to Richard Kessling whose lifelong accepting friendship helps to sustain me

"My avatars (characters) are conglomerates of past and present levels of societies, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of people, patched up strips of old best clothes now patchworks, just as all entities are stitched together."

August Strindberg ¹     

narrative: perhaps a door bangs a phone rings, one sound: thud, unpreceded by hinges-squeak, ending in fluting phone-trill, once, unreal; bangring! enter spook, spook, spook, spook and spook, and some others.

spook: undine test liability, shatter ragamuffin, sad, strip fury, hole in the amulet; toxin itinerancy, garments, amoral quiver; oscillate sharp-witted wrought iron, sultry reach, fresh awry, fluctuate, eerie backward glide; fiasco; sharp-sighted roving slab; enjoin label, hot and humid; wrongly could, blustery, wrongful, bump with the head and itemise en masse.

spook: nymph, trial zeal, secede sharpness, bubble wry, crossed the earth, used to decorate zany currents, forum fortune-teller, vagrancy slip, enjoin cash-on-delivery; crush hot humorist wrong side of the tracks; day of rest sway, blab, youthful crash, clumsy person on uncanny nonsensical crack; nativity.

spook: nagging pixie investigation; fay abundance, fitly Hong Kong, special wording crammed between older or higher up enormity preparation; our vehicle fracture on the move clasps never sully atrocity; amoral patriarchal charging dense equipment, charging incorrectly, shattering devices to prevent speech; slept; mobile worrier; immediate arrival; idle talk enhancement; erect ark, twisted, fitly mythological.

spook: tenseness plugged! consolidated telegraph connected with rhetoric conjurer; assign hefty; sump thereupon surprises the birth of Christ, inexhaustible dolt, solids, courage hit with a sticky hammer, price far away on the radio, enormity surrounded by unsettled gawky person though amoral; head triturate, dual hit, makes clear by no means tooling; high; strange vulgar gruff breathing modernistic duplicate preparation.

spook: peg testaments! aerosol cellular incubus engraved plate; coal black, she's booby, attachment near at hand abraded engraved plate, venom quantity or saw smudge; pseudo shatter way, enormity hidden; thick pernicious itinerancy; chafe nerve, surge rub, evil a breaker of sultry wind; bias break ago, hot and humid -

noise: Dehydrated! arriving, a pain in my chest, the morning glamorously uniform; daylight, turned by the sea, returned stronger; my doubts, my hands, out of reach, my memory yelling things, a man imprisoned in his own fearfulness, risen and fallen, all in one, astonishing!

unencoded voice: Though the goat is dead, its fur glows, its teeth shine.

noise: Aching is aggregate that there is into it. A few delay following the banquet. Any insignificant beginning developer, booty pulls what's left of individual spheres. This is all that there is: a small four-sided flower pottering in what's left of a field, a break after lunch.

spook: nymph test aerial, ruin cleft ubiquitous, muggy, baneful wacky veteran, grub-roving; neologism ore; floor covering; crack prescribe true preparation; orb abuzz, endowed with colour, abundant babble, weird enormity; flatten strange classic did unfavourable lie.

spook: nymph, test high; uncanny beak, tap sake, hot raid, smash flap, vote man supernatural... crush, clack, crash, imbecilic, ruthless, crack nuance; oscillate, sweltering lummox, sly but… colouration bust; thrashing respite; feral snub; sustenance battered.

spook: nymph test, elected fiend, fresh ill spirit; ah, enjoin, reach muggy bubble, humid-thick, nevertheless trying command out hybrid sac, connected with enormity -

noise: The wind's radio static. Try that, possessive or verb; your guess could be mine for neither knows I'm sure. The wind's radio static. Neither's true; neither makes sense. The world's barmy. It just sounds like that.

spook: - bid fiasco of fluctuating beech; ordain, ah! atrocity vying hue -

noise: Flow between lines!

spook: -grand lecher fracture, hurry, current ugliness an amoral rostrum.

spook: nymph, test towering even if one owes - beckoning grimace fission, an efface, unfortunate itinerancy; ho! grandeur! a place where the water is of little depth; an enormity; gunpowder stab into breakers, horrible slobber, inept person; puncture; swell, skylark skill effacing disaster, be nerve-racking; visa; glide on skates, roving lummox; enhancement.

unencoded voice: Hello again, dear brother nymph test airy aficionado sink egg We are not responsible for our foundations. We may be responsible for our actions. Just something I'm worrying on; feel free to contribute. To rise above our foundations, enabling responsibility, is the most difficult step to make. Our foundations do not give us the skills to make that step. It is easy for us to be diverted from knowledge to ignorance.

noise: The wasps returned, and the rats. Dry hot months. Luxuriance becoming colourless. Honeyless. Meatless. And spiders! rushed legs under every page, gaps in the wall, the roof going, not you; one had to stay, and all stayed, stayed! dying, a pattern of convenience; categorisations of hopelessness, rich sex in the voice, and warmth in bed, familiar body smells, all else unwelcome. The laws of nature change, and could be changed. Sleep now.

spook: in a dream - I walked three hours - holding close the unpinned pocketed grenade - close knit - pulled on appearances unravelling all the while - till inside it banged off.

spook: nymph tests lofty citizen for dew; he? sulphurous, migratory; ruthless; ocean clasp; side-by-side harm, us; nomadic quack, signal distorted nervousness lying, scowl, fracas motion, shallow evil, shy pout, wandering gang, wobble, each atrocity; shoaly mandible; shoal discharges wastes.

unencoded voice: We are moved to build pyramids, drink chartreuse, construct jujus, splash on or smoke opium, tour Mercator by Mercedes. With each experience our ignorance is reinforced. There is nothing which directs us to construct towers in our psyche.

echo: there is nothing, which directs us to construct towers in our psyche.

spook: sulphurous, a shoal, no holds barred for the tenured worker, flagitious slobber swell, occasion nerve-fibre obstruct extrusion, skylark by way of illustration; shallow living thing, wandering sigh, own weird.

unencoded voice: Sometimes, it is time to be allowed to fall. Sometimes, I'd like to think, it is ok to be caught. How to trust that choice, made by you or, at another time, made for you?

spook: nymph, test tall fables, fearless travel; hunt illegally, sky-rocket; vocalise sabotage, unsettled sea; enjoin sultry text, sizeable wave -

spook: hoopla! commence the dance! half the, hazy, highlighted, always west; as before into waves against... that day... broken... pouring... the balance... between... tension; once patterns between thread these shallow cameras; proved... not only... motion... and thin lives; truncated perfection; packed shadow; he had that awful newness, seeing, the world's celebrated technicality; they listened to his intentions, abstraction to disguise, written dissipation, with... humiliation; wished... all the... once; and sitting, in the, performance, reciting firelight, speaking of hell; to hunt his grave down quietly; to devour days to confirm astonishment; to point more mass and energy; in slowly, nevertheless, I crawl and find his eyes, circling; only in a new loop; and white into turning; that strings fast; in a single faster claim; in the smaller bits made vibrating, their brightness still still, like this, the original something I'd made, set off in a blaze, the shape complex and lazy, seemed holding and shook, for influence, to look an idea; down, in a word, on the next before, arranged, the same, from the, underneath.

spook: from a great deal pied breaker.

spook: day stream flows, over edges, of dark to -

spook: splash and -

spook: nervousness evaporation.

spook: baneful by no means, but staining the cognate bank; outrage; quotation despite sweltering intelligence quotient -

noise: You've got a habitat as varied as anywhere else.

spook: notwithstanding loaded sultry and put-on.

noise: Research into human variation has become highly sensitised.

unencoded voice: Cast impressive large bronze bells, decorated with runes and symbols of magic and power. Paint blue, to mitigate against disruption of normality, and protect from internal strife. It just now occurred to me that the application of woad may well have become prevalent as blue did not reflect ultraviolet which is what, inter alia, many insects, many species, are guided by in assessing suitable areas for puncturing, biting, alighting. cf - how do you say that? I mean how does one say that? window frames in Greece, indigo dye worker clothes in China etc., France etc., Levi strides in the Californian goldfields. Must go. More love.

noise: This odd separation of fact and understanding.

spook: nymph trial energetic hiatus, the devil in it, and the detail of it, newspaper item obliterating allegorical frowns; errant booby mound; proposed law bank; nuance frightening curl; clouded besides blinding skylarks cancel unmake supernatural gesture why bad but sobs?

spook: nymph inquest diabolically costly; hesitate in speech bird glare; errant cashier nascence silly depravity vastness, the archfiend, breaker boom breaker prohibit effacing bulk ascribe vying harmful living thing hugeness near.

spook: nymph investigation, high-minded crest, tense magnitude, awkward aggregate vow, sticky precious metal glare, pallid smile fence evoking courts; swell yielding surge through surf abusing ripple; geese attack enlarged sac as stock delete.

spook: nymph, inquiry overwhelming as depravity becomes worthless cellular sum and substance through loud noise; arrive sullen; fly, loitering, yields confidence; take pleasure from a plastic bird, expression gathering crows.

spook: nymph inspection; atmospheric mischief; ranging billow mobile a mob; through ennui; skirt on the move; iterative sepsis having little depth, frowning the whole thing slabby.

spook: nymph, experimental mannerism, wave a summarised frown -

spook: comedic dogs.

spook: jazz. wave. nervousness. upsurge. enmity; nest, unfavourable matrix, prescience; yet make clear and entrance, measuring stick engulfed.

spook: tomato concentrate dull where it has splattered; the islands blowing, dust going into the upper air, where I had pointed, trying to lean out of the wind. I open the door. I smell the coffee. I smell the marijuana. I can see it. Corner of. Pale films. Admit it! they are arresting him. They are an enormous -

spook: nymph analysis high, stifling sweltering outcome, enmeshed radiance nevertheless near at hand - muggy item used to decorate a grimace - thrust item of clothing, nest egg jabber, saccharine sharp item in a log year after year, amalgam effecting depravity glutinous party depressing enlightenment.

spook: nymph; electing probation; sulky derision outlaws commodities at a greater distance; taunt sly gesture but -

spook: sprite; test; towering la! moody, fragile, morose, itchy, ruminate over misfortune; pan: inconsequential destructive sun, embankment.

unencoded voice: Destruction, malfeasance, corrupt, dishonest, praetorian.

spook: sprite trial lofty itching to fib fearfully a miserable sneer.

unencoded voice: Amoral, baseness, depraved, sinister, false.

spook: sprite inquest airy financial institution; a sea rule out irregular pain; grieve while no showiness sprays icy vigour.

unencoded voice: Baneful, malignancy, incorrigible, mercenary, unethical.

spook: sprite investigation tall itching rollers issuing it' a snap jag canoe it's easy senor.

unencoded voice: Unfavourable, turpitude, deserted, underhanded, lying.

spook: sprite inquiry energetic eerily golden let ivories mob jabber shrouded jack motion with enormous -

unencoded voice: Bad, disaster, adverse, stagnant, lasting.

spook: sprite, inspection, intense stare; enough blueness; wound, sparkle, cancel mermaid; escapade, fut! financial institution; sharp-sighted newspaper item; jumpy; ties; jack up gossip, say crime; wave flutter, a stupid ugly grin zodiacally stabilised.

unencoded voice: Base, calamity, unfavourable, still, continuing.

spook: pin testament, aerosol fret; depraved era, uncanny box, hindered in peace, heaped up motion, inconstant, changeable; plus effulgence; injurious, hovel injurious expressiveness effacing nerveless enigmas; knuckle-buster; elaboration; jackass; impudence through heaped up force; corrupt churlish slab.

unencoded voice: Corrupt, harm, unlucky, motionless, permanent.

spook: sprite experiment intensified lying sky-rocket jacket slice tense uneasy foxy suitor dwarf saw aegis sulk cosmetics sulky ridge sullen gibe shallow uneasiness jackpot and enraged sensitive sullen itinerancy.

unencoded voice: Depraved, mischief, detrimental, stationary, unceasing.

spook: spike, covenant, aerosol shore, satanic roving, weird watery-jabber shore, itinerant effect bases and sand irritable mug chatter sure yet dirty shore, touchy atheist!

unencoded voice: Flagitious, misery, adverse, unmoving, unchanging.

spook: undine test liability; hoard; jab, effecting splash, adverse rollers, enraged silent oak, huh vulgar agile slop, toy with surges, voyage blindness.

unencoded voice: Harmful, misfortune, unpropitious, idle, steady.

spook: testament attached, aerosol, physic which frowns casts off physical sex, shore effective rapture, omnipotence a physical education instructor, nasty gibberish rent, physical fitness a sneer and harmfully squishy.

unencoded voice: Destructive, pain, negative, unused, established.

spook: spirit investigation animating cruel alarm; apt osmosis; medium uncanny malevolence, raw vigour sea shore awry enraptured abnormal venom still wet.

unencoded voice: Injurious, sorrow, disastrous, constant, in effect.

spook: fastening high lip shore ocean head whoop huffy extract shore an injurious medication fear skylarks' idle talk enrich unwieldy physical impairment sworn statement atmosphere dribble a shoes shabby.

unencoded voice: Mischievous, corrupt, catastrophic, continuous, in force.

spook: undine test aerial barbarian phraseology skittish cesspool shore lazy current shore hoe. delete nerves, and nonsense. shore shit-enriched facial lad enrol yielding photographic medium, fencing sword mask, mean shore twaddle.

noise: A message has come through the door. Tell me what it says... It says?

spook: reading capital o our glorious summer is just about over open brackets sorry to remind you about this close brackets and capital i hope we all had the good sense not to have left our windows wide open when we went out so that the thief didn't have a ball stealing our hard earned property full stop capital a as the evenings draw in comma we must be ever vigilant with regard to protecting our property full stop capital r remember to fix that outside light and to trim the bushes away from the door and windows so that the burglar is not hidden from view full stop.

unencoded voice: Pernicious, abandoned, adverse, opposing, feint.

spook: reading; capital; over; our; glorious; summer; to; just -

noise: Vector.

spook: - over; to -

noise: Beak.

spook: - brackets -

noise: Quota.

spook: - sorry to -

noise: Expunge.

unencoded voice: Unfortunate, depraved, antagonistic, conflicting, gloomy.

spook: you is unstable!

unencoded voice: Disastrous, dissolute, repugnant, contrasting, blurred.

spook: unstable is you!

unencoded voice: Ill, immoral, unfriendly, resisting, murky.

spook: - you; about; this -

unencoded voice: Amoral, incorrigible, antipathetic, facing, cloudy.

spook: close; brackets; and; capital; one's own eye -

unencoded voice: Miserable, amoral, dim, clashing, pale.

spook: capital is hope!

unencoded voice: Depravity, nefarious, conflicting, confronting, dark.

spook: we know! we all know all that!

unencoded voice: Vice, unfavourable, opposing, disagreeing, recondite.

spook: - hope we -

unencoded voice: Badness, bad, adverse, opposed, opposed.

spook: hope is all!

unencoded voice: Crime, base, adversary, opposed, opposed.

spook: and so is silence but all too rarely experienced.

spook: - stealing; aerosol; stealing; fiasco; out; so; that; aerosol; thief's; sensitive; eye; stealing; aerosol; property; earned; property; aerosol; enunciation; a; as; aerosol.

quiet voice: The chi-square test for Mahalanobis D-squared depends on multivariate normality.

spook: all sense choice tedious capital have esoteric windows wide thief eye aha ghosts eye ogle stealing liability windstorm ever widespread.

spook: with regard secrecy no lefto property nub property.

spook: [singing] no lefto property nub property.

spook: [singing] property nub property.

spook: [singing] nub property.

spook: [singing] property.

spook: [singing] no lefto property nub property.

spook: ever widespread, wide property, wide capital, ah remember -

spook: excuse me: with regard secrecy, no lefto property nub property naiad, seedy naiad, widespread, jogs and remembers glorious selfhood - I must fix that outside light! she hums, lying eerily and in her glory.

spook: reading stealing our fix that sit have property outside seal light have light stealing light capital property trim wide bushes eye away have glorious from wide door wide thief eye -

spook: and windows have that wide burglar is not hidden from view aerosol.

spook: with test liability nap stealing property ever busily nervous property widen teach widely everlasting vote near nervous property table property widely separated vying.

spook: with inquiry, lofty property rhetoric; wide, ruffled, ashen leftist; oil left-handed wideness, tea widow.

spook: her voice has been modernised: it is a clean and light clean light, clean and light; she changes her jacket with its flicker.

spook: the light changes; corridors gleam inside her body.

spook: ever swindling an empire of its obvious legacy lumpish.

spook: reading enfeebled, tea party cesspool -

spook: left unplanted -

spook: stealing property -

spook: tie left-wingers.

spook: stealing jam stake, property astealing.

spook: woman eye window covering has ascendancy.

spook: specialist eternities…

spook: reading, stealing our DDT, left, yawing, ever-aching, lured; laying down property, uneasy; gems la! wide thief eye stealing zephyr via effectiveness -

spook: twaddle!

spook: eye effectiveness.

spook: gremlin inquiry ethereal, gremlin analysis whitish, gremlin probation facetious, imp test, imp trial, imp inquest, tree inspection, tree experiment, tree analysis, gulf probation, gulf test, gulf trial, gulf inquest, gulf investigation, gulf inquiry, gulf inspection, gulf experiment, gulf analysis, enchantress inquest, enchantress investigation, enchantress inquiry, enchantress inspection, enchantress experiment, leprechaun probation.

noise: We need a spokesperson.

spook: icebergs of confectioner's cream; never beg: how can I be in two faces at once?

noise: One mip basement-level cog egg silky!

spook: sprite analyst strong effectiveness new devious have easy permanent maladroit secure have gauche stable nod at large property colouration property wan characteristic glorious cessation belongings property eyewitness real estate move to and fro property purse oak.

spook: with inspection airy hen widespread left property have unprincipled have dysentery have matron eye nucleus property owed everlastingly nonsense equivocating left unplanted.

spook: with experiment channel stealing bloodless he equity, expunge stealing advisory board frailty, sow shabby bumbling belongings, amnesty perpetually expanse, eye glorious omit wideness peg.

spook: reading stealing our left alone vocabulary stealing ever cubing left-wing sea effervescence effervesce legal profession donation have property legal profession constant firm.

spokesperson: We don't want to manipulate people's preferences; we just want to speak to their desires.

noise: I know, I know.

spokesperson: Solicitude like interrogation -

noise: Yes.

spokesperson: Acquisition like asking, bread like commands -

noise: In deed.

spokesperson: Rations like clasps -

noise: I know, I know.

spokesperson: Energy like hooks, nourishment like bait, sustenance like attraction, food like affection -

noise: Important!

spokesperson: Support like awareness -

noise: Of course.

spokesperson: Relief acumen and grasping hands, discharge covetous nurture, procurement like pumping, buying like drawing off -

noise: Bargaining simulation.

spokesperson: Decline like fictitious destructions, debasement like feigned upset, complexity like charlatan suffering.

noise: Involvement pretence.

spokesperson: Property enjoyed by invitation, delight in propositions, cash criteria, gratuities benchmarks, profits standards, assets paradigms, wealth flags, abundance an augury, affluence like fortune-tellers, benefit like subjectivity, rehabilitation our guarantee of privacy.

noise: Amen to all that. Everything not connected with something prior to itself falls into nothing. 

Footnote 1

I have taken a liberty with the quotation from Strindberg's preface to Miss Julie, the original of which is given below because I do not wish to misrepresent him. The Swedish själar would, I believe, normally mean "souls" or "spirits". My translation, avatars, suits my purposes and points, anachronistically, to how I think Strindberg operates in his plays, to some extent."Mina själar (karaktärer) äro konglomerater av förgångna kulturgrader och pågående, bitar ur böcker och tidningar, stycken av mänskor, avrivna lappar av helgdagskläder, som blivit lumpor, alldeles som själen är hopflickad." August Strindberg, Fröken Julie, 1888

quoted from August Strindberg: En samlingsvolym (Page 736) Bokförlaget Prisma, Stockholm, 1972 ISBN 91 518 0197 3
to beginning of networking

 A note on networking (Version M)

networking is one of a sort of sequence with huming and queuing. networking moves on, as the next item in the semi-sequence, from queuing as queuing moves on from huming.

It is an assumption that networking will be read aloud, by one or more performers, that punctuation and paragraphs will be read as measures of pausing (punctuation offering a progressive measure in the sequence ,;:. with a paragraph break providing a cue for the longest pause) and that what might be taken to be the names of the characters are to be considered part of the text.

In multi-voice reading, there is no need for performer voices to remain in sync with text voices... i.e. each performer might read one paragraph regardless of the names heading the paragraph so that each performer might read from the speeches attached to some names.

huming was published online as POTEPOETTEXTSEVEN; part of queuing was published online in POTEPOETZINEEIGHT, both edited by Peter Ganick; and both texts were published in full during November 1999 by Writers Forum as huming / queuing (1999, second revised edition 2000: ISBN 0 86162 974 4)

The web URLs are:

huming:http://www.burningpress.org/va/pote/potet07.html

from queuing:http://www.burningpress.org/va/pote/potez08.html