"Steps gets called a novel but it is really a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever. Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close to where Kosinski goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined."
— DFW Seven Fragmentary Novels That Aren’t The Pale King | biblioklept
“why alphabets look like they do, what has happened to them since printing was invented, why they won’t ever change, and how it might have been.” (via Shapes for Sounds: A Visual History of the Alphabet | Brain Pickings)
“I just got back from a trip with my dad to New York. It was enjoyable! We stayed here, and I got really angsty and “STOP IT GAWD YOU’RE EMBARRASSING ME IN FRONT OF ALL THESE PEOPLE WHO ARE OBVIOUSLY FLOATING FOUR STORIES UP IN THE SKY AROUND US” when my dad insisted on taking a touristy photo.”
-Tavi of Style Rookie
"In a more technical way we can acknowledge that unfamiliarity plays an important part in pattern-recognition, and we can ask how this feature gains its effect. If two words are placed together that are not normally associated as from the same field of reference or meaning, a kind of semantic spark or jump may be created that is intensely localized within the continuity of the text process: it may be a kind of “hot spot” that burns very bright but which the reader can quite quickly assimilate within the larger patterns of composition. Sometimes these sparks can follow in quick succession, many of them, producing disturbance patterns of their own, extended trains of unfamiliar words and phrases which break the rules for local sense."
—
J.H. Prynne, ‘Difficulties in the Translation of “Difficult” Poems’, Cambridge Literary Review, I/3 (Easter, 2010), pp. 151–66
http://www.cambridgeliteraryreview.org/wp-content/uploads/PrynneCLR3.pdf
"BEE vs. DFW is not exactly news. Ellis (b. 1964) and Wallace (b. 1962) both published their first novels in the mid-eighties. Less Than Zero made 21-year-old Ellis a star, a likely “voice of his generation.” The Broom of the System didn’t exactly go gangbusters for Wallace, but its voluminous scope, Pynchonian silliness, and its willingness to pick up the postmodern games that Ellis and the other new minimalists seemed to reject announced a major new talent who was willing to both think and feel—to go beyond the surfaces. Indeed, Wallace’s entire project might be defined as setting himself apart from the cool, detached irony that characterizes Ellis’s ethos. In a 1993 interview with Larry McCaffery,Wallace decries fiction that devotes “a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis’s American Psycho: it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself."
(via Urban Books)
This site documents the Urban Books Collection of artists’ books in the Olin Library Special Collections at Washington University. The site is intended as a study resource for students in the Urban Books class, an interdisciplinary project combining Urban Theory (taught by Professor Zeuler Lima) and the production of Artists’ Books (taught by Jana Harper). The original collection of 91 books was purchased in 2004 at Printed Matter bookstore with support from a Sam Fox Interdisciplinary Teaching Grant from Washington University. The goal of assembling the collection was to provide original study material for students in the class. The class has been taught since 2004 and during that time student final projects have been added to the collection, which now numbers over 150 books.
The spectrum of modern and contemporary Artists’ Books in Reed College’s Special Collections and collected on this website include traditional letterpress printed books of poetry, conceptual book works, sculptural and visual works, concrete poetry, and magazine works. This unique collection, which holds significant 20th century and contemporary artists’ books, gives students and the broader population insight into the significant role artist’s books have played among the avant-garde of Eastern and Western Europe, Asia and the United States, from the turn of the last century to the present.
