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News & ArtsFriday, November 23, 2012
Books Assume Nothing
Posted by Paul Constant on Fri, Nov 23, 2012 at 3:25 PM
This sentence is a sentence about sentences. But it's only a sentence about sentences if you decide to play along with the social contract that every reader and writer implicitly agree to when collaborating on a text. It's really just a series of symbols with a discernable pattern. The symbols work together to represent ideas. (In our specific example, it's a self-reflexive idea about a self-reflexive idea, but whatever.) Writing is nothing more than highly stylized illustration: Memoirs are self-portraits, some cookbooks are still-lifes, political tracts are propaganda posters.
The Last Vispo, the new visual poetry anthology by Nico Vassilakis and Crag Hill (Fantagraphics, $39.99), doesn't allow its readers to make the single basic presumption—that words are a code, symbols to be received in a specific order, and not an arbitrary series of marks—that every reader makes on opening a book. As an art book, it demands hours of investigation...
(Keep reading.)
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