of the world she organized and assembled over decades, a dispersion
firsthand when my mother died, what happens in any death: the dispersion
and organism. things need names and often don't have them; i learned
fecund, the flower is a shape, the flower is the merge of connection
this point in time. forget them. work the world.:the flower is connected,
machinic constructs that disappear as so many props only necessary at
constant state of rebirth, airborn, earthborn. nothing but prims, pixels,
the grit of the real, imaginary of the virtual, cleansed, hairless, in
of bodies and media, topologies of media, topographies of representation,
of lives disappear, all moments, topologies of desire, topographies
sex-playing roles in organic display that disappears, sheaves
of nodes and vectors is in my wayward closet of attachments and parts
Your small tables
seeps into my closet of attachments and parts - turning me Julu-Jennifer
Your breast
should there be such a moment or singsong as these, nouns and
adjectives, genitives and genitals crawling across or throughout the body,
dearest julu, the body of text, or what should i say about ourselves, if
not something used once and neither more nor less:there's always a
question or query of these sources, to be sure? or a listing of lines or
striations among queries or something of that sort, dear julu, now i will
be very very wet when i am writing in my panties boohoo dear jennifer
dearest jennifer and nothing else:a range of scalar values submerging the
screen, there's something dear julu that must be beyond or in the midst of
the other side of the tree, surely the use of values better written point
to newer sources::yes yes yes yes yes
Your pure yes yes yes yes yes is in my edgy is this where i say the end
with my wettest panties, dearest nikuko, or just the slightest bit just a
slightest bit and further on, we are traveling wet and hands are pulling
panties, are they not dearest jennifer
Devour pure yes yes yes yes yes julu-of-the partying should there be such
a moment or singsong as these, nouns and adjectives, genitives and
genitals crawling across or throughout the body, dearest julu, the body of
text, or what should i say about ourselves, if not something used once and
neither more nor less!
Scalar value @a[$gen2] better written as $a[$gen2] at a/julua line 121.
Scalar value @a[$gen3] better written as $a[$gen3] at a/julua line 121.
Name "main::b3" used only once: possible typo at a/julua line 78.
Name "main::sign" used only once: possible typo at a/julua line 33.
a range of scalar values submerging the screen, there's something dear
julu that must be beyond or in the midst of the other side of the tree,
surely the use of values better written point to newer sources there's
always a question or query of these sources, to be sure? or a listing of
lines or striations among queries or something of that sort, dear julu,
now i will be very very wet when i am writing in my panties boohoo dear
jennifer dearest jennifer and nothing else should there be such a moment
or singsong as these, nouns and adjectives, genitives and genitals
crawling across or throughout the body, dearest julu, the body of text, or
what should i say about ourselves, if not something used once and neither
more nor less is this where i say the end with my wettest panties, dearest
nikuko, or just the slightest bit just a slightest bit and further on, we
are traveling wet and hands are pulling panties, are they not dearest
jennifer
http://www.alansondheim.org/betweenworlds.jpg
