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CORE Volume 1 Issue 6
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Volume I
Issue VI
~~~````''''~~~
CORE is published monthly by Rita Rouvalis (rita@eff.org) and is
archived on ftp.eff.org in the /pub/journals directory. It can
also be downloaded from the EFFSIG Forum on CompuServe, Library
5, Zines from the Net. 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.
~~~````''''~~~
FEATURING
A Short History .... Joe Green
I Look At My Children.. .... Kenneth Wolman
Busted .... RICHH
The Old Hobo's Tale .... Robert Curtis Davis
___________________________________________________________________________
Rita Rouvalis rita@eff.org
New Frontiers
When people ask me how many people read CORE, I generally shrug and
say I have no clue. I know how many subscribers I have, and I can
even track pretty closely how many copies are ftp'ed from the archives
on ftp.eff.org, but where the e-zine goes from there is anybody's
guess. It's put on bulletin boards and distribution sites all over
the world.
I tend to think of these BBSs and other services as little islands
out there in the grand matrix. Some are linked to each other
through e-mail gateways, others are not. One of the things I would
like to do with CORE and the other e-zines (with their editors'
permission) is start building bridges between these islands over
which writers can traverse and meet and talk with one another.
Recently, due to the advent of a free account and some work
I need to do there, I've been exploring CompuServe. The writers who
hang out in the literary forum have never even thought about doing
an e-zine.
Geoff Duncan's editorial in the anniversary issue of InterText
talks about an individual who believes electronic fiction publishing
dead. Au contraire. Electronic publishing is barely into its infancy.
I fully expect it to flourish in the coming years as more and more
individuals travel between the networks and discover the excitement of
the medium.
__________________________________________________________________________
Joe Green n2412@willow.cray.com
A Short History
I have been very good.
I have been very good for 8 years.
I told my wife that our children looked like tiny skeletons only
three times.
When I spat blood I did so discreetly into monogrammed hankies.
I told my wife that at last I had a single integrated action plan (SIAP).
The time I went to Disneyland and blew the head off the hippo in the
jungle ride was an aberration.
The time I spent 2 weeks in the Rocket Motel with a topless dancer
named Baby Madonna was truly unusual.
I no longer think I am a wolf.
When I vomit on family holidays I do so with some grace and never at
table.
It has been years since I insisted on going into the woods to shit.
I have been interested in organizational development.
I no longer drink wine from bottles wrapped in paper bags
with guys named Spider and Bullethead. I especially avoid doing
this in our driveway.
I am meek at work and participate with enthusiasm in group activities.
When I run in 10 kilometer races it is hard to tell that I itch all
over and am imagining that I am being chased by hearts with mouths.
I only speak to the dog in my command voice.
I go dutifully to all the Vietnam movies to learn what I should
think. I explain to my son what a dustoff is. I do not
mention the fact that to me it looks like people in the audience
have the heads of hyenas and jackals.
My son looks like a tiny skeleton.
When he was born I went down in the cellar and built him a coffin.
I will send this with him when he goes into the army. From Dad.
If all dads did this it would save our government considerable expense.
Dads should also build coffins for the sons our sons will kill.
I have a complete set of plans for coffins for sons of many
nationalities. Spider told me that this was a waste of time.
Just send along some extra-strength garbage bags. He said.
And what about the mommas and babies. He said. And, anyway,
you dumb shit. He said. There ain't nothing to bury most of the
time. He said. You dumb old fucker. You think we're back in Vietnam.
I still think that it would demonstrate our compassion.
I often imagine my daughter on fire.
I was reading "Come Away, Joe" to her and she was curled up in my arms and
I imagined that she was hit with white phosphorus and burned from the
inside out. The white phosphorus looked like a star in her belly.
I imagined that she was also hit with napalm. Have some jelly, honey.
We called people burnt up by napalm "crispy critters." This was
a popular breakfast cereal at the time.
Here is how I am telling you I make love to my wife.
I imagine that we are both dead and holding each other. We are under
a hill. The hill looks over a blue and peaceful town. The town
is not a town. It is the shadow of a tone. The bank, the church,
the little stores and tiny houses tremble and dissolve in a soft mist.
No-one can see the town. It is not in any government records or on any
maps. Our children live there.
For a long time I was unemployed. I drove a car the color of a cloud.
I would pick up our children from school. Your father comes for you
in a car the color of a cloud.
At night I imagine that our dead cat is walking in the garden.
I imagine I am in the garden and she treadles my chest. She licks
my eyes thinking the moon's rays are milk. Her eyes shine with love.
Lay down with me lay down in the humility of death.
You see that I am very sentimental.
This morning we all sat at breakfast and I said "I am worried
about Goethe."
"Why, Dad?" My son said.
"Ok, dear." My wife said. "You have been good for eight years.
You can have that party."
This is a lie. My wife left me 10 years ago. She lives with our
children and her new husband in a very nice rambler on a cul-de-sac
in the very nice state of California.
I often imagine that my children are dream children.
I still live in the same house which is where I grew up. My father is dead.
My mother is dead. They are buried in Fairview cemetery. Just off Oak
Street. Warrensville, Pa, 19320.
They are on a very nice cul-de-sac.
Old joke.
I spoke to my mother the other night.
"Do you have your gloves on?" She asked.
"Yes." I asseverated.
I came home from Vietnam when my father died.
"Your father died." They said.
"Complete this form." They said. "Be back in two weeks." They said.
When I got off the plane in Honolulu they hung flowers around my neck.
Then they unloaded the bodies.
When I saw my father in the coffin I saw that they put glasses on him.
He only wore glasses to read. They wanted a homey look. I vomited
in the men's room. I held my mother at the grave. Her cloth coat
smelled the same as it did when I was little.
We went home to the funeral meats which were Vienna sausages in tomato
sauce. This is how a lot of people live. My cousin turned on the TV
to watch a football game. True. He was down in the basement. True.
Other males were enjoying the game. I threw my father's hammer
through the screen. Incoming. I kicked my cousin in the face.
Everyone was embarrassed.
Here's who was dead when I came back.
Daniel Mitchinok
Carlos Gonzalez
John Rollins
William Latoff
Gross weight: about 710 lbs.
I bought a tape recorder to record my thoughts about war and letters
to my mother.
Here are my thoughts about war as recorded by me at Landing Zone
X-Ray adjacent to the Chu Pong Range:
Here is a continuation of those thoughts as recorded by me trekking
overland with the 5th Cav:
Here are my thoughts as I surveyed the 800 dead of a famous battle
that you can read about in a coffee table book available at
a discount rate from Barnes and Noble:
My letters to mother were equally eloquent.
Is this too easy? Yes.
Do you want to know the truth?
My wife told me she was leaving. I am tired of this shit.
Blah. Blah. She said.
I asked her to wait. "Don't pack yet." I said.
I went to the mall and bought a camera. Plenty of film.
When I came home she was crying. She was on the couch.
I took pictures of every room in the house.
I opened every closet and drawer and took pictures.
I took her picture.
When the kids came home I took their pictures.
They left.
Then her mother and her brothers came over and took everything.
It took me two years to complete the reconstruction. Now I have
a lifesize wife weeping on the couch. My son sits at his desk
and plays Pac Man. My daughter plays with her doll.
Some of that shit was hard to find.
You understand. You are also sentimental.
One year I drove to California to see my children. In the car the
color of a cloud. In Oklahoma I woke up at dawn and went outside
the motel room. It was next to a pasture. There were horses in
the pasture. I stood at the fence. The horses were the color of
the dawn. They came to me.
Then I kicked in the bedroom door.
Shot this picture.
Reader. Rider. Horses.
Slaked. Plausive. Ignorant.
_________________________________________________________________________
RICHH richh@tigger.jvnc.net
BUSTED
James and I got busted for underage drinking. A cop called
our parents and told them we had a choice: either pay a three
hundred or so dollar fine or pay seventy-five and attend weekly AA
classes for the summer.
We picked the latter.
Once a week we would get drunk, stoned, and head over to these
classes, held in a church and held specifically for minors who'd
been caught with alcohol or a joint or so.
There were maybe a hundred of us all together and we were
broken into groups, each of which was run by a former alcoholic.
They passed out charts, pamphlets, etc. and lectured us against the
dangers of letting our lives turn out like theirs had. James and
I had a field day. Most all of the other kids there were the dregs
of teen humanity, while James was president of our Honor Society
and I was, well, me.
One day, the woman who led our group was explaining how very
risky it was to take both quaaludes and alcohol together, that if
you take a certain amount of both you could lapse into a coma and
die.
"Well, how many?" said a particularly scummy member of our
group.
"How many what?"
"How many 'ludes can I take, before I die? I wanna do one
less."
We were rolling.
She passed out a chart to all of us, showing a graph that
compared body weight to intoxication.
"If you weigh so and so and drink such and such, you will feel
drunk, lose your sense of balance, your reaction time will
suffer..." She added more drinks. "And if you drink this many,
you can pass out...fall into a coma...die."
I raised my hand.
"Yes?"
"Well, if after nine drinks in two hours you pass out, how can
you ever drink enough to make it to the coma part, or die?"
"Um, er--"
"I guess if one of your friends hooks up an IV..."
"That's enough."
We bought a loose joint off of the 'lude guy and ate a pizza.
__________________________________________________________________________
Kenneth Wolman ktw@hlwpk.att.com
I LOOK AT MY CHILDREN AS SERPENTS
AND PRAISE THEM
It is defiance that borders the dark, abusive land of indecency:
referring to my children as ``serpents'' swings opens the garden gate
to a world of expectations in our notions of the serpentine:
a Miltonic shade, clutching a Bible, squats in the corner by the love-apples,
shaking its head and scratching loud tickmarks on the well-worn slate,
recording my errors. Snakes, indeed! why stop at snakes? why not go
the distance:
enter the allegorical human barnyard and name them ``wolves'' for how they eat?
We are bound to our theologies, and lose the beauty of the created world
in the straits of our closed systems. With the skin of a stained-glass window,
the snake
absorbs and emprisms the sunlight, radiates the silvered colors of the moon,
and like the undenounced (because it is unreal) resurrective Phoenix,
lives its rebirth of new skin, and its Mozartean geometry of new colors.
Shedding the old, it remains its self-recreated self, rebirthing itself
in splendor.
What is our religion when it teaches that the snake walked erect,
a thing of radiance before its fall, but that it paid the price
of beguilement by surrendering its feet and spine? It's our jealousy, perhaps:
did it eat the fruit of the tree and have the knowledge that we lacked?
Or was it, in its prelapsarian allure, the lover of the bodyless
but shape-shifting God, who cast it down for sharing their secret, for its
betrayal?
Deprived of speech, the snake cannot answer: instead, it crawls quietly away
from its interrogators: or raises its hood and bares its fangs
to hiss at the presumptuous, colorless people who would dare to seek its truths.
Serpents are of the created world, but, recreating themselves, go beyond
creation:
and view experience as manna, a gift to be devoured, swallowed whole.
Once my sons stood in a pet shop, and gaped with fascination while a python
took and absorbed the inert body of a mouse. This is Nature, I told them:
it is not always pretty, it is not always fair, but it is Life. They
ignored me:
or they intuited the snake's true meaning as they watched the python, sinless
and sinuous,
brilliant-colored, taking his prey into himself with a lover's concentration:
and took their own lesson of their place in Nature: not cruel, but able
to envelop, absorb.
They are not snakes, that is only metaphor: and the power of metaphor is
that it says more than saying bald truths. ``Children grow, renew, yet remain
themselves.''
Suppress the yawn: contemplate instead the beauty and wisdom of the serpent
who sheds his skin, who is reborn, who creeps and grows close to the earth
from which we sprang,
who does not fear the coming of his new self but knows it as part of his old,
who cherishes the smell of earth around him, who takes his life into his mouth
and holds it there, lovingly, with an old passion that is morality.
And understand.
__________________________________________________________________________
Robert Curtis Davis sonny@trantor.harris-atd.com
THE OLD HOBO'S TALE
Shadows from a ragged slouch hat played about the old hobo's rough,
weather-beaten face. He stared into a campfire and spoke in low, growling
tones to his nodding companion.
"Hell, it ain't my fault I'm so ugly or that I lack what my Momma
always called the 'Social Graces'. It all goes back to when we was
dirt-poor and Momma, me, and my baby brother lived in that old
run-down shack just outside Moundville. Hell, I reckon I was about eight
years old -- just a snotty-nosed kid you might say. 'Ugly as homemade
sin' my Momma was always saying. Said I got my looks from that
'no 'count Paw' of mine who'd done run off with some 'floozy.'
"Why, we was so poor in those days till most times we didn't even have
milk for my baby brother, and he'd cry and cry -- mostly at night.
"Now, Momma was forever and a day trying to talk some storekeep up in
Moundville into hiring me to sweep floors or some other piss-ant job like
that. Hell, I didn't care nothing 'bout sweeping no floors! And I'd tell'em
so! Why, they'd 'bout have a fit when I'd spit on the floor to let 'em
know how I felt about sweeping floors!
"Well, you might guess, I never did get me no job. So we never had no
milk. And my baby brother, that rascal, he'd squall nearly ever' night. I
coulda hung around and lived with it if it hadn't a-been for my brother --
him always cryin' and hungry like that at night...
"Now, I ain't never told nobody this, but, you know what? Lotsa times I'd
be in bed and Momma'd come in with a kerosene lantern, lean over me, and
you know what she'd say? She'd say, 'Damn it all, Johnny! Why was you born
so all-fired ugly? And so lacking in Social Graces? Damn that no 'count
Paw of yourn!'
"I'd scrunch down under the quilt, watch my Momma leave, and, why hell,
I'd have to fight to hold back the damn tears. I'd grab that old tore-up
stuffed bear of mine and lie there listening to my brother and my Momma
bawlin' in the next room. I'd shove my head under a pillow to block
out all that hellacious squallin'! And, you know what I'd do then?
Now you ain't gonna believe this, but I'd pray... Yeah, pray. Me -- Bama
John! I'd usually say me something like, 'God? Maybe You could see Your way
clear to take some of this here Ugly off me and bring me Social Graces.
Now it don't matter a whole lot to me, but it shore would make my Momma
happy!'
"Next morning I'd get up real early and stumble over to the mirror... and
you know what?... Why, hell, I'd still look just as ugly as ever!... So
I'd spit on the floor and say to myself, 'Crap! Probably didn't get no
Social Graces neither!'"
The old hobo chuckled, spat a thick, sizzling stream of tobacco juice
into the fire. His companion stirred, grunted sleepily.
Beyond the railyard, a whistle wailed as a powerful engine stroked
away into the night, drilling a hole into the darkness that lay beneath
the bright stars.
___________________________________________________________________________
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
THE LOWELL PEARL, a stable, paying literary magazine affiliated with
the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and the Lowell Arts Council,
is currently accepting submissions of short fiction, poetry, and essays
for its summer issue.
All submissions must be typed and include a SASE*. Please
do not send originals as no submissions will be returned.
Deadline is 1 May 1992.
Please send to:
Literary Society
S. Campus Student Information Center
University of Massachusetts at Lowell
One University Avenue
Lowell MA 01854
*Submissions may also be e-mailed to me. In this case, a SASE
is not necessary. You can also ask me any questions via e-mail.
Internet: rita@eff.org
Compuserve: 70007,5621
((((********))))
March 1992
