, an introduction.
In the 1990s, I didn’t have many texts saved on my computer, so I called this essay “Pentext”, but since then I have added so many other pen texts to my computer that I have had to be more discerning and specific in my pen-text titles. An early version of this text was dated with the span of years 1993-1997, and some guy laughed and said to me, “It took you 5 years to write it?”, and I said to him, “No, it took me 5 years to read for it”. The text, at the time, was 20 pages long, single spaced, and the bibliography was 22 pages long, and currently it’s 60 pages long. This pen essay consists of 13 parts with subtitles, and parts numbered 1 to 13. You’ll notice a difference in the visual texture of the text of this essay, with its dearth of hyperlinks, since it was written before the birth and during the infancy of the “world wide web”. That was what writing used to look like before the word “inter-network” was shortened to “Internet” and then in turn, finally, to just “the Net”. And the frontispiece below is its sole illustration 1. There are no footnotes because all the references are explicit and obvious, and all the cited works are listed in the bibliography, anyway.
.