Sent: Sunday, December 04, 2005 1:31 PM

Subject: Re: your third Re: Oops, labeling

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Floundering is a constant sense of how any artist is doing and true sure-footedness has to be felt and used within it. It's not just when making a poem. It's when, then, crafting a book, which is why my "strange" responses to Winnie and Dominick when they asked not how can I make a book, but how can I have a book already made and bask in the glory. In both cases I pushed, as I always do, to get inside the making. I told Winnie to use the available tools, the html potential, to actually type poems into a "dummy" book and then rearrange it, by feel. A learning curve, of course. And a very unwelcome message. Could somebody do it with paper, photocopy, and cut and paste? Well, I could, because I've lived forty five years inside the writing, but for most, and particularly for those who do things mechanically, who write poems like term papers, like memos, like acceptance speeches, plunging somebody into depth in the work might best be promoted by forcing movement into a new medium. It didn't take. She pounced on your advice to think in terms of "themes" which might cause her to at least look at poems in terms of something about the content.... Dominick wanted somebody to tell him if his poems were okay, to give him a grade. But he wanted a book to sell in cafés. Uhhhmmm. So, I told the story of Julia V.. Let him enter the story. BUT, I confronted him with somebody at a table, asking, "Why should I buy your book." I suggested an answer, but one that forced him to know why he wrote the poems AND selected them for the book. The answer: "Well, this is why I think you should read at least some of them, and you've got to buy the book to do that. ...". That ellipsis, means he gets into why he wrote the poems, other than to get an A+ from somebody at the MOAPG table, an A+ together with an explanation that'll tell him somebody found some "inspiration" cycling in him that he's afraid may not be there. He indicated only that he had no idea what I was talking about, that it scared him, and that he could survive only by misreading me in detail so grotesquely that I had trouble even pointing out how he misread me in detail.

You know that what I think is fine in your work, always present, had its best hour in MOTORCYCLE TO HELL, the story of Eddie, in that line in which you rode like Eddie and which you let all that actual and hovering peer-pressure force you to constrain and tame in that and a next few lines. You got a poem, a fine poem with the wildness live in it, that an editor snapped up. But I miss that line. Remember the talking point I just sent through. Line break as "looking glass".

So, what about my monkeying with your Juice online? Not on a bet. I monkey with my poems, notes for my poems, eletters, though only maybe with eletters you pull into "eavesdropping"s. Or seagull droppings. And I offered to assist with some of the hands-on formatting I've programmed IF you wanted that for some of the eletters hopefully you're writing for that same collection AND only if doing some of what I did in my hands-on approach isn't readily done in whatever page-making software you use.

That's two "if"s. And it'd be done in email exchanges and then I'd make an html file.

None of that's monkeying with Juice online, any more than our "contributing editors" are monkeying when obtaining, accepting, editing work. (One thing I'll do when sending in an eletter of mine is be more specific about the label and it's placement and not put any of my running on into the same cover note. Sadly I run on at the drop of a sheet to write on.)

What was I doing in my first Re your Re: Oops labeling? All that formatting stuff, since formatting Juice online is your "work"? Ahhhh, it was what, in my last post of the season, suggested Mugsy and Winnie could have done in an exchange of posts.

I was sketching ideas, not making suggestions that could be taken under advisement. So, it's all there in a couple artists talking, like Bill Evans and T. Monk might do, or Bill Evans and Glen Gould, since they had some interaction and mutual respect, for all their playing different music, inhabiting different volumes of what Evans called Universal Mind.... When you're drafting, re-drafting "segments' ("lines"?), you'll hear these other riffs (which Winnie thought her first writings were, missing, of course, the point about sketching vs. suggesting, something I tried to work out twenty-five years ago when I began talking of suggesturing, and suggesture).

I like your handling of the Index for eletters. A small window comes up with the Index, and that's as it should be. I got Memo #1 in the reading pane by clicking on it and the small window went away. Down at the bottom, I saw: Return to Index, clicked on it, and the Index came up in the reading pane. I assume that's on the bottom of each eletter in there.

Javascript controls the array of windows. You could pull up the little window, but what a drag. Now that you're reading eletters, obviously planning to get a next one, or another one, anyway, keep it all in the reading pane. When you're ready for something other than eletters, you're going to go to some other TOC.

I just thought I'd give this sketch a good review just in case, some time you wondered about either (1) getting the window between eletters or (2) losing the little window for the initial checking (going right to the reading pane). The thing about sketching is keeping the liveliness of the sketch when you, then, work it into later focused down "drafts" and, finally, letting the work go out the door....

* I made bmp screen images, converted to gif and since colors are primary didn't get any funny colors. The links, faked here, will have to be juggled by hand-eye. The whole works, here, in <center>...</center>. I also reduced the images to 90% of what was live on the screen. A little more (hell, even a fair amount more) MIGHT be possible. Anyway, this illustrates (as if in 2005) my sketched idea for the archive link over on the right. Ties in with the idea of covers. The idea. On the 2005 CD of course, all three links just lead to ordering information, probably, because live links on a CD copy MIGHT outlive Juice online. Of course, there'll be other live links in eletters and such, so ...who knows. Sketch possibilities in your head. And the whole business, remember, is just sketching....

And, an html ad page for mailing, before Christmas, requires only the 2005 bar above these and the links would be: Visit Life-Edit Current Copy Order CD Copy (Actual Delivery, January 10, 2006). These might be UNDER a quick run-down of the 21st century hyperzine world and, then, of Juice online's place in it.

----- Original Message -----

From: Stephen Morse

Sent: Friday, December 02, 2005 2:53 PM

Subject: Re: Oops, labeling