Glazier
In Digital Poetics, I look at such writing. Picture yourself with two windows open: in one you are editing pure ASCII text using the glistening, black Model T Ford of EMACS and sputtering through the black & white fields of VT100. In the other window you have Netscape open, that graphical but heinously sloppy browser that seems out to get you with its delays, bull-headed error messages, and proclamations that it just found you 750,000 items that match — exactly — your search for the term “phanopoiea”. You are editing not on some back-up up system then uploading but on the server itself, every time you save your work in progress — improvements, tests, errors — it is immediately available to the world. The process has all the risks of live television but there is an added excitement since it is the act of writing that is the performance. In this investigation we will write, read, and breathe within the UNIX C-shell environment. A C-shell so efficient you swear you can hear the ocean if you put your ear to the monitor. This is a dynamic, expansive writing space, a pixelated meadow on a revolving disk inside a UNIX box. It is a field for which permission is an actual fact of the UNIX environment, in Robert Duncan’s words (with the meadow representing creative space for Duncan):
Often I am permitted to return to a meadow
as if it were a given property of the mind
that certain bounds hold against chaos…
(Duncan, The Opening of the Field 7)
