The words a reader of today may trip on, in the order you would look them up. Definitions are grounded in the work’s own usage—the lexias behind each are linked—and cross-linked to the wiki where the wiki has the longer story. Where a definition needs knowledge from outside the work, the entry says so in a closing line marked General reference. For who and what occurs where, see the index; for the plain questions, the faq.

A · C · E · G · H · I · J · L · M · O · P · R · S · T · U · W

ARTS WIRE

One of the two rooms Scibe was written in: a conferencing network for the arts, run as a program of the New York Foundation for the Arts from 1992. Its members reached it by modem and met in text conferences; Scibe lived in its Interactive conference, and its postings here carry headers in the form AW 20:… Judy Malloy worked on its staff from 1993—she did not found it; it was proposed by Seattle artist Anne Focke at a 1988 NYFA gathering. See the wiki’s ARTS WIRE.

collaborative writing

Several writers making one work in a shared place, answering one another’s pieces as they appear. Scibe is collaborative writing before it is anything else: Malloy began alone, in pain, asking her two rooms for company, and the other seven writers began posting pieces of their own lives toward her—unasked. The work’s shape, its strands and echoes, is the shape of that exchange. The faq takes up whether any of it was planned; the wiki has the writers.

eWorld

Apple’s online service of the mid-1990s. It appears once, in passing, and perfectly of its moment: Chris Abraham’s handle there was “Shooter”, and it is where the woman from the computer store turns out to know him from (lexia 12).

General reference: eWorld, Apple’s consumer online service, ran from 1994 to 1996.

extrocate

Chris Abraham’s coinage, in lexia 25, said three times like a spell while he works out how to leave: “I need to extrocate myself from this woman.” To extract oneself—out of a person, a place, a pattern—with the Latin of extricate and the finality of a door closing. The work uses it three times, all of them there.

gearhear

Brenda’s word, reported by Tim Collins in lexia 27: the listening you would need to hear what animals are saying. “She says we need gearhear to really hear them talk. Too bad there is no ‘gear’, that intensive observation is the only way.” A coinage for attention itself.

handle

The name you chose for yourself online. In 1994 your legal name often followed you into the rooms, but services still ran on handles: Chris Abraham’s, on eWorld, was “Shooter” (lexia 12).

home page

In 1994, one’s own place on the new web—a page with your name on it, out in public. The writers of Scibe, who had lived in conferencing rooms, imagine the web through it: “We live in a home page”, Chris Abraham writes in lexia 40, considering the universe as a World Wide Web in need of a good one; and Valerie Gardiner, crossing the country, is sad to be “without a home page” (lexia 47).

hyperfiction

Fiction built from hypertext: a story told in linked passages—lexias—where the reader’s choices among the links compose the story actually read. No single order is the work. Scibe is an early instance, and an unusual one: not one author engineering a labyrinth, but eight writers posting live into two conferencing systems in the autumn of 1994—sixty-seven lexias, no single reading order, the links drawn between pieces of an actual exchange. See the wiki’s hyperfiction.

Interactive

The ARTS WIRE conference in which Scibe’s ARTS WIRE side lived. Judy Malloy names the stack outright in lexia 26: her account of Valerie Gardiner’s dream is “response #20, item #20 on Interactive on Arts Wire on TMN”. See the wiki’s ARTS WIRE.

jack in; the acoustic coupler

To jack in is to get online from wherever you are—the roadside motel, the borrowed floor. Chris Abraham, travelling in lexia 19, looks for “motels with HBO and places to jack in”, and buys an acoustic coupler: an early modem that works by listening—you set the telephone handset into its cups and it hears the line’s tones, for phones with no jack of their own.

LambdaMOO

A text world you telneted to: rooms, objects and people made entirely of words, live around the clock. Scibe opens by being mistaken for someone there—“there is already a Scribe on LambdaMoo”, encoding patience, medicated—and in lexia 51 its Pavel “as usual, knows all the answers”.

General reference: LambdaMOO ran from Xerox PARC; the Pavel of lexia 51 is Pavel Curtis, its creator.

lexia

One unit of the work: a single posting, kept under the header it was posted with—conference, topic and response number, name, date. Scibe has sixty-seven of them, s1 to s67.

General reference: the word comes from Roland Barthes’s name for a unit of reading, taken up by hypertext scholarship for a unit of linked text. The work itself never uses it; its own words are topic, item and response.

Mapirota

The work’s shadow geography: a county, its court, and the nursing home—“the Mapirota home for the Criminally Insane”—that haunts the hospital strand. It surfaces in Valerie Gardiner’s lexia 21 and frames lexia 35, the county memo reporting the disappearance of patient Q. Whether a real Mapirota stands behind it, the work does not say.

the oversoul

In lexia 40, Chris Abraham, lost in speculation about the World Wide Web, reaches for the largest soul available: “Maybe this is the oversoul of the Germans, borrowed by Emerson to explain a universal mind”—the web as one mind that everyone is part of.

General reference: Emerson’s essay “The Over-Soul” (1841) names the unity of souls; behind Emerson stand the German Romantics he borrowed from.

Poniecki

A host machine at Berkeley—poniecki.berkeley.edu—and one of the addresses at which Scibe could be found. Judy Malloy logs its weather like a room’s: “1 message on Poniecki” (lexia 51); “Nobody but Christine knows how to find me there.” Her mail “seeps in on poniecki” in lexia 66.

PowerBook

The writers’ machine: Tom Igoe writes his first piece on one, on a borrowed floor, in “a nest of dirty laundry” (lexia 5); Chris Abraham’s dies and is “in the shop in D.C.” by lexia 49.

General reference: the PowerBook was Apple’s portable Macintosh line.

the reducing valve

The mind’s filter: whatever normally keeps the world’s flood down to a trickle you can use. Mark, pitching a retreat in lexia 14, promises to “open your reducing valve much more than drugs (THC, acid…)”; Chris Abraham takes the figure up as “a dangerous game” (lexia 40), Judy Malloy notes her many opinions on it (lexia 49), and Valerie Gardiner sends it fishing (lexia 53).

General reference: the valve is Aldous Huxley’s figure, from The Doors of Perception (1954), for the brain’s narrowing of perception.

the Republican contract

The document Bill hunts for, between revolutions of the laundry, in lexia 61—while Joseph considers wedding chapels and two men with white hair pass by.

General reference: the “Contract with America”, the platform of the U.S. House Republicans in the 1994 midterm elections—that autumn’s political weather.

scibe

The narrator’s name, and the work’s. In lexia 1 Judy Malloy, coming back to life and the net after her accident, asks the Wizards for an accurate name—and is given a misspelling: “Between life and the net, I asked the Wizards for an accurate name. And the Wizards sent back Scibe. Not Scribe.” The missing r is the point: a scribe with something gone—the legs, the certainty—writing anyway. See the wiki’s Scibe.

sternklang dogs

Douglas Cohen’s sign-off, in the header of his single posting (lexia 63). The work does not explain it, and this glossary will not pretend to: some handles on 1994 stay shut.

telnet

The way in: a protocol for sitting down at a distant machine as if it were your own keyboard. Scibe’s mind in lexia 2 “telnets to” node after node; a whole era of net life is in the verb, down to Douglas Cohen asking, on a holiday, “who telnets on holidays?” (lexia 65).

therapyhell

Tom Igoe’s one word for the rehabilitation ward where Judy Malloy is doing time: he opens lexia 5 imagining her “escape from therapyhell”. The work mints compound words as it goes—see gearhear and extrocate.

TMN

The Meta Network: a conferencing system opened in 1983 by Metasystems Design Group, and in later years the host of ARTS WIRE—the ARTS WIRE edition of Scibe was served from its tmn.com addresses. Its part in this work is exactly that hosting: the links out of lexia 66 point to that copy, and those addresses are dead. See the wiki’s TMN.

topic, item, response

The furniture of a conferencing system. A conference holds topics—also called items; each posting to a topic is a response, numbered in order. That is why every lexia wears a header like “20:26)”: response 26 to topic 20. The work explains itself once, early, in lexia 3: “in this item—this topic”.

URL

A web address. In 1994 the word was still new enough to argue about; by the work’s last lexia it has won: “Eric was right about URL’s. They are ubiquitous now.” (lexia 67). Chris Abraham had already proposed, in lexia 44, sharing one “with our friends, with any hope of becoming friends”.

The WELL

The other room: the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, a conferencing community founded in Sausalito in 1985, where members post under their real names in conferences and topics. Scibe’s WELL side carries headers in the form WELL#… or #… of 33. You Own Your Own Words was its founding rule—the words, and the copyright in them, stayed the writer’s. See the wiki’s WELL.

windows on the world

What Scibe asked for, and what the other writers sent. The title page says it outright: seven writers collaborate “to provide Scibe with windows on the world”—other lives, other rooms, while she lies in one bed in Tempe. Inside the work it turns literal: “It is a kind of window where others enter scenery or events” (lexia 3), and lexia after lexia looks out of one—her WELL window, a borrowed apartment’s, a car’s. The index follows the image under windows.

the Wizards

The keepers of the system, who assign names and keep the machinery turning—in lexia 1 they send back “Scibe”.

General reference: on systems like the WELL, wizards were the staff who ran the conferencing software; the name is the period’s own joke about who holds the power.