to: ellipsis
from: utopia
9 July 1996
subject: letter nine I
attachments: from the book of a village
: following giraldus
: twenty-five villages
dear t+j
You may not have realised but this is Utopia not
jcj writing today!
Noticing that he is many days behind with his
letters,* Numeroso and Edwina Mare and William
Dragon and I offered to write some of them for him
- so that he can have some rest and yet meet that
deadline which he's set his mind on.
When I told him of the idea he agreed immediately,
saying, 'The first one will have to react to the
two texts I left waiting ... and then choose texts
for whoever writes the next letter ... and so on' ...
and then he went to sleep with a look of relief.
We didn't promise to write much - just enough to
keep the process going while he sleeps, four
letters in a night. Perhaps no more than
postcards.
We used his table of random numbers to decide the
order in which we are going to write, and also to
choose the texts for each other, just to avoid
arguments. The chance process chose Numeroso and
me to write the first two letters and e + w to
write the second two. So here I am writing letter
nine. I'll be as brief as I can.
So how do I react to the two softecnica texts from
letter eight - the one about the book and the one
about the phone?
I don't think that they require comment - they're
self-explanatory. But personally I like 'The
phone' more than 'Book', and I especially like the
hypertextual form of it, but I know that jcj is
not happy about that.* He still finds that what he
calls its gestalt, or connectiveness, is not
present in his mind when he reads it in Jonathan's
fragments, beautiful as they seem to me in
themselves. But to me the hypertext is fine, as it
seems to be to many who would not be able to read
a text of that density at one go. No wonder you're
getting appreciative comments from people who are
looking for clarity.
I think the essay on the book shows why literary
people are disturbed by the internet. If everyone
can write on the net, what will happen to literacy
and literature? What they seem to forget is that
the printing press is a machine and not a temple.
If poetry could come to terms with 'mechanical
reproduction' so can it also come to terms with
the electronic version.
My chance choice for Numeroso to read is called
'From the book of a village'. I guess he'll like
it.
Utopia
ps I am also including extracts from 'Following
Giraldus' and 'Twenty-five villages'. In these two
projects jcj visits Wales where he invites people
at the perifery to be central to his work.
[Periferal spelling accident!]