Ira,
A number of things.
- (firstly) *nice one*. I had exactly the opposite reaction to friend
Milne. 'What a relief... what a *pleasure* ...' (some of it purely and
immediately visual, for me).
- the formatting problem can be solved by any (e)reader if they simply set
their email program to display messages in a so-called 'monospaced' font
(in which each letter occupies the same amount of horizontal space on the
line, as for typewriter 'fonts' -- 'courier' on most machines; 'monaco' or
'mishakawa' on Macs; and many, many others).
- on the Web, html reduces all spaces to single spaces unless you (or some
techie) encodes 'significant' spaces as 'non-breaking spaces' " " or
" " in html conventions. You would still have to indicate that the
page should be displayed in a monospaced fonts. This isn't too difficult to
set up, just a little tedious. Worth it in the case of such work.
Alternative, the poem can simply be surrounded by <PRE> and </PRE> tags,
which mark it as 'pre-formatted text' (quick and dirty fix, but native to
html). Alternatively turn the text into a graphic (many of the virtual
visual poets seem to prefer to do this) for Web-use.
- are you, or interested others 'here', subscribed to the wr-eye-tings list
(for Visual Poetry)? Send "subscribe wr-eye-tings" to [log in to unmask]
And/or visit this list's 'scratchpad'
http://www.burningpress.org/wreyeting/index.html.
- I've *just* received Johanna Drucker's _The Century of Artists' Books_
(1995) which is very recently out in paperback from Granary Books in NYC --
inquiries: Steven Clay <[log in to unmask]>. Excellent, although her
academic style (also evidenced in her _Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and
the Critical Tradition_ Columbia, 1994, which I'm in the middle of) is a
bit dry (plus having the positive benefit of *clear* commitment to
positions/points of view). There was an excellent email interview with her,
conducted by Matt Kirschenbaum in a recent issue of _Postmodern Culture_.
Well worth trying to track down. (Sorry, I don't have the URL to digits.)
- I've already mentioned _Chain_ 4 (Fall, 1997) on this list. Relevant
issue of a great magazine.
- sorry I missed your (well-reviewed) su<per/b>Voice in London.
& and in-,
John
Formatting PS: Actually, when I received the w-in-p I have my email set to
a monospaced font and saw what was going on immediately, but out of
curiosity I've just switched to a proportional font on my Mac (geneva). I
think the form of the thing is even more beautiful in this font (only the
left-most vertical lines retain their 'verticality'; the farther right you
go, the more the verticals curve and show what typographers call 'rivers'
(of white space).
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