If only to compensate for the sensory deprivation, lack of concreteness,
etc., of Web communications, perhaps the best citation would be like that
of folk tales, where the footnotes come first, as in "When I was about
your age, Missy, we used to sit on the stoop and bet on the stickball
games, and then one day my uncle Zeke, you know the one, the one who was
a real Stalinist, well, he said, ..."

We could do something similar, e.g., "Well, back when we stopped going
out to meetings, maybe it had something to do with the shutdown of the
government and the common sphere of life, or the Blizzard of 1996, or
something like that, I leaned back from the glare of the reflected snow
and the astonishing quiet of Brooklyn streets, shifted my heating pad (to
help cure the distress that came from all that shoveling), and began to
recite the web, you know the one that leads outward in all sorts of
elegant patterns on snowfilled afternoons, etc."

Only kidding, or maybe not!

Richard Rabinowitz
AMERICAN HISTORY WORKSHOP
588 Seventh Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215-3707

Tel:  (718) 499-6500
Fax:  (718) 499-6575
email:  [log in to unmask]