QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQ] QQQ] QQQ] QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQ] QQQQ] QQ] QQ] QQQ] \QQ\ QQQQQQQQQ] QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ] \QQ\ QQQ] QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ] \QQ\ QQQ] QQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQ] QQQ] \QQ\QQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] QQQQQQQQQQQQQ] Volume II Issue I ~~~````''''~~~ CORE is an electronic journal of poetry, fiction, essays, and criticsm. Back issues are available via anonymous ftp from ftp.eff.org from the /pub/journals directory They are also available on CompuServe from Library 5 of EFFSIG. Please feel free to reproduce CORE in its entirety only throughout Cyberspace. To reproduce articles individually, please contact the author. Questions, submissions, and subscription requests should be sent to core-journal@eff.org. ~~~````''''~~~ Flavors of the month: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ MARK SCHORR .................. A POINT OF ORIGIN .................. COBOL ODE FIONA WEBSTER ................ INTRODUCING MAMA LANSDALE'S YOUNGEST BOY _____________________________________________________________________ Rita Rouvalis, Editor rita@eff.org I had ventured into real life for a reading of the Merrimack Anthology. One of the readers, Mark Schorr, caught my ear when he mentioned working for "a large computer firm in Littleton". I thought to myself, "he works for DEC; I'll bet he has an enet address and I can con him into submitting something to CORE." (Editors are always on the make for new material.) Mark not only let me have a couple of his poems, but he also told me about a project he is working on to to distribute, display and promote poetry in Cyberspace. The "Kiosks" are After Dark (R) slide shows created by using an illustration and a screen capture program. I've put three of the Kiosks in the CORE directory on ftp.eff.org as PoetryKiosks.sea.bin. You'll need a Macintosh and the After Dark program to view them. 1. Download PoetryKiosks.sea.bin to your Macintosh. 2. I've stuffed them using a self-extracting program, so just double click on the icon. 3. Choose one of the folders, and drag all the slides in it to your Slide Show folder, which will be located in your After Dark folder (probably in your system folder). 4. Start up the After Dark control panel, and choose Slide Show for the display. The idea is copyleft; use it and create your own Kiosks. If you do, let both Mark and me know about it -- especially if you do it under other hardware platforms. If I can collect enough of them, I'll set up special directory for them here. The text for two of the poems follows. The third Kiosk is of CORE1.03. _____________________________________________________________________ Mark Schorr schorr@ljohub.enet.dec.com A POINT OF ORIGIN In memory of Robert Ross Making my way from a land that can never measure up Past safe harbors and beach roses and the rotting hulls of nuke subs Past nineteenth century visitors who measured New England as so many miles of rivers and poems These days my thoughts run simpler to foreign friends or family members met or missed to journeys made sometimes with you, sometimes not or sometimes not made at all Or run to others who are only signatures where sky and sea align or run along different line Caught up with each other until they too retrace your eddied light and herbal banks To get their bearings with reverse immigration reciting every maiden name back to where we came Until there in that garden isle we simply are beyond all land or sea a point of origin. ______________ ~~~````''''~~~ _________________ COBOL ODE In memory of Adm. Grace Hopper ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. Your larger outlines would drive us mad if we were in the business of the past or common oriented business aboard some mother courage carrier that shells the straits of Lebanon that depends on you to perform perform well down to the lowest level a figurative constant or some LIFE-like picture clause. But instead you satisfy some inner need for order, some need to situate ourselves for you are nothing if not a place, a structure, or a map we can invoke at will Even in the absurdity of Sunday afternoon traffic, we sense the bold outlines of El Salvador across your sodden sky, and from the terminal grid even the most mundane designs, begin a process we don't even have the sense to know until what *ONCE WAS* a pilgrimage is now a People Express that checks, "BAD PEOPLE RECORDS" in packed decimal in so many coding squares of so many paragraphs, statements, clauses. INPUT/OUTPUT Observe the order of a pack of cards that say "DO NOT FOLD OR MUTILATE" for the pleasure mere pleasure of folding cards. But by all means fold the cards to fit them in your pocket. Everything we have built Should have some art or use Else build it better. DATA DIVISION. Provence. When I think of the way we rushed through Arles observing the inscriptions on every row and column in the metropolis of time, then your graphic asterisks seem closer. On the high bluffs opposite the River Rhone we waited for fireworks to reflect how small the state to reflect how small we feel at a time like this. When they finally explode, there are eight obscure points and hundreds of asterisks. Picture the way we hate watching the kill in the arena of Arles. EXIT PROVENCE. PROCEDURE DIVISION COBOL-ODE. Crowbar. O! I had a little chicken who wouldn't lay an egg so I laid a crowbar down on his head. O! the little chicken cried and the little chicken begged but the crowbar laid a hard boiled egg. UNTIL NO-MORE-COBOL-ODE OR NO-MORE-CROWBAR. PERFORM TERMINATION. EXIT-COBOL-ODE. STOP RUN. Initialization. I am talking to you people who shift lock CAPS on subway walls. graffiti figurative clauses under a proscenium words upon a public telephone spray paint constants on a public convenience or who asterisk comments around a square. And I am talking to you people who work, meet, live in the fourth subbasement or on the fourteenth floor but who leave the business of living to some Common Business Oriented Language that works below the surface of your lives. And I am telling you to write the number on corner of your electric bill and also on the corner of your check And I am not telling you about the legendary figurative constant that... TERMINATION. When all the files are closed, there is no system on earth, no pyramid of data that can do to us what we would not do to ourselves or, not doing, what we would do. _____________________________________________________________________ Fiona Webster fi@grebyn.com INTRODUCING MAMA LANSDALE'S YOUNGEST BOY Joe R. Lansdale. Let's talk about Joe R. Lansdale. Life-long resident of East Texas, one of the weirder corners of this planet, by anyone's estimation. Joe Lansdale is a writer who doesn't get compared to anyone else, who doesn't fit into the pre-arranged categories residing in the minds of literary agents and publishers. I don't mean just the genre categories--although he does range widely through westerns, mystery, science fiction, thriller, crime, and horror--often all in the same book--but also those other, more insidious categories, about what sort of social commentary is allowed in an entertainment rag, or what sort of plotline a successful story should follow. So he's had a hard time making it. (I'd bet good money you haven't heard of him.) But if you approach a dedicated horror maven--not your casual King or Koontz reader, or your trendy splatterpunk reader, but someone who's been patiently panning the stream for a long, long time to find those few chunks of gold that make it all worthwhile--and you ask, "Who's original? who's brilliant?" you will hear about the man from East Texas. Now, as usual when I'm recommending horror fiction to people I think of as discriminating readers, I feel the need to issue caveats. Horror is a literature _in_extremis_, and as such, it's not terribly refined. Maybe it's because of the intensity of emotion evoked by the extreme situations being portrayed--what other genre is labeled not for a type of story, but for the specific *emotion* it aims to provoke in the reader? Maybe it's because the field, despite having roots going all the way back to Shakespeare and Beowulf, is very young. The pioneers of the contemporary horror tale--Richard Matheson, and of course, Stephen King--are still alive and writing. Whatever the reason, as things stand now, you have to cut a horror writer some slack, and accept a certain simplicity of theme. You should also bear in mind that if sometimes the language is crude, that's because the story is chopped from the author's heart, rather than processed through their head. What you should not tolerate in a horror writer, though, is lack of originality. If you find yourself thinking, as you read, "This is just another haunted house tale, vampire/werewolf tale, psycho-killer tale, sigh..." you should put down the book and look elsewhere. And that's why I'm trying to drum this one name--Joe R. Lansdale--into your head. What makes him special? Former manual laborer and good ol' boy that he is, Lansdale might find it odd that I'm applying this word to his work, but this man has an *aesthetic.* His fictional world is firmly placed amidst the piney woods and chicken plants and hard-bitten characters and tall tales and bigotry of his home state, but also mixed in is a dumbfounded fascination with the tawdry imagery of pop culture. Neon lights and garish decor. Cheap paperbacks with glossy red-and-black covers. Spiritual concepts straight out of _Weekly_World_News_. Clint Eastwood movies. Roger Corman's dyed-red "blood popcorn." It all co-mingles in Lansdale's highly visual aesthetic sense, and what comes out is not these images _per_se_-- Lansdale is sparing in his use of quotations from the media--but utterly new word-pictures. Such as a man wearing nothing but cowboy hat and boots, who floats, adrift, through a starry sky where '57 Cadillacs and Mexican whores beckon to him--a strange recasting of the figures in the cyclone, beckoning to Dorothy. But it's not all about beauty: you're not in a stylish and yet desiccated post-modern landscape, when you're in a Joe Lansdale story. This man writes with soul. He writes unflinchingly about the racism, the ignorance, the often callous disregard for values that he sees in the people he grew up with. His stories have been turned down because they're too graphic, but more often because they make a blunt social statement that makes editors so uncomfortable, they simply shudder and then try to forget. Lansdale is funny, bleak, and truthful--in the sense of presenting basic truths about the human condition--and the result is an unsettling brew that doesn't always leave you smiling. So what should you read? Well, if you asked that hypothetical horror maven, "What's the best horror short story of the past twenty-five years," you just *might* hear them say, "Guess I'd have to pick 'Night They Missed the Horror Show.'" In fact, if you don't check out Joe Lansdale for any other reason, do so for "Night They Missed the Horror Show." For this reason, and also because his novels go out of print quickly and are darn hard to find, I recommend his anthology of shorts, _By_Bizarre_Hands_. The Avon edition is still on bookstore shelves, and the cover features a lovely illustration by J. K. Potter (one of horror's best artists). I suggest you read "By Bizarre Hands" and "The Fat Man and the Elephant"--and perhaps "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks"--to ease yourself into Lansdale's world, and then head straight for "Night They Missed the Horror Show." It's a ride you won't forget. **This piece originally appeared in _The Reading Edge: An Unpretentious Newsletter for Readers_, edited by Sherry Mann (smann@ihspc.att.com).** _______________________________________________________________________ CORE is not a publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and its contents, unless specifically indicated as such, should not be mistaken for the opinions of either the organization or the editor. //>> November 1992 <<\\