Dear Ric,thanks for your plug for the recent West House books, and for
the earlier one which I did find when I ransacked the archives the other
week.It's not for me to comment but 

I would like to ask: Can I quote your remarks in future blurbs, fliers,
etc? I ask the question because I'm such a greenhorn in e-space and
during the 2 or 3 weeks I've been a mostly silent reader/watcher on this
list I've been thinking a lot about the status of what we're doing here:
it's such a curious no-man's-land between private & public/published
correspondence (or whatever) & I suppose is breaking down that
private/public barrier quite rapidly. Exciting & unnerving.

At a tangent to that, or, Further Reflections of a Greenhorn in E-Space:

Re Sandra Waller's project. Keston's right about the need for scanning -
in fact a lot of what he calls 'smaller press articles' could not be
reproduced any other way (which connects w/ a remark of Cris's the other
day about the typographical limitations out here); what can't of course
be preserved is the materiality of the original. What bothers me a bit
is that sooner or later the book as such will be sidelined - why produce
300 copies if a few for non-web-users will do? - the effect might be to
push small press books further into the category of private press or
artists' books - finally one 'original' would do & the work would take
on the status of a painting, known mostly in reproduction. Well I quite
like that idea in some ways and what I don't mean to do here is to
bemoan the Death of the Book in some grand or even McLuhanite sense; in
fact I think there's a deep phenomenology of the book as object which
guarantees its future. But there's the rub: the book will maintain its
status as the main vehicle of literary publishing at the same time as
publishing 'out at the [largely economic] margins' will become less &
less viable.Okay so we'll lose a hobby & save some money, but: it seems
to me that a lot of the talk about 'schools of poetry' etc is misplaced
- search is made for distinctions of form/content/style between
'mainstream' and 'other' poetry when the central distinguishing feature
of the so-called 'mainstream' is the mode or rather profile of its
publishing. Point illustrated by many of the mass media reviews of the
anthologies Tony listed; I was amused by one which wondered why a
'social realist' like Kelvin Corcoran was included in Conductors of
Chaos. At the same time as Peter Reading likes to talk in interviews as
if he's the only English poet who's ever thought about auto-destructive
page-space or various other post- or pseudo-Dadaist devices. I'm not
quite sure where this train of thought is leading; perhaps I'm just
envisioning further obfuscations in an already confused situation; on
the other hand in an optimistic mood I might hope that there will be a
kind of democracy in web-space which will allow for more useful
comparisons and evaluations than we usually see at the moment ...

No I should have called this NAIVE Reflections of a Greenhorn in E-
Space. I'll shut up. Best, Alan 



-- 
Alan Halsey


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