The Grothendieck discussion has moved a bit far from the main reason for this list but, if I may, a couple of points: First -- in answer to Max's query -- Roy Lisker tells me that almost all of Grothendieck's autobiography in the original French has been transcribed onto www.grothendieck-circle.org. Second, who is Roy Lisker? I've valued him as a resource for over 40 years. He was a student at Penn and a few years later I was a character witness in his trial for draft-card burning. Yep. And he served a 6 month sentence. Among other mathematicians who support his efforts are Lou Kauffman and Mike Barr (Mike has known him longer than I have). Take a look at www.fermentmagazine.org. First you might want to read: Commonweal 02/09/2001 Stop the Presses by Richard Alleva I enter the Russell Public Library of Middletown, Connecticut, just around the corner from Wesleyan University. Walking past the circulation desk, I turn left and enter a publisher's office. No, wait, it's not a publisher's office but the library's reference department. But, behold, in one corner, publishing is indeed in progress. Crouched over a computer keyboard is a middle-aged man with a pate appropriately monkish and a face appropriately gnomic, for like any good writer he coaxes his thoughts onto the page with the humble intensity of a monk decorating a manuscript or the greedy intensity of a gnome counting his gold. He has slipped his complete works onto some disks which he carries to and from the library. With the aid of a benevolent library computer technician, he has installed a wide variety of typefonts on the hard drive which not only he but any other library patron can employ (thereby making our writer not only the beneficiary but the benefactor of the library), and once he has written at least a couple of drafts in longhand, he chooses the most appropriate font for the story or essay in progress, types it, revises again and again until satisfied, prints, photocopies, turns the results over to a bindery, and winds up with the latest of several handsome booklets with blue or purple or red covers, puckishly decorated by their author. Presto, a twenty-first-century descendant of the Elizabethan chapbook. The contents? Modern variations of Greek and Indian myths, "cynical" (but actually quite poignant) Christmas stories, short fiction about Americans in Paris in the 1960s, factual reports on scientific conferences, ruminations on the state of current academia, horror stories of the homeless, book reviews, farces, musings on the latest developments in physics, and one of the most unsparing and tacitly poignant autobiographies I have ever read. Whose autobiography? That of Roy Lisker, onetime math prodigy, ex-wandering musician, contributor to JeanPaul Sartre's Les Temps Modernes, and local character in a succession of places (mostly university communities), political protestor and prankster, and indefatigable self-publisher. Unless you are Noam Chomsky or historian Howard Zinn or composers Milton Babbitt and John Harbison or one of the other subscribers to Lisker's monthly publication, Ferment, you will have to take my word for it that Roy is worth reading for the way he can make a fictional character as rooted in the real world as the subject of a New Yorker profile, while endowing a real-life academic with the fabulousness of a character in Dickens. If there were any literary justice in the world, Linker's story, "Sam, The Messiah Man," about a violinist who devotes his entire career to perfecting the violin passages of a Handel oratorio, would be as renowned as Borges's fable about another artistic specialist, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." But what really concerns me here is to point out how tenaciously Lisker reverts to the seemingly outmoded notion of the writer as local character and streetcorner vendor of news, satire, and fantasy. To be sure, Lisker has been conventionally published (his academic satire, Getting That Meal Ticket, was published in Paris by Rend Juliard in 1972), but he now confines his energies to using his private printing press in the Russell Library, hawking his wares on the Wesleyan campus, giving readings at local bookstores, and mailing his publications to subscribers who are all over the country because Roy, in his youth, had been all over the country befriending and bugging people while enacting his role of academic-mathematician- wandering minstrel. [For the whole thing: www.fermentmagazine.org/Commonweal.html]