494 lines
13 KiB
Plaintext
494 lines
13 KiB
Plaintext
|
|
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ]
|
|
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]
|
|
QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ] \QQ\ QQQ]
|
|
QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ] \QQ\QQQ]
|
|
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ]
|
|
QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ]
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Volume II
|
|
Issue I
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
~~~````''''~~~
|
|
CORE is an electronic journal of poetry, fiction, essays,
|
|
and criticsm. Back issues are available via anonymous
|
|
ftp from ftp.eff.org from the /pub/journals directory
|
|
They are also available on CompuServe from Library 5 of
|
|
EFFSIG.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Please feel free to reproduce CORE in its entirety only
|
|
throughout Cyberspace. To reproduce articles individually,
|
|
please contact the author.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Questions, submissions, and subscription requests should be
|
|
sent to core-journal@eff.org.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
~~~````''''~~~
|
|
|
|
|
|
Flavors of the month:
|
|
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
|
|
|
|
|
|
MARK SCHORR .................. A POINT OF ORIGIN
|
|
.................. COBOL ODE
|
|
|
|
|
|
FIONA WEBSTER ................ INTRODUCING MAMA LANSDALE'S
|
|
YOUNGEST BOY
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
_____________________________________________________________________
|
|
Rita Rouvalis, Editor rita@eff.org
|
|
|
|
|
|
I had ventured into real life for a reading of the Merrimack Anthology.
|
|
One of the readers, Mark Schorr, caught my ear when he mentioned working
|
|
for "a large computer firm in Littleton". I thought to myself, "he
|
|
works for DEC; I'll bet he has an enet address and I can con him into
|
|
submitting something to CORE." (Editors are always on the make for new
|
|
material.)
|
|
|
|
|
|
Mark not only let me have a couple of his poems, but he also told me
|
|
about a project he is working on to to distribute, display and promote
|
|
poetry in Cyberspace. The "Kiosks" are After Dark (R) slide shows
|
|
created by using an illustration and a screen capture program. I've put
|
|
three of the Kiosks in the CORE directory on ftp.eff.org as
|
|
PoetryKiosks.sea.bin.
|
|
|
|
|
|
You'll need a Macintosh and the After Dark program to view them.
|
|
|
|
|
|
1. Download PoetryKiosks.sea.bin to your Macintosh.
|
|
2. I've stuffed them using a self-extracting program, so just double
|
|
click on the icon.
|
|
3. Choose one of the folders, and drag all the slides in it to your
|
|
Slide Show folder, which will be located in your After Dark folder
|
|
(probably in your system folder).
|
|
4. Start up the After Dark control panel, and choose Slide Show for
|
|
the display.
|
|
|
|
|
|
The idea is copyleft; use it and create your own Kiosks. If you do, let
|
|
both Mark and me know about it -- especially if you do it under other
|
|
hardware platforms. If I can collect enough of them, I'll set up
|
|
special directory for them here. The text for two of the poems follows.
|
|
The third Kiosk is of CORE1.03.
|
|
|
|
|
|
_____________________________________________________________________
|
|
Mark Schorr schorr@ljohub.enet.dec.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
A POINT OF ORIGIN
|
|
|
|
|
|
In memory of Robert Ross
|
|
|
|
|
|
Making my way
|
|
from a land
|
|
that can never
|
|
measure up
|
|
|
|
|
|
Past safe harbors
|
|
and beach roses
|
|
and the rotting hulls
|
|
of nuke subs
|
|
|
|
|
|
Past nineteenth century visitors
|
|
who measured New England
|
|
as so many miles
|
|
of rivers and poems
|
|
|
|
|
|
These days
|
|
my thoughts run simpler
|
|
to foreign friends
|
|
or family members
|
|
met or missed
|
|
|
|
to journeys made
|
|
sometimes with you,
|
|
sometimes not
|
|
or sometimes not made at all
|
|
|
|
|
|
Or run to others who
|
|
are only signatures
|
|
where sky and sea align
|
|
or run along different line
|
|
|
|
|
|
Caught up with each other
|
|
until they too
|
|
retrace your eddied light
|
|
and herbal banks
|
|
|
|
|
|
To get their bearings
|
|
with reverse immigration
|
|
reciting every maiden name
|
|
back to where we came
|
|
|
|
|
|
Until there in that garden isle
|
|
we simply are
|
|
|
|
beyond all land or sea
|
|
a point of origin.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
______________ ~~~````''''~~~ _________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
COBOL ODE
|
|
|
|
|
|
In memory of Adm. Grace Hopper
|
|
|
|
|
|
ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Your larger outlines
|
|
would drive us mad
|
|
if we were in the
|
|
business of the past
|
|
or common oriented
|
|
business
|
|
aboard some
|
|
mother courage carrier
|
|
that shells the straits
|
|
of Lebanon
|
|
that depends on you
|
|
to perform
|
|
perform well down
|
|
to the lowest level
|
|
a figurative constant
|
|
or some LIFE-like
|
|
picture clause.
|
|
|
|
|
|
But instead you satisfy
|
|
some inner need for order,
|
|
some need
|
|
to situate ourselves
|
|
for you are nothing
|
|
if not
|
|
a place,
|
|
a structure,
|
|
or a map
|
|
we can invoke at will
|
|
|
|
|
|
Even in the absurdity of
|
|
Sunday afternoon traffic,
|
|
we sense the bold outlines
|
|
of El Salvador
|
|
across your sodden sky,
|
|
and from the terminal grid
|
|
even the most
|
|
mundane designs,
|
|
begin a process
|
|
we don't even have
|
|
the sense to know
|
|
until what *ONCE WAS*
|
|
a pilgrimage is now
|
|
a People Express
|
|
|
|
that checks,
|
|
"BAD PEOPLE RECORDS"
|
|
in packed decimal
|
|
in so many coding squares
|
|
of so many
|
|
paragraphs,
|
|
statements,
|
|
clauses.
|
|
|
|
|
|
INPUT/OUTPUT
|
|
|
|
|
|
Observe the order of a pack of
|
|
cards
|
|
that say
|
|
"DO NOT FOLD OR MUTILATE"
|
|
for the pleasure
|
|
mere pleasure
|
|
of folding cards.
|
|
|
|
|
|
But by all means
|
|
fold the cards
|
|
to fit them
|
|
in your pocket.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Everything we have built
|
|
Should have some art or use
|
|
Else build it better.
|
|
|
|
|
|
DATA DIVISION.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Provence.
|
|
|
|
|
|
When I think of the way we
|
|
rushed through Arles
|
|
observing the inscriptions
|
|
on every row and column
|
|
in the metropolis of time,
|
|
then your graphic
|
|
asterisks seem closer.
|
|
|
|
|
|
On the high bluffs opposite
|
|
the River Rhone
|
|
we waited for fireworks
|
|
to reflect how small the state
|
|
to reflect how small we
|
|
feel at a time like this.
|
|
|
|
|
|
When they finally explode,
|
|
there are eight obscure points
|
|
and hundreds of asterisks.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Picture the way we hate
|
|
watching the kill
|
|
in the arena of Arles.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EXIT PROVENCE.
|
|
|
|
|
|
PROCEDURE DIVISION
|
|
|
|
|
|
COBOL-ODE.
|
|
Crowbar.
|
|
O! I had a little chicken
|
|
who wouldn't lay an egg
|
|
so I laid a crowbar
|
|
down on his head.
|
|
O! the little chicken cried
|
|
and the little chicken begged
|
|
but the crowbar laid
|
|
a hard boiled egg.
|
|
|
|
|
|
UNTIL NO-MORE-COBOL-ODE
|
|
OR NO-MORE-CROWBAR.
|
|
PERFORM TERMINATION.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EXIT-COBOL-ODE.
|
|
STOP RUN.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Initialization.
|
|
|
|
|
|
I am talking to you
|
|
people who
|
|
shift lock CAPS on subway walls.
|
|
|
|
|
|
graffiti figurative clauses
|
|
under a proscenium
|
|
words upon a public telephone
|
|
spray paint constants
|
|
on a public convenience
|
|
or who asterisk comments
|
|
around a square.
|
|
|
|
|
|
And I am talking to you
|
|
people who work, meet, live
|
|
in the fourth subbasement
|
|
or on the fourteenth floor
|
|
but who leave the
|
|
business of living
|
|
|
|
|
|
to some Common Business
|
|
Oriented Language
|
|
that works below the
|
|
surface of your lives.
|
|
|
|
|
|
And I am telling you to write
|
|
the number
|
|
on corner
|
|
of your electric bill
|
|
and also
|
|
on the corner
|
|
of your check
|
|
|
|
|
|
And I am not telling you
|
|
about the legendary
|
|
figurative constant that...
|
|
|
|
|
|
TERMINATION.
|
|
|
|
|
|
When all the files are closed,
|
|
there is no system on earth,
|
|
no pyramid of data
|
|
that can do to us
|
|
what we would not do
|
|
to ourselves
|
|
or, not doing,
|
|
what we would do.
|
|
|
|
|
|
_____________________________________________________________________
|
|
Fiona Webster fi@grebyn.com
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
INTRODUCING MAMA LANSDALE'S YOUNGEST BOY
|
|
|
|
|
|
Joe R. Lansdale. Let's talk about Joe R. Lansdale. Life-long
|
|
resident of East Texas, one of the weirder corners of this planet, by
|
|
anyone's estimation.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Joe Lansdale is a writer who doesn't get compared to anyone else, who
|
|
doesn't fit into the pre-arranged categories residing in the minds of
|
|
literary agents and publishers. I don't mean just the genre
|
|
categories--although he does range widely through westerns, mystery,
|
|
science fiction, thriller, crime, and horror--often all in the same
|
|
book--but also those other, more insidious categories, about what sort
|
|
of social commentary is allowed in an entertainment rag, or what sort
|
|
of plotline a successful story should follow. So he's had a hard time
|
|
making it. (I'd bet good money you haven't heard of him.) But if you
|
|
approach a dedicated horror maven--not your casual King or Koontz
|
|
reader, or your trendy splatterpunk reader, but someone who's been
|
|
patiently panning the stream for a long, long time to find those few
|
|
chunks of gold that make it all worthwhile--and you ask, "Who's
|
|
original? who's brilliant?" you will hear about the man from East
|
|
Texas.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Now, as usual when I'm recommending horror fiction to people I think
|
|
of as discriminating readers, I feel the need to issue caveats.
|
|
Horror is a literature _in_extremis_, and as such, it's not terribly
|
|
refined. Maybe it's because of the intensity of emotion evoked by the
|
|
extreme situations being portrayed--what other genre is labeled not
|
|
for a type of story, but for the specific *emotion* it aims to provoke
|
|
in the reader? Maybe it's because the field, despite having roots
|
|
going all the way back to Shakespeare and Beowulf, is very young. The
|
|
pioneers of the contemporary horror tale--Richard Matheson, and of
|
|
course, Stephen King--are still alive and writing. Whatever the
|
|
reason, as things stand now, you have to cut a horror writer some
|
|
slack, and accept a certain simplicity of theme. You should also bear
|
|
in mind that if sometimes the language is crude, that's because the
|
|
story is chopped from the author's heart, rather than processed
|
|
through their head.
|
|
|
|
|
|
What you should not tolerate in a horror writer, though, is lack of
|
|
originality. If you find yourself thinking, as you read, "This is
|
|
just another haunted house tale, vampire/werewolf tale, psycho-killer
|
|
tale, sigh..." you should put down the book and look elsewhere. And
|
|
that's why I'm trying to drum this one name--Joe R. Lansdale--into
|
|
your head.
|
|
|
|
|
|
What makes him special? Former manual laborer and good ol' boy that
|
|
he is, Lansdale might find it odd that I'm applying this word to his
|
|
work, but this man has an *aesthetic.* His fictional world is firmly
|
|
placed amidst the piney woods and chicken plants and hard-bitten
|
|
characters and tall tales and bigotry of his home state, but also
|
|
mixed in is a dumbfounded fascination with the tawdry imagery of pop
|
|
culture. Neon lights and garish decor. Cheap paperbacks with glossy
|
|
red-and-black covers. Spiritual concepts straight out of
|
|
_Weekly_World_News_. Clint Eastwood movies. Roger Corman's dyed-red
|
|
"blood popcorn." It all co-mingles in Lansdale's highly visual
|
|
aesthetic sense, and what comes out is not these images _per_se_--
|
|
Lansdale is sparing in his use of quotations from the media--but
|
|
utterly new word-pictures. Such as a man wearing nothing but cowboy
|
|
hat and boots, who floats, adrift, through a starry sky where '57
|
|
Cadillacs and Mexican whores beckon to him--a strange recasting of
|
|
the figures in the cyclone, beckoning to Dorothy.
|
|
|
|
|
|
But it's not all about beauty: you're not in a stylish and yet
|
|
desiccated post-modern landscape, when you're in a Joe Lansdale story.
|
|
This man writes with soul. He writes unflinchingly about the racism,
|
|
the ignorance, the often callous disregard for values that he sees in
|
|
the people he grew up with. His stories have been turned down
|
|
because they're too graphic, but more often because they make a blunt
|
|
social statement that makes editors so uncomfortable, they simply
|
|
shudder and then try to forget. Lansdale is funny, bleak, and
|
|
truthful--in the sense of presenting basic truths about the human
|
|
condition--and the result is an unsettling brew that doesn't always
|
|
leave you smiling.
|
|
|
|
|
|
So what should you read? Well, if you asked that hypothetical horror
|
|
maven, "What's the best horror short story of the past twenty-five
|
|
years," you just *might* hear them say, "Guess I'd have to pick 'Night
|
|
They Missed the Horror Show.'" In fact, if you don't check out Joe
|
|
Lansdale for any other reason, do so for "Night They Missed the Horror
|
|
Show." For this reason, and also because his novels go out of print
|
|
quickly and are darn hard to find, I recommend his anthology of
|
|
shorts, _By_Bizarre_Hands_. The Avon edition is still on bookstore
|
|
shelves, and the cover features a lovely illustration by J. K. Potter
|
|
(one of horror's best artists).
|
|
|
|
|
|
I suggest you read "By Bizarre Hands" and "The Fat Man and the
|
|
Elephant"--and perhaps "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with
|
|
Dead Folks"--to ease yourself into Lansdale's world, and then head
|
|
straight for "Night They Missed the Horror Show." It's a ride you
|
|
won't forget.
|
|
|
|
|
|
**This piece originally appeared in _The Reading Edge: An Unpretentious
|
|
Newsletter for Readers_, edited by Sherry Mann (smann@ihspc.att.com).**
|
|
_______________________________________________________________________
|
|
|
|
|
|
CORE is not a publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and its
|
|
contents, unless specifically indicated as such, should not be mistaken
|
|
for the opinions of either the organization or the editor.
|
|
|
|
|
|
//>> November 1992 <<\\
|
|
|
|
|
|
|