Re: new memetics book?

From: Ray Recchia (rrecchia@mail.clarityconnect.com)
Date: Thu 09 Jan 2003 - 21:13:56 GMT

  • Next message: joedees@bellsouth.net: "Re: new memetics book?"

    At 08:33 PM 1/9/2003 +0000, you wrote:
    >http://www.adeenakarasick.com/book4.html
    >
    >Actually, I'm not sure whether it is or not.
    >
    >__________________________________________________
    >

    It's a book of poetry published in 1994. Quote from Publisher's Weekly on the writer's latest work:

    >Publishers Weekly
    >Continuing her pop-charged, extroverted and libidinal poetic
    >investigations, Canadian ex-pat Karasick (Memewars; The Empress Has No
    >Closure; etc.) here offers her most visually compelling, over-the-top
    >collection to date. A high-end production--one of the few paperbound books
    >of poetry to boast full-color, glossy pages throughout--the book uses
    >photographs, drawings, multiple typefaces, the "open field" spatial
    >accoutrements of projective verse and other kitchen sink-isms to propel
    >words across, under and on top of the page--and in one's face. The
    >sequence "Menaheh Yehuda" invokes the 1997 bombing of a Jerusalem market
    >and jars each syllable forward on the phonemic contours of the
    >preceding--trashing, along the way, notions of lyrical morality by
    >sexualizing the event's horror and troping Jewish cosmopolitanist
    >stereotypes: "Tropic/ blot clotters/ a cotillion of many cullers, isolata
    >eros swigs in/ blunt pulses & skins the surface of/ her dimpled limits/
    >fermented in riggish gashings/ grasped in spronged frottage ruffled
    >fetchings/ fraught with h ute conduits." The book's centerpiece,
    >"Improbable Grammars V" juxtaposes a barrage of quotes about and images of
    >the Western Wall with deformations of Matisse, Haring, adlike depictions
    >of women's bodies and didactic theoretical text. The clashing color images
    >and attention-deficit typefaces ("dyssemia" is a coinage for disrupted
    >units of meaning) are eye-catching, but fail to develop a sustained
    >critique of their seeming targets--sexism, capitalism, anti-Semitism,
    >troubled Arab-Israeli relations--though the text-as-theory and the naked,
    >juggled graphemes (the effect of which can't be reproduced here) conspire
    >to create some intriguing hermeneutic whirlpools. The book as a whole is
    >most successful as an exhibitionistic, youthful, pseudo-hysterical display
    >of ambition and desire, and points the way to further poetic
    >appropriations of images and politically explosive material. (Sept.)
    >Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|
    >

    Ray Recchia

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