hi,
i believe the midlet can only access data within its own jar or within its own area of flash (accessed through the microedition RMS apis).
as such, your text file can only get into RMS via the app - so it needs either to be downloaded or read from the jar.
so you're fairly stuffed: most devices won't let you have jars bigger than a few hundred kbytes at most, and a
java app can't directly access an external file.
one possibility, on phones which allow native applications such as symbian, would be to run a little native http server which serves up the text file, then connect from the java app to
http://localhost, but perhaps not what you're after.
there are some newer phones coming out in near future with filestore access i believe, some newfangled JSRs or other, don't see what's wrong with MIDP1 myself...
hth, dan.