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Open Books: Event Archive
March 20, 2008 07:30 PM
ROBERT MITTENTHAL & NICO VASSILAKIS
Robert Mittenthal's latest book, Value Unmapped ($10 Nomados), begins, "It's an unfortunate iron that walks stiffly over us, pressing our clothes.
I miss the comforts of a baggy garment which covers everything while
revealing little." What follows is a gentle, meandering polemic, at times
oblique and at times direct, which often finds itself studying the
possibility that language controls the individual rather than the other way
around. Political and economic speech are certainly part of this concern --
"now shareholder value has become the sublime." Mittenthal's writing is
dished out with a wryly comic resignation. "Realizing the body's capacity to
absorb even more savage value, I took my daily constitutional. Prozac and a
single malt."
Text Loses Time ($15.95 Many Penny) is the generous collection of Nico
Vassilakis's broadly ranging work. His poetry and prose move between the
shimmeringly surreal and the flatly declarative. Alive with word play --
"browsing, the brow singing" -- he can also masterfully layer images like
laying out a set of lovely clothing in which a body can be imagined -- "a
new continent spills from / her eyes. A glassful / of pencils. An
autobiography / composed entirely of photos." But Vassilakis takes text a
step further. He also manipulates words, letters, and punctuation marks to
construct visual poetry, the arrangement of text free of meaning, so the
look of the building blocks of printed language becomes the stuff of
non-representational art. In one sequence in the book what looks to be
photos of text on a bowing page are stretched and bent, resulting in an
picture of a page with letters that becomes as beautiful and as mysteriously
nearly legible as birch bark.
Robert Mittenthal and Nico Vassilakis are both members of Subtext, the vibrant experimental writing collective long based
in Seattle.
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