I've only poked my nose into a couple of chat rooms. Insane indeed. But I'm
a delicate flower.

I think of poetryetc as marginal; it's certainly full of marginalia. I
think of me as a margin. I like margins too, they're places with lots of
crisscrossings and interesting ecologies. But if I'm truthful, and given
aggrandisement, I think margins are where the real stuff happens, which
makes the margins the centre. What we call the "mainstream" often seems to
me to be simply past tense. But mainstream (here at least) is defined by
mass media attention, which is always several steps behind the game, if it
ever catches up at all...

Best

A

On 7/3/05 11:23 PM, "I.C.Davidson" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Well maybe the frontier days of the internet are over, it's all mainstream
> now, parcelled off into tidy spaces. Or maybe no one has any more to say
> than they ever had and the responsiblity of filling all these virtual
> spaces has driven everyone back into their rooms, a chat down the corner
> shop, a conversation in the pub, a cosy corner of a chat room somewhere (PM
> me, they must be saying). That's the real insanity on the internet, the
> public chat rooms.
>
> My experience of working on the margins of the educational system is that
> when someone says they're going to mainstream you like they're doing you a
> favour it means you're going to disappear. Two images come to mind, of a
> fertile margin, ecologically diverse, inhabited out of choice and of a
> wasted, barren shoreline, where htings wash up, rot and get neglected. The
> maisntream of course can always flood and your cosy margin disappears under
> water. And you can get carried away. This is getting good isn't it.
>
> Is poetry etc any of these? It has more 'traffic' than most mail bases, the
> only one i had to put on digest, so lots of people seem to like it. Is the
> internet a type of margin or has it infiltrated everywhere? Some would say
> that the centre/margin concept is old hat and everything is now equal
> within a pluralist meshwork. Pity, i've always enjoyed margins and
> marginilia, but we have to keep up with the times.
>
> I have to go and teach now. Postmodernism. Up the shallow end.
>
> ian



Alison Croggon

Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com