I find this pretty amazing - when you broke near the end a few times with the 'mandy' beginning, it lost me slightly, but then seemed right. the intensity carries through in this all the way; it seems incredibly real in spite of, or because of, the structure. I hope you continue with it - Alan
On Wed, 5 Apr 2006, ross wrote:
a word on a screen. mandy is viewed through a glass tank and suspended in animation all the stories but what the point? mandy has rings under her eyes, hair down to her shoulders, lips that are nice. she is not vulnerable but she puts herself in places that are. suspended in all the stories but what the point? cut out the pretty parts. mandy is a preson who hardly sleeps at night because she does not want to miss anything. mandy is someone who changes so fast and keeps so much inside that she hardly exists. mandy is healthy but sick in the terminal ways that old people are sick, mandy is a girl who goes to catholic school and played the guitar until her private teacher tried to get her to undress with his camera. mandy smoked weed laced with crack and had an experience. mandy ran her hands across a boy's face in the hallway at school and told him "you have a soft face." mandy dropped out of school. mandy wanted to live in arizona. mandy worked as a stripper after she graduated. mandy sold shrooms. mandy stole a card from CVS for her friend's birthday. mandy changed her name. mandy was a different person. mandy watched her sister's brain shrink. mandy made her mother worry. mandy made her mother worry that she wouldn't find a place. mandy was a girl. mandy had sex in a rusty bath tub in a field in virginia. mandy did experiments. mandy was a scientist and a computer expert. mandy found a computer out front of somebody's house in adelphi and took it for her own. mandy checked the computer for viruses and found one called 'clinger.worm'. mandy named her computer 'rotten fruit' mandy never wanted kids or a house or a car. mandy exploded off the page. mandy exploded into grace. mandy used to dance. mandy stopped. mandy sometimes wished she was a boy. mandy dated a technician who used linux. mandy first asked if that was some kind of drug and then began to learn. mandy danced with computers and took what she wanted from the internet. mandy treated internet people with care and learned from them because they needed someone to talk to. mandy stopped dating the computer technician. mandy kept going with the computers. mandy knew that technology could be for everyone. mandy cried sometimes. mandy figured out how to dial-in to free internet acccess. mandy felt crazy in her own home. mandy felt safe in her room. mandy loved the world inside. mandy knew that love wasn't in the words. mandy felt not catholic guilt. mandy didn't believe in god or heaven. mandy knew that she'd die too. mandy fought monsters. mandy went to sleep for a long time. mandy wanted to sleep for longer. mandy realized that her time awake and time asleep were becoming the same. mandy wanted a name that would work like a key. mandy had names that worked like keys on the internet. mandy had a name that people called her and the name that was secret. mandy thought that two names, one for other people and one for her private self should be enough for anyone. mandy learned about these kinds of names from her ex-boyfriend, the linux guru. they had gotten along well but sometimes she felt like a martian rover that could only relay information back to earth indirectly, humans never experiencing firsthand the planet that could have once supported life but now all that's left are dried-up river beds and frozen polar ice caps. mandy started to become decentralized. her personality was already nonlinear but now instead of moving in a general direction it grew in many directions. adopting many different fragments of personality instead of thoroughly integrating. mandy was many things but mandy was definitely drifting away from her given name. instead of saying things she wrote them in her notebook because her notebook already knew the previous facts and could understand her current train of thought. mandy began to think all the time. mandy knew that theoretical thought was not just for boys. mandy began to read much more. mandy began to make words appear on the page. mandy began to make pictures with words (words within pictures and pictures within words) because pictures alone were not enough and words alone were not enough. mandy bought a bright pink dildo and had different kinds of sex with an old friend from elementary school she had not seen in years. they reconvened on myspace. mandy believed in chance to some degree but not in everything. mandy's ex boy friend was still her friend but he became boring. he sat in his room in his parent's old victorian house with dog shit on the floor he was too lazy to clean up and insulin needles he left around. mandy wasn't sure why but there was a noose of purple rope next to his desk hanging from a pipe near the ceiling. the computer he and mandy had built together became choked with porn and stupid shit. mandy needed some data she had backed up onto his computer which she had lost in her first big crash but she did not want to go to his house. his mother would be too nice and he would be too hospitable and smelly and everything there had gone to hell, the family was grotesque on the inside, the foreign man living there whom she had never properly met or spoken to would greet her with a friendly smile but this was not her home she did not belong here ( i don't know comments/suggestions/criticicisms/etc system here yet. thought i'd jump into the water. hello water. )
For URLs, DVDs, CDs, books/etc. see http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt . Contact: Alan Sondheim, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] General directory of work: http://www.asondheim.org .