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Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 12:17:05 -0500 (EST)
From: Clifford Duffy <cwduff@alcor.concordia.ca>
To:  eyebeam@list.thing.net @list.thing.net
Subject: <eyebeam><blast> localizations & Words "on" Web
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Situation here:
// Montreal: Big Ice storms at the start of the year and 2.3 million
people were without power. All around the island; darkness, then rumours
of water going bad; army called in: Ice frozen everywhere and thousands
of trees - [So left then returned] - train schedules delayed **hours of
line ups for grounded jets*** snapped, scattered, massacred trees.
Price-gouging; batteries, and the return of the Transistor radio. Not so
many "direct deaths" at least at not ** meantime Cyber spaces virtual
worlds going on/off as computers flicker/ screens fadograph (Finnegans
Wake)first.//** Mean while this poet that I am writes.***  ///The
hospitals held up well. Until the hundreds of injured began to show up
come and we saw how recent "cut backs" have affected our health care
system which used to be benign, rich, and capable. Now we have Ministers
on television telling our doctors they should manage the little staff
they have better. And last week a  woman died while waitin for service
in emergency./// Paris- Montreal connection is strong for many here
because of the language. But many here head "south for the winter" to
Florida. Strange place to head, but best for modern day colonialists;
the descendants of the conquerers of La Nouvelle France. A cold country
it is; a cold time we had of it.  ** Re:Paris some go south, Others head
East to Paris, France, and not Paris, Texas. And drop away into the
European spaces of immigration and emigration. Are they in Virilio's
sense, dromomaniacs? Are they cyber travellers (having already seen the
world through the television screens of their lives) disguised as real
travellers, virtual nomads disguised as tourists? IS this, to quote
Johnny Rotten, a Cheap Holiday in Other People's Misery? /// Word-break
cut and reality slash/ While real war bullets and shells cut through the
screens to achieve real body pain and death// And on the streets? More
homeless and more beggars than ever. "Montreal" a "great" city in
decline. And I/ I am a poet thinking each day, and more and more of
LEAVING. For various reasons; personal, political, educational. **P.
Virilio states that we no longer live in space, but that we live in
Time, in what he calls the World Chronopolis. That North Americans are
being endo-colonized. That televison is the 'museum of accidents.' If
that is the case, then what is the web? What is the cyber-space? Can
poetry be read on the flickering web pages? Does it make any difference?
Has it really changed the medium itself?


           Paris...Montreal "a Canadian"...Moscow?

        **************
About** Hopscotch (1959) by Julio Cortazar. Are we hopscotchers over the
cyber-web of virtualities? Are the cities now virtualities of the
screens in our cave-rooms living rooms? In Cortazar's novel, the
characters live the 'exile' scene in Paris. But that is inaccurate; they
are expatriates. Which is not the same. They move by choice. One
confuses the issue by naming expatriation exile, as one confuses another
issue by calling refugees emigrants. But where is the boundary for those
exiled by their own lonesomeness, their own 'internal' exile.*** Thus
the cyber-days and a walk through the 'living-room' of computed
cyber-space.** Perhaps to really be a traveller one should not own
property.  Should a poet publish "on" the web? How can one "publish"
"on" something that is not there, and is merely the imaginary flicker
[the virtual?] of electronic-chemical circuitry? If all text is a
deconstructed seamless flow of breaks and hazards stretching back and
forth, sideways and "rolling" into the depths as well as contracting on
the surfaces, if the pusillanimous "real" paper texts of the dead cannot
reach us and be read, then what purpose to play the margins of the
strange dead land called the web?  My fear is that de-realization is the
normative measure of the web "text," and if that is the case, then there
is a real danger that Poetry will not survive the "cyber" scene. This is
not to deny that marvelous and magical sites have and will be
constructed. But how can one read a web page? How can Poetry in all its
myriad and many difficult forms survive this further disembodiment? Is
it desirable? It is one thing to download personal letters, gifts and
poetry, prose excerpts, and essays, but does one own want to "down-load"
[what demeaning lingo!] the whole cultural inheritance of literature? To
what purpose when the books already exist.*** On the other hand, there
is always room for experimentation and glorious innovation, and if It
Works don't fix it.***         ** No position taken, except that of
personal taste? Is that what one is left with in the end? A personal
space, a merely personal taste? ***  And I say, No; one must find a
machine that cuts both ways  and uses the net, the web, "cyber-space"
against its limits. A desire machine that uses the emptiness of the
virtual to return a richness and plenitude to all domains of experience.
*** Some thoughts.







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