Matt Chimes In (Yes to Dr. Faustroll!)

Count me in, too, though I'll probably have to limit any strict commitment to the bi-weekly/monthly as well, so as to not distract from diss writing.

I think Craig is right in that character/plot restrictions are probably to the side of the project. However, there should totally be some major constraint(s) guiding the work (some that force contraction and some governing expansion). Given the multi-directional (hyper-textual, even?) possibilities for the project, I would suggest starting on the cellular level (for sanity's sake) -- a single set of documents written under a uniform set of constraints so as to create a cohesive thread. That initial set can then then be the spring board for a number of spin-offs/associative projects (in differing platforms and with different participants/contributers), each with their own unique constraints to allow for a more encyclopedic growth of the project. That way we can allow for multi-modal work that includes fiction but is not limited to fictive constraints. I'd add to Lane's list of precursors Jacques Roubaud's Great Fire of London, Alfred Jarry's Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Charles Olson's Maximus Poems, as well as Lost and it's spin-off media.

This sounds quite exciting and hydro-conductive!

-Matt Trease

Project Management

Thanks Lane for moving this out of email.

Before we begin this project, I would like us to consider the collaborative structure that works for film production. With the model of producers and directors the most complex art projects in history manage to synthesize the collaborative efforts of hundreds of highly motivated and creative people.

Producer: a person whose job it is to secure the means of production, identify and define what deliverables are and specify the dates when those items are due.

Director: a person whose job it is to articulate the creative direction of the project and manage the sub-projects within the scope of the collective/unified creative goals of the big picture.

While I think the people who play roles sh/could change over time (the end of each term?), I think that we should seriously consider identifying them at the start, because of the project management structure they afford. I will even be so bold as to volunteer and propose something, altho solely for the sake of discussion:

1) If I'm going to build and host and manage a wiki-site , which I am happy to do, over Christmas break, that seems to place me in the role of producer, at least initially. That is to say I would be happy to volunteer if that is what people decide we want. In this role I would not only manage the site in terms of functionality and architecture, I would also meet with the director and the contributors (virtually) to determine commitment levels and "assignments" which could be pegged appropriately to participants interests and availability. I would in that role, working with the director, give you an assignment(s) and a due date(s) and track that it gets done, posted, etc.

2) Since Lane has articulated the initial vision for this, in this system I am proposing, it seems to make sense that he would fill the role of initial director, or director pro tem—again if that's what he wants to, and if that's what other people want. I'm not trying to grab roles or define relationships, I just think that these internet groups seriously lack focus and accountability, so I'm being pro-active. I'm happy with whatever we decide as a long as it includes some system of meta-organization other than total chaos and inertia.

assignment structures

Folks,

With the desire to facilitate the beginnings of our discussion about wiki space and "Midwestern Water Wars", I have concatenated various emails onto the old class blog, Storypool (blogger sucks, btw!).

You all still have posting permissions, though Pete will need to respond to an invitation if he wishes to post. It is fine to still post to email, but if the information is useful for our archive, I will also place it on the blog.

Lane

ps... Trent and Craig, I do like the idea of Constraints, or using what we did in the seminar, with directed and customized "assignments". This could be an option: that anyone of the group generates an assignment to a writer. For instance, I could email Craig and suggest: "build the research archeology of the Muratorian Fragments", while Craig might suggest to Trent: "The Covert Lexical Movement was comprised of various guerilla cells devoted to undermining language. Find and report information about one of those cells..."

These assignments would of course grow additively, new formulations suggested by each contribution.

From Lane

Trent,

Craig is with us, though will be mindful of his time, and Pete has also expressed interest. I am fine with lurkers, or different levels of engagement, and I am also fine with people outside of our UWM circle joining in. Though I think it is best, first, to decide on 1) rules of engagement, and 2) platform/environment.

My idea with "Flowage Rebellion" is to set up a quasi-historical scenario that is liberally seeded with citations, apocrypha, contested histories, and retellings of events, centered around an at this time non-specific ecological conflict, with (duh!) water. As water is more and more in our current news, and will certainly be a huge crisis point of global proportions (if it isn't already), I'd like this project to have "water conflict" as a pivotal center point. I look to fictions such as Museum of Jurassic Technology, Walid Raad's "Atlas Group" and a growing list of wonderful projects (nice site at ) which in themselves merit further study. Books that are inspiring to me (for this) beyond Oulipo, are Watchmen (without the gimcrack Uberman shit, which I can't abide!), Anne Carson's amazing "Autobiography of Red" (get it and read it!) and "The Making of Morel" (thanks, Trent!), "The Third Policeman" among many others.

I like Trent's ideas stated below quite a bit, and would probably go with either the "Larry David" structure (writing towards some event, as yet unrevealed) or the email that Craig just sent, which seems an excellent beginning point. I'm not sure yet how character-driven this will be, as I am also interested in colloquial, vernacular, cross-genre forms that might not involve characters at all, or would involve them in the Borges sense, as the founder, secret society member, historian, recorder of such documents.. (but that is just me.. honestly, the excitement I have for this is that it can take its own form!)

Craig, would you want to set up the wiki, similar to your Prelim site, with the form you suggested, and give yourself, me and Trent edit level power, with all others included for gradual absorption?! (you *will* be assimilated!).

I am very comfortable with Blogs, and Lisa is a pro at customizing them in a robust way. We can go that route as well, but wikis seem more textual, and I think I would get less hung up on how it would *look*, and focus more on the writing. However, I could see Flowage Rebellion later drifting to blogspace or dedicated website, depending upon our results and interests.

Lane

Response from Craig

Apologies for not cc:ing all before.

I was thinking about Lane's structure question (below). If we organized the site around specific characters or plot lines I think that might be too constraining (as a site architecture). I think people ought to have the permission/flexibility to create their own new pages (as well as edit in existing pages) so that when they add a chapter in the ficto-history their responsibility is to create a new page (or a new thread in an existing page) and to link to it wherever (and as many times as) it makes sense. That way the site architecture begins with a single page introduction and the threads just spin out innocuously from there. The 'turks' are simply responsible for stitching their pieces into what is already there with links etc..

I also think that there should be a site manager/editor who is empowered to make editorial and structural edits to the site and its structure as we go. This could be a rotating position.

Craig

Response from Trent

I don't know who else has committed yet so I'll keep everyone copied in.

I've got a couple of different ideas of how we could get the ball
rolling, many of which admittedly stem from my role-play-gaming past
fused with concepts from the restrictions/obstructions class:

-- Anyone remember the "Thieves' World" series?
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thieves%27_World) These was a fantasy
series co-authored by a number of the biggest names in f/sf back in
the late 70's early 80's. I haven't been able to find the original
rules the authors were bound to, but I believe they were allowed to
create a certain number of characters in the same setting. The authors
then wrote short stories where I believe the only thing they weren't
allowed to do was kill another author's character, but they fucked
with them mercilessly. To quote from one of the founding authors "You
write your first Thieves' World story for fun and the rest for
revenge."

-- Another idea: we start with Act 1, some seminal event in Lane's
World (something major on par with 9/11 or the Kennedy assassination)
and we all write a scene about characters who are impacted by this. In
Act 2, perhaps by random pairings, some of these groups must meet or
interact while others must *not* meet. In Act 3, by more random
selection, different groups must interact or not interact. We could
mix in other "events," such as a wild card that states someone in
Pairing B must be utterly humiliated, and a character in Pairing C
must have a stroke of unbelievable luck. And so on. The could easily
be expandable/adaptable for the number of users in a given round. For
instance, no new characters introduced until a new author introduces
them.

-- Another way would be to write towards some event, sort of like a
Larry David "Curb Your Enthusiasm" episode. There's some wire frame
holding the thing together, but there's a whole lot of ad-libbing
going on. Yet everything somehow comes together, or perhaps weaves
back and forth.

Lane, do any of these sound appealing or am I off track? I think what
I'm envisioning is having authors grappling with some specific set
rules, but also being encouraged in pushing the narrative further,
even if "further" means just discovering new parts of this world, or
new rules about it--which are then "in play" for subsequent authors!
The ever-evolving rules and facts could be collected on a wiki that
later authors would need to reference before writing. I could also see
a story map evolving, where you could track developing plots amongst
more random entries.

Or is this more restrictive than what you had imagined? The way I'm
describing would almost be game-like, in that you'd need a referee
holding things together somewhat, but I think I'd be more intrigued by
clusters of cohesive storytelling rather than completely disparate
chunks.

I'll stop here. If you're not careful I'll try and usurp the whole
damn project! Also, I would be tempted to invite some non-UWM
colleagues at some point. Lots of talented writer folks I know are
very interested in alternate and ficto- histories, pseudoscience and
the like. This kind of stuff is very popular in science fiction and
fantasy.

Looking forward to more input!

--Trent

Response from Pete Sands

I've been playing with mind-mapping software, such as Cmap Tools, Mind
Manager, and Mindmapper.

I like the visual richness. But they're not *exactly* wikis (see, e.g.,
http://www.activityowner.com/2007/04/09/map2wiki/ and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki).

Response from Craig

Hi

I am very interested and I could commit to uploading short pieces/new pages on a monthly if not bi-weekly schedule. Our sense of 'authorship' seems to disappear once we begin inviting others, so collective and/or ghost author don't really seem to capture the sense of boundlessness. If we have a sense that say, authors are limited to UWM, then maybe we could attribute the work to a place.

Craig

Set Piece (Flowage Rebellion)

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The Flowage Rebellion ++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The Muratorian Fragment contains a list of the extant histories of the Midwestern Water Wars. The most interesting witness to the formative stages of the rebellions was a woman known only as Sister Pulcheria, who, in either tribute or “penance of the spectrum”, added mysteriously potent dye concentrations to water sources, inadvertently creating the first Flowage Rebellion according to the Chronologies of the Water Wars. Bright spectral coloration became synonymous with covert insurrection, which led to both the Forbidden Palette Act, and the sweeping Pigment Prohibition Laws of the mid-century. Color attacks, characterized by their vehemence and violence, were frequent, and their punishment swift and brutal. Words such as tone, green, yellow, hue, blush, crimson, blench, redden, color, colour, colorize, discolor, discolour, emblazon, people of color, people of colour, vividness, chromaticity and tinge were forbidden in public use, creating the Covert Lexical Movement, often subsequently associated with baroque and poetic syntactical style. “Lexical” thus became shorthand for “one who brings color-to-water” and has since been used as both rebuke and honorific.

First Email Invitation from Lane

Craig, Trent and Mike,

I have been interested in experimenting with collaborative authorship, and wanted to run this idea by you for feedback. Inspired by Waxweb (multimedia project, kind of hermetic, that came from early muds), House of Leaves (allegedly began on a wiki), alt-history projects, and a lifetime of addiction to collaboration, I propose trying to develop a disjointed "novel" titled The Flowage Rebellion, centered upon the apocryphal histories of The Midwestern Water Wars. Below is the set-piece for the project, and I have no expectations other than 1) it deal with this history, 2) be open in form 3) inhabit an ethos of ecology, pseudo science and ficto-history.

Here are my first concerns:

1) do you perceive this as interesting?
2) would you have time to devote a bit of development to it as an ongoing piece (not too demanding, but needs to develop over duration)
3) how would authorship "product" be constructed? (a collective? a ghost-author?)

My concern is that I wouldn't want this to distract anyone from their primary work, but on the other hand, it might be an exciting exercises in creative authorship and form that could be useful in both pedagogical and formal arenas, and who knows, it might lead to an exciting piece!

If a core group of you signs on, I'd propose a viral structure (what's a little virus among friends!) where we then each invite participants based upon a collective invitational narrative that The Core develops. Off hand, I would certainly invite others from our Obstructions class, as well as various grads in the CW program. Because this is (would be) a ficto history, I see that form could easily be adapted, as different people would be interested in developing different modes, narratives, reviews, exerpts, tangeants. I would also expect a lot of genre cross-over.

I have been busy developing my website, (check out little embedded videos in recent posts - ) and would be interested in using some content for that, and using all content as "found text" for further sausage-grinding. Others could do whatever they wanted with the text: that would be another "rule".

Thoughts?

(be honest: if this is merely a distraction, or not an esthetic interest, please feel free to express!)

Lane

An Innaugural Address

AMONG the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions all I dare aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the partiality in which they originated. Besides the ordinary objects submitted to your care, it will remain with your judgment to decide how far an exercise of the occasional power is rendered expedient at the present juncture by the nature of objections which have been urged against the system, or by the degree of inquietude which has given birth to them. Instead of undertaking particular recommendations on this subject, in which I could be guided by no lights derived from official opportunities, I shall again give way to my entire confidence in your discernment and pursuit of the public good; for I assure myself that whilst you carefully avoid every alteration which might endanger the benefits of an united and effective government, or which ought to await the future lessons of experience, a reverence for the characteristic rights of freemen and a regard for the public harmony will sufficiently influence your deliberations on the question how far the former can be impregnably fortified or the latter be safely and advantageously promoted.

After The Opening of the Field

First there is the light emitted from the corner as if to control the shadow. Drawn lines multiply their imperfection until each blade moves as if caught in the current of breeze. Lately, money can buy love off the clearance rack, but why buy when you can steal for free. Outside the coffee shop the sun is done playing good cop. Time to brace for the severity of Fall. October is the cruelest month. We're shouting our criticisms because the last piece of the puzzle doesn't fit. "I'm not coming back until we get a cleaning service in here," she said. The grinder grumbles an answer, but we can't make it out over the steam. We drink iced coffee to practice coldness in waterless air, but we must be careful not to take the edges for granted, leap out of the fishbowl. Fall-back will arrive two weeks later so that we can grasp the energy a bit longer. Often I Am Permitted To Return To A Meadow as if it were a scene made up by the mind. Hanging on the wall, but opening the stone. The Eye of the Needle is a trail cut between large rocks. I Miss the Rockies, their redwoods so tall they could extinguish the light of day. It seems I'm always looking for a forest in the least likely places. Crease the page until the paper takes shape, ever finding phylum: its lively limbs. If you blink you might miss the most amazing transformations. Leaves bending over your ear, "Look closer and see. See into the trees. Find the girl….if you can."

John Bruce Stump Speech #4: Darkness on the Edge of Town

You better get it straight, darlin'. By the end of Darkness, I'd found my adult voice. Poor man wanna be rich. Rich man wanna be linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. Songs like the Animal's "It's My Life" and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" were infused with class consciousness. You're born into this life paying for the sins of somebody else's past indignations, and I know that many of them are sitting in front of me. The country seems to have lain down and shrugged off something as serious as Laos, just as we calmly shrugged off the loss of 700,000 lives in Pakistan, the so-called greatest disaster of all times.

I had a reaction to my own good fortune. I asked myself new questions. I felt a sense of accountability to the people I'd grown up alongside of. I began to wonder how to address that feeling. And I tore into the guts of something in the night. We're born with nothing and better off wiping away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more and so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say "Vietnam" and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

I was searching for a tone somewhere between spiritual hopefulness and 70's cynicism. She says, "Baby, if you wanna be wild, you've got a lot to learn." For ending such a war, I have personally advocated that this is the best procedure. It is a traditional rather classic procedure of how to end a war that could be called a stalemate, that neither side apparently has the capacity to end by military victory, and which apparently is going to go on for a long time. The possibility of transcendence or any sort of personal redemption felt a lot harder to come by.

From the fire roads to the interstate, some guys they just give up living and start dying little by little, pieces in the record, and someone who actually does something, so that they can recognize it in an election, if they are interested. This was the tone I wanted to sustain. 'Cause they understand if I could take one moment into my hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

I intentionally steered away from any hint of escapism and set my characters down in the middle of a community under siege. And you better believe, boy, somebody's gonna get hurt tonight. And will our children and grandchildren ever live in a world as safe and secure as the world in which we grew up? Weeks, even months went by before I had something that felt right. 'Cause in the darkness I hear somebody call my name and when you realize how they tricked you this time. And it's all lies but I'm strung out on the taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals with turned up power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies.

Darkness on the Edge of Town dealt with the idea that the setting for personal transformation is often found at the end your rope. I've been working real hard trying to get my hands to clean the mucous out of his tube and he suffocated to death. If you don't do that your characters ring hollow and you're left with rhetoric, words without meaning. Everybody's got a secret, sonny, something they just can't face with a very sickening situation in this country, because there is no moral indignation and, if there is, it comes from people who are almost exhausted by their past indignations.I was twenty-seven and the product of Top 40 radio.

John Bruce Stump Speech #3: Born to Run

In '70's New Jersey, the car was still a powerful image. All the redemption I can offer is beneath this dirty hood with a chance to make it. That somehow resolutions and failed inspections would make this world a more peaceful place. He was hoping we'd turn away. But now I was appreciating their craft and power.

I walked into a Tenth Avenue freeze without Saddam Hussein. At first I thought it was the name of a movie or something I'd seen on a car spinning around the Circuit, but I couldn't be certain. And the world is busting at its seams and you're just a prisoner of your American dream. And if we did that, we'd have more consumption ability in America, which is what we need right now in order to kick our economy into gear. I liked the phrase because it suggested a cinematic drama I thought would work with the music I was hearing in my head. At night sometimes it seemed you could hear the whole damn city crying. Blame it on the lies that were killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.

And here's what she wrote to you, "That gave me an opportunity to feel out the arrangement. Baby, this town rips the bones from your back, it's a death trap, a suicide." Some 27 percent have tried, and they try because they come back to this country and they have to face what they did in Vietnam, and then they come back and find the indifference of a country that doesn't really care, that doesn't really care. Born to Run was released in a post-Vietnam America. And tonight you'll try just one more time to leave it all behind and break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings" with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using.

Were we fighting in the European theater? People were contemplating a country that was finite, where resources and life had limits. And the word's been passed this would increase the chances of the U.S. being hit by another 9/11-type terrorist attack. Slowly, the dread that I had managed to keep out of Rosalita squeezed its way into the lives of the people. Outside, the street's on fire in a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy. And the poets down here don't write nothing at all. They just stand back and let it all be. And in the quick of a knife they reach for their moment. But I want to come back to where I began, on homeland security. When the screen door slams on Thunder Road you're not necessarily on the Jersey shore anymore. You could be anywhere in America.

Schnitzel

Oh god, it still embarrasses her, not because she was wearing a dirndl under her wool jacket, with her black tennis shoes, not even because he was the Libertarian candidate. The man was a fool, a complete fool, uneducated and ignorant. He ran for governor and the state gave him a solid 10% of the vote.

But it was a beautiful afternoon anyway, and the polling place was just down the block from her apartment. She brought her lease and she brought her driver’s license and, because she wasn’t sure, she brought her passport and her social security card (even though her middle name was misspelled on it). And afterwards, she wore the sticker, proud, and jumped on the 30 bus downtown, to the German restaurant she worked at.

Ultimate Frisbee

To be fair, she’d never found him that good looking, but he was popular, sort of, and an Ultimate Frisbee sensation. He had bad taste in movies and music and he played video games too often, his pants were always too short, he was pigeon-toed and he had a faint hairlip.

But all that was only clear twn years later, when she heard he married some petite Malasian girl. Back when she was 17, she was just so grateful that he paid her attention, that he liked her, and it hurt so much when he didn’t any longer that she thought she would never recover, so she joined an Ultimate Frisbee team, though she hated running fast, and found she actually had a pretty decent forehand, but the team was awful and it lost every single game it played that season, several months after he broke her heart.

She quit before long. She never liked sprinting.

John Bruce Stump Speech #2: The Wild, The Innocent, the E-Street Shuffle

The opening cut, "The E-Street Shuffle," is a reflection of a community that was partly imagined and partly real. Sparks fly on E-Street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

I wanted to describe a neighborhood, a way of life, and I wanted to invent a dance with no exact steps. Forcin' a light into all those stoney faces left stranded on this warm July. More in September than in August. And now we see beheadings. And we got weapons of mass destruction crossing the border every single day, and they're blowing people up. And we don't have enough troops there. It was just the dance you did every day and every night to get by. And there hasn't been a talley since Sally left the alley, issued a memorandum from the Defense Department saying, "If you weren't with us in the war, don't bother applying for any construction." That's not a way to invite people. I watched the town suffer some pretty serious race rioting and slowly begin to close down. And circus town's on the short, waved them off and said, "No, no, no, no. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."

Just when you thought the song was over, you'd be surprised by another section, taking the music higher. But they sighed "Johnny it falls apart so easy and you know hearts these days are cheap" – none of which were true. It was, in spirit what I'd taken from the finales of the great soul revues. You don't need to call me Lieutenant, Rosie, and I don't want to be your person who could be a commander in chief who could get your kids home and get the job done and win the peace. When you left the stage after performing one of these, you'd worked to be remembered. Together they're gonna boogaloo down Broadway and come back home with the executive who looted it, who bailed out on a golden parachute. America can do better. And help is on the way. Not that it would all BE funny but that it would all SEEM funny. That would come later.

John Bruce Stump Speech #1: Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ

There wasn't a lot of interest in hearing original music, which is what I mainly played. Madman drummers, bummers and Indians in the summer with teenage diplomatic efforts under way. They just decided the time for diplomacy is over and rushed to war without planning for what happens afterwards. I was sitting on the front steps. He shouted through the car window that he was going up to New York City.

I'd been going through some hard times in New Jersey for a while, and I planned, once again to leave the state. The hit-and-run plead sanctuary, 'neath a holy stone they hide around the world. We don't need mass armies anymore. One of the things we've done is we've taken the – we're beginning to transform our military."Mary, my queen, your soft hulk is reviving the economy." I had heard plenty of promises before – Broadway, Joan Fontaine, advertiser downtown training money – $1 billion was cut. They only added a little bit back this year because it's an election year. So I left that day telling Mike I was interested, but without making a commitment.

That Christmas, Tinker and I drove cross country to California in Volkswagen vans with full running boards dragging great anchors of this country, and we're going to free ourselves from this dependency. So it was, back home, for me. You wouldn't even give me time to cover my tracks and make this system operate effectively. I know that the idea of working within the system has been used so much, and many people have lost confidence that it can be done. They wish to destroy the system, to start all over, but I don't think in the history of human experience that those destructions of systems work. They usually destroy everything good as well as bad, and you have an awful lot of doing to recreate the good part and to get started again. The songs required too much attention for a crowded bar on a Saturday night. Oh you don't know what they can do to the younger generation- and I am certainly getting at the end of my generation because I have been here an awfully long time- but that you younger people can find it possible to accept the system and try to make it work because I can't at the moment think of a better one given the conditions that we have in this country and the great complexity and diversity.

I really believe if we can stop this war- I certainly expect to do everything I can. I combed my hair till it was just right and commanded the night brigades of students and people, young and old, who took time to travel, time off from work, their own vacation time, to work in states far and wide. They braved the hot days of summer and the cold days of the fall and the winter to knock on doors because they were determined to open the doors of opportunity to all Americans. I have done all I can with all my limitations. I worked to find something that was indelibly mine. Them gasoline boys downtown sure talk "integrity, integrity, integrity." Those are the three words that she left me with. I never wrote in that style again.

 

Seven Escapes: Concluding Remarks

Seven Escapes: Concluding Remarks

A scintillating saga, these seven escapes, sending spirits soaring, defying depression, promote possibilities for incarcerated imaginations, a sponge for sodden souls and spirits, appropriate advice for artless adolescents, suitable suggestions for superannuated sourpusses.

Curmudgeons who can count might cry, "Seven, swindler? The sum stands at six!"

Silence simpletons, for Sister Archipelago's supreme seventh son, jaunty Jehudiel, bettered his brothers, effecting an exhaustive escape, transcending the terminus of this text, for not even confabulation could confine him.