# The Fallow Ledger

A quarterly newsletter, then an irregular one, mimeographed, print run somewhere
between sixty and a hundred and ten. Eighty-four issues, Spring 1981 to Winter
1996. It is the single source for roughly two thirds of everything in this
folder.

## The position it was named for

The first issue argues, at length and rather well, that a tradition is mostly
not doing anything, and that this is correct. *Fallow* is a farming word chosen
deliberately: a field left unplanted is not a field being neglected, it is a
field doing the thing it needs to do and cannot do while bearing.

The target was a specific irritation — the assumption, from outside, that a
technical underground is measured by output. The Ledger's answer was that the
compulsion to publish is what destroys these groups, because publishing forces
you to have a position, and a position forces you to defend it, and the
defending is what turns a craft into a faction.

That the newsletter making this argument then ran for fifteen years and
eighty-four issues is a joke the editor made himself, in No. 40, and made
badly.

## What is in it

Tone tables, mostly. See [[lore/tone-tables]]: forty-odd pages of measured
signalling frequencies across the run, which is more of the total wordcount than
anything else and which almost nobody has read. This is the origin of *marrow*
in [[lore/lexicon]] — the part everyone has copied and nobody has read past.

The rest, in rough order of how often it gets cited:

- **No. 3** — the earliest [[lore/quiet-exchange]] account. Nobody has produced
  it since 1998. It carries the two-second gap and the forty seconds of silence,
  which is to say it carries everything that makes the story a story.
- **No. 39** — the [[lore/halberd-and-ossuary]] exchange, printed in full.
- **No. 41** — [[lore/the-specimen-card]].
- **No. 47** — "On Sitting", the standard statement on [[lore/long-count]].
- **Nos. 52–63** — the [[lore/gravewalker]] column.
- **No. 62** — "Cold Comfort", on the 1989 [[lore/the-deprecation]].
- **No. 84** — the last issue, widely copied, and the only one most people have.

## The condition problem

[[lore/sources]] sets it out and it is worth restating in the plainest form: the
issues that are missing are not randomly distributed. Nos. 1–8 are the founding
material and exist as one incomplete set that has been claimed and not produced.
Nos. 64–83 are patchy and several are attested only by an index entry in
somebody else's paper.

What survives well is the middle. What is thin is the beginning, which is where
the origin stories are, and the end, which is where the group would have said
what it thought had happened to it.

A tradition that keeps its middle and loses both ends will, reliably, be
described by later readers as having been more coherent than it was.

## The editor

Not named here, and not named in the Ledger, which carries no masthead in any
issue anybody has seen. The convention of [[lore/marchford]] — record the plant,
not the person — was applied by this publication to itself, thoroughly enough
that fifteen years of quarterly work has no author attached to it.

[[lore/sisken]] contributed for nineteen years and is not the editor; that has
been checked, and the checking is one of the few genuinely solid negative
results in [[lore/lineage]].