RE: [-empyre-] Texts as fodder

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

Hi Patrick,

Concerning longer textual works, I would look at what long texts we read online. That's
primarily email, isn't it? We tend to read these when we're directly involved in the discussion.
Or the narrative. Or the meta narrative. Or something. Like reading lists. 'Life of the mind'.

Or critical essays about net.art works. Or at least I will read interestingly done critical
essays online on the Web when I run across them.

I also enjoy searching through list archives, sometimes, and reading threads therein.

It would be interesting to create email clients as part of works. web.art and net.art combined.
I'd like to turn Word For Weirdos in Arteroids into an email client of sorts. And a new
interactive audio piece i'm working on will eventually let people email editable multimedia
compositions to one another. And others will be able to browse the archive.

Have you read any of Lanham's writings about the return of rhetoric? One of the upshots is this:
not long ago, discourse was dominated by the form of the stand-alone piece of writing. A return
to a 'rhetorical mode' of discourse involves more emphasis on the dialogical, not on the
stand-alone text but on discourse that proceeds via dialog.

It always did anyway, but we wouldn't be able to read what lead up to those stand-alone texts.
Now, of course a good stand-alone text saves us a lot of reading so that we sometimes wouldn't
care to read what lead up to it or what followed from it (except another stand-alone text), but
sometimes not.

it's the representation of the relations of words that people dig in the Plumb Thesaurus, isn't
it? Not so much as a functional thesaurus?

When I experience Melinda's work, I'm struck by the role of text in it. A fascinating and
important role. But text is not the only thing going on there. Yet text is still important, and
reading that text is something we're drawn in to.

i remember reading burroughs's trilogy way back when. i was struck with how all the characters
dissolved into one character via the cutup. when we read and contribute toward lists, it's as
though 'everybody knows' differently but the same. jpmalr.

ja