Quoting Mairead Byrne <[log in to unmask]>:

> I wonder would anyone have an email contact for Gary Sullivan.
>  I've been
> trying to access Readme and getting the earthlink page.  All
> suggestions
> welcome.
> Mairead
>
Mairead:

Gary Sullivan recently posted/claimed on the U.S. Electronic Poetry
Center List that, due to some alteration in web server, the URL for
Readme had been changed and now required some additional word
("home"?).   You might check the Buffalo archives for that--- although
I believe you may still find yourself dead-ended.

Because, PLEASE NOTE:

This posting appeared fast upon the tail of certain legal/ethical hot
water Readme had churned.

In August, the Buffalo List focused a great deal of public attention
and pressure on Sullivan for having published identity theft documents
and homophobic hate literature in Readme.

He had printed a fraudulent interview between "John Ashbery"and one
Jacques Debrot,--- which in fact John had no involvement with or
knowledge of.   The interview puts words into Ashbery's mouth equating
homosexuality with insanity.  Sullivan also added to the Debrot by
himself commissioning two forged "Ashbery" poems that accompanied the
interview, by an author whose identity he has refused to disclose
publicly.

Simultaneously, the trail lead to another "Ashbery" counterfeit in
Andrew Felsinger's litvert, previously accused of being mere copyright
violation of a valid text.

Felsinger had perhaps been duped (by Debrot, who gave him it) into
believing the fake was a real Ashbery poem.  Felsinger yielded fairly
quickly to persuasion and removed the link to the forgery, and he
xxxx-xxxxxxx-ed out the name "John Ashbery" so that web search for
John's name would no longer lead to the traces of that deception.  His
initial plea of naivite is plausible, given the benefit of the doubt.

Sullivan, however, remained recalcitrant and, despite heated public
disclosure and outcry, he defended his deceit (as in the spirit of
Nabokov, or as a nostalgic evocation of a similar mid-1900s petite
scandale Berrigan/"John Cage" interview [also, note, aimed at a
homosexual man] which he said is a touchstone role model to him).

It was only after September 11th had given Sullivan still more time to
perpetuate his malfeasance, or to let it openly malinger, that direct
contact from John or his agents was reported to have secured a promise
that a "disclaimer" would appear in Readme.

But it was then at only exactly that point that Sullivan announced,
ostensibly, taking the entire contents of all Readme issues into
subterfuge by making them inaccessible behind the password protection
that you encountered.  (By then, intimations and admissions had
emerged about additional Readme forgeries or more identity theft.)

Within days of that, Sullivan --- when a subsequent case of false
identity was found on-List --- theatrically threatened that he would
have nothing to do with that on-line poetry community anymore and that
he was signing off from there forever, because they should have
censored the use of a pseudonym.


I hope this is helpful to you and others, and that it answers your
question.

Fond appreciation for the U.K. List's and that country's ongoing
level-headedness and encouragement for us beset New Yorkers, sent
gratefully from here on the palisades of upper Manhattan.  And regards
to Gabriel Gudding, Mairead, whom Joe Amato remembers fondly from
their old collaborations on the U.S. List.

Jeffrey Jullich