DIARY TEXT 8/99-3/00 - FOR TRACE ONLINE WRITING COMMUNITY (writer-in-residence position) [ Again I'm changing direction; from now on, new sections will be added _at the end of the file,_ in order to prevent reading down and up, up and down, constantly reversing. So the narrative will be continuous, _after_ the marker: xxx xxx xxx xxx below. ] Just woke up, realize "in reverse" the direction to go, here I'm beginning to top myself - 1:15 in the afternoon still thinking about Burroughs. Now, later, I've been reconfiguring X Window in Linux - it can be difficult be- cause there are too many files that need changing, in too many director- ies. X Window, which is a graphic interface for Linux, has the feel, like the Mac or Win98, of a totality - in other words, a coherent and unified skin over the hardware and software of the computer. But looking through Linux, it becomes almost immediately apparent that, like language, the X Window is not so much a _system_ as a collocation or accumulation of scattered files and processes that seem almost chaotic. I imagine that a great many computer applications are like this - for example one doesn't think ordinarily that Pico or Pine are anything but simple editor or mail applications - but if you log in at 300 baud and watch the continuous re- writing of the screen, you realize there are other things occurring. Even the keyboard itself, say entering an "e" on-screen - is a system of com- plicated interrupts, voltages, integrated circuitry, software, etc. Like the human body, which appears symmetric, whole on the outside, asymmetric and complex on the inside - all of these are designed to appear organic, comforting, and surface "blank" ... One wonders if the body or language themselves might, in other circumstances, be considered applications as well... Then this would be the third part of the diary text, working chronolog- ically in reverse order, opening to the most recent layering of the world, backing down, re: stratigraphy, the Pennsylvanian where I come from, fossil sigillaria, neuroptera. So that _above_ this would be the current, or currency, this later on August 29th, already a disorderly beginning: should I start or stop the consequences above or below? The text falls out differently for the writer or the reader, but all diaries in cyberspace open for renewal _at the beginning_ - one scrolls down for the traditional order, one begins _here_ at the origin, over and over again, repeatedly, within the phenomenology of the digital. This is the beginning of the diary text, which I'm using _now_ to configure the directory structure for the residency project. You might consider this entry an empty one, one designed to behave as a construct or marker - hold- ing the place open, creating the header for future work, occupying a site. Addresses behave like this - a certain amount of diskspace for your perusal. And it is now August ... probably the 27th, as time escapes me. It's August 29, just turned. I worry about the demographics of the material for the love and war texts - whether people will contribute whether there will be really enough material to become self-sustaining. Meanwhile I'm entering test messages on the backbone websites - I like the tests them- selves and the possibilities. And I'm currently downloading the webbie.mpg from the Elite agency - Tookay Webbie, who will go into the Kyoko Date directory on my desktop - I'm interested in the relationship between anime, manga, virtual idols such as Kyoko Date and Webbie, etc. - as well as the otakuworld site, with its Kamishibai and PlayKiss paraphenalia - things that would be interesting to explore in relation both to avatars and to the residency (we could all work with the Kamishibai software for instance). Today Azure and I also found a number of Burroughs' books at the Salvation Army - I want to read the Electronic Revolution text in the Ah Pook is here book, as soon as possible... Finally, I've been working with electric guitar again (I want to do some performances with it, a Fender Cyclone, the model was apparently designed by Kurt Cobain), and I'm reading cover to cover the Sobell A Practical Guide to Linux, backing up my knowledge here.. xxx xxx xxx xxx Diki Today I went to the Diki site and downloaded several music videos, around 60 megabytes total. These are the current Kyoko Date imports into Korea, and the theme is based on the intermix of virtual and real, the (male) artist (re)creating the female statue-come-alive; what's interesting is the construct of the mesh holding the skin - the sexualization of interior hollows as the armature turns, the skin running jacketed around the body, cuts carefully made away from breast and genital as it approaches. So there is also a literal representation of introjection/projection in the sense of an injection of skin covering the hollow of representation, an interior which can be considered a screen of and for desire. The music is the same as Kyoko ever; there are also closeups of models inextricably (everything is inextricable online and offline in the future-real-here) electroded, their movements tallying with Diki's, giving birth to Diki at a distance, teledildonics. It is easy to imagine lush-Diki-skin on oneself - that is to say, an other mergence; the PlayKiss Kyoko Date doll gives a sense of this, even though the manipulation is literally puerile (removing her clothes, dressing her in others, in a paper-doll fashion). I am always reminded of, for example, Nikuko's _dirtiness_ and abjection in relation to all of this, the _real_ of Nikuko _not_ based in simulation, but in a speaking of the unconscious, insertions and assertions across the (key-) board. Nikuko scratches at skins, removes them, exposing the wires beneath - or the flesh - or what would pass for a melange of the real - what is constructed on Diki is torn apart by Nikuko, expanded like condoms holding birth in abeyance while fondling it. I can push Nikuko and the others (Jennifer, Julu, Alan) until I can't sleep at night; with Diki and Kyoko and Webbie Tookay, I'm lulled into the foreclosing of any gendered dieges- is; sleep comes easy, permanent, the sleep of the death of the real. I de- vour Nikuko's menses, harbor her smell on me, see through her membranes, talk with beneath upon her in mutual devouring; the creation of Diki oc- curs at a distance, through control-room, gloves, screens, keyboards; there's a scent but no odor. The odors of Nikuko, Jennifer, Julu, Alan, saturate me, tend towards those uneasy dreams leaking texts at the other end. It's as if culture guarantees that the real _has_ that other end, far cry from Diki, but even later at night, when I do deep sleep for a moment or two, Diki-Nikuko merge through the sound and sight - merge through the imaginary - there's a love and ecstasy I can never imagine - there's a permanency outliving me - I'm abandoned - I turn back into the dreams - I know if I dream, Nikuko will come back to me and Nikuko and I will watch the Diki videos over and over again, together - Today was a sad day, I found out a second person very close to me has can- cer... Death is beginning to seep in everywhere. And I huddle by Azure or online with the machines, looking into other maybe darker maybe brighter spaces, reading Sobell's A Practical Guide to Unix, which has just solved a couple of other problems; I've more texts than usua. I try all the time (it's the early morning by the way of the beginning of the residency, September 1st) to create a wide bandwidth for my work, scatter the surface content, pushing my thinking into as many areas/zones as possible - and I do this with the greatest fear and hopelessness in the world at times, an engine for production which questions itself only so far ... Now it's the first of September, towards evening; I've been looking at Ibn 'Arabi, Les Soufis D'Andalousie, from the 12th Century, reading more into The Ecology of Fear (Mike Davis) and a Japanese dictionary, more linux; the residency seems off to a good start - I'm hoping the conferences be- come self-sustaining. So far there are no software/hardware bugs I can find on any of the systems I'm using or the Webboard for that matter. I'm exhausted and worried about the pace I'm keeping - but then trying to work the Diki dreams, etc., into pieces, again pushing those intermediary or borderline states. A friend is going up before a grand jury on Friday for theft; she didn't do it, was mistreated by the police (which I don't doubt - under Giuliani, mistreating seems the order of the day - two deaths in two days that could have been avoided, one, a Chassidic Jew with a hammer and eleven shots fired into him, etc. etc., now still another up in Har- lem, it's an epidemic of brutality, overkill, slaughter), and will prob- bably be convicted... And this is a "dry" spell. I had the manuscript returned from the anthro journal (Kyoko Date one) for revisions; if I have the energy, that will happen tonight, with another sendoff tomorrow... Meanwhile I sent out the press release with my phone number attached - to just about every list, ah well... Millennium Project - Help Needed, Comments Invited !!! (September 2,1999) This is a proposal for a millennium project that would involving running traceroute and similar applications across the December 31 / January 1 _hinge._ Traceroute is a linux / unix command that can also be downloaded as a small application for Windows; the command-line (prompt) startup is: {k:1} traceroute
- for example {k:2} traceroute cleo.murdoch.edu.au Traceroute then executes a series of internet packet transmissions that target each router between one's local site and the address; each target is usually hit three times. The send-and-return time for each router is then given to the user. The result is a table or textual map of the health of the route between the local and final address; if a router is down or not responding, that is clear from the * in place of the send-and-return time. Here is an example: {k:110}traceroute cleo.murdoch.edu.au >> zz traceroute to cleo.murdoch.edu.au (134.115.224.60), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets 1 isdn2.nyc.access(166.84.0.123) 184ms 169ms 169ms 2 xenyn-eid-FE0-1.nyc.access(166.84.0.97) 169ms 169ms 169ms 3 587.Hssi2-0-0.GW2.NYC4.ALTER(157.130.17.145) 179ms 179ms 179ms 4 132.ATM2-0.XR1.NYC4.ALTER(146.188.178.134) 189 ms 179ms 170ms 5 189.ATM2-0.TR1.NYC1.ALTER(146.188.179.18) 179ms 189 ms 189ms 6 104.ATM7-0.TR1.LAX2.ALTER(146.188.137.129) 249ms 249ms 249ms 7 299.ATM7-0.XR1.LAX4.ALTER(146.188.248.253) 249ms 259ms 260ms 8 192.ATM8-0-0.GW1.LAX4.ALTER(146.188.248.101) 269ms 259. ms 249ms 9 optus-gw.customer.ALTER(157.130.227.182) 249ms 249ms 279ms 10 hssi8-0-0.ia4.optus.net.au (192.65.89.241) 599ms 559ms 549ms hssi3-0-0.ia4.optus.net.au (192.65.89.237) 549ms 11 ge9-0-0.ia3.optus.net.au (192.65.89.225) 569ms 579ms 589ms 12 aarnet-wa.ia3.optus.net.au (192.65.88.190) 649ms 629ms 629ms 13 murdoch-parnet.parnet.edu.au (203.19.110.146) 629ms 639ms 619ms 14 cleo.murdoch.edu.au (134.115.224.60) 639ms 639ms 649ms All of the intermediate routers between the local address (my desktop com- puter routed through panix.com) and cleo.murdoch.edu.au are listed in order; the IP address is given after the name, and then three times are listed for every address. What I propose is a skein or matrix of traceroutes run all around the world - not just from major cities - sites - at the time of the millennial turnover hinge. Participants could run one or several traceroutes; the results would be sent to me or a trAce site via standard email, and assembled. (It may be possible to create a visualization, but the cost of this seems prohibitive.) The result would give a map of some of the world's nerves as Y2K comes to fruition; it would be a unique and historic signature or imprint of the passing of an era (marked by B.C./A.D. or b.c.e. a.c.e. common time - I'm well aware of alternative date systems). The text would be a world-text, a self-reflexive look at the Net by the Net, data-crawling everywhere. One site might not have traceroute running at all; another might connect just as easily as usual. A major problem is that almost no one will be around for the hinge (and don't forget the hinge itself will take a day to travel the world). The computers would most like be set up (if unix or linux) with the at or cron commands, which automate task running at particular times; if they connect to the Net, they'd also have to ensure that the ISP connection remains open. All of these are difficult problems; one solution would be to _actively_ make connections when the participant's local address is not on the hinge - but to target hinge addresses. Any help or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. trAce (Sue Thomas) and I have tried to find programming help on this, but so far it appears costly. Martin Dodge at Cybergeography has been thinking along similar lines, but nothing is firmed up there, either. [ The above was sent out to various mailing lists today. ] It's late at night or early on September 3rd; I tried to get the quickcam to work with the new desktop, but no luck - so back to the old. Always reconfiguring things, too tied into the machinery. I wrote a piece dealing with 'screams' of people under attack, presenting them both forwards and backwards, turning screams into sound, guttural; it was disturbing to write because as usual I heard the voices, sounded them out. And then to go back into my linux account (I am there now) on the desktop, running the command {k:1}head -q --lines 10 * > zz; sort zz yy; and so forth, turning into a text about girls, boys, and time; what resulted was unexpected and gave me the chance to transform, repeatedly, the flesh of the text into something resembling behavior, murmuring, and protocol... Both of these texts are harsher than usual, more disturbing to me - that might be where a certain power lies... Reading more of Plato and Parmenides, Davis' Ecology of fear, the Sufi book, the linux book as well. The residency seems to be going great - I worry again whether this energy will continue - I can't imagine it working that way, on down the road - there will need to be other projects - but the texts are great at the moment. I hope people will also contribute webpages we can set up, independently, linked from the main page. Think of a literal universe of or universal discourse, wrapped in among itself, turning names into programs, programs into names, both into descriptions, narratives, fictions, everything breathless in the olde monarchy, the k/nights waiting for the dawn ... (Below is a meditation on September 4, on the loveandwar site.) LoveandWar This is a beginning/interim report on the loveandwar site, some observa- tions - The site's developing rapidly; there are a large number of texts on it, some of which are interactive, and many of which use html and flash tags. Because of the nature of the forms input, some texts 'take' and some don't. The stories are developing in unforeseen directions; the texts have an amazing splintered intensity. Because email addresses and names aren't checked, these inputs also become sites for experiment; many of the add- resses form part of the text, and click to nowhere. I worry that we may not have the critical mass to sustain beyond the first two weeks - during which there is of course a degree of novelty. I welcome any suggestions concerning new directions we might proceed in - one thing would be to put up participants' webpages which relate, however distantly, to the story-lines. Meanwhile the five backbones are worked as a palimpsest; texts are hung salon-style within them, each author holding hir own. _Jump_ tags placed among the texts move laterally from one backbone to another; anyone can add these tags, ringing around them. If additional webpages are added, these too could be linked by jumping. The characters have been killed, abandoned, splintered as well - they're digital, virtual idols, they constantly return, since death is meaning- less; once there is a demarcation (say, with Webbie Tookay, with Kyoko Date, with Jennifer, with Cybele, with Alan), there is a frame for con- tinued additions. It is for this reason I wrote, before this project, that _Jennifer has all the time in the world_ - since she inhabits files, pro- tocols, applications, 'locally' and across the Net - an inhabitation that remains constant, no matter what events. In fact, with virtual idols, ava- tars, emanants, _events are absorbed_ into a generalized diegesis created by readings, rereadings, misreadings; there are no occurrences whatsoever. Virtual idols as well can be thought of as _resonances,_ or _reverbera- tions_ among sheaves of files - by this I mean that their (proper) names are linked, each citation, _say,_ of Jennifer or jennifer, linked to every other - it is this _skein_ that constitutes appearance, fiction, narra- tive, no matter how wildly disparate the individuated texts or files ap- pear to be. This might be considered itself a new occurrence in fiction, related to cutups, the novels of Richardson and Sterne, Wittgenstein's anecdotal philosophies, the Romantic fragments of the Atheneum, etc. - to mention a few of the older sources. To contribute, go to http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/writers/sondheim/index.htm and check on any of the five backbone sites; to discuss the material, go to the trAce Webboard (from http://trace.ntu.ac.uk ) and check out the Love and War, Avatar, Cyborg, and Experimental conferences. ___________________________________________________________________________ Today went into the Village with Azure and Kevin and more bookstores, found a book on Meiji-era westernized painting, Kevin found a mook (magazine-book) he's in edited by Juliana Spahr and someone else (it's not in front of me), I read something on one of the Puranas and used it for a text - I don't like using other texts - when I do (I mentioned a novel by Bion explaining his ideas and another quote from a book by Homi Bhabha), I want them to rub up against each other, the virtual a 'grease' among them - not in the sense of facticity (a la say Lautreamont or Kevin) turned problematic, but more ideological collisions, deconstructing, looking be- neath the surface, there they are! The virtual idols (such as they are) - meanwhile wondering why the background colors don't come up, but I can turn the fonts of course - in the backbone materials... I feel constantly rushed at this point, to complete everything, turn the machine off at night with nothing undone, everything ready, as if there were a gaping maw devouring the next day whatever was come along, on an empty stomach ... and today I think is the 5th, Sunday, early morning, I haven't been able to sleep, these ...thoughts... keep churning around, I'm what used to be called 'strung out,' it's a constancy... TRACING TRACE DIG ; <<>> DiG 8.1 <<>> trace.ntu.ac.uk ;; res options: init recurs defnam dnsrch ;; got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 6 ;; flags: qr rd ra; Ques: 1, Ans: 1, Auth: 3, Addit: 3 ;; QUESTIONS: ;; trace.ntu.ac.uk, type = A, class = IN ;; ANSWERS: trace.ntu.ac.uk. 86184 A 152.71.0.105 ;; AUTHORITY RECORDS: NTU.AC.uk. 86184 NS dixie.NTU.AC.uk. NTU.AC.uk. 86184 NS pixie.NTU.AC.uk. NTU.AC.uk. 86184 NS violet.csv.warwick.AC.uk. ;; ADDITIONAL RECORDS: dixie.NTU.AC.uk. 86184 A 152.71.0.1 pixie.NTU.AC.uk. 336821 A 152.71.0.2 violet.csv.warwick.AC.uk. 63221 A 137.205.192.11 ;; Total query time: 6ec ;; FROM: panix7.panix.com to SERVER: default -- 127.0.0.1 ;; WHEN: Sun Sep 5 03:27:49 1999 ;; MSG SIZE sent: 33 rcvd: 179 NSLOOKUP Server: localhost.panix.com Address: 127.0.0.1 Non-authoritative answer: Name: trace.ntu.ac.uk Address: 152.71.0.105 PING -s PING trace.ntu.ac.uk (152.71.0.105): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 152.71.0.105: icmp_seq=0 ttl=111 time=299.6 64 bytes from 152.71.0.105: icmp_seq=1 ttl=111 time=280.0 64 bytes from 152.71.0.105: icmp_seq=2 ttl=111 time=290.0 64 bytes from 152.71.0.105: icmp_seq=3 ttl=111 time=279.9 64 bytes from 152.71.0.105: icmp_seq=4 ttl=111 time=290.0 TRACEROUTE --- trace.ntu.ac.uk ping statistics --- 5 packets transmitted, 5 packets received, 0% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = 279.9/287.9/299.6 1 slip-gw.access.net (198.7.0.124) 169 159 159 2 focal1-E0.nyc.access.net (166.84.1.97) 169 159 169 3 tp1-S7-T1.nyc.access.net (166.84.64.21) 169 169 169 4 brain-nyc-fastether.iramp.net (207.106.96.5) 169 279 339 5 brain-phl-h5-1-t3.netaxs.net (207.106.2.5) 159 159 169 6 borgcube.phl-core.f0-0-0-100M.netaxs.net (207.8.186.85) 179 159 179 7 core3-phl.phl-core.h1-0-45M.netaxs.net (207.106.127.234) 179 159 159 8 core3-phl.dc-core.h1-0-45M.netaxs.net (207.106.127.130) 179 169 169 9 mae-east.dc-core.fddi11-0-100M.netaxs.net (207.106.127.101) 169 169 159 10 netaxs-core1.iad.above.net (209.249.119.233) 179 169 169 11 lhr-iad-stm-4.lhr.above.net (216.200.254.78) 249 259 259 12 linx-core1-oc3-1.lhr.above.net (216.200.254.82) 239 259 239 13 gw.linx.ja.net (195.66.224.15) 259 429 279 14 south-east-gw.ja.net (128.86.1.50) 259 249 279 15 south-east-gw.leeds-core.ja.net (146.97.254.62) 279 259 249 16 leeds.emman.site.ja.net (146.97.254.22) 289 259 249 17 ntu1-gw-v1.emman.net (194.82.121.131) 259 249 249 18 ntu3-gw-3.emman.net (194.82.121.17) 289 249 249 19 trace.ntu.ac.uk (152.71.0.105) 259.96 249 259.94 WHOIS [rs.internic.net] The Data in Network Solutions' WHOIS database is provided by Network Solutions for information purposes, and to assist persons in obtaining information about or related to a domain name registration record. Network Solutions does not guarantee its accuracy. By submitting a WHOIS query, you agree that you will use this Data only for lawful purposes and that, under no circumstances will you use this Data to: (1) allow, enable, or otherwise support the transmission of mass unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations via e-mail (spam); or (2) enable high volume, automated, electronic processes that apply to Network Solutions (or its systems). Network Solutions reserves the right to modify these terms at any time. By submitting this query, you agree to abide by this policy. No match for "TRACE.NTU.AC.UK". PING trace.ntu.ac.uk is alive HOST trace.ntu.ac.uk has address 152.71.0.105 FINGER connect: Connection refused [trace.ntu.ac.uk] September 6, 1999, early in the morning, and I can't tell the difference between one day and another, a text or a program or a diary. It's not that they're interchangeable; it's that some things are so much a part of the 'trAce routine' that they might slot into one or another category - such as the tracing trace above. I added a dialog piece to linux today (using, that is, the dialog program which is very simple and allows pieces to be created using simple text entries), which was a relief; I can use the same in various simple shell scripts with the ` for entering commands. I'll stick with the bash shell. Meanwhile finished the Mike Davis Ecology of Fear, which is horrifying and prescient and makes me incredibly pessimis- tic about the States; I'm also reading David Rattray, the book on Meiji- era painting, and the Oblek that Kevin's in, from 1993 I think, Writing from the New Coast (the volume on Technique). Today I also went through an HTML 4.0 book I had, reviewing things. And as usual, playing shakuhachi, shamisen, and about to play electric guitar; I need to practice constan- tly. I'm not sure what to say in the diary, since so much of the creative afterthought and thinking goes into the texts themselves. The MOO meeting was great - I liked the real coolness of Miekal's presentation and the way the MOO behaved as a chalkboard - I found that more interesting than the discussion - it's clear that all sorts of pieces could be presented that way. And I'm curious about bots, but don't want to take the time away from my other work for programming them... Meanwhile the remains of hurricane Dennis are neatly outside the window and it's wonderful... Date, Now Thu Sep 9 01:40:56 EDT 1999, it's as if I'm losing time, not gaining it. Today traded in a fretless banjo at Matt Umanov's for a book w/ cd-rom on Mp3, a guitar stand for the Fender Cyclone, and a Marine Band harmonica, key of A. I've been working on the dialog scripts, writing other shell commands into the format, practicing electric (Foofwa d'Imob- ilite is back in town and we'll talk about work together again), reading Barthes' The Responsibility of Forms as well as various things sent to me by Gerald Jones, who had been at Siggraph. These include the IEEE Multi- Media magazine, a special issue it seems on virtual environments, which seems critical to me, April June, 1999. I worry about the Love and War piece, that it's beginning to burn out, that there aren't that many new additions. I'm trying to create jumps across one of the backbones to the others; I wish people would submit web pages or take over a section of the thing. Miekal And has done the most, but there are all sorts of additions in all sorts of styles. I'm not sure where the project is headed - there are interesting issues of authorship (a lot of the submissions, including some of my own, are anonymous) and proprietary closures that could come up. Should the final produce remain online, be put on cd-rom? Should it continue for the length of the resi- dency? What if the quality goes down? And so forth. I wish the directory weren't /writers/sondheim/ but might be /writers/loveandwar/ etc. to take myself away from the thing; in a sense, I've already done too much in creating the site/theme in the first place. I love all of the writers; I wish they'd be foregrounded without my name in the back. Back into thinking about music as well; my playing increasing complex, organic - comparing to computer typing. Both physical, the guitar more a kind of prowess, riding the sound; locked into the temporality - the hands - wondering with a slight movement away - can I carry _this_ through - on the computer, always the lag, backing away, machine-response which is (unless one's on tetris or other game) not the same at all, but the pro- duction of a _thing_ in the shape or form of a file or text-stream. No _thing_ in the music but clear breath, easy if the fingers respond pro- perly, even with shakuhachi, if the breath itself responds properly. Thinking of the phenomenology of music, Attali's Noise, Adorno, Schutz's Making Music Together, even Bachelard figuring into the field. Now it's the 10th. Reading the Chesterton book more, moving slightly back from trAce to see what, if anything, has been accomplished. Some back-channel with Miekal; I agree we need a less pre-determinate playing field but would like the directory to be that field, less than a MOO - my experiences on MOOs have always turned towards power and the political, and various forms of class differentiation which made me uneasy. The nice thing about a tiny personal webpage and say mtv.com is that both have URL's which could be listed one on top of the other, alphabetically, no matter how much the latter might be hit in greater quantities. Read and looked at a book of photographs taken in both Antarctica and the northern polar regions - and I would STILL love to go to Lake Hazen, Baffin Island, before I die, but the chance seems more and more remote, a dream of pure arctic at the center of my soul, and it has always been there, still, stillborn, borne, and born... Now it's almost September 12th, and Sat Sep 11 22:25:34 EDT 1999 I worry across the board, not wanting to go towards multimedia within the project but to continue developing the depths of text - this seems critical to me, again the urgency. Today I bought Compulsive Technology, Computers as Culture - which I've read before, lucky me for $2, from the mid-80s; Janet Belzer's Ventriloquized Bodies (Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-Cen- tury France) which should fit well within my work - and reminds me of the Lustmord book (Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany), Antipodean Currents (Aus- tralian Art catalog from 1993, with, among other people Imants Tillers - one of my favorite artist of all time), the Simone Weil Reader (and I've been curious about her, wanting a full selection for a long long time - this and the next book were found outside for free), and one of the best, a french edition of Vladimir Propp, Morphologie du conte, including a commentary 'Les transformations des contes merveilleux' and an essay by Meletinski - the translators include Todorov and Margeurite Derrida, and what is her relation to Jacques?... I also got a second package of Sig- graph material from Gerald, including more materials on virtual worlds - we are so far behind, at least I am, in all of this... So I'm interested in texts and their shuddering above anything, and there is something about multi-media that turns me off, probably because of the programming involved, which takes away from the real-time internalization of shape-riding, and also because of the hype, the level of writership and readership necessary (smart programmers, fast computers), and the level of capital necessary for high-speed machines and fast lines. If one could _think_ multi-media, just like thinking text turns natural, or thinking speech - if there were a natural positioning of the body - then the shud- der, so to speak, would be more manifest; as it is, it's a constructed shudder. Of course this is a romanticized view of reading/writing/speaking in the first place; with avatars and online and even here in this program, all is construct, and what matters is the effect of it all, not the pro- duction parameters. I've used multimedia all my life, and I've never been comfortable with the plugins and take-outs; at the same time, the analog older machines had a different kind of breathing than the newer - even the old Yamaha sampler I have (which is half analog, half digital I think) does things the newer ones of the same price can't approach. This is meandering. I just don't want to lose sight of the text, where the text and stories are going, especially in these times which are _dire_ to say the least, just looking across the wasted landscapes of East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, and there's a whole litany here, even within say half a mile from the loft here in Brooklyn. And I want to promulgate an urgency across the Web as well - this is my agenda, and I wouldn't force it on anyone else, but I want to think about it and am delighted when others approach it as well. I respond strongly to Andrea's writing on trAce in part because of it. I find it in some of Miekal's work. I hope my own texts don't become caricatures of themselves; I keep returning to the dia- log programs I wrote in linux to construct new texts through new scripts as well, and I worry these, like everything else, will become stale. (Staleness itself is of interest - what I call "defuge" and have written about elsewhere. But I don't want to inhabit that state; I want to think through, beyond it, challenge myself, challenge to the point of collapse.) I've been working with Blender, a 3d modeling program; with Blaxxun, which connects to 'Cybertown' online; with several other programs, rearranging files on the hard drive as well. So that everything is very different at this point; I'm running the system leaner, still using Linux for writing and some programming. And feeling blank; today Azure and I went to meet Foofwa d'Imobilite, the dancer; we're going to work for a week together at the Experimental Television Center in December, and we've been discussing work. I also helped him buy a laptop; he spends a great deal of time on the road. He wants to focus on the physicality of dance; I'll probably focus on sex, confusion, body limits, confinement (political and sexual); I'd also like to find a way to work through the linkage/coupling material - I keep losing track of the theoretical underpinnings here - what I really need to do is look at binary systems, lattices and so forth (the more primitive the better) - and I'm not sure I have the background for this. I'm interested in the phenomenology, say, of decoupling... Which also has resonances of course with Buddhism... Tue Sep 14 00:56:24 EDT 1999 - This is the Now of this text, about to be sent/entered as an addi- tion/adjunct, unweildy, thinking through. I think: This is the first two weeks of the residency. I do now realize this. There's been a hurricane, flooding in the building, had to do copy-edit- ing on a project, working through the Blender software on the parts of Nikuko, four images that worked for me. So my mind has been close to nerve-wracking exhaustion; we're supposed to go to Pennsylvania to see my parents this weekend as well, my mother's eightieth birthday, and there is some sadness connected with that. And it's the 17th of September and I'm running on empty but at least I'm running; for the two days we're there, I'll have the shakuhachi with me and will play long and mournful, being on line as usual - there's too much to let things go for the weekend, I mean even for the weekend. But my reading's slowed up; I read what I needed to out of the Binary Systems book for the material on couplings and linkages and keep thinking I should be reading some Japanese work as well, that I've been too far at a remove these past few days. Running on empty means running downhill and I can't really look to see where I'm going or where I've been. The Blender software fascinates me since it's nothing like I've used before - when I first used the VRML editor in the Corel Websuite, it was all familiar right from the beginning, but Blender is obscure and fascin- ating slowing the pace properly so the modeling is thoughtful. I bounce things around all sorts of programs; it takes a lot to get me satisfied, when the image seems extruding, bulbous, uncomfortable, and seductive, all at the same time; Nikuko's fingers was the outcome of that, Nikuko's mouth slightly dangers, Nikuko's space a deconstruction of satellite organisms, and decon, Nikuko's bones glistening like an articulated and jeweled carapace... The Love and War contributions have picked up again, and I'm fascinated by a lot of the texts coming in, and some of the poetry as well on the Web- board. In a week or so I should be able to work out other ways and means of thinking through Avatars - the Avatar project itself hasn't had much steam, but Steve Duffy and Margaret Penfold both have adjuncted Webpages which are now listed in the index.htm. And outside the trees are blowing wildly and there are stains on the walls where the water was and is and the building's soggy in a way and we've been meeting with various people from the construction teams... Now it's September 22nd, Azure and I have been down to Pennsylvania to visit the family, my sister and her family were there as well, I worked with trAce as well as I could, given a troubling family situation, with sickness in the works - I've been writing in and out of sickness - I remember Chris years ago talking about disease and dis/ease - she was and maybe still is the video curator at Hallwalls - Chris Hill - and I've been thinking through my work for years about discomfort, now trying to write those pieces which have no beginning and no ending, that is, pieces which are always already in a state of process or continuum, pieces answering the call or creating or continuing the call or the echo of the call, since there is little else to do - and I wrote about how thinking on death erases the foreclosing of texts, opens them up to the elements of the rethinking of others, of incompleted projects, since projects are never completed, never sustained, and so forth. At a distance just working with simpler programs, and then thinking through as well how trAce is going - in the midst of these others - and there has been a lot of backchannel to me about it, and I've been seeing an intensity developing along and through the lines of love and war, at least among the contributors - which fascinates me - I hope the intensity holds, hope the text almost becomes totally obsessive... I still need to go in and work the MOO more, maybe move some of the Bodi projects over there as well (to linguamoo) and experiment with the renaming of objects by numbers - but I haven't had the time to do any of this recently. I feel as if I'm on the run - need a breather to slightly switch direction. I still wish there were more webpages up... It's hard to believe that the project is only three weeks into itself, which is about an eighth of the whole, so there's plenty of time to experiment... Went over to panix.com today for the first time, to meet Magosia and to see the place. Saw the Cisco routers, the panix1, panix2, panix6, panix7, etc. machines, mail1, mail2, etc. It was terrific. Bought The Age of Bede (still looking for the History of the English Church), Japanese No Plays (explanatory - I have a lot of the texts), the first edition of the Cyber- reader (I have the second), and the collected works of Ambrose Bierce - want to look at the short tales/parables. Meanwhile Malgosia and I talked about old times, literally, and Michael Current - I gave her the disks I got from his mother - he died almost five and a half years ago. Current and I started the Cybermind email list together, and he helped me with the beginning of the fop-l list - then died shortly after... Today's still the 22nd in the afternoon... I want to work on some 3d mod- elling and thinking more about the direction of trAce - there was new writing on the loveandwar and the conferences seem to be fairly active... Other than that, with the loft still in pieces and my mother's illness, I feel somewhat dulled - Should be around the 24th in the morning; on the 23rd, slept and was very depressed. I downloaded a linux-on-a-floppy which really works - you boot from the floppy and the system is loaded into ram. I can't yet get it to connect to the Net, but I can mount msdos floppies and read and write to/ from them so work isn't lost when I get out of it. It's quite beautiful - very useful, since I can carry it from machine to machine! Took a while to get it running but then it was incredibly smooth - the easiest linux system (of course!) I've seen... Meanwhile, Miekal's class contributed some excellent things to the loveandwar, and I've oddly continued to be ahead of Sue on conference posting - still worried about taking too much stuff up. Reading more Bede, have the Latin which I can only read by using the English, as well as a book from Tom on the Anglo-Saxon names in one of the Bede manuscripts. Looking again at Grammatology (which doesn't seem so hard now), Derrida, and a number of other books - I bought five today so doing a hard read. And practicing shakuhachi and electric guitar so it's been busy. Mainly I'm still thinking I want to take the residency someplace new - perhaps looking into linux as a way of getting others in- volved with writing? I'm too tired to figure all of this out at the mom- ent... Finally, I worry about the advice I'm giving on the Webboard - I have no idea at times what I'm talking about but I like the liquidity of the conversations... Later this day of the 24th, having downloaded and run one more version of linux (as well as gotten on with the first version and almost lost a com- puter with a third version), having made more texts, having bought a copy of a collection of Lenin (which is as mechanistic and bad as I thought it would be), then reading Max Stirner (who I should be using with and over and above-board Lenin), not worrying about all of the problems at the mom- ent, just trying to reconfigure texts, moving between one machine and another, I dreamed of form slots the other day, today just violent torna- dos, going to look at the Stirner again (one reason I like the early Marx is his hysteria over Stirner like some sort of bad medieval passion play), having done all of this, I still need to practice some music, get offline for a while, just think think think - I wrote a text about Max Stirner, sent it out as usual. These texts are all found on the trAce site as well, but I have the distinct feeling that no one is accessing either them or this diary - if you _have_ read either (you won't know unless you read this far), please let me know - send a letter to sondheim@panix.com - I'd appreciate it. Today's the 25th of September; I'm reading a John MacDonald novel for relaxation, still on Derrida's Grammatology (skimming) and a few other books. I want to have a change in direction in my own writing, tend towards some- thing larger, perhaps another (for me) thinking through the couplings and linkages, something like a report on foundations - I half-tended towards that way of thinking with the two Lenin texts I sent out. I never dealt enough with halfgroupoids and in particular their extensions to groupoids which may or may not have relevance - it's fairly technical math for me and I need the time to think about it. The writing I do now seems more thrown out from centrifugal force, so to speak, as if it were spattering off the ends of things - the days are too complicated for me. Meanwhile, trAce continues to gnaw at me - while the Webboards are running well, I still want to go back to lingua moo myself, and think through other pro- jects - it would be a shame to remain only with the loveandwar project, which seems to be just about as successful as it could be, which is beyond what I thought possible. God, is any of this of interest here? Please write me, sondheim@panix.com if it is ... Meanwhile, again last night, I downloaded two more versions of linux on a floppy - one wrecked havoc (my fault I think, I was combin- ing things) on my 486/25, but nothing permanent, and the other went in as far as it could with the 4 megs and then just stopped. It runs really well on the other machine - called Traveller's Linux - so I have two linux- ready disks and I'm totally fascinated by these systems - with Tom's, I can get online with it as well, something called miterm, but the slattach program needed to run SLIP seems to hang. It's amazing, though, and gives me more power than I had before - I'm still looking for something (includ- ing the knowledge) to put on the 486/25 to turn it useful again - a couple of ideas floating around, but it's a long process... I love the idea of _energy_ and _portability_ and riding the operating systems and it occurred to me today that linux-prompt stuff is similar to thought itself, that is fast-segueing, jumpcuts, nuances, shaping material from the preconscious - in large part because the full screen is all lang- uage, no advertising, and the language rides like a shell on other shells and languages (pun intended), etc. - all the way down into the neural op- erations of the machine itself. And more on this later; it's a sunny NYC day out and I stay here like Monsieur Teste, and think, think, think ... Today we went to the Atlantic Antic street fair; I found a number of books including a hardbound version of Spencer Brown's Laws of Form, a book on Derrida by Hartman (Saving the Text), a book on binary systems which is critical for me, and the two-volume Skeats edition of Piers the Plowman - also a book on Chinese painting, and the second volume of the notebooks of the Indian mathematician Ramanujan. So a great deal to think about, and we're watching the 25th anniversary special of Saturday Night Live, and I'm wondering about binary systems. Today we talked on the MOO - I'm still wary of MOO stuff, especially after the Quota Review Board fiascos on Postmodern Culture MOO (PMC MOO) - the vehemence and thicketry (new word) of MOO politics came through loud and clear over there. Julian Dibbell's book helped back that up, unfortunately (my tiny life). The MOO talk was interesting; we'll try a chat room and see what happens - I'm curious about the difference, and whether others might join us. Meanwhile, I'm writing these texts which come out of using Tom's linux on a disk, mounting the full file system and ransacking my files, rewriting. So they become very very edgy, very wary, and I hear these voices scream- ing in my head, I've heard so much anguish in my life, I can write it down - then I place Old Clar as the main character/caricature/stereotype, some- thing out of a crime novel as well, undercutting myself, etc. It's compli- cated - the work's not at all politically correct, but is true to sounds I've heard, carried inside me. Then there's the material about Lenin, Marx, etc., and that makes me un- easy as well; I can't write all my doubts out here, but they keep surfac- ing; Marxism seems so much of a foreclosing and totalization - until one hits the Critical Theory people... I know the exaggeration of this, but I keep returning to images of the Gulag, etc. I'm a cold war baby... Mon Sep 27 00:08:24 EDT 1999 - right now - Monday the 27th towards evening; my mother should be all right, the pet- scan came out negative, meaning the cancer is just in the lungs and ad- renal gland. Hopefully the surgery a week from now will take care of things; it's been a harrowing period. I'm still working on renegading texts from the misc. directory - writing them from notes, from pieces of things. Today I did get the Michael Current disks from Malgosia and opened most of them; they're fascinating for the picture they throw of early Cybermind (not that the list is that important), as well as the wranglings over philosophical lists and list philosophies relatively early on. The relevant dates are 1993-94 of course. I sent three letters to the lists which should be of interest; I also forwarded them to Jon Marshall and Jerry Everard, both of whom have written on the lists, and both of whom are in Australia. Finished the John MacDonald novel, read some Piers the Plowman and the book on binary systems, then went back to Spencer Brown's Laws of Form which I still find irritating in a way - infused by neoplatonism. I'm trying to figure out how, if at all, it's possible to convert his notation into standard notation so I can see what the math is beneath the surface. I'm slow at this... And at the Salvation Army found a magazine from Kyoto that had two articles on shakuhachi, one by Marty Levinson who repaired mine. I'm glad I'm away from the ideology of the instrument; I have a personal relationship with it and that's sufficient... Forgot to mention reading also Ladakh in the Mirror of her Folklore by Kacho Sikandar Khan Sikandar, which Laura and Anastasios brought back; it's beautiful and reminds me of yet another literature I know nothing about. It reminds me of the ma- terial in the Ganesa Statuary of the Kadiri and Sinjhasari Periods that I have on Java. We'll do the new backboning hopefully in a week or so. The loveandwar piece stands as a monument to... something? I'm not sure what - perhaps texts that tear or pull at themselves, flay away at themselves. Mainly I love the intensity of the works; I'd like to see texts that are last texts, like the last texts of Nietzsche or Paul Celan. In the Seven Deadly Sins section Passus V of Langland, by the way, almost nothing on sexuality - I think it's the shortest section of all. Why? This would seem to underlie everything else... Next day, these fade into one another, I think it's the 27th? No, I'm online, it's Tue Sep 28 18:58:10 EDT 1999, just like that, now later. It's been a very rough day and night; we're strained over family and other issues, working them out, too much family complexity... But much better now; I downloaded DLX Linux again - I tried to Rawrite it to a DOS disk before - it wrote, but wouldn't work properly - this time it worked, writing it in Linux. So I can boot with it, but I STILL have nothing that will run on my 486/25 since this version demands a math co-processor. Still I have three different versions of pocket linux to play with it, and it's getting easier; I used elvis (a version of vi) to write a text based on the root directory structure. This was comple- mented by things out of the /dev/ directory in panix7.panix.com, as if directories were crashing down on a "Directory Club" and crashing down as well on the notion of narrative. I've _got_ to do more with binary structures; they sit gnawing at me. And I'm trying to work out the next few months, very tired at the mom- ent and not that able to think clearly. The Webboard has been really active, which is exciting; there are still some people checking in what seems to be dozens of times a day - I have no idea why. I keep looking at the Most Users and Most Posts categories... I absolutely cannot _distinguish_ between self, mind, brain, body, and language. I can sense differentiating domains in the mist, that's all. Meanwhile I find myself drowning in my neuroses, which seem incontrover- tible, a source of both work and misery. No one should have to live haunted; I drown in regrets, in imaginaries, almost as if I were hearing voices, seeing things, out of the corners of my eyes - recriminations, uncomfortable murmurs (I always think of Lingis in this regard), screams muted by distances across sea-side meadows in the night... Thursday the 30th of September, the last day of September, the last day of the the the six month writer-in-residency stint. I want to begin the changes to the loveandwar soon before everyone's steam runs out and I disappear into the Nigerian financial schemes/scams that my brother-in-law just forwarded. It is a bleak day in the US again as the debate over "ob- scene" or whatever art heats up and mayor Giuliani makes play after play to the yahoos, although I like the yahoos in Swift a fair degree above all of this. I've been reading Spencer Brown who tends towards oscillation in his math when bivalency appears, I think, then gives it a time-frame and turns it into a generator. I have to think about this; I read it late at night when I'm not necessarily at my best. Somebody sent me a note saying that Details magazine had an article on Kyoko Date and Webbie Tookay, who I've both "worked" with in terms of thinking theory - they had some of their facts wrong re: the former - who has become Diki in Korea, etc. So much for Details. I'm also thinking about trying to write something for Home Magazine - I met with the senior editor today who I quite liked - possibly on Mp3 or spam/scam, but I've no idea if I really have the ability to write in that style. Anything to extend myself and bring some extra money in; I'm always haunted by money. Then I'm thinking binary systems again and wondering about substitution systems, the kind I wrote about in Textbook of Thinking - if I can make a binary model out of those, relate it to couplings and linkages, and think about symmetries in the latter, I'll probably end up somewhere interesting if not totally naive as usual - but it remains to be seen if I have the time. So I wrote something called ~VM1 today - the VM for virtual model, and the ~ for the use of the vi editor - I was faking that (after having to use vi in one of the pocket linux systems). I like the idea of pages as scrolls or frames or frameworks, and the ideal of virtual models as both absolute and closed systems - so I'm trying this stuff out. If I were virtual I could live forever and be happy, because I always want to know how things come out here on the planet and I have no interest in afterlife where I'll be regaled with old friends, etc. I want to see what goes on all the time on earth; I wish I could look into everyone's home and heart all the time. Then I'd be happy! Just barely October 1 now; this afternoon looked at binary systems in all sorts of forms again. I wonder where this is taking me. I feel the need to create some sort of ordering among all the philosophical/phenomenologi- cal/literary/etc. work I'm doing - as if there were underlying structures guiding me. The only ones I can see are those related to couplings and linkages - in other words, those which have relationships between elements and those which have relationships only based on loose framings. The dis- tinction is fuzzy at best although it can be mathematically described to some extent. And given the complexity of the universe, such ultimate re- ductions (I'd include Wittgenstein, Carnap, Brown, etc., even von Foerster here) seem, in the long run, rather meaningless. So I keep going back to close readings and writings which can't be generalizable. I think some of this is also related to my ambition, which is to somehow produce a "masterpiece," whether or not I admit the absurdity of this. In- stead, I keep writing shortened and resonant texts, but these are still not finding a publisher at all - everyone who has said they would bring out a book of mine in the past 3-4 years (and there have been several), has reneged, as if they turn out to be embarrassed by my texts. So my writing and theorizing remains stillborn - even the few people who were going to bring out the Net text on CD-rom have backed down. I'm constantly twisted by this, internally seeing my work on one hand as ground-breaking etc. - certainly making philosophical stakes in new domains - and on the other as impossibly ugly, weak, faltering, etc. and unable to ever find any kind of legitimation. And while I'm at it, this lack of legitimation (i.e. "real" publishing) also keeps me from getting decent employment in terms of my work; I take part-time jobs when I can. The trAce residency is the best thing that has happened to me in years... And god, I'm tired of constant publication in e-zines and even offline zines - with nothing else accompanying the writing - as if I have to start over and over and over again. The last real book I had out of my own work - real book as opposed to chapbooks, broadsides, or hand-mades - came out from Station Hill - and that appeared in 1988. In this regard, I'm a total failure. So I keep thinking, _if only_ I could find a key, that is a "masterpiece" assembled out of my fragments - if only I could believe in such a key - that would make all the difference in the world to me. In the meantime, since I can't, and couldn't believe in such, I'm stuck with my work such as it is, hoping like hell that I'm not kicked off the servers that carry my webpages... It's gloomy, thinking this way... Now it's the day of October 2nd, early morning; Azure and I were a good three hours in front of the Brooklyn Museum, listening to a number of speakers; it was a rally against shutting the Museum down - something fascist Giuliani is making a platform here. There's a real hatred of art and the artworld in New York at the moment, although 60% of those polled were against Giuiliani shutting the museum down. As if that were a vic- tory - what about the 40% who want it closed? In a city supposedly this liberal, it's a horror. Susan Sarandan, Dred Scott, Wendy Wasserstein, Judy Blume, Norman Siegal, Jane Alexander, Rev. Docherty spoke - that was great - it was like a return to the old liberal Black/Jewish coalition in the midst of a lot of other multiculturalisms. It was cheering - but why these fights against censorship continue, decade after decade, with no progress - and why they're occurring in a country now with two million - TWO MILLION - people incarcerated in its jails, is beyond me. The US is a horror for a lot of people, but they're effectively silenced as most of the middle-class or yuppie population plays the stock market. I want to do some work for the Civil Liberties Union here if I get any spare time; we'll probably join. Meanwhile still thinking about fragmentation and binary systems and that has led to the last three texts back there in the ld.txt file - this has been a struggle I've gone through all my life, how to reconcile fragmen- tation and the split writing I do, with the idea of a "book" or "theory" or other authoritarian and institutionalized structure. And I was de- pressed all day, feeling totally like a failure; I wrote to a publisher, trying to get one of my books back up and running again, but I think it's really a waste of time. All my life I've felt somehow tainted or contaminated; things like this come back and reaffirm the feeling. Tomorrow working with Foofwa with electric guitar; we'll start thinking about the next dance number - Azure will also participate. And I'm read- ing a book on conspiracies just for fun, tried watching a bad print of Godard's Weekend, and going back into Ronin which I can watch with one eye open and no idea why I'm looking at it at all. But it's good to go unconscious at various emblematic moments... My god, it's October already. I should be up for the fest. Next day, October 3rd, I'm online in a few hours, talking about writing and despair; today I was looking again at Arabic and its similarity to Hebrew which is astounding, almost all the propositions close to identi- cal for example. This afternoon played guitar for Foofwa; he, Azure, and I talked about the collaboration coming up at the Experimental Television Center, which will involve body, sexuality, ballet, foreclosings of clas- sical forms - technically we'll use digital and hi8 video as well as quickcam and sampling. Foofwa wants to emphasize the dance which is a re- lief for me, since I want to deal more with text myself. Then we went to a party at Gary Sullivan's and Nada Gordon's, a housewarming, which was won- derful, although I always always always feel out of place, a loner or drifter - this is for real although so trite to say - If I could fit in I could be real famous! But I look around and I feel like a worm or something, worthless, stuttering, or too loud, whatever. And then everything internally falls apart... I can hide behind the Webboard; the liveliness there is wonderful. Do you ever feel everyone is complete somehow except for yourself? Today is the early morning of the fourth; I've been sick, feverish, and sleeping on and off, ran the early morning chat session on writing and despair and came back for half of the second - both were really rewarding - it's something I like doing. I'd taken notes ahead of time, so I had material to work with; these are issues that concern me, through Duras, Kristeva, other depressives - I'd even put Nietzsche in there through a false diagnosis on my part. I'm reading Saving the Text, Literature/Derrida/Philosophy by Geoffrey Hartman - I'd owned this book before, now have it again. Some of the intro is really relevant to my own work: "But what can it mean to place mind on its own axis and free it from books - to make mind its own text, as it were? Can we transcend telling toward, more simply, showing? Would that bring about (as both Husserl and Wittgenstein once hoped) a return to things themselves? Yet does not the very existence of words indicate a breach with the phenomenality of things, or with an ideal of showing, of evidentiality, taken from that sphere?" This also for me references Barthes' punctum or the grain of the voice; it's far too easy to forget in cyberspace-hypertext that there are things in the world, that a call of twentieth-century poetics has been towards the bypassing of language, "back to the things themselves." My own work in that regard is already _past the ruin_ - it tends towards or beyond a recognition that _things_ are always already lost; we're no longer innocent but caught within the skein of the symbolic. Which leads me towards a certain extremism in the text - what else is there to do - what else can be done - in order to return (as if there were a return; as if it were possible; as if it were possible without a politics) to a real of feminism, chora (in the Kristevan sense), discomfort, and _presence._ One might ask: _Where is presence on the Net?_ - refusing all answers, taking no easy way out... Tue Oct 5 23:12:43 EDT 1999 right now when I begin to write; I've been worried about my mother all day long, the operation was a success, there may be trouble with her lymph nodes and I'm upset, we won't have the results until Friday, I've also been very moody about Japan, trying to think through what happened to me "over there," and dealing with it, as usual, with a text - also a cancer text. I've also been working with the DAT recorder, recording my guitar work for future use - I love the quiet of the machine. And reading Clement on opera, Barthes on Japan again, Richard Klein on smoking, I don't smoke. And feeling incredibly happy about the loveandwar project - the backbones are developing really amaz- ingly - some of the texts I read today are astonishing. The conferences are going full-blast as well; I wish I could take time off... Meanwhile the Supreme Court of Jokers has denied Mumia's appeal, there was another protest, this one against something called Fallen Angels, and I worry more and more and more about a right-wing takeover of the States in the next election; Giuliani is ahead of Hillary Clinton for the NY Senate race 46% to 43% which is called a "statistical heat" but that gives the lie to the fact that Hillary had started way ahead of him. In my spare time I wonder if Piers the Plowman had an effect on Wordsworth and I answer to myself yes of course, but the dates might be way off. ... More tomorrow naturally - or the day after ... Tomorrow we're going to the Internet World convention here in New York - October 7, 1999, very latenight of the 6th, we'd been at the Internet conv. and the main thing, new buzzword, voicemail/email telephony etc. - get your email read to you over the phone, etc. All over the place. Less emphasis on community, little on webboards, lots on delivery. Picked up AOL5.0 and in- stalled - then removed it, after it began to interfere with dialup. It's already bloated, unnecessary. I've had trouble removing AOL Instant Messen- ger as well - I'd rather use ICQ - and finally just deleted a bunch of files, hoping for the best. Installed the new version of Netscape which works fine and picked up various from the AOL version which didn't unin- stall such as IE5 - I'd been on an earlier one. So that was ok. Reinstalled for the millionth time Quicktime 4.0 - one of the CDs I got wouldn't run. Picked up a trial BSD Unix, debating whether to play with this or not - I'm thinking not at the moment. Waiting to hear news about my mother. Reading Internet magazines by the dozen, going to give them away - very little of the older spirit survives of course, and I can just read so much about IPOs and killer apps and the like. Glad to see Silicon Alley still thinks the email list is the deeper and most intensive community - that always seems the case to me, but is rarely mentioned. Too many displays with glitter and little substance and false launches etc. - you can really see the bubble at Internet World. And that's taken up most of my day, now I've got reading otherwise to do, for which I'm looking forward. And running around in the Webboard of course as usual, more tomorrow; this has just been too much in- formation, with not enough necessary, solid, solid, solid... Fri Oct 8 00:29:31 EDT 1999, too much of a busy day, found Turkle's first book (which I'd already read) on psychology of computers; a novel by Ariel Dorfman, reading absolutely wonderful books - D.J. Waldie's Holy Land, A Suburban Memoir; Richard Dorson, Folk Legends of Japan; Lafcadio Hearn, Letters from The Raven (very strange, pre-Japan; I tend to like Hearn af- ter reading I. Noguchi's memoir, which seemed to stress the manic-depres- sive aspects of the writer); Anne Allison, Nightwork, Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (which reflects on Niku- ko's snack-bar existence in Fukuoka), whew... And going through all the materials from the Internet World conference; now the keyword seems to be _convergence_ - whiteboarding, webboarding, audiovideoconferencing, and so forth - Internet Telephony seems of interest here, and there are _a lot_ of companies, URLs, etc., to look up. Oh, I'm still happiest on Linux. Tomorrow we find out the _condition_ of my mother, what the tests will show, the biopsies, etc., and I'm unable to sleep or think properly. On top of this, I pulled my neck out a few days ago, and can't keep my head upright - I'm more aware than ever of the _weight of the nub_ that char- acterizes the top of the body. So I've been using a heating pad, taking (at night late) tylenol, etc., trying to take of the problem - which doesn't seem to be working... Finally (for now) I woke again thinking of all the missed stuff - the books which were supposed to come out (the third is probably not going to appear either), the reading I was supposed to have in Buffalo, the cd I was supposed to have out with the Internet Text on it, the magazine article I was interviewed for (on my music) that probably won't appear, etc. etc. - I'm feeling like a pariah, wondering again if there's a black list against me, since all of these projects (and there are more) start up with a flourish and excitement, and then decay into me writing a letter once every few weeks - until that stops as well, and my voice / their voice disappears into darkness again. The last real book of my work (I keep saying this, here, keep thinking about it, but this is a diary, full of repetitions, not novelty) came out in 1988, and nothing since. And I _still_ feel I'm doing new work, in relatively uncharted waters, and that this work with die with me, which won't be any great loss _then,_ but feels like one _now._ Fri Oct 8 16:45:53 EDT 1999 So I wrote these letters last night, telling people I won't write again, about the book (not) coming out, additional copies of Jennifer, etc.; it's better for me to draw closure than to keep hoping. And I'm staying off-line, hibernating a bit. So I've been reading mostly, more of Holy Land, Nightwork, etc. I draw a blank on my life. I think about the fragmentation of my work and my justification for it; I wonder if every fragmentation is equivalent to every other; if there are no over-arching principles, take what one can, what serves the community, what seems proper. I attach cancer to Jennifer and think about the disease-free arena of telecom, computer viruses and worms notwithstanding. I dream of my fourth wife screaming at me in the loft, the place ugly and chaotic, water leaking through the ceiling, my usual feelings of hopelessness. The insomnia's gotten worse; I don't like trying to sleep because it's a long period of doing nothing. Sun Oct 10 00:09:15 EDT 1999 Just turning, the news from my family has suddenly reversed as well, my mother getting better, health on the way for real. And I'm confused in the face of my traditional pessimisms but glad I'm proved for wrong for once. On the street bought "Love Bytes, The Online Dating Handbook" from 1995, The Waite Group, no less, to add to my collection concerned with Net ideology relatively early on (not really, but during the period of the turnover towards the web); I also got yet another copy of Sartre's Being and Nothingness, all 800+ pages in the Washington Square addition - I'm not sure where my other copies are. And found a local bookstore which is very cheap has a _basement_ they'll let us down into and so Azure and I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, all around Chinatown, and back across the bridge and back home, maybe eight miles tonight which was as perfect weather as we get. And I got back Xanadu, The Computerized Home of Tomorrow and How it Can be Yours TODAY!! from the 70's, so things are actually looking up. On the Webboard, submis- sions to dout.cfm and eout.cfm are interestingly confused, ending up in the middle of the texts, difficult to find - I'm fascinated. This was the result I think of editing out someone's submissions - which was a real nuisance for those involved (not me). So I'll relax a little and play electric guitar, last night worked on Keep on Truckin' at very high speed veering into pure noise. Diaries replete with narcissism. Then today heard the book etc. is still coming out, that I shouldn't nag, I replied that I shouldn't have been told the work would appear in July, but I'm grateful in fact if anything of my work appears, it's like harsh loam grown in harsher fields, looking somewhere for the flowers/stems/ when all there is, is below ground, tubers, rhizomes, meristemations... Tonight, now it's the 11th, this was the 10th, at the Zinc Bar, I heard three poets from Luxembourg read, Nico Helminger, Jean Portante, Pierre Joris, and what I thought might have been an evening of stable writing ended up fascinating me, with talk of the Luxembourgian language in relation to Yiddish and German, multi-lingual poems, and a real sense of urgency in Portante's and Joris' writing. I know Pierre, admire his writ- ing, translations, anthologizing, and roots (Jabes, Blanchot, Celan, mean the world to me in a way); his poem re: Jabes on the desert, his new work h.j.r. (which he explained by way of the hegira/nomadicism), his referenc- ing Sumerian, Arabaic, etc. fascinated me; I also feel myself marginal, nomadic, shifted among cultures - a _constant_ feeling, one of not belong- ing anywhere; the writing brought that home. As did Helminger's discussion of Luxembourgian, apparently spoken by very young children until they French/German their way in school - and the way all three poets moved among English, German, Luxembourgian, French, even Italian, etc., the words intense across all of these. Portante read close to the mike in Eng- lish, not comfortable with that, speaking the words slowly - reminding me of Jack Nicholson in King of Marvin Gardens - or Acconci - I also thought of Wilfred Owen - there was something about the trenches in the work, as if it _had_ to get out - I keep thinking today about issues of urgency/ emergency/timing. All of this work seemed somehow bound both to geography and "ageography" - not postmodern, but walking on a satellite of a dis- tant planet... The chats went well today; I only regretted my own lack of clarity - but I am so trapped in intertwinings, unable to see on one hand metaphysics and on the other foreclosings - I put some final notes up for anyone who might be interested. In a way the Webboard is seething with energy which is how it should be. And I got Ivan Morris' The World of the Shining Prince, on Genji, which I've wanted for a long time - I need more time for reading, practicing music, writing theory - there are not enough hours in the day - I push myself to the limit. Azure marked my body this evening, wonderful. Tue Oct 12 00:38:04 EDT 1999 and this afternoon I slept for long hours, almost until 3, after getting up earlier; I've been reading Ivan Morris and the Luxembourgians but I did want to stay offline for a long time today for a change; we walked around looking at equipment. I feel dull. I've been working on the portal page, putting up a temporary new one which will become permanent; for this I used Netscape composer and then cutehtml 1.2 to correct some of the tags. It was easy but slightly tedious to do. So my writing hasn't gone very far until now. It's a very weird time for me - catching up on too much missed sleep the past few days and nights. I did finish Holy Land, bought two more paperback Freuds (I'd given most of my Freud away but am getting the set back, mainly for Azure, although it's good to see the titles again). Cybermind seems tired to me; fop-l, which will become fiction-of-philosophy@purdue.edu (you can subscribe through majordomo@purdue.edu if I remember ok) is going ok; cyberculture is going ok; the world seems paste. It's my state of mind, coming down from the tension/stress over my family, trying to figure out if I'll be able to survive economically after trAce. At this point I have no idea at all, but then again I'm always writing as if each text were my last. So I'll let you/it go at that; tomorrow, more meandering --- Wed Oct 13 01:38:02 EDT 1999 Today went to the basement of a bookshop with Azure, Tom, and Leslie; this is one I discovered - the basement's not open to the public. I ended up with the Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites" from 1983, published in the USSR - this is the show-trials verbatim, totally chilling stuff. I also found two Smithsonian Annual Reports from 1931 and 1938; a chilling biography of Kim Il Sung; and a novel by a Sara Levy translated into German, Berlin 1931, from French - I need to research this. I traded my Kathy Acker diary to Tom and Leslie for the DAT recorder. I also got another collection of essays on intuitionist logic, and a book on Modern Radio Science, 1988, technical. After this, I went back into Blender and prepared an image for the trAce new site; Miekal And did a brilliant Flash work for the same, and we're getting set to go. The _absolutism_ inherent in so much Soviet writing is frightening; the violence of language is so apparent. I don't think this should be over- looked, forgotten, now that the USSR has passed in one form into history - these texts need to be studied. The same goes for the writings of Kim Il Sung - all my fears I expressed in Annihilation: To the Limit! come boil- ing to the surface again. Fear rides the pages in these books; I'll prob- ably write into the texts this evening - my usual kind of work when I can't come to grips with something. T & L might go to Graz; I've got to get _writing_ and it's been a long strange day - I've also got these tapes from Julian Samuel to watch in the next day or so... Wed Oct 13 20:58:00 EDT 1999 And Roswell's about to come on. I've been reading about categories and topoi, particularly a section by MacLane, Sets, Topoi, and Internal Logic in Categories. I don't understand too much of this of course, but the example of the category Set^N, _sets through time,_ close parallels the immersive/definable distinctions I was making back in 1973 (this book's from '74). The diagram looks like a ladder, goes from left to right. In my i/d distinction, immersivity references being- in-time and definability references abstracted structuration; the diagram represents their interaction. An _i/d hierarchy_ is apparent, since the diagram embeds i/d, and can be considered d(i/d); one's consideration is moved to i/d(i/d) and so forth. This was related to the "structure of reality" I worked with, state or process diagrams, etc. Meanwhile found a nice edition of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason today, quite lovely; and I'm still tuning the new pages - that should be finished tomorrow. There has been too much online today, even today when I tried to take a break. I used Blender last night to make another image for the top of one of the new backbones (which I also think of scratch pages, as in scratch music among other things); it's uncomfortable, organic, partially broken in appearance - in other words, works for me. Will write again thinking through the Soviet material. Will practice shak- uhachi, which I've been away from for a while. Will think and try to sleep by 3. I can't keep going at this pace. Will continue practicing the weird jazz chords I've been using. Today played all over the place in B minor. And trAce has already been adding to the new pages, and the discussion is thick and I worry about the server. Speaking of which found a newer old Mac for $49 with a CD-rom drive; I'll pick it up most likely in the next couple of days... Very tired, not getting enough sleep. What else is new... We went to Foo- fwa and Banu's tonight for dinner - I saw the tapes that Freddie did - he's on the cover of one of the Village Voice sections and apparently in Elle magazine as well. I borrowed back a book I gave him, Women on Ice, Feminist Essays on The Tonya Harding / Nancy Kerrigan Spectacle, one of the best applications of theory I've read - it's edited by Cynthia Baugh- man, and is brilliant. I need it for the work I want to do - I'm thinking of working through ballet issues as well as a piece based on the recent "play" texts, all of which go together. Meanwhile, I'm offline, it's the 14th heading towards the 15th, maybe the 15th already - and I have to prepare for a talk coming up at the School of Visual Arts as well. I no- tice I repeat myself in this diary - issues of exhaustion, worry, prepar- ation, but maybe writing here is a way of calming down. I didn't get the Mac by the way - it was already gone; I did get a tape from Foofwa (who is also Freddie, Freddie Gafner / Foofwa d'Imobilite) of the recent dance pieces (I provided video and music for them) in Germany. And at Allen's bookstore I bought a second-hand copy of early Roman Empire poets - I have the later Roman Empire volume which has been important to me. And I'm hoping that the pages are properly set up at the Webboard - I've been having trouble uploading to it - this diary.txt will be a test... Sat Oct 16 17:14:42 EDT 1999 Much later you see, and I can't get into trAce with ftp to put the diary.txt up so I haven't been writing too much into it. The usual books, Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, another book on Chinese art and architecture, Euclid's works along with others, etc. Reading constantly into the early Roman Empire poets. So not too much has changed. Working guitar and shakuhachi again. Always too tired and now thinking of going for tests at HIP to see if something's wrong. Very pleased at the Webboard - Miekal's flashworks are stunning. Me, I just want to do the plays - Foofwa's interested in doing them as well so we'll probably do something with them at the Experimental Tele- vision Center - I'm looking forward to this, coming up soon. In two days speaking at the School of Visual Arts - I've been working on notes. The pieces at trAce are continuing to fascinate me in general; after this project, I'd like to focus on the millennium works, if we can ever get traceroute off the ground. I've got to get in touch with people about this - have something foregrounded on the entry page, if I can - maybe send out an announcement to Net Happenings. Didn't get my work accepted for nerve - but I didn't think I would - what I do isn't really erotic, etc. I can't see anything they'd be interested in at all. All I do is work or think about work and writing and theory and I have no idea how Azure puts up with this, but it's wonderful; our relationship is incredibly strong both ways and sustaining... Mon Oct 18 01:30:58 EDT 1999 I do the talk tonight; I might not be on that long. The chat was more scattered today than usual (Sunday) but went ok. I'm tired, feeling ill. I played guitar good. I got a book on the Japanese cinema from 1954-52 under the American occupation. Read more of The Shin- ing Prince. Ordered a book on early Tantric metaphysics and another on Kristeva. Made a .gif of 16k which I'd like to put up, slightly off or risque, but not heavily so, nothing censorable; still, I wonder what the limits of Nottingham, trAce, the demographics, myself, are. Watched more of Julian Samuel's work on postcolonialism. Read a bit more on Ladakh. And am feeling just worn; I'll be happier when the School of Visual Arts talk is over, and/or when the Mets wih the playoffs. I apologize to the dull- ness of this, if there are any readers left; I promise to say _something_ when the ftp to the trAce directories is up and running again. I'm always making promises...