Transfixion - Softcover

Lavender, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1891053116 ISBN 13: 9781891053115

Publisher: Garret County Press, 2010

Synopsis

Transfixion is the hypnosis of language itself, the engrossing (enlarging) of consciousness itself by an alien structure. The book revolves around a kind of pun expressed in the two epigraphs:

”Hee... shal finde both an explicit contradiction, and a double transfixion, like that stroake of Phinees... pearcing with one speech through two at once.”
Bishop William Barlow (1609)

And…

”The word ‘transfiction’ has been coined to this interactive narrative system where users can interact with narrative machines (devices with computing power and containing databases of meaningful information).”
Nandi Alok and Marichal Xavier (2006)

Bill Lavender deploys here the weapon he's hesitated to use until now: the "I," in its most bitter-sweet reflexive lethal mode. The barrel is pointed at a mercilessly dissected self that it fires at with compassion and a wealth of sportive detail. This book is an amazingly beautiful collection of (self) hunting notes.
-- Andrei Codrescu

Each word has two meanings, it's regular meaning and the other one: let's rejoin the hoopla till "the onrushing host loops thought as a green sprig".
-- Bernadette Mayer

This is sharp swish writing in tongues forked twixt Horace and Lorca and everyman & woman you have or have never met. I call it a gift that keeps giving "to see, to understand or think immediately." Keep smiling, keep reading, all your friends are here and then some, though the "ground of imago is fear / a paranoid metropolis" -- but we know a paranoid city is a city knows the facts -- and why worry, there’s a hospital of grammar copulating beneath a full moon. For Bill Lavender is the doctor of present experience, be that in oddly populist states, rich republics or cities emerging from the water, like Atlantis spelled backwards.
-- Pierre Joris

Edition details

• Publisher: Garret County Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1891053116
• ISBN 13: 9781891053115
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120