For those who prefer a less
twitchy kind of read, some of these opinions have appeared as a printed
essay in the journal Parallax,5 (1999): 17-31 where it is preceded
by the following account of its growth and afterlife.
`The piece of writing that follows has existed for the last two years
or so as a paper on my website. Indeed it will remain so after the publication
of this version of the text, and I can't promise not to carry on adding
to and subtracting to it beyond the publication. One of the good things
about the web is that it allows you to sprint into the daylit conclusiveness
of print, and then to dabble at leisure amid the friendly murk of your
first thoughts. I have come to think of this piece, not as a completed
product, but as a kind of plant, an aging bathroom philodendron, say, a
bit pot-bound, gone oaky at the roots, and starting to get tangled up with
the towels, but still rather likeable and capable of surprising little
spurts of growth. Where others retire into the garage after work to do
french-polishing or tinker with the Morris Minor, I go off to cultivate
my web garden, feeding, snipping and spraying for bugs. Something of this
weekend, cardiganed feel may attach to the piece of writing that is just
about to start, and I suppose it is too late now to apologise for it. I
am rather pleased though that, where the finished, proof-read version of
the essay will be available only in academic libraries to a few hundred
readers, most of whom will encounter it, if at all, well after its actual
publication, after turning it up in a bibliographical search, or a citation
in some other work, the web version, still now and then putting forth a
feeble twig or bud, will still be there for literally millions not to read.'
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