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CORE Volume 1 Issue 8
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Volume I
Issue VIII
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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
