QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQ] QQQ] QQQ] QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQ] QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQ] \QQ\ QQQQQQQQQ] QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ \QQ\ QQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] Volume I Issue VIII ~~~````''''~~~ CORE is published monthly by Rita Rouvalis (rita@eff.org) and is archived on ftp.eff.org in the /journals directory. Subscriptions and submissions should be sent to core-journal@eff.org. Feel free to reproduce CORE in its entirety across Cyberspace as you see fit. Please contact the authors to republish individual articles. ~~~````''''~~~ THIS ISSUE: The Joshua Tree Quakes ..... John Perry Barlow Cartoons Vs. PostModern Fiction & Criticism ..... Richh State of the Art ..... Barbara Hlavin ___________________________________________________________________________ John Perry Barlow barlow@icecube.pinedale.wy.us THE JOSHUA TREE QUAKES Sunday, June 28, 1992 Direct from the Fault Zone... In case you were wondering what the Joshua Tree Earthquakes felt like to someone in Hollywood who wasn't working for CNN, here's one guy's experience... My daughters and I spent last night in a large stucco and masonry house in Old Hollywood belonging to Coco and Peter Conn. I slept on the couch in the living room next to a huge cage housing 6 parakeets. The younger two girls were in the next room . It was a troubled night even before the terra got infirma. At about 3:30 AM, our five year old, Amelia, came out, woke me up, and told me she dreamt that her room was filling with rattlesnakes. I assured her it wasn't and she padded back to bed. At around 4:30 Anna, the seven year old, emerged with her own nightmare. It was about her little sister being kidnapped, she said. But then, , she claimed she still couldn't find Amelia in bed. She really *had* been kidnapped. This brought me right around and I went to check it out. Amelia, it turned out, was curled up in a little ball at the foot of the bed. I went back to my couch, fell back to sleep at once, and was awakened 15 minutes later by the frenzied lashing of little wings as the parakeets suddenly began hurling themselves against the walls of the cage and bouncing off one another in hysterical flight. I looked at my watch. It was 4:55 AM. They continued to engage in this alarming activity for the next ten minutes, during which time the whole house joined them. A couple of minutes before 5 AM, the shaking started, rattling dishes, causing the hardwood floors to moan and creak. The overall displacement and acceleration was about what one might feel in a large airliner experiencing moderate turbulence. Outside gathered the sound of ten thousand car alarms, at varying distances, being activated. Eerie beyond description. But the most singular phenomenon was the lights. The house is somewhat elevated on the slopes of Mount Hollywood. (The one with the Sign.) To the south one could see a lot of LA bathed in large, spreading patches of softly throbbing lights. They were diffuse and a sick green in color. They looked a lot like ground level Aurora Borealis. Which, I conclude, is pretty close to what they must have been. At first I thought they might be coming from downed power lines and exploding transformers, but there was no arc flash. They had the same soft build and decay that I've observed in the Northern Lights which can be seen in the high mountains of Wyoming quite frequently in the fall and spring. My best guess is that there is some kind of piezelectric energy release which causes phosphorescence in the atmosphere's own natural neon. But why have I never heard of this effect before? (It wasn't just my hallucination either. I have since talked to a number of people who saw them, though there was no mention made of them by any of the media.) The quake went on for an amazingly long time...about 45 seconds...but I never felt motivated to grab my kids and make a run for the lawn. Nor did it ever get strong enough to wake them back up. If I was frightened it was more on account of the of the lights, which really did have some ominous End of the World quality to them. LA in the Latter Days. I got up and found the parakeets all clinging sideways to the exterior bars of the cage as though spun there. They looked very uncertain. I went back to sleep and then woke bolt upright about two hours later as though hit by a cattle prod. I lay there for about a minute trying to figure what had induced such a compete and unwelcome alertness before the second quake hit. It seemed only a little weaker than the first, but it also seemed to go on longer and cycle through several waves of intensity. This time the parakeets didn't budge (so to speak) nor were any lights to be seen. (Not that they would have been visible. The sun was up.) Really, except for those lights, the strongest Southern California quakes in 40 years seemed kind of denatured. But it might get weirder. Seismic experts claim that there is a 50% chance of an additional 6 point plus quake over the next few days and are advising people to avoid the freeways. There's little evidence that anyone is taking them seriously. ___________________________________________________________________________ Richh richh@netcom.com CARTOONS VS POSTMODERN FICTION & CRITICISM ------------------------------------------ POSTMODERN FICTION & CARTOONS CRITICISM -------------------- ------------------------------ Leaves one feeling warm Chyeah, right and nostalgic, with a profound sense of satisfaction and well- being. Celebrates play. Likes to think it celebrates play, but actually is more analagous to "explaining the joke away" than anything else. Today's cartoons suck moose. I'll take Coleridge and Trilling over the Yale school any day. Foucault is dead. AIDS. Mel Blanc is dead. Age. Barthes was a big eater. The Tasmanian Devil. POSTMODERN FICTION & CRITICISM CARTOONS ------------------------------ -------------------- "Metafiction," as practiced by I really like when you Borges et al, is fiction that see the hand of the cartoonist calls attention to itself, never holding the drawing pencil, lets the reader forget that it or when the characters step is artifice. outside the film. Derrida will often use a word and It's also cool when you see immediately cross it out to achieve the pencil swoop down and a desired effect, a technique he erase the character. I especially calls "sous rasure", meaning like when this happens to Daffy 'under erasure' Duck, and he becomes nothing but his mouth(!!) None of the works that have been The cartoons I like best, old "deconstructed" have ceased to be Tom and Jerry's, Bugs Bunny, vital works. For example, Derrida Daffy Duck et al, are still deconstructed Freud. Yet Freud's around, and you can usually writings are still out there, still find them during Cartoon sending messages, still contributing Express from 6-7 on USA, or on TNT. to our understanding of the mind, And Nickelodeon, of course. and will y Rubble Much deconstruction is spent "Be vewwwwy quiet." searching for the ever-elusive "trace" Much deconstruction is spent "If he catches you you're through." searching for the ever-elusive "trace" Barthes is my favorite post- "That Road Runner is really a structuralist. crazy clown." There is no universal signifier. My pencil is bigger than yours. Phallocentricism is old news. There are only mis-readings. Shit. The Flintstones are on. __________________________________________________________________________ Barbara Hlavin twain@u.washington.edu STATE OF THE ART Now suppose we are having an "affair," you and I, by which we, and the world, or our own cozy corner of the world, no different really from any of the other corners, containing as it does the same kinds of garbage, but this is our garbage, we have created it, we are comfortable with it, it is ours; means that we are sleeping together, sharing the same bed or beds, two of them, alternately not simultaneously, think of the laundry bills in sheets alone, and which also means, in addition to sharing beds (yours or mine, depending on whether you are allergic to my cats or I to your Sharpei, whether you are subject to homesickness or even a mild but disturbing uneasiness when separated from your water bed your electric blanket with dual controls your Mr. Coffee coffee machine your electric toothbrush your Waterpik) and I hope I'm not boring you but it is important to lay out the essentials of this, as it were, limited partnership, to establish as they told us in business school the formal limits and definitions thereof in order to prevent confusion and misunderstanding and lawsuits in later life -- it means we have dinner together three times a week, see Japanese films of Shakespeare's plays, discuss the significance of Beckett's bicycle (does he ride it? does he ride it too much? does he ride it enough?), argue the relative merits of Valium vs. TM, we are of our age, we are culture-acquisitive and badly educated like everyone else in this pox-eaten country, we are pleased with ourselves and, for a time, each other, we smoke each other's cigarettes, you smoking Balkan Sobranie made from the topmost leaves of the famous Yenidje tobacco with the famous Balkan Sobranie Filter, I Camels without filters, which has a cultural position of its own, eat each other's English muffins, look out the same windows, and through the insidious process of propinquity find ourselves appropriating one another's metaphors, I have never told you how much this bothers me. Suppose all these conditions to prevail, these details to be true, suppose that one night I am sitting up in bed and you, in an abstract but friendly manner, are scratching my back, right there, ahh, between the shoulder blades, ahhh, but suppose I then twitch in a way, a fashion that you interpret, correctly as it turns out, as portentous; this alarms, distresses you, and when I tell you... oh you will say you "understand," I know you, Pamela or Joyce, or Joan, or Susan, or Brenda, but you continue to cry; this crying or "weeping" on your part first concerns then irritates me; it is not after all entirely my fault: there is something you refuse, deny, I don't know, there is something you want from me, the electrodes you attach to my head when you think I'm sleeping, I don't know, it's, there are limits, I don't know, I want you to be "reasonable," I want you to stop crying. You cry nicely, using the edge of the sheet to wipe your eyes, and for the first time in eight months your feet are warm, a consequence no doubt of the emotion provoked by my "announcement." I can't stand it, you will say, weeping; of course you can stand it, dear girl with the Balkan Sobranie burning expensively in the ashtray, plenty of people have stood it, only consider the generations and generations yet to come who will stand it, stand for it, unless there is a revolution of a nature the practical aspects of which elude me, maybe the Chinese... It is not you, I say, to comfort you, although this is a lie and you know it is a lie, it is precisely you, you with your exhaustive knowledge of Russian Orthodox iconography, your truly remarkable collection of Bix Beiderbecke records, your hair which is either red or yellow, unless this time it is brown, or black, you with your scandalous uncle who moved to France and became a Communist deputy, you with your poetry or your painting or your cello music, your weekend skiing, your job in Social Services where five days a week you harass the poor, you with your under- or over-privileged childhood, it is you, I am tired of you. Your closet is full of old picket signs, I am often unable to find my coat, you wear the stigmata, I have seen your palms bleed, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, when you thought I wasn't looking, and even though the old horrors are not ours -- except, perhaps, in a metaphysical sense, but let us be pragmatic: I did not kill Robert Kennedy -- the night is young, we have time, we have made a beginning, here. You are not alone, take comfort from that, I am unhappy too, does this solace you, I am trying to balance on this difficult situation like a paralytic on the top of a flagpole, are you even remotely conscious of the humor as you stand in front of the mirror hating your face and swallowing three, four, five aspirin? Some claim predestination or karma, but I don't know: consider the effort, the intricate plans that would have to be laid down like architectural drawings in the very structure of our genes, the foundation of the universe, do you really believe anyone would go to all that trouble just to make you miserably unhappy? It seems doubtful, it is, at the very least, problematical. Nice word, that: problematical. I enjoy speculation, the mutifarious forms of useless intellect, the uses of formlessness; at this very moment there are nine books on my desk, like nine bottles of poison: Do Not Touch. Four primary and five secondary sources, two of the secondary sources are irrelevant. The thought of irrelevance inspires me, I begin to play Chopin's Etude in E Flat Minor sitting naked at the piano, my inspiration is often mistaken for frenzy; the reproduction of a famous triptych by Hieronymous Bosch rattles on the wall, the neighbors are cursing, you are talking, to the toilet, to the laundry hamper, to the soap dish, the mirror: For you I had exotic tattoos applied to my face, brilliant shades of crimson, blue, green, the tattooing done in accordance with arcane placement rituals, following the patterns of the Dugam Dani, who fight for fun; the serial number on my wrist matched your dog tag. I joined the Church; you told me you loved me when I said the Pope had moral authority. I sent bottles of expensive whisky to your mother. Men, other men, found me desirable, they expressed interest in my legs, I had them removed, the legs. You gave me a beautiful wheelchair, one that had belonged to Lionel Barrymore, decorated with flags of sixteen different nations, we were so gay! I refused you nothing, my promising career with the Ballet Russe, I gave away our children, and now, now, now... On and on the soft plaint, like rain in the evening, like a Benedictine at prayer, poor Sister Polycarp, floundering in the frigid North Atlantic, off Cape Farewell. A SAMPLE CONVERSATION Nothing fixed Nothing tangible A dark mood, like a stream like a wind drifting, listing illusion illusion as illustration illusion is the problem illustration is the problem Passing the stars I tried... I know. Very hard... You're a good lass. My heart is breaking. Don't overdo it. It's all so meaningless. It's not without meaning. Not the meaning you want, perhaps. NOT THE MEANING I WANT! This is no good. It clarifies nothing. All across the continental United States, in France, Germany and England, in the socialist people's republics and in doomed democracies, in obscure tribes that employ the full range of vowel sounds, this dialogue is taking place. Think of it! In every time zone, all hours of the day and night! Spangled with umlauts, cedillas, in Welsh and Hebrew, in French, the language of promises and evasions, in Basque! In Icelandic! Probably not on Mars. But everywhere else! When you come out of the bathroom I will present you with a fistful of words, even though you would prefer daffodils or carnations; I will make a gift to you of the unfading word, the fern that lives on air, it is a pretty thing; nevertheless you will prefer sweetpeas or nasturtiums. When you come out of the bathroom, if you ever come out of the bathroom, I will hurl memories at you, I will stuff you full of memories as if they were ice cream, perhaps we will weep together and you will fall in love with me all over again, which will be very satisfactory. And while I look for my coat among the signs I will offer you a noble friendship, we will sweep up the fragments of this broken night and I will lay them on my empty pillow, if you had any sense you would slash my wrists with them, but you will put them in an urn in your room containing the full-size replicas of the Easter Island monuments, a gift from a former lover, or else you will make a necklace of them for your giraffe. So keep your chin up Broken Blossom, courage Camille, stiff upper lip, don't take any more wooden nickles, keep your head out of the gas oven, and better luck next time. I am the youngest of seven sons, I am on an impossible quest, I have many castles to visit before night falls. ///////~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~\\\\\\\ CORE1.08 JULY 1992