What is Permanent?
“The Monkweed — A Seasonal Prediction,” which I wrote more than 30 years ago when I was ill in bed with the flu, is still my most ambitious piece of fiction, though it contains only 9 words, not counting the 20 footnotes.
It was initially published in print by The Agent, a British small Zine, which made me mighty proud. The Agent, however, faltered sometime in the eighties.
I revived The Monkweed by sending it to the Duck and Herring Field Guide, in the new Millenium. I was delighted they provided a new home, again in print. Alas! The Duck and Herring Field Guide followed The Agent’s fate, leaving The Monkweed to linger in some warehouse storage room, if indeed it lingers at all.
Now I discovered a journal, all electronic, with the morbid title Rigor mort.US, whose declared purpose is to facilitate the digital archiving of fiction that was published in print but is no longer available.
So now against my intuition, which suggests greater longevity of the printed medium, I reluctantly committed The Monkweed to preservation in a digital graveyard. I’m thinking neither The Agent nor the Duck and Herring Field Guide are surviving anywhere. With luck, there might be a single copy of each in the Library of Congress, but they might languish there for centuries before being exposed to an intelligent reader.
Rigor mort.US at least lets the reader take another look at what is permanently lost to the printed world.
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