OLIVER GOLDSMITH

Essays (1756)
Book without a book
(Original from Oxford University. Digitized July 31, 2006)
--from The Art of Google Books

XAVIER SERRANO (2)

BARTLEBITS
(work-in-progress: "a black hole in expansion")

Bartlebits is about erased sections in books. Most of these are not just corrections but actual deletions, wanted or unwanted. Throughout the various chapters, you will recognise some famous figures or familiar writings. These words, however, have been for some reason taken out and omitted from the original works. At the end of Bartlebits, sources and links can be found. Why call this Bartlebits? Maybe because we are dealing here with dead letters. Maybe... Note that this is a work in progress, in other words a black hole in expansion.

Xavier is the author of several books of fiction and poetry published in France and Canada. His work has been featured in a number of international magazines and webzines. He is interested in alternative, experimental and authorless writing. He is also the editor of a small but funny magazine.

(Author photo is a screenshot from Zswounderground.)

XAVIER SERRANO (1)

Zswounderground 
(Extracting Buried Meaning Since Aug 08)


About the Zswounderground Blog Project:
INTRODUCTION 
The Introductory note on the site reads as follows: 
«These mines, tunnels, pits and shafts are regularly being extended. If you need some light while excavating, please contact us and we will provide you with some instructions. But remember that everything here is happening below the surface. If you get lost, get lost.» 
=> This is a blog WITHOUT any posts on the home page; 
=> ONLY COMMENTS are inserted ; 
=> ALL posts are left blank (or may contain an error message) ; 
=> Everyting is taking place BENEATH the surface, is hidden from sight, and potential content has to be unearthed (that is to be discovered from the “Comments” area).  

INTENTION 
Meaning/mining: The blog is built upon the metaphor of mining.  The explorer has to dig his/her way to light, content and meaning (if any).  But the site of course is full of traps and dead-ends. 
**First of all, I was interested in undermining communication and the very act of blogging. At first sight (and as we say somewhere "sight is under destruction"), there is nothing to see on the HOME-page (we call it the HOLE-page).  No feeds, no notes, no dates.  The only way to enter is to fall through the HOLE-page. In the absence of any white rabbit, the digger is free to find his/her own gems or get lost. Secondly I wanted to disrupt the nature and content of “Comments”. Usually “comments” are focused on praise, criticism, comparison, spam, promotion / self-promotion, etc. Instead, I wanted to create some confusion and play on bizarre interactions, disconnected reactions, nonsense, etc. 

DESCRIPTION 
Some kind of borgesian maze is thus created with internal loops (within the mine) or external drills (towards other sites or networks).

While the posts on Zswounderground are devoid of content, there are some titled posts.  Per the projecs concept, most of the action occurs in the Comments section.  For example, there is a textless post entitled "Collapsing spaces."  When you go to the comments section, there is this comment:

Zswlkr said...

1. Hand written melancholy
2. Dreamscape formation after working hours
3. Boxin[g]Love
4. Screening obsessions
5. Dalinian virgin auto-submitted to her own pain
6. Kinematic frontier
7. Mutilated erection
8. Distance between two crashing planes
9. Defeated body
10. Escape

Note that No. 10, "Escape," is a link.  Click on link and you will end up at a YouTUBE video by donnasummerschool of "Bubonic Plague - Dracula."  

Xavier says, "Many posts lead nowhere. Some, on the contrary may lead to the comments zone through which you can get to other posts or other comments. But the overall themes being darkness, emptiness and loss, you never go far and return to what I call the 'hole-page'."

The "hole-page," of course, is the original empty post on Zswounderground.

CONCLUSION 
Zswounderground is a blog which refuses to make things easy for the reader. On Zswounderground, readers will spend either 0 seconds or several hours. Zswounderground is one of the many projects from Zswound (http://zswound.blogspot.fr/p/about.html).

Xavier is the author of several books of fiction and poetry published in France and Canada. His work has been featured in a number of international magazines and webzines. He is interested in alternative, experimental and authorless writing. He is also the editor of a small but funny magazine.

(Author photo is a screenshot from Zswounderground.)

ADITYA BAHL

ARE poems
(currently in manuscript form, Himachal Pradesh, India, 2014)

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
ARE poems is an erasure of the book titled, John Clare, Poems Selected by Paul Farley.  The "cover" below is the result of the erased book cover to "create a sort of a digital book artifact for now."

Artist Statement:

The book, John  Clare/ Poems Selected by Paul Farley was bought on the street side Sunday book market of Daryaganj, Old Delhi, all for twenty rupees. The prices largely depend only on the size and thickness of the books.

Several de/re-readings/writings/ventriloquisms (English is not my mother tongue) of Clare's phenomenology and local descriptions soon developed into a close attention to the fundamental particles of language/life— diectics, expletives, pronouns— language of everywhere and time.

The work (via I) progressed as a narrative of a loss and recovery of itself, as meaning— revealing the perceptual/perpetual correspondence between description and it’s grammar— as as what’s what’s.

The semiotic implications of the Cartesian subjectivity— the fundamental dichotomy of subject-object have had concurrent manifestations in the liberal lineage of private property (Machievelli Hobbes Locke Rousseau onwards the constant attempt to supplement the rather sterile Enlightenment understanding of I, with varied invocations of the more political “We”)    

What is I & What is not-I. Not “the inhuman black of empty space” (note on Ronald Johnson’s Radios) but Shunyata—a negation of drishti (view, judgement), not to be mistaken as the denial of reality, but rather to be understood as a “freeing of reality of the artificial and accidental restrictions” (T R V Murthy).

Acts I perform are creatures
Who create others.

. . .or words don't need us, any more than trees? … What do words know of each other, possibilities of sentience in words as well as dogs, plants.  

The form is perceived and the eye is the perceiver. It (eye) is perceived and the mind is the perceiver. The mind with its modifications is perceived and the Witness (the self) is the perceiver. But It (the Witness) is not perceived (by any other).

We live in a world of things.   

and some such. . .
 

{Nagarjuna, R. Grenier, Drg-Drsya Viveka, G. Oppen}

SAMPLE PAGES FROM THE BOOK:

(Click on images to enlarge; when you look at the pages, you can see the ghosts of the erased text):

Born and brought up in the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh. Works have appeared or are forthcoming in E-Ratio, Lilliput Review, iArtistas, Haiku 21, Offerta Spceiale Otoliths, Poetry Salzburg Review, Rampike. A chapbook of visual poetry is available here. Co-edits Bones, a journal of contemporary haiku.

JULIE DANHO

Six Portraits 

(Slapering Hol Press at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., 2014)

Julie Danho’s Six Portraits is the 2013 winner of the annual Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Contest sponsored by one of the oldest chapbook presses in the United States.  The poems in this collection include:

Erased de Kooning

Robert Rauschenberg wanted to know if unmaking art

could make art. This idea seems too much for me,

having just seen giant irises blooming out of a wall, a painted

lower intestine, a woman’s bust sculpted from soap. But I’m standing

before his canvas, his Erased de Kooning Drawing, and, like much art,

its title tells me what to see. If you were here, how you would

praise this, how we would argue over whether this was true,

over what, if anything, was. Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning

that de Kooning reluctantly gave him because he appreciated

the idea, and it was, Rauschenberg said, all about the idea.

He erased the painting in celebration, just as you (I wish I could believe)

erase me. Not that I’m art, or you’re art, but weren’t we ideas

of each other? If you were here, you’d make your point, walk away

before you saw that Rauschenberg erased for a month and still

there are ink spots, de Kooning’s violet crayon; there are even eyes,

still looking. My love, Rauschenberg lied. The idea,

yes. But how his arms must have ached afterwards.

Julie Danho received her MFA from Ohio State University and recipient of a Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Julie won the 2013 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition with her collection Six Portraits. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as Barrow Street, Southern Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Cream City Review, and West Branch. She works as an editor in Providence, Rhode Island.

SS PRASAD

O Poems

(currently in manuscript form, Bangalore, India, 2014)

About the Project

I see this work as extending from 100 Poems.  As an attempt to reduce further, I decided to write poems with titles alone and make the body 0: unpoeming the poem as opposed to leaving them untitled. I call these ‘0 Poems’.
--SS Prasad


Here are images from the book (click on images to enlarge):

SS Prasad is the author of 100 Poems. He writes from Bangalore, India.