Amerika On-Line

Excerpts from GRAMMATRON

an Internet column by Mark Amerika

Alt-X is still making history as we continue to receive a great deal of attention in diverse venues such as SPIN, American Book Review and the San Francisco Review of Books. We have also been placed in Point Communication's Top 5% of all Internet sites for our content, traffic and user feedback. This is all due to the cont inued efforts of our primary network including Director of Architextural Ambiance Knut Mork (knut@gar.no), our Anarchivist Nile Southern (mantis@netcom.com), our Director of Covert Operations Fran Nelson, and all of the writers and contributing editors who have put us on the virtual map.

Another example of the spirit of cooperation located within the circuitry of energy circulating in the Alt-X environment is this month's launch of the Electronic Book Review (EBR). EBR's editor Joe Tabbi has put together a powerhouse first issue of reviews and essays and has received considerable production support from another Alt-X Contributing Editor Greg Martino, whose Silence journal is receiving raves all throughout cyberspace.

For this column I'd like to share excerpts from a major work-in-progress. The work, GRAMMATRON, will be available sometime next year and promises to change the way we experience narratives in virtual reality. It will have all manner of hypertextual links, sounds, poems, graphics, rants, No Mo PoMo theory digressions and prose passages that in book media would convert into what we now call a novel. Here are a couple of the poems. Happy Holidaze.

IRL: poem

on the net, nobody knows how sexy you really are, how bad the dog gets whipped, how crude the sadistic brute can be, how ambiguous the thought patterns generally are, what race makes you salivate, what gender makes you cringe, what age you first got laid, in whose biology you are now swimming, in what hospital you gave birth, in what signal you now divest:

unless you publish all of this information as part of your public domain narrative environment:

but who's to say that what you publish is true?

what is truth in an adversary culture?

is virtual documentation always already the fictionalized representation of a pseudo-autobiographical self even if this self is outwardly acknowledging its role as cyborg-narrator?

rethinking representation: moving beyond the knowing and entering a world of resistant topographies that open up new vistas (spherical menus) full of narrative worlds composed of unstable identities, ambiguously located intentions, and surrogate lovers.

a language that persists despite itself.

you don't have to be there for me: poem

asynchronous communication

answering machine

voice mail system

e-mail

bulletin board systemsinteractive web site

snailmail

fax

virtual performance

telefictional soundtrack

hypertextual consciousness

cyborg-narrator

astrological bandwidth

sim-city

unreal estate

moment #21 ( a footnote with no end)

host open connection: poem

You can ask the host to

	send you the accumulated contents of your 

box.  You don't have to be anywhere.

	Being Digital is Being Networked is Being Enough.

You can send dispatches to your outbox

	for distribution. 

Distributing Digital Being is readying yourself for

	the phenomenon of flesh.

I know someone whose entire love life is conducted 

	via an "anonymous remailer." 

She tells me in a recent email that she is a machine that functions       

	like a numbered postbox or Swiss bank account. 

She says I can use her as a virtual porn-grrl 

	whose box I can drop my idiosyncratic disseminations into. 

I'm not sure I know what to do

	as the Network comes on to me like such an eager whore.

Amerika Online