Selected Letters from Readers

Editors’ Note

The following responses were submitted by PMC readers using regular e-mail or the PMC Reader’s Report form. Not all letters received are published, and published letters may have been edited.

As promised in the last issue, this installment of Letters contains a selection from the electronic mail we received in response to our decision to begin publishing by subscription in Project Muse. A complete archive of these exchanges can be found at:

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/lists_archive/pmc-jhup

Because of the length and number of these messages we have grouped them into a separate section.

Letters on other topics begin immediately below.

PMC Reader’s Report on Michael Joyce’s “Twelve Blue” (PMC 7.3)

What a happy, disturbing, confusing, challenging, delightful joy to discover Michael Joyce’s simply breathtaking story(ies) “Twelve Blue.” I’ve been drowning in his words for the last two days, gasping for breath.

The potential and not the realization...the process and not the product. I am reminded of Michael Ondaatje’s astonishing poetry and poetic prose. This is bleeding edge writing, exciting and disconcerting.

Where can I find more?!?

Linda Wallace
wallacel@is.dal.ca

The Editors reply

“Twelve Blue” was co-published by Postmodern Culture and Eastgate Systems. Both “Twelve Blue” and further information about Joyce’s work are available at Eastgate’s Web site.

PMC Reader’s Report on Fredman, “How to Get Out of the Room That is the Book?” (PMC 6.3)

I’m currently working on a PhD thesis on the novels of Paul Auster and always interested in collecting material in the shape of articles and intelligent criticism. Vol 6, no 3 of Postmodern Culture had an article by Stephen Fredman entitled “How to Get Out of the Room That Is the Book?” I’ve been able to secure an abstract of this (a student of mine gave it to me); do I have any chance of getting the whole article? Thanks.

Carl Springer
fs5y246@public.uni-hamburg.de

The Editors reply

Text-only versions of all conventional articles, including Professor Fredman’s, are available at http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/. This archive excludes hypertextual articles and media pieces that cannot be presented as plain text.

PMC Reader’s Report: cyberspatial hypereality is a capitalist plot

So I see the only remedy to this centuries-old disease to be the total sharing of information for free by those of us who see the light at the end of the tunnel as that belonging to the oncoming train called cyber-capitalism. This will keep the culture of the net pure for long enough until there are so many of us “doing it for free” that the snakey train of consumerism will derail. So will you please send me enough money for room and board while I dedicate my life to this setting-the-world-righteous cause? I will appreciate email with the details of where and when I can collect my share ASAP, as my rent is again due.

Thank you,
RIC ALLAN
ricallan@loop.com

Special Section: PMC and Project Muse

Russell Potter, 3-25-97

I wanted to comment on some of the issues in John Unsworth’s informative posting, and thank him for taking the time to lay out all these histories, and set up this list.

The vagaries of academic journal publishing certainly exert their pressures in all kinds of frustrating ways, and the transition into on-line incarnations has not radically altered them. But I always thought of PMC as fundamentally different from other journals, in that its functional ephemerality (back in the days, at least, when it was retrieved by e-mail or ftp) represented at least a partial exception to the old habits of thinking of texts as things, as commodities, texts as substantial material entities.

Now, marketed as “America’s oldest electronic journal” (a rather ghastly moniker, I think), PMC is a little...