LEMONODO (2)

ERASED SPACED

(Creative Commons, 2014)

“the white space must take up less space in Garamond”—Lemonodo

Erased Spaced consists of an erased (blank) cover and 218 blank pages.  It's subject matter, according to the book site, is “erased, erased de kooning drawing, nothing, nuthin’.”

About the Cover Image:

BEFORE

AFTER (FINAL)

(shows up as grayish here; it's white on the book site)

The cover illustration is very interesting.  I previously selected an image by Jason Kottke of an "erased" sculpture in the British Museum in London.  I switched to an image of my own as I felt Kottke wouldn't take an interest in Erased.  My image, shows how a house is slowly being erased from memory by way of being boarded up and allowed to rot.  It has been boarded up for 30 years, and generally older houses like this are demolished once they're vandalized.  My particular town (on a peninsula near San Francisco) is noted for its past as an artist's colony and beach cottages.  Nobody builds beach cottages any more, and the idea there is an artist's colony here is equally laughable.  A typical house here is big, complicated and costs a million dollars.  I produce the original image here that I selected and will write for permission to use it, but if permission isn't forthcoming, I am pleased enough with this somewhat original visual take on "erased," and it also has the advantage of not belonging to a notable figure.

About the Interior Pages:

In Erased, I make four search-engine searches for things on erased themes, in each case the maximum number before they don't show any more results to me.  I scrape these entire results minus hyperlinks for their lexical interest.  The Erased Erased version, while an irrevocable transformation that renders the results and lexical interest null, nevertheless retains some of the fascination.  The oral reader on archive.org gives you an idea what Erased sounds like.  I'd say when I read it, the sound isn't quite as even.  Erased Erased is notable for its silence, and the automated reader has an odd way to pronounce "www."  There are 264 pages in Erased and only 218 in Erased Erased.  To achieve the blank text, I used a regular expression find "." (the wildcard for any character), replace with a " " character.  Thus the text was transformed to whitespace, and ended up being briefer at 218 pp than the original 264 pp.  I didn't determine precisely why the number of pages is so dramatically different, but it seems to me the white space must take up less space in Garamond.

Lemonodo has little by way of curriculum vitae to mention despite being quite old enough by now.  It was a surprise to win recognition for a sound poem written to celebrate the opening of Denise Fujiwara's dance production of Christian Bök's Eunoia in Toronto: http://blueceilingdancer.blogspot.ca/2014/03/drum-roll-pleasethe-fujiwara-poetry.html

This list of blogs offers some indication of Lemonodo as a writer:

http://lemonodo.blogspot.com/
http://voidsmith.blogspot.com/
http://poami.blogspot.com/
http://autopoet.blogspot.com/