Category: Blog

Though the situation’s murky, the syntax estranging, the form itself is familiar, for most of the book: left-justified lines, grouped into stanzas. But between these are several visual poems, much weirder to the eye. On these pages, letters cascade down in code like patterns. At first the arrangements seem random, or merely artistic — typography meant to be seen but not read. Keep looking and they start to accrue into strings, as when you stare at a word search. In one, words form the shape of a body whose head you can read from left to right. Then you reach a chunk that looks like this:

If you keep reading from left to right, it’s meaningless. You have to change your strategy and read from top to bottom: this is a hand for form’s sake. In another, letters form the shape of a mask or a human face. Curving columns of lower-case l’s make the sides of the face. The last l leads into the words “loss of”; the word “identity” forms the chin. The eyes are made of lower-case e’s (e for eye), the nostrils are o’s, the mouth a line of m’s (m for mouth). Downward, the features spell “eom” (memo-ese for end of message). The satisfaction of “solving” these puzzles, or finding possible solutions, offers relief from the mystery of the rest, which might be unsolvable — much like the real problems (climate disaster, ecological collapse) the book imagines us living, or not living, after.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/03/books/review/for-the-ride-alice-notley.html

i was just playin, i already used another from this series of photos
of DEM as Kafka in Prague by Oktober, but
when i o’erlayed the yellow on top of it
and then ‘impressionised’ it . . .  i loved it
i want a book for this to cover – i don’t have one
i played with the idea of replacing the cover for my w-i-p, max nix,
but it felt disloyal to the cover now-in-place,
which i had done as a place-holder, very early in book development,
but now it is so integrated into the book, that is impossible

that current cover for max nix is “the stolen shift_impressionism”

max-nix-linear-b                          max-nix-linear-a

apparently i have degenerated from one who writes books

into one who makes a book instead of knuckling down and writing,

instead, playing around with cosmetics

e.g. the end pages  . . . now in a paperback, i am not sure there

that there even is such a thing . . . but now i will always have them . . .

i might even go back to my prior book

still out on offer, not yet self-published

and add end-papers there . . .

might be an interesting experiment in time-travel,

to get back into the head-space of the book

to make appropriate end-papers . . .

yeh, i think it must be a german flick, but maybe there is an english version.

i wanna see.

i’ve been thinking on these lines lately, sorta, cf prior blog entry “How like life it is!”