I’m moving in a couple days and this weekend I finally packed my books, a task which I put off for quite a long time because I was overwhelmed by the thought of transferring so many books into boxes in a stifling hot apartment with no air conditioning. I couldn’t delegate this task to my boyfriend because I wanted to go through my books and organize them in a certain way. I am a ridiculous control freak. Like most people who love to read I am a inveterate book buyer. I buy books because I read a review or because they have a pretty cover or because I like the way the paper feels. I’ll make a purchase based on a whim or a recommendation or out of spite to see if a writer really is as good as everyone says they are.

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"Ceci n'est pas une hotdog"

[via Fail Blog]  Magritte’s semantic play may have borrowed from the Tower of Babel, or the prophetic man just knew. Every time a pulled-over crack head pleads to the officer “this is not a pipe,” art wins. I knew a guy who deep fried sushi after it went bad, until it became good again. I guess that’s moral relativity.

The Opening Page

Amazon Description:

The Giant’s Fence (by Michael Jacobson) is a unique book. Instead of being filled with words, it gives you 80 pages of trans-symbolic script. Each page has several lines of linked, dancing symbols. They live, move, mutate, and die. The whole book could be interpreted both as the song of how we humans invented symbolic communication, and the telling of its slow disintegration. There are at least 2 ways to “read” The Giant’s Fence. You can begin at page 1, scan the first line, scan the second line, and so on, as you would read a regular book. You can also flip to a random page, and jump to a line which catches your eye. Some pages distort the rows of horizontal lines of symbols into curves, so you can’t exercise your usual reading habits. The Giant’s Fence stimulates new ways of reading and new ways of thinking. As the introduction says, “any meaning” the reader constructs “is a correct translation.” The book’s title is a translation of Finnish “Jatulintarha”, a name given to many of the stone labyrinths found in Finland. The only precursors to The Giant’s Fence are the hypergraphic novels of the Lettristes (such as Alain Satie’s Ecrit en Prose) and some of the more complex works of asemic poetry. If you want to step outside of language, and bathe in unmuddied waters, this book is for you.

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