Thanks to Jeremy for providing the information about how to fetch files of messages compiled on SCREEN-L. As perhaps many other SCREEN-L subscribers, I've (again) saved that to my own files and at some point when I find more time or have occasion to use the material listed may exercise that option. But in the meantime, I'd prefer to approach Screen-L not as a repository or on-line library, but as a conversation group. I, too, do not have interest in every item posted, and quickly discard many items after glancing at their contents, or even just at the subject line, if I have no interest in that line of conversation. I don't post often myself and I've dropped subscrip- tions to networks that made me feel overwhelmed with information or inquiries I considered extraneous to my interests. But I personally have been glad to see SCREEN-L revive a bit in the past few months, after a marked decline in posting that I suspect was associated with 1) summer schedules and/or 2) the advent of the H-FILM list, in which many SCREEN-L subscribers also partici- pate. While I have not been interested in -- or have even felt aggravated by -- some of the discussions that have recently dominated SCREEN-L, others have given me welcome information or unexpected insights or sparked my thinking. These qualities -- both the aggravation and the inspiration -- also characterize the semi-public collegial conversations in which I engage at occasional dinner parties or public lectures around my university or at conferences; it is of such conversations that collegiality consists in part. And it is one of the contributions that the new technologies can make to the lives of academics, perhaps especially those such as myself, who, while richly stimulated by colleagues with related intellectual interests, feel a bit isolated from a body of specifically film/media scholars in between conferences. (I teach in an English Dept. and have only 1 colleague in my dept. and 3 or so across this large campus with whom I speak with any regularity about cinema/tv -- besides with my students. And they have benefitted from my subscription from SCREEN-L, in my recalling conversations in which I had little interest but on topics which they wished to pursue, e.g., science fiction films.) To extend the metaphor of SCREEN-L as a virtual conversation: I should hate to be at a dinner party in which people who started a line of conversation in which others were not interested were told simply to shut up or to go outside. And that people who were curious about the results of the outside conversation might later drop by (especially considering that "dropping by" involves noting and executing a number of unfamiliar commands, comparable to having to climb out a window and shimmy up a gutter.) I think the SCREEN-L "party" is in a room large enough that participants can just cruise by different groups and move right on (dump the messages without reading them!) without the network's having to change policies about postings or needing to evaluate topics for gen- eral relevance. As at a dinner party, guests always have the option of starting their own conversation, withdrawing to a corner, or even beating a fast retreat -- and on SCREEN-L, there's no social sanction for doing that! Enough metaphoring-- this just a rare contribution to an ongoing conversa- tion before I myself retreat to my work and the rest of my life. Ramona Curry [log in to unmask] Department of English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign