Radical Books of 2011, 8/10
You Can’t Have Everything… Where Would You Put It!, Bruce Andrews, Veer Books
There is no way this book will get past your spam filter:
facework cootie itsier-off
we are the dream sequences in your conventional cultural life –
Indeed we are. Here’s verbal salad (French dressing? Russian dressing?) shot through at times with lines of split and reassembled words:
zy^rit
sect^in
sing^franchi
cres^offi
It’s a delight to apprehend such text, passing words beneath one’s eyes, thinking about what it all might mean and sound like. Looking back now, I wonder if I should have flipped this open and read at random when I encountered it originally. Instead of plodding through, I might have thought for days about a line such as “tractor the Real.” But, as it happens, I can still do that. Although I have everything, I had nowhere to put it. I have to delve in again for specific examples of juxtapositions that Bruce Andrews fashions. The book is no doubt worth reading, scanning, or hashing into – however you want to have it all.