Thursday, April 18, 2024

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Finding Jane - Chapter 1


FInding Interzone

I have always been fascinated by liminal space, the hidden world of in-between places. Some of the first places I explored, at age 10, were abandoned railroad lines and old highway alignments. Computers were a natural extension of that interest because they communicate over a virtual liminal space, their internal operation is a hidden world, and the very nature of their working memory, their RAM, is transient. You can create and entire world, and make it disappear with a couple of keystrokes. Yet, while you are working on your machine creating a thing, whether you are writing polemic or source code, you are a minor god of sorts. The whole magilla is right there at your finger tips for you to do whatever you want, constrained only by your ability and whatever notions you come up with. Computers aren’t the only thing this happens with, they just happen to among the most common and easiest thing a young person can get into trouble with, and I mean the wholesome innocent trouble that is the product of youthful exuberance, mostly legal, and generally only discouraged by authoritarian control addicts like the ones you might find in William S. Burroughs’ fictional Interzone. Interzone is an interesting place. It’s dangerous in the sense that it can offer a high risk to reward ratio, and many people who venture there wind up rolling snake eyes after getting hooked on edge work. Burroughs I think fell off the edge, but managed to keep from falling all the way down and climbed back up to a point where he was safe and comfortable. He managed to live until the ripe old age of 86 which is pretty good considering his issues. You can learn a lot from old Bull Lee, but you have to keep in mind some of it involves what not to do. You also have to keep in mind that what may have been radical or avant garde back during his creative career has since gone from daring to dilettante. To quote Emerson, “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Dutchess County, NY Type-In

https://pleasantvalleylibrary.assabetinteractive.com/calendar/vintage-typewriters-and-type-in/ This is the first type-in occuring in the wri...