The New Alexandrian Library (South Africa) Boekie Collection. Blog 2. Marie Wintzer - Leda or The Search for Beauty and De Villo Sloan - Principles of Hology.

[cheryl penn]

Leda – Or The Search for Beauty by Marie Wintzer.

Minxus  tirelessly walks the arduous road in Search for Beauty.  Marie wrote and told me that she had visited an exhibition in Japan featuring the work of Leonardo Da Vinci.  That visit inspired this series on beauty.    

In Greek mythology, Leda was the daughter of an Aetolian king and a Spartan mother.  Her daughter was Helen of Troy, hatched from an egg after being seduced by Zeus disguised as a swan.  Sound like a triangle? There’s ALWAYS a triangle when Zeus gets involved.   

Marie was worried the photos were dark.  But that’s the other side of beauty isn’t it? The darkness.  Women trying to fit into some sort of expected mold of beauty. Da Vinci worked on Leda about a year after he finished the Mona Lisa, but as far as I am aware, the original painting is lost although numerous drawings are extant.  Her myth was a popular motif during the Renaissance.  John Keats wrote:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty ,—that is all.

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Marie wrote:

Considerable progress has been made on the Road to Truth and Beauty. Truth is always more tricky than Beauty. Beauty will be a piece of cake.

Principles of Hology - De Villo Sloan

Once again I am faced with MinXus-Lynxus work - the PROOF Copy. 

Holism in science is an approach to research that emphasizes the study of complex systems. This is NOT Holism, its Hology, but it sure is complex. It has a manifesto (see discussion below). It has a following and a history and a Finnish Connection.   It has upside-downess and poetry. (Just as an aside, the  term holism was coined in 1926 by Jan Smuts – a South African…)  

Hology has asemics and seated torn fragments. It has fitting tips and Visual Poetry.  It is Red and strong and although it has place for Lager hip Size, it also makes provision for Petite Haunches. But thats the part you cant see.  De Villo tore the pattern, I cut the page.  Is Hology about Torn Patterns?

A long while ago De Villo wrote a poem. About a little hoarse. The size of a dog. It grazes on the blushing plain.  My favorite line - I could sleep in the footnotes. Printing on gloss paper suits methylene blue solubility.

The tooooooo page:  Toooo short, toooo long. Its better to hide in the Red Shadows of Hology, where the writing of the unconscious explains things to sleeping maidens hidden on half pages.

Meta-L.  I’m thinking Meta-Language? Metalanguage - a language used to make statements about statements in another language. 

Language language language, so what’s a language?  Well I guess it’s the complex system we as humans have designed to communicate.  Bearing in mind the numerous incompatible schools of linguistics, I’m not even going further!  Suffice it to say, this branch of language belongs to MinXus-Lynxus, a branch of, um, I’m not certain what but it has its own whole (hole)  history, art forms, manifestoes etc. 

Its a mental faculty you see, this Meta-L, which I think dislocates language from any sort of signification.  It takes letters and tears them and places them over images and crosses them out, creating a sort of hieroglyphic state – the way the pages look just before sleep overtakes Text and images become blurry. 

I think this is The State of Minxus?  Of course the rules for studying language are abstract, something like the visuals of Meta-L?  This is no formal system of signs governed by some sort of grammatical rule, rather, it’s text in a state of flux. The MinxFlux.  

AND I'm placing this publication in the Meta-F category Metafiction - fiction that draws attention to its own fictionality. 

Nancy said to the elephant if you don't stop pointing at the peacock he will dwindle into asemic writing and enter the shadowlands. He will disintegrate and become a Post-literate Peacock. Reader Berate - why aren't you following???

Diane Keys sent me a TINY boekie – a boekiejie?

Its made from “Some trash elements sent to me by Stewart Chabilois (Sorry DK – claiming the 15 Trashpo Amendment here – which states – all interpretation of writing of an undecipherable state, deciphered, will not be the responsibility of the decipherer). 

Something like the Was of Chloroplast – The Was of  Chloroplast is the thing that causes the Exhibition of Spinach.  And its Interchange – the blueprint for the circulatory and roductive systems.  And when I’m big I want to be one of those – I think it’s a bit simpler than being human! 

[De Villo Sloan]

Do you know, damn.

[De Villo Sloan]

I'm serious. Do know I can read those DK text-fragment-weaves and they make sense to me?

[cheryl penn]

YA DE VILLO - WHAT-EVER - I'm laughing :-))!

[De Villo Sloan]

Nancy, geez, don't let my monkey drivel dissuade your cosmic meatwheel vision.

 

Viz(po)ma - gosh durn, thanks. A major Minx Kit is on the way to you all about counting sheep & flying butt-resses.

 

Cheryl - this is why I am so honored - M-L editions are basically Neanderthal products assembled by monkeys compared to the work of the book artists you usually post. One of the pages in "Hology" is upside down. They're printed in low budget micro-press style, although no two editions are the same.

 

So, you know, I'm really grateful.

[cheryl penn]

MAN!!! REPETITIONS!!!! Re-write!!!

Nancy-Bell - NO starting over!! Send already!!! De Villo - for sure this is in the new Library - AND Principles of Hology arrived - also a winner :-)!!! You're talking about a palimpsest? But a pre-printed, re-fragmented textual one rather than the traditional hand written one. You say discontinuity, BUT I think stylistically it all 'belongs' together - for sure in - perhaps (I'm not convinced - but hey - so what!) absurd associations.  The thing is, you use repetitions of similar narrative material (visual) which has connotations attached already - due to previous use.  Besides. I always wanted a Post-Modern Peacock - they're highly prized.  Viza - ethereal - good word :-).  O - and The Was of Chloroplast? Its actually a manuel for making green.  The contents of which are secret XX

[vizma bruns]

Wow. DVS bloody-L, those layers of text are ethereal, for real.

[De Villo Sloan]

Oh - and it's not random. There are consistent attempts to align pieces of texts from different books in Meta-L to construct some sort of new text from the old ones - which I think all of us try to do in our work - with the predictable result of discontinuity, absurd associations, nonsense & a very few sparks of recognition and relation.

[De Villo Sloan]

Cheryl, I can't thank you enough for thinking Meta-L worthy to be placed in The New Alexandrian Library - and to be blogged with a heavy-hitter like DK, inventor of the Trash Book, well, I am practically swooning.

 

Your concepts are fantastic & your book about books concept inspired Meta-L. Yes, that's short for metalanguage. We've had too much postmodernism lately, but unfortunately it applies in the case of Meta-L.

 

A sub-definition of metalanguage is that strange discourse born of pomo of self-reflexive language - language that only talks about itself, texts that refer only to themselves in enclosed self-referential systems largely detached from the world.

 

I wanted to express - through visual poetry - that when we read a book we are actually reading many other books embedded in that text, usually invisible to us on a one-dimensional surface. So you have the layers of different book pages that offer glimpses of pages beneath & beneath - and come together only in a way that produces a confused conversation of competing "languages."

 

The foundation pages are from Virgil's Aneid but they are so over-layerd with children's book fragments, bits of forgotten poetry, self-help guides, etc. from the distressed pages of destroyed books that it's hard to find Virgil.

[Nancy Bell Scott]

After even more looking, I must say, DVS's boekie makes me want to throw the one now on my table into the trash and start over. In it he does some things I've dreamed of doing but never done, and even in dreams they were not this breath-taking.

[Nancy Bell Scott]

WOW!!! Splendid!!!