Lastly

Oi, what a bilge generator this has become. Shoot me please, Kent Johnson! Cut and paste isn't writing, is it? Google and Babel Fish, yes, but in moderation, an impossibility, really, in this culture of anxiety and addiction, to the computer, porn, beer, blogging, YouTube and MySpace, to cheaply generated words and images--the triumph of Capitalism, eternal growth & cancer--to everything, really, even the good stuff. There are 162 baseball games a year and I must watch them all. Where's my pen and paper, a flat surface that doesn't navigate away from itself? Before I had my first computer, I wrote differently, thought about writing and life differently. I was less desperate, less anxious. Instead of googling, I had to go to bars and used book stores to collect my bad English. Murat Nemet-Nejat comments on ye good olde days: "The effort and energy necessary to go through different magazines, used book stores and porn shops (or to eavesdrop on conversations) are greater and represent a more intense involvement and obsession than doing the same thing through [googling]. " Another poet friend laments our present: "What I regret about flarf: that it's essentially robbing us of the poems people like K. Silem Mohammad and Drew Gardner and Katie Degentesh would have written if they had not had access to all this bilge." So no more bilge from me. Adios!