Written/Spoken/Drawn The idea was a simple one: Various contributors to the past eight issues of lacanian ink were sent a mailing tube containing two sheets of drawing paper and two bottles of ink (red and black). Most of them were artists, some were writers. Also included in the package: the phrase (taken from the first issue) "written and drawn in lacanian ink" and the journal’s return address. Some tubes, like one sent to Zaire, were never seen again; others elicited refusals ("too busy," "can’t draw"), but most of them came back, like homing pigeons, from various points around the globe. The contents revealed that some respondents had kept scrupulously to the red and black ink, while others preferred to supplement the ink with all kind of materials, or to simply ignore it. Some of the drawings created were by experienced artists at ease with the medium, others by writers who hadn’t drawn since grade school. At Thread Waxing Space, these drawings supplied the backdrop for a series of reading, lectures and discussions. Some were sold to benefit the magazine. Now all - drawings, essays, poems, and stories - are regathered here. I think it could be said of these drawings what one of Lacan’s - how shall I put it? - less enthusiastic patients, Antonin Artaud, once said of his own drawings: "None of them, to speak exactly, is a work. They are all attempts, that is to say blows - probings or thrustings in all directions of hazard, of possibility, of chance, or of destiny."* Raphael Rubinstein. VIEW * Stephen Barber, Antonin Artaud: Blows and Bombs (London, Faber and Faber, 1993).