WπHπAπT 2

"...lively discussion in the panel which decided I did not know what the essay was about..."

"Eudora Welty as innovative writer I wanted to place first in my volume."

All of this makes me love you more, and is very quieting.

Thank you for loving me, Meg. 2001 was the ten-year mark of WπHπAπT started it for me. I related it in anecdotes at Ana Verse and in query letters.

Alice Munro:

"Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about."

I salted them away in essays and letters.

The Academisation of Avant-Garde Poetry at The Argotist Online features an essay by Jake Berry along with responses by critics, writers, and poets and an interview:

http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/The%20Academisation%20of%20Avant-Garde%20Poetry.htm

There are not enough avant-garde poetries, it says, the gate has closed to newer ones.

What did I write? How did I write it? (August 2000):

Clare de la Zeitung
Clarice Lispector is cronicas
Ann is ana
The short story is the most important literary form of the 20th c.
Ana is a recycling choice
Experimentalism is recycling
Memoir is mer-memory
Fiction is a right

http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/letters-notes-conversations-partings

Threads avoiding prosetics yet related to this piece can be found here:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/otherstreamunlimited/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/239480959503066/

Fragmented, which makes it sort of .. good. Though at one point it veers back towards coherence ("Later I started .." - a concession perhaps to linear narrative). Then it ends with a logic orphan - ie the last sentence might as well read 'Ben Bolt wrote about boxing fiction in Sports Illustrated in 2005.' That's my impression, anyway, after reading your abbreviations, forward slashes and greek symbols.

The opening pulls me right in - like a Godard film: "Could someone msg. me? I am lost. Gioia is establishment. My agreement to review Side/Berry's Outside Voices came before Berry's essay and companion responses appeared..."

Good pull sentence to sentence - or moment to moment.

"Eudora Welty as innovative writer I wanted to place first in my volume. It's on the notecard in 'Hoss Men' in my ebook Jeffrey Side pub'd at Argotist in '10. Belladonna had a conference in NY in '09 including 100 participants and turned down 'Hoss Men' for inclusion..."

Great form and approach. It works for me. I like this, Ann.

Thanks, Sam, and thanks, Eamon. Eamon, your last sentence is quite funny. The sentence about Ben Marcus that ends this piece echoes my quoting him at the end of "Turning Thirty." Fiction is kind after a long night of poetics.

i don't even know what to say!

"Could someone msg. me? I am lost."

So many failed plans, stunted efforts.

"Later I started a movement to define experimental fiction called WπHπAπT, and the two men I invited in an email to join did not reply, and I did not follow up."

". . . who decided that I (Ann Bogle) didn't know what the essay was about." The name has become parenthetical. A year later (Ann Bogle) goes home.

So many threads to follow.

I like this and want to read it more.

Thanks for the links.

marvelous ann! *

The second FB thread linked above was deleted. I wrote the following comment about that at the first thread linked:

"I still need to check this for certain, but Jeff sent a msg. to say that he had deleted a thread at Argotist Online group about my entry at F'naut based on the comments I left here, called WHAT with pi sign insertions, that referred to Sarah Sarai's departure from OtherStream after asking and not being told by Jake or Jeff who posted the thread [at OtherStream] where she might read Gioia's review of Foley. Jeff seemed dissatisfied that the discussion in one thread had cross-germinated to discussion in another thread. To me it was metafiction in the making, if process can also be a story with members and a plot. It was like Godot, I said, and then I think he deleted the thread. I feel the deletion of that thread by Jeff and my decision to abrupt and create a story called WHAT for F'naut readers is not related to anyone's fixation on UK or US poetics but to a poetics exclusion of prosetics (my term) and experimental fictions generally that is gaping and widespread and goes beyond academic settings and poetics. I'll repost the story at Argotist Online group, since its internal links are related to AO, but we will not be able to recover the thread Jeff deleted. Some of the Fictionaut comments on WHAT are interesting. Unlike Jeff, who cared only for a word or two in it, the Fictionaut commenters see in it a process story."

Marcus, I like your not-knowing.

John Riley, you make most sense of this as a story, one I had not seen in it. (Ann Bogle) wrote an essay that led to lively discussion and rejection of it. (Ann Bogle) went home.

(Ann Bogle) wrote the essay, went home, sent the essay to the feminist poeticists who debated it lively then passed.

Place of birth as stump or milk crate to sit on or throne. I picture a little star on it.

John, your comment is engaging.

James Claffey, thanks. I hope it is rogue literary, well-heeled bijournalism.

Sam, until James Robison related my work, as he has read it over 20 years, to Godard, I had missed not only Godard but a lot of serious cinema, in my avoidance of unserious cinema. Then I studied it a bit. That you see Godard in WπHπAπT connects to what JR said. Exciting.

The Godardian thing would be the jumpcut. When you take continuity out of film, logic glue-words out of writing, it's what you get. It's a stylistic (as you say, prosetic) device, quite different from plot/thematic discontinuity. That latter is done sometimes brilliantly by Chris Okum, among others.

Eamon, cool, cool. As I write in the main body here, "prosetics" became a pursuit of one and so did not lead to theory but to praxis. Praxis, practice, not in the sense of "rehearsal" but in the sense of religious practice or yoga practice, for example.

Along the way, I intuited that "form" was a reject word among poeticists, based probably on post-structuralism, and less related to form in poetry, as Lewis Turco meant. The poeticists were not trained in creative writing, but in theory and literature, and they published works of abstract poetry.

Style didn't cover it for me. Style? Style. So I like, Eamon, how you adopt "prosetics" here in parentheses after "stylistic." It soothes me because it includes more than style, avoids the issue of form, that is touchy academically, and indicates a range of applications.

Etiquette, prose etiquette? I think came from Mary Gaitskill, but I may have been hallucinating.

Nice to see Chris Okum mentioned here.

Anti-linear, anti-memoir are not my positions. Linear can be useful and fun to write as well as read. And for me, memoir is astonishing when the story that arises is visible or sculpted. I like those: collage, sculpt, but do not want to toss them about. Jumpcut, too. Jim (Robison) said, "run and gun," a film-making technique he applied to my writing.

From the trailer that Meg Pokrass made for my Argotist ebook, Solzhenitsyn Jukebox, that Jim reviewed (I think without publishing the full version of it):

“Ann locates herself at an anomalous distance from the events of her narrative. Involved as character, recording agent, diarist, poet of event, absurdist, reinventing the story on the fly, (called “run and gun” when making films), so the text seems finished, polished, framed, and still underway, in process.”

"Self"-promotion or self-"promotion"--what are you gonna take? You give that? "Self-promotion"--that is what you give? I give this (prosetics), and you give that as what I take? And call it that? That is what you mean by opportunity?

"In fact, Lucy preferred art, and before she died, she had learned to sculpt using her favorite red yarn—favorite since early cathood—in large cursive letters: G, L, J, and the symbol for pi. Lucy Rain Cat, I called her, and Lucy Bourgeoise."

--from my story "Animals in Reverse" that appears at Altered Scale.

Lucy's G and L were in cursive, but her J's were printed. There were many J's, one at a time, that might have been umbrella handles or hooks. Once she made a failed J or backward L that I decided looked like a tire iron. It was down the middle of the hall. I teased her. I said, "Lucy, you wouldn't be able to catch a sunfish with that hook."

She sculpted the pi sign on the last step of the stairs.

".. visible or sculpted .." - style/prosetics - these are terms which relate to form, don't you think? What fascinates me in prose is something that poets take for granted: the shape of the text on the page. That's why I liked your current piece mainly for its first paragraph, which was, visually, so untidily compressed, so phone-texted-like. That sense of being written in shorthand, with its tense shifts, abbreviations, parenthesis, slashes, suited well your usual highly personal themes. But mainly, to the eye it looked good.

Eamon, prose form is what interests me, as the subject that seems missing in inquiry and Internet conversation; as I said (above), form seems to be a reject word in poetics. An alternative to form is "design."

"Structure" occurs to me in the act of longer composition.

I just wrote on Penny Goring's story, "(Style is either deeper than I tend to think it is or there is something involved in the telling that is not style, but form.)"

You write, "What fascinates me in prose is something that poets take for granted: the shape of the text on the page."

Do you mean poets take it for granted that they are working with the shape of the text in a poem and writers do not all think of the shape of the text in prose? Or do you mean poets as readers of prose take the textual shape for granted?

Thanks for noting the phone-texted quality in WπHπAπT. That comes from its original context as comments in a thread in a group at FB. I wanted to sketch it, as background, without detaining the reader.

Do you really think it's "highly personal"? The content?

Nick Carbó notes, "I'd say, quantum writing. Where the trajectory of words behaves wildly."

I ask him, "WπHπAπT (the movement) or WπHπAπT (the F'naut entry) or what I call prosetics, you would call quantum writing? Quantum is a key or code word in the journey [experience]. I decided against pursuing post-academic study of the field called Narratology."

And, "Narratology in about 2000 concerned physics in finding structures in texts (I think)--not in writing them. Barthes and Russian futurists I read in an/other context."

Jeffrey Side wrote yesterday via email:

Ann, I’m glad you removed your Otherstream FB group posts [in WπHπAπT], as I thought they were very confusing, as did a couple other people. Jake [Berry]’s response to the situation is the following. I have his permission to quote it to you:

“Maybe the link to Dana [Gioia]'s review of Jack [Foley]'s books confused her. If she thinks Dana is establishment and we are supposed to be anti-establishment, then Dana's presence would be contradictory. Maybe she can't accept the notion that the same person could be part of one establishment, the NEA, and opposed to another, academic control of poetry. Dana does confuse a lot of people because he's neo-formalist yet also non-conformist in his critique. Should a complex personality in the world of poetics create confusion? It shouldn't but it does for some. This only demonstrates how backward and entrenched we have become. Most of the modernists would be considered radically experimental again. My conclusion is that many people want their poetry, and everything else, very clear and simple. I suppose that makes life easier. But life is a complex ordeal. Why should we try to simplify it? Do we need these tonics in order to make it seem rational and bearable?”

Parallels interest me here, such as the place of modernism if we imagined it taking place now. Bookmark: In a thread at F'naut at Matchbook, James Robison and I agreed spontaneously on Eudora Welty as an innovative writer. He went on to say that point of view in Henry James means he is a "permanently avant garde writer." [I'll paste the full comment from the "Digressions" thread below.]

The "confusion" Jeff cites about my passages conflicts with Jake's explanation that I am confused about Gioia's position in relation to Jeff's and Jake's within Argotist.

Gioia's complexity should not confuse, Jake says, but (sometimes) does. There is no suggestion by Jeff or Jake that my complexity caused their confusion.

From the "Digressions" thread at the Matchbook group at F'naut:

"I modestly offer an opinion--A flash is either a distillate intimation of a longer traditional piece or a kind of Art Povera concrete-poetry thing, a language object. Neither strikes me as avant garde, both have been going on for about a century. Whereas, the pov that Henry James uses seems permanently avant garde, (most lit classes don't address how insane and radical is his strategy as I suspect many lit teachers don't appreciate his decision not only to "host" his novels and stories, [talk about postmodern!] but to do so in a koo-koo plural that is "we" but not the royal "we") and again, thus, therefore, nothing can be new except the self. I read writers who have settled on a time and place and method and who are, sadly, suddenly, irrelevent. Everyone knows the punchline. The effort to evolve a 2009 self will be, perforce, different from a 1968 or 1868 self but have nothing to do with history or literary trends or technologies. No literary artist makes this argument as clearly as does Godard, a film maker who refuses and refuses to belong to any time or syntax or code and always seems fresh as new paint. He's talking to himself. He will edit and cross out on screen and he can use a dissolve to evoke regret, while another film maker is still trapped in narrative. I'm saying the battle for the new is entirely internal and related to form or genre in no way."

--James Robison, September 13, 2009

1. "nothing can be new except the self" (James Robison)
2. Ann Bogle writes pure self.
3. Ann Bogle is always new.

*

Yes!

Nick Carbó writes, "Think LHC, large hadron collider: beautiful movement of particles, particles as words, sentences."

Luis Lemus writes, "I do love me some good controversy and pi. Only thing better might be some form of controlled conflagration (smile). What and whose works might appear in your proposed anthology?"

Yesterday at 3:44pm · Unlike · 1

Ann Bogle writes, "Luis, a list of those to come. Stay tuned to this posting for now."

Ann,
Many of your comments here work as - or could be shaped into - a postscript or long footnote to "WπHπAπT" - or could stand as part 3.

The file containing notes for the proposed anthology is in the drawer of the file cabinet. The first topics list I generated in late 2000 while visiting NY. The list circles the question "what is experimental fiction" and is four pages in length. I sent it to Ronald Sukenick, mIEKAL aND, Mark Wallace, and Sid Farrar. I composed it after attending the Modern Language Association conference in D.C. in 2000, where I had heard a panel on narrative structure, unrelated to creative writing or contemporary writers, that included a paper by a scholar in Hawaii about Richardson's Clarissa. To go to D.C. to hear that paper had cost (B'go out of pocket) $1,000. At the time the "genre studies chairs" within MLA, a new area, were entirely unfilled, and by the next year, the genre studies chairs were packed, scheduled into the future, several by scholars recognized in poetics.

Drama (history, criticism, & theory) (D008)
Film (history, criticism, & theory) (D009)
Nonfiction Prose Studies, Excluding Biography and Autobiography (history, criticism, & theory) (D010)
Poetry (history, criticism, & theory) (D011)
Prose Fiction (history, criticism, & theory) (D012)
Literary Criticism (history of criticism; theory of literature) (D014)
Methods of Literary Research (D046)
Autobiography, Biography, and Life Writing (D077)

Sam, your comment, "Many of your comments here work as - or could be shaped into - a postscript or long footnote to "WπHπAπT" - or could stand as part 3."

Yes.

The F'naut format for posting is very helpful here. The display is actually better than most websites in doing (not being able to do) this thing.

"Hoss Men" an essay in prosetics is experimental and has a linear narrative that emerges if the reader reads to the end, around its various techniques and ruses, incl. lists, a poem, and epistolary forms, a narrative more full and linear than the bare narrative of WπHπAπT, and is longer, about 5,810 words, 21 pages or so. I edited it for slight revision, glossed it, highlighted a long passage in yellow, tightened it slightly and sent it to The Believer for publishing consideration. It was written in '08 and is set in the 90s.

This discussion probably deserves a forum of its own. If anyone wants to start one, I'd love to contribute.

But clarity, if possible. The trees in this forest are too dense with jargon from lit studies and French theory. As your nice excerpt from James Robison shows, deep thinking on the craft of fiction predates modern academic literature studies. (I agree with James's point that James is an avant-garde writer in the true sense. For a tutorial exercise: count the commas in the final sentence of The Beast in the Jungle.)

Ann, with visual "shape of the text", I was thinking of classical precedents like the tri-split pages of Finnegans Wake, the cut-ups of Burroughs, the dense single paragraph elongations of Krasnahorkai and Bernhard, the footnotes of Wallace, the coffin graph in As I Lay Dying, the typographical play in Gass's The Tunnel .. I could go on .. The examples are from works showing a high degree of awareness of the effects which can be attained through text layout.

Eamon, general forums at F'naut have typically not sustained the level of focus seen in the groups, particularly Matchbook and Sex (sometimes in the first line), a little earlier in F'naut history. Please begin a forum topic about "prosetics" if that is what you have in mind. Usurp by all means. Baby burp. Form a combine.

Clarity is what you are reading here. It is not based on jargon or overdetermined by theory, French or otherwise. You and other men within earshot may be misevaluating my interest in inquiry. No other woman has joined in besides Meg Pokrass, who said she loves me.

Of course, you "agree" with what James Robison wrote about Henry James; he successfully and briefly argues it. You say, "I agree," as if you had already thought it; yet I believe it is original thought. My professor in Madison who taught Henry James was very bright, very sharp, and Harvard-trained. He never said what Jim said about Henry James, "his decision not only to 'host' his novels and stories, [talk about postmodern!] but to do so in a koo-koo plural that is 'we' but not the royal 'we'."

Clarity or Enough is the name of my ms. now courting at 1913 (Rae Armantrout judge); Flannery O'Connor (U of Georgia); Lit Pub (Molly Gaudry judge); BlazeVox, McSweeney's, and Patasola. Texas Was Better is the name of the first volume. The book of stories, collected, runs 435 pp. double-spaced.

Nice textual examples of prose visuals.

Jake Berry writes, "Tried to post this at WHAT, but am not a member. Gioia's article on Foley's books has not yet been published. It is forthcoming in Poetry International and The Tower Journal. Jack sent it to several friends, including me, and I assume Jeffrey. Sorry about the confusion. Though it has become a very creative confusion."

Dear Ann Bogle,

Thank you for your unwavering patience in receiving a response from The Believer. Unfortunately, we won't be able to take "Hoss Men" for the magazine; however, we wish you luck placing it with another publication.

Thank you for thinking of us!

Best regards,
The Believer

Dear The Believer,

[Sent through Submittable]

The interview with Lucinda Williams you ran inspired me to try you with my essay in prosetics, "Hoss Men," that I discuss in the third person in my brief at Fictionaut about my starting an invitational movement to define experimental fiction called W~H~A~T, tho with pi signs not available on this cell phone. I first saw The Believer on a visit to my fiance's hospital room at Beth Israel in 2009. He is not a poet but the poet, first-period last-period. I liked The Believer instantly not least the boldness of its name. And will continue to read it, and if I ever find credence, try you again.

Ann Bogle
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

The Vida Count on WπHπAπT:

112 views

37 comments

2 women made 25 + 1 comments

7 men made 11 comments

14 women mentioned or quoted within comments by 2 women and 2 men

26 men quoted within comments by 1 woman and 3 men

These references, aside from Welty and pi, go way over my head, but I love the term prosetics. Is there any equivalent to poetics now in use? When I looked up prosetics on Google, they tried to correct me with prosthetics. And speaking of prosetics theory, I'd start with adding yet another southerner, Flannery O'Connor, myself. I'm curious what you think.

Gloria, poetics is poetry and politics or poetry as politics and creates in action a light social architecture, almost like a cob- or spider web in atmospheric design.

Poet, playwright Christa Forster wrote at F'naut general forum "Experimental":

"Experimental is what people call prose or poetry that they cannot 'follow' overtly (re: Bogle's quote from Powell). And let's face it, most people like to be led and like to know where they're going when they're being led.

"In an experimental story, the unfolding prose does not obviously lead the audience to the meaning; meaning is suspended in the process of reading the story. Reading a 'traditional' story is like the act of stumbling upon a spiderweb with a fat, monster spider smack in the center (if it's a winsome story). Reading an 'Experimental' story is like the act of walking through the spiderweb, accidentally, only realizing you've done so because you can feel its threads on your face.

"I speak as an audience/reader here because I think it's the audience that defines the writing as 'traditional' or 'experimental,' not the writer. The writer, as Gaddis and Bogle point out writes what she thinks is the truest way for her to write."

Textual analysis of Welty reveals startling innovative technique. O'Connor is overtly exploring her Catholic position in art of deep conflict or mystery. There is mystery in both O'Connor and Welty. In Welty it is more like air or aura of mystery. Suddenly I am reminded of "A Rose for Emily" (1930). Faulkner was born in 1897, O'Connor in 1925. O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955).

I like very much the way you force doors to open. *

Penny, thanks for reading and commenting. It's not even a favorite of mine, but thanks for the fave as well.

[FB msg. I sent 8/3/12]:

"Jake, my position is that men become naturally disinterested in inquiry initiated by women. If the women remain "nice" about it and advance their ideas cordially and in appropriate channels, then the men glean whatever there is to glean from it, without giving attribution later, unless a senior adviser (elected counselor or poetry senator in the world of poetry outside ivied walls and within) directs their attention to the woman inquirer's contributions, and then homage must be paid to her ideas.

"I invented prosetics, as I relate in Jeffrey Side's ejection of Ann Bogle threads at FB and in the F'naut entry I created from my own comments first added to the Gioia/Foley thread, inappropriately as Side insisted, meaning not "nicely" or later he said not "fairly," called WHAT with pi sign insertions.

"My coining the term or putting it into use in 2001 was not where prosetics began. It began in my apartment in Binghamton, NY, in 1988 or so. LANGUAGE with its = sign insertions figured in to my prose innovating then. LANGUAGE is more closely allied with poetry and my training had been in canon-based literature and fiction writing, especially short fiction. My reading is poetry, especially modern and contemporary poetry, mostly outside of school, meaning post-matriculation. I read poetry widely on the Internet and in books and chapbooks and journals. For whatever reason, poetry goes in as printed matter and fiction or creative nonfiction or prose poetry comes out. That is my situation or condition or position.

"The hostility came from men in those threads Jeffrey started in the two FB groups, and the support came from men as well, yet the support was mainly not directed as support for my ideas or inquiry. Occasionally, it came out as support for my primary creative writing. Primary creative is what I call fiction or creative nonfiction or poetry or prose poetry and is the name of a short story I wrote at Wryting-L and published at Big Bridge.

"A man named August Highland called me a 'cunt' at Wryting-L after I had posted medical recommendations based on my own experience, in the hope of perhaps saving someone some time or trouble, in response to Alan Sondheim's postings about major depression he was then suffering and that August Highland was attacking on the list. After Highland emailed the list, addressing me as 'cunt,' I addressed Highland as 'crowded bitch,' and then Sondheim rose up in indignation that a female pejorative would be directed at a man and likened it to homophobia in London, and then I think he kicked me off the list, where he is or was moderator or owner. Talan Memmott apologized to me as if for Highland's behavior. Memmott had forwarded to the list threatening emails Highland had back-channeled to him. I guess Sondheim saw little difference between Highland and me.

"I used to email Sondheim, who had written to Buffalo Poetics Listserv that he needed a print publisher, that I would one day publish his work if at all possible. I was a great admirer of it. I was very poor at the time so could do little except appreciate his writing, and then later my poverty was relieved and I was involved with publishing more directly, but by then ...

"Marc Vincenz told me that Jeffrey Side had emailed Marc asking Marc whether I (Ann) was suffering mental illness symptoms recently, and Marc, I don't know what he said to Jeff, took Jeffrey's side in finding it unacceptably rude, from the sound of it: my gentle insistence that 'we' talk about it, prosetics. Any other attempt to talk about it politely, nicely, not rudely in any way, appropriately, had been ignored. It concerns me that fiction writers are mainly disinterested, poets are definitely disinterested, and women seem less likely to be interested, especially women poets, and are definitely less likely to participate in discussion about prosetics online.

"I intended this email for you alone, but I think I will add it to the WHAT entry at F'naut as further notes or little knots in history.

"I'll answer your email more directly in a different email to you."

[FB msg. I sent to Ron Silliman, 8/3/12, to introduce the link to WHAT]:

"Apology in advance for piling reading material on you, that you have not requested, but in case it might be of interest to you I'll send it along. My first attempt at collaborating in prosetics occurred with Miekal And, related in a thread at OtherStream on FB, a group I suddenly exited today after sustaining repeated attack and not seeing a way to get somewhere that way. Mark Wallace, in addition, had long ago offered to co-edit an essay anthology about experimental fiction. I sent links of WHAT to Mark Wallace and Miekal And and did not hear from them directly, and a further query to a mutual friend of ours, Jeff Hansen, went unremarked though he replied to one other issue, a reading that Jeff wants me to perform alongside Eric Lorberer in Minneapolis later this year for Jeff's journal, Altered Scale.

"Jake Berry has become involved via rather complicated routes and channels and is kind and has even commented on prosetics as inquiry."

[Comment I wrote at FB today]: "The toothbrush is a fine example of literary allusion. Since it is my allusion to a story I wrote, it might need to be called self-referential. Self-referential needs more careful definition. Once, in a different story, I chose a semi-omniscient, unreliable, semi-embodied narrator to tell the 3p story of a so-called girl. At first, the narrator wasn't male or female, then it became necessary for her to semi-embody, given other exigencies in the story she had hoped to narrate omnisciently, but her character had pooped out, had become too passive, inactive, so the narrator had to step up her own participation in the story to get things going or moving again. An agent, where I sent the story, referred to the narration or style, I guess, style, as 'self-referential,' and I thought he meant 'about me,' as in 'creative nonficton passed off as fiction' or something along those lines, but we never discussed it. It was a, you know, decision that the agent made."

[Prosetics related? I don't know, but I guess I'm in charge of prosetics because no one has joined, so here it is, from an email I sent on 8/2/12}:

"Paranoia is very hard to take. I have had that, too. I had decided not to take up the political as others do and as bipolar-d'x'd who get paranoid do to their demise. I feel the individual cannot and should not try to stop government on any kind of solo or group mission outside proper actions and discourse.

"Religion is more my paranoid side in the past, why the Princeton doctor checked for TLE, I think. That doctor, Braverman, answered his phone, 'Jesus, yet?' And I said, 'Ann, mother of Mary,' and he said, 'Good, because today alone I heard from seven men claiming to be Jesus.'

"Braverman really helped lance a sad bubble of stored up religious trouble in me; my pastor from childhood had killed himself (detailed event in my understanding of theology). Yet I didn't have adult religion, so it built up in me and came out like bp.

"I still love BL in friendship. Her talent is so fine and kind and travels through deeps moving lightly."

Barrett Watten: "originary event"

Summer-Fall 1991, U of Houston, event as written in document by Ann Bogle. (I have the original typescript and never xeroxed or retyped it on the computer or scanned it. Fragments exist at Black Ice and Big Bridge.)

Post-originary prosetics.

Prosthetics as Google asks if you meant it.

17 / 18 printer pages to here.

Comment I made to Penny Goring, London writer, who commented on WHAT at F'naut:

"You wrote at WHAT that you like very much the way I force doors to open, phrase that is a little unsettling, given that standards of Internet and Outernet conduct for men and women are disparate and standards of creative conduct for mentally diagnosed writers are if anything higher than those for writers not diagnosed. A thought."

Today is working on WHAT and avoiding thinking of the weird conflagration that occurred in the thread at OtherStream, group I left. I msg'd to Marc Vincenz asking him to pull my story contributions to the OtherStream anthology. Chris Watts' comment and timing hit my threshold for shock. I do not know what others may have thought of it or whether the thread there or at Argotist Online group continued or not. My statement about it is at WHAT.

Penny Goring to my F'naut wall: "ooh, i didn't mean 'doors to open' as in the Doors of Opportunity or The Doors to the Palace etc. More accurate would be to say: i like the way you force the boundaries ... of what we can/cannot do with our words. That is what you do for me - I see boundaries falling away and I loves it."

Catherine Daly followed me at Twitter today, and I tweeted a link to WHAT to her, saying that it was WOMPROSE-related and asking whether WOMPROSE has been active, and she msg'd me: "we can revive it any time; it is still there... we should just start posting and inviting?"

WOMPROSE is a spin-off of WOMPO, founded by Annie Finch. Women's Poetry Listserv and Women's Prose Listserv, started by Catherine Daly.

There are a lot more poets. WOMPROSE stuttered and stopped, as I used to do a lot.

In response to your privately sent condolences that I might seem not unhappy, I asked someone to stay with me last night to cheer me down. I explained the reason for his visit. In the morning, my euthymia waning, I said that with him, I feel fine, and he said, with you I feel much better than fine, and I said, in Texas and songs, fine means very fine, and he said his Texas roommate in college said, "They's nuthin' better'an fine." Ron Sukenick would know how to write that line.

Serial fictions or sequence fictions. Again, poetry (world) has defined these in poetry. It seems okay to borrow from poetic work in delineating craft. Yet I feel fiction is a slightly different or definitely different attitude in composition than poetry.

Thrice Fiction published my 1987 novella in 24 parts (numbered) called In a Basket in 2012. The story ran originally 120 pp. My novel workshop professor, who taught by specific method, Larry Woiwode, had asked me to go up to 300 pp. Instead, not only to be contrary, but related also to leaving school and working long hours at a Gannett newspaper, I edited the first draft until it was 50 pp. then 35 pp. Now it's 8,020 words. I call it a bonsai novel.

Length in fiction has become such a measure of it.

In Institute of Tut, my unpublished collection of stories in 2000, the stories went from shortest to longest, and I imagined it as a pan flute. Zamponia in Peru. Editors liked the style in the writing, did not publish the collection nor note the arrangement of the stories by length.

The stories are listed alphabetically now within chronological epochs of my 27 years in short story.

I like varying lengths and prose genres in the collection.

[From my comment in M ILLNESS group:] After [Millie Niss] died of other health problems, someone asked, "Did she ever give up her idea that she had a mental illness?" That poet's comment reminded me that people tend to feel that either someone is [in actuality] not mentally ill, so misdiagnosed, where misdiagnosis would be perceived as an injustice, or that his or her ideas or art issue from faulty brain chemistry, thus classing the work in a lower hierarchy. A test of a [poet's] competence might be logical (normal, conventional) prose behaviors outside his or her abstractions in poetry.

Unconventional prose behavior off the printed page is source for dispute in poetics.

"Could someone msg. me? "
I'm with Sam on this. As a first sentence and given what follows this pulled me in as a flat out physics question rather than merely a polite form of request.

Thanks, Sally