item8

a glossary

The vocabulary of a vanished room, defined — wherever the work allows it — in the work's own usage first, and in the world's second. Period terms the text itself leans on, the software it ran on, and the references that carry whole responses. For everyone and everything the work names, see the index; for the plain questions, the faq.

artist

The conference on The Meta Network where item 8 lived. Caucus conferences were the rooms of that world; artist was the room, and item 8 was one conversation in it.

Caucus

The conferencing software The Meta Network ran on — one of the group-talk systems of the pre-web and early-web years. A Caucus conference holds numbered items; an item holds numbered responses, read in order, new since your last visit. Item 8 was written at a text prompt in Caucus; the cmd face of this site is that screen, remembered. The editor's thanks, on the what page, go to Caucus Systems and to Scott Burns.

coelaboration

The editor's coinage — collaborative elaboration — printed at the head of the work's first response and carried as the work's other name. The method of item 8: each response elaborating the ones before it — quoting, answering, extending — until the elaboration is the work.

collaborative writing

Writing made by more than one hand in one work, each writer's text answering and altering the others'. Writing classes play with it as a method; here it happened in the open. On item 8 the mechanism is visible in the record — a response quotes the one before it, answers it, and hands the thread on changed. See also coelaboration.

Cuchulainn

The Hound of Ulster, hero of the Irish tales. Dirk Flinthart retells his death at length in 8:99: the bright spear that must slay a king, cast three times — the king of horses, the king of charioteers, then the king — and the hero binding himself to a stone by the lake to die on his feet, known dead only when the crow takes his eye. The telling anchors the work's Irish run (8:94–8:99).

dead soldiers

As used here — the text defines them itself, in 8:35: in Chris's life, dead soldiers are the empty paper cups beginning to collect on his desk at the office. The empties of a working day, standing in a row.

EFA

Education for the Arts — a magnet program operated by K/RESA for the schools of Kalamazoo County. On TMN, EFA kept classroom conferences of its own — Classroom A and Classroom B, a Homeroom, a Café, a Publishing Area, an Authors Forum — next door to the Western Michigan University conferences. EFA is background to the people of item 8, not a frame for the work: item 8 was a public item in the artist conference, and no class assigned it. The editor's own scrape of the EFA and WMU conferences, made in November 1999, survives as part of the record.

frozen

In Caucus, a conference organizer could freeze a response: its number stays in the sequence and its text drops out of the record and out of exports. The 29 missing numbers of item 8 were most plausibly frozen or withdrawn in Caucus itself, or lost in the editor's 1998–99 export; the near-run 193–199 suggests a single event. See the colophon, and any gap page — 8:25, say.

Gretna Green

The Scottish village just over the English border, famous for centuries as the place couples ran away to marry. In 8:108 Chris remembers being 21 and nearly rushing there with the train an hour out — “to become wed by a scottish elvis.” He said they couldn't. He has since called the refusal spineless, in the same response.

hyperfiction

Fiction written to be read on a screen, in pieces joined to one another — lexias, in the period's word — where the reader's path is part of the form, and more than one writer may hold the pen. My Name is Scibe (1994), which the editor co-wrote, is a hyperfiction of linked windows. Item 8 is its heir with the geometry changed: not a web of links but one river of responses, still many-voiced, still in an order no single writer controlled.

item

In Caucus, one numbered topic inside a conference — a single thread with an opening text and its responses. This whole work is one item: item 8 of artist.

JPO

Junior Police Officers — the text expands it itself, in 8:15: Honolulu's school crossing-guard corps. Chris served at Aliamanu Elementary — up before dawn, in an orange tunic, carrying the aluminum pole with the red STOP, stopping traffic for children who arrived hours after he did.

K/RESA

Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency — the regional agency serving the public school districts of Kalamazoo County, Michigan. It operates EFA. In the 1990s it also ran the server many Kalamazoo students connected through; in the classroom conferences its initials are a lobby, a program, and a dial tone at once.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?

Latin: “who guards the guards themselves?” — printed in the work in this form: Dirk poses it in 8:113, and Chris quotes it back, among the lines he is carrying, in 8:116. The classical tag is usually written custodes; the work prints custodies, twice, and so does this entry.

Rambo / Rimbaud

The pun that runs from 8:127 to 8:129. In a gym, the volume down and the captions on, a segment about Leonardo DiCaprio's first major film — a film about the young French poet Arthur Rimbaud — renders the poet's name “rambo,” and Chris is the only man on the bikes who laughs. Two days later Boris, a young Frenchman at the World Bank, completes the joke: Rimbaud — rightly pronounced, on excellent French authority — gave up poetry for the trade of arms dealer. “Rambo he was.”

response

One numbered entry in a Caucus item, posted under its writer's name with its date and time. Item 8's responses are numbered 8:0 to 8:240; 212 survive, and each has its own page here.

TheBUS

Honolulu's city bus, styled TheBUS — the whole subject of 8:15, Chris's answer to Hope's yellow school bus (8:14): five miles before dawn, on a paper pass, in rubber slippers, to a school his family no longer lived near — because he had to be ready at the crossing at 6:30.