Chris Jones wrote:

> The fictional
> situation in this case is more wild and innovative because it is happening in
> cyberspace and cybertime between several different characters where you can
> no longer be certain who is who, on and off lists, out of sync, here and
> there. Who is to say that I, Chris Jones, is really me, but also an
> intercessor, in this situation. Even Charles Stivale got dragged in as an
> intercessor and placed in a fictional situation for some genetic testing
> tasks.

    This is all the funnier if you know Charley Stivale, who's one of the
more conservative Deleuzian academics--a rather earnest fellow, wouldn't you
say, Chris? I had no idea he was running a Deleuze list, and last I heard he
was working on a Deleuzian analysis of Creole music, which would probably
have struck Deleuze as on a par with the bisquits at Bo Jangles.



> So I have to
> admit to being amused when Candice asked me to vouch for it, while fully
> understanding Candice's position and being happy to put my professional
> judgement on the line.
>
> Son of genet is a virus which spreads by contagion. It is the devil's child,
> the devil not being able to beget children by direct filiation and sexual
> reproduction, must act by becoming a female succubus to a man and by becoming
> a male incubus to a woman. So I was being asked to vouch for a viral
> contagion, a child of the devil, understand my amusement, now?

    I should explain that Chris's being asked to "vouch" for SoG was not
standard procedure when people seek to sub to the list and Jiscmail sends us
an automatic notification of the request, which we usually approve just as
automatically. Since the Kent Johnson/David Hess heteronymous circus,
however, we've been checking Ids at the door with those who try to sub under
an obvious pseudonym (and typically a Hotmail account). So, when I happened
to catch the sub-request from Jiscmail for SoG, I sent him (or rather, "it")
the usual polite e-mail, explaining that we didn't care who he was but only
that we knew him to be who he said he was and asking for the usual home
address/phone number or URL of his website.

Another 24 hours or so went by before I heard back from SoG, who wrote me a
long and rather impressive e-mail (it had very nice manners, I must say),
explaining in turn that "son of genet" wasn't a pseudonym but its actual
name and that it was the illegitimate child of Jean Genet and a woman in the
Black Panthers. Well, I knew enough about Genet's biography to know that
this was plausible in some ways (the Black Panther bit) and not at all in
others (though artificial insemination could account for those). SoG went on
at some length about its deep need for privacy, such that it wouldn't even
reveal its gender, let alone its home address, and claiming to have no
website either. It clearly wanted to join the list, though, and offered two
Poetryetc-listee references in lieu of ID. One was Chris--and the other was
Kent Johnson. That gave me pause, as you might imagine, but I'd come to know
Chris a bit back-channel when he gave me some helpful insight into how
Poetryetc members who were also on Brit-Po came to be on the receiving end
of the SirCam virus. (Did that also provide the germ of this idea, Chris?)
So, I e-mailed Chris about SoG and received a long, glowing testimonial to
its erudition and intellectual sophistication; indeed, said Chris, he'd
learned a great deal from his own interactions with SoG, which I can now
well believe.

The erudition and sophistication of SoG were soon demonstrated in a thread
on classical music, during which it held its own with no less an authority
than Martin Walker. Even so, SoG quit the list a day or two later,
complaining that we talked too much, a complaint that now makes perfect
sense in light of SoG's constructed origins and, for me, is the most amusing
part: how could a virus not experience an e-mail discussion list as anything
but spam?

Candice