1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
|
I have been reading your "autocento" for many days now and have delights and
frustrations to report. As for delights, the "articles" themselves are
generally engaging, enlightening and challenging and indicative of the poet's
capacious imagination and broad range of knowledge and interests from the
esoteric to the quotidian. The autocento as an object itself is fun to play as
the reader explores an infinite number of combinations and connections. Just as
themes and motifs start to cohere-- the moon, mirroring, death, the sea, love,
modes of communication-- they just as quickly effervesce as another link takes
us along another twisted path. That quality is a strength, but it is also
a drawback, I fear. At times I feel like I was lost in a Borgesian library of
everything with no escape in sight. This was not an altogether pleasant
sensation. I'm not necessarily arguing for changing anything, but I would like
the project at some point to be more clear about itself and what it expects of
the reader. Even though you do assert the loosey-goosey nature of the thing,
readers expect to feel like they are making progress, that there is a finish to
a project, an end point of some sort. I was interested in the way that your
project fundamentally questions the beginning-middle-end assumptions that are
traditionally brought to bear upon literary productions of all kinds, but
I wanted the text itself to be aware of the ultimate tediousness that comes
from infinite possibilities due to lack of authorial or editorial selection.
Alternatively, a table of contents that actually looks like and functions like
a table of contents (i.e. these are the titles of the things you will find in
this book) might be reassuring. After awhile, after reading for many days,
I became weary of finding a new "article." I wanted the comfort of
a controlling consciousness, not more manifestations of "what my head looks
like on the inside" that exist outside of a compelling argument regarding why
that is a worthwhile pursuit for the reader ad infinitum. You need a site
map!!!
|
