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University of Rhode Island VAXcluster

On member URI3 -- a VAX 8650 running the Common Cluster System

Username: NEWKIRK
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        Welcome to VAX/VMS version V4.6 on node URI3
      Last interactive login on Thursay,  30-SEP-1988 16:22
      Last non-interactive login on Thursday, 28-JAN-1988 13:40

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Queue URI 1$TXA1 stopped at 4-MAY-1988 18:18, NOT IN SERVICE
Queue URI 4$TXF3 stopped at 1-OCT-1988 12:30, problematic

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MAIL>
    #1          30-SEP-1988 21:39:01                                        NEWMAIL
From:     BITNET%"KEANE@BLUEOX.HSUVAX.HSU.EDU"    "Emily Keane"
To:       Buddy Newkirk <NEWKIRK@URI_GELLER>
Subj:     Reply to history as writer reaction

AUTHOR'S REACTION:

Don't know the language don't know th e languae gdon't know
the laguage...deaf and dumb stuff on lmuyy tongue, nothing coming
to  life  (Christ  I'm horny,  how long have I  been  suppressing
thins?) Sudden awakening, the <Ceiling's Falling Down...Something
to  do with the death of od:  As my dad would have  put  it:  Two
fragments aof sexual consciousness are talking (Picture: Men with
precise  victorian bears clutching cigars with penises  in them_)
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes its daddy's peepee."
"Well,  it is obvious sat ze female will experience more  intense
organms  after se death of ze ather,  because she will no  longer
feel  se  residual guilt over desring in ze moment of  Non-Being,
the Absent,  lusted after parent." "But on zw oyther hand,"  Sezx
the  toher Freid,  stroking his beard,  "Exery time shecomes  she
will hear ze father Crying..."

They   now   begin  a  Disey  parody,    in which  automata
representing the Victorian Steam powered model of the mind  parade
through  their  jackwork  paces amid oaa gaggle  of  pirhouetting
alienist chorling luyirics like...
"I love to fuck
long and loud and hard
I love to fuck
Here, let me give you my card..."
You see,  of course,  the point. I can whak thiss stuff off
at the typewriter, or the bneach, or (as is really the case) onhe
D-Train,  southbound,  avoiding a class I'm not happy with today;
moving   downstairs  against  the  southbound  midtowners  earger
learners  dosgorged from the corporate towers and  vomitedf  into
the Village for dinner atnd nightschool.]

I  still share a secret and occasional smile of the street,
just walking, knowing what my tcfater owuld have thought about is
or  that,  a  way of thinkin,,,of texting,..so deeply a  part  of
where/when  he was that it was possible to ever find  him  again,
his Self amid th storym oof words.
This  reminds  me aof a short srtory tyou talked about  that
you wrtoe with a friend of yours,  about the computer  programmer
swho  used yhethe rings of interxecting texts of his dead  wife's
life  as  a program that creates an AI environment  that responds
like  her.  Gosh, I whondr who THAST was about, eh?  But it pioints
out something:whent  he programmer fails to questions th eghoset
in  themachine, how can anything fail the turn}G<e1ing test?
If everything is tesxt, and faith, and each perception, each
moment,  everyt gflash of loight relflected from a pufddle a full
universe full of being and meaing, then what?
Odd  speculations,  analysis.  >>Not even my own  voice.  Not?
Well, I took your advise ofn the first draft (I have not, howeer,
changed  it,  as  you can see,  I've merely added  thses  further
dpeculations:  As i see the nature of the text, to rewrtie what I
said,m  which   was  in  fdfact what <i meant  at  the  time,  as
eveidencveed  by your feedback...would be to dejustify,  to  give
you  ca control I reserved for myself,  or can learn to)
You  wanat more detail about it?  About "Harry" and me?  Well,
well  we  well...lwts see now (and here is a brif pause  and  the
writer  thinks  for a minute so as to see whose  head  we  should
leook into the events from a n important thing that writers do al
of the time ,  darling, or haveen't you wcperienced that?() Well.
Break think,  think, resting my hads lightly on the  mute plastic
finish of the VT-100 terminal, thyping this right in, no editing,
just  excuse the speooling,K?  close tthey eyes turned up looking
for the muse: talkto me talktome talk to me...

FLASHBACK:
Debbie's  party  for Buddy and Fred who are going  away  ton
tonight.  Harry was there,  looking wierd as ususal...not one  of
the kids,  they alwasy make fun of him,  but i think they al like
hgim  because he lurks back and says funny things (that we  all,
yes,  I gueess  me too,  ) steal...but I just like him.  He's too
wierd. everybody (well, debbie and Linda (yech) and Gred the lighting
designer who had the dope  and Buddy and Jeanne were upstairs and Harry
and I waere talking  for ALMOST FIFTEEN MINUTES!  Can yo imagine it
like  the longerst he's talked to a human being.  He never tells jokes
but he's always funny.

Compare this flashback to:
Isuppose that Carl was in some sense a conscious, deliberate
choice on my part.  How wacan I talk about that?  how can I justi
fu  it  to  you  myself looking at it  as  an  actionagainst  you
Against.  Not  against,  awayufrom .  >>YOu know me too well?  I jt
wantwd  (several images here all involving militaristic vision  s
of penetration,  capture) an airhead who wouldn't kno when I  was
fucing up.  I dfon't know,  dcissentig feeling,  feeling can't be
rifhtor  rwrong...it's the way we ecternalize from them that  can
me right or wgrong. In a stricely moral senxe I don't klnow.
Ah, but I did know, even back then, and when I wr te you hat
letter, freshl from a badd weekend night with Carl out on
the little league field in Canarsie (oh,  god,  oh gos, he yells,
lying  dfacup  on the piterchers mound where he pitched  a  littl
league   shutout,   that's  good,  he doesn't  even  realise   th
significance the Freudian implication,  but I di  ,even  than nd
you would have,  had it been your cock  in  my mouth) but that was
not what could go on with us,  bnack in those days,  As Chris says,
they were slow muddy times, and we moved in slow  muddy ways.
ANd i spent that year or so with  the  vaguely dcholastic  Carl,
playing  the  part of a  disembodied  Oedipal mother  and  tryng
not to be too  dissatisfiec  with  hisflaccid attemps at gratification,
thankful in th bowles of my deconscious ming that here was someionge
hwo would'n ask what my did did  for a  living beascause he was Dead,
you see,  and that is,  as  you know, an effective terminator of any
inquiry about a subject.
Talk about the sense of the religious, miraculous. As my dad
was always fond of quoting Greg Bateson,  "The two most important
ideas  of the centrury are the idea of Sacrament and the idea  of
Entroypy." Harry. God.

What  was  he like when he appeared,  back in seventh grade
lefthanded from Connecticut,or somthing.  >God,  everybody though
he  looked like a fdeck ofr somthing.whtn think glasses and  left
handed and talking dufunny.  (well, we aere all, (most of us,) from
Brooklyn,  born  and bred) And I still remmebr my  first  thought
when I saw him, "God, I hope he's not smarter than me."
Tuff to tell, but true. I would have done alomost antyign to
neutralize the intelligence that lived behind those eyes.
(Even,  suggests an evil,  dep voice,  even convince yourself you
wrer  in  live with him,  lure him on,  and kick him when he  was
down,  ismply in an attempt to somehow cancel him out? COuld cush
an inner voice, impossible, unheard, exist? COuld there have been
trails of meaning underlyingn my actions aall those years that  I
had  not  the lighetst inkiling of for the netmoments and  meshes
of?  Why has my typing gone to shit so fdar recently...is it  the
wordprocessor  laziness...suddenly I feel a great fatigue  coming
over  me  and  the effort of striking the keys  becomes  Visible,
measureable  Aha,  I  shout  to  myself  in  sulient  jubilation,
Tresistence! That means that I have had to the very motivation in
my tdealing with Hary that I had just been exploring.  See?  No I
understad!  When I dont' want to type its because I'was  blocking
what I was thinking about.
Or  is  it possible that this very line of reasoning  is  in
itself  a  line  of  resistent  blocking,  and  that  ether  awas
something even ddeper I wanted to talk about here, comething that
these  almost  purely technical matters have been a vehicle  gofe
orating over trather than exhuming.
Clues  if they wexist,  muyst lie in the old  writings,  the
avague  notches and icon's of childhood's  communication  itseelf
into the adult future.  Childhoro writinting, as an entity in the
throes of self-replication,  like self-replicating Life automata,
we   move   from  place  to  place  by  copying  and   sectroying
information.  To move ourselfves,  we must first construct a  new
self in the place we want to be...and then destroy the Old one...
You see, during those last months before my father died, the
one thing I ws nmost aftraid of was that silence;  tha absence of
breth.  And  as dad said somethwere,  it take some kind  of  real
inscanity to listen for not for a sound,  but for the fading away
of sound.
What  I've  ben doing is living in the hollow eches  of  that
sound of breathing,  that all this,  the owrods,  the books,  the
essays, are gfragments of a print culture barely maintained above
BMR.  My  dead father is the model of our society,  and >I feel o
self   consciousness  or  ahshame  about  explicatingh   my   own
experience,  because  of analsis and post-structuralist criticism
have  taught  us ntohing wlse,  they have taught us to  take  our
behavior,    our   breathing,   being,   condescencion   to   be,
submneesissiona dn insertion into a varieyt of sstems, discouses,
chainds  of  chance (variously and only contingently real  as  we
are)  our <Presence itself as a Tesxt,  a legitimate  object  for
discourse   analysis   and   all   the   rigourous   tollery   of
decosntruction.  I am a living fiction,  and you,  insofar as you
are  reading  me,  are constructing and everting  my  presumptive
world.]    Th text that I am is a slice of  culture,  deliveratey
selfinflicted,  ,  composed not of what my father write,  bnut of
what  I  tok from what my tahter made.  Maybe in the  future  our
secondariy  oral electronic tribe will eveloe an instictive taboo
agaoinst  memic  incest.  Maybe.  I  want down  the  Garden path,
falloweing in the Fadprints of my fearther.'

In a way,  the clash of print and electronics athat express
itself  in me is working out its solution...as structurealism and
the  boundaries of dacademic discourse breadck doen  and  meaning
manking comes to be seem as the  central  work of the  cedutcctional
enterprise,  wht  Loast continet of Lemuria of which even writing itself
represent merely an  Atlantean  splinter  faction.  I make  meaning.
I  now  make meaning,  and  makin g my meaning mankes me mean.
Making me mean
makes me.
make me
mean.

-30-

MAIL> q
$

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$mail

You have 2 messages.

MAIL> dir

# From                 Date         Subject                             MAIL

1 BITNET%"KEANE@BLUEOX". 29-SEP-1988  History as a writer
    2 BITNET%"KEANE@BLUEOX". 30-SEP-1988  Reply to history as a writer reaction

MAIL> send
To:     bitnet%"keane@blueox.hsuvax.hsu.edu"
Subj:   me, you, him
Enter your message below. Press CTRL/Z when complete, or CTRL/C to quit
reader's response:

Emily-

When  you  first suggested that we write stories  about  our histories
as writers to each other,  I was afraid it was  a  bad idea:  I knew that I
would deliberately distort what I remembered to  maintain some kind of image in
your eyes.  And  it is obvious to  me that you have seen through my pathetic
attepmpts  in this  direction.  Of course you didn't need to add more  material
about who you were after high school,  or where you are now,  or tell  me more
about your relationship with "Harry" -- me.  I know all  that.
And  the fictive voice of a disinterested reader which I adopted to prevent
myself from believing what you are saying cannot  work here, I know. My deepest
apologies.

I do believe you, Emily, and I am very sorry  that your father and I did
not get to talk more.  He *was* a great  writer  and I loved him,  loved both
of  him,  Venus  and Hesperus,  without knowing it.  And you are a great writer,
and I love you too.
And maybe,  just maybe, if we can find some way to fall back to each other from
these opposite poles,  we can begin to make the meaning we missed, abnd perhaps
i can help to rub some of the stiffness out of your poor tortured feet.

all my love
-B*EXIT*

MAIL> q
$ bye
  NEWKIRK       logged out at  1-OCT-1988 16:41:37.78

Accounting information:
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  Charged CPU time:    0 00:00:42.76    Elapsed time:     0 01:35:55.65
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