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By John Schwartz Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, October 7 1996; Page F19 The Washington Post

When we talk about the Internet these days, most of the attention goes to the multimedia flash and dazzle: audio and video feeds, animated doodads on Web pages.

Well, here's a surprise for you. Words matter. Still.

This is one of those epiphanies that hits me every month or so. It happens whenever I read in an on-line discussion a long string of funny postings that caper and build, and I begin hooting with laughter -- and then realize sheepishly that my co-workers are again wondering if I've lost my mind.

And it hits me when I find a particularly bracing "Zine," those on-line publications that were once put together with paper, Elmer's glue and a photocopier and that now are created and distributed on the desktop.

Most recently, however, I renewed the pleasant surprise of text's power when I stumbled into a trove of on-line fiction.

This round started while I was on vacation this summer. I got some e-mail from a woman named Xander Melish. She suggested I read some of her stories, and stories by other young writers, on-line. "It's a real shift of power from establishment to artist," she wrote. "I tell people it's like punk rock for writers."

Punk rock? As someone who lived in Austin in the late 1970s, when it seemed that everyone was in a punk rock band and every night was open mike, the phrase brought back memories. My interest was piqued; I took down the on-line address.

I went, and I read, and I learned a little more about Melish. She seems a little bratty and self-promoting, but in a sort of charming way. By day she writes about the bond market for Dow Jones. After hours she creates fiction and cartoons. That's what gives her life real charge.

Finding it hard to break into the world of publishing, she initially took her stuff to the streets, pasting up the first paragraphs of her stories on telephone poles and on walls and in laundermats and pizza parlors. She put her phone number at the bottom, inviting people to call her for the rest of the stories. She was stunned to find that hundreds of people did.

But even on the street, she ran into publishing problems. "Since the election of a new New York City mayor in 1993," she writes, "putting up posters has become rather futile. The city's run better now, and the lamp posts get cleaned, usually overnight." In September 1995 she went on the Web. At last count, her site had received some 650,000 "hits."

It has stories, cartoons, audio files of friends reading her stories, and translations into French, German, Japanese and Danish. Most of the stories on her site are worth reading.

I can't say I liked everything -- on her site or on the others I've visited and listed in the accompanying box. But then, I'm not an X'er. My tastes run to novelists such as William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling. But many of Melish's stories contain at least one line or thought that shows sparkle:

It took a longtime for a train to come. A foreign-looking lady shook out her umbrella all over me.

"Watch it!" I said.

"Zxybrxp," she said.

"Right now, print writers look down on electronic writers," Melish writes. "They consider us hacks. . . . They'll be sorry. There are little D.W. Griffith all over the Internet, and in my own small way, I'd like to be one of them."

Melish and the others are showing the rest of us the real value of the Internet. This is desktop publishing taken to the limit, not just for news or data or argument but for art.

Okay, there's no money in on-line publishing, not yet at least. But I made next to nothing on the first freelance print journalism pieces I wrote when I was getting started in the business; I felt compelled to write, and to be read.

Like Melish, I pulled some stunts, opening magazines to the page my stories appeared and leaving them on the rack. I saw the pieces as a good investment of my time, and hoped they would sharpen my skills and get me the recognition that would lead to jobs.

We're all guinea pigs in a grand Net experiment: freebie-nomics. Even big publications such as The Washington Post and the New York Times give away their stories and other services on-line, hoping to make some of it back in advertising dollars -- and, eventually, to get on-line readers who are so hooked on the product that they'll be willing to pay for it. Cyber-journalists -- such as Brock Meeks, who has given away his CyberWire Dispatch for several years now and found that it brought him better jobs -- are proving that freebie-nomics can work.

Which brings me back to punk rock. A lot of the music I heard in Austin was awful -- but some of it was good, and the whole town seemed suffused with a kind of energy that's been very hard to find since. I've kept up with a lot of those instant musicians over the years.

A few are still connected to music. At least one became a lawyer, and one is an artist. A few went to Hollywood, one went to work in Christian television, and another became a pastry chef and has since become a folk art dealer. And one -- the woman I married -- is an archivist.

But for that moment back in the '70s, they could get up on a stage and be what they wanted to be. And after you've done that once, it's a little easier to imagine that you can be anything else you want to be too.

Schwartz's e-mail address is schwartj@twp.com

Melish's site can be found at www.interport.net/ xmel; but don't stop there! Visit these other literary sites as well:

www.levity.com/

www.webcom.com/roosterv/table.html

users.aol.com/alhinil/essays.htm

pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/ rea49625/poetry.html

fiction-palter.mentat.com:1000/ default.html

www.duke.edu/ saw1/stories.html

www.cais.net/aesir/fiction

© Copyright 1996 The Washington Post Company

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