| Description |
Stitch and hem and line and flight appears in three formats. There is this present one, which adheres to the manuscript design requirements as outlined by The Graduate School at The University of Utah; there is another which is a book six inches high by nine inches wide, printed in three colors, with text aligned to its gutter; and there is a broadside printed from the same forms of standing metal type on a single twelve-inch-high by nineteen-inch-wide page, where all spreads are registered to the same points so that all lines of all sections overlap exactly, excluding the last lines of the longest section, which are left immediately readable. The second and the third formats were produced in editions of fifty each, and copies are available to the reader through the Special Collections Library at the J. Willard Marriott Library. The text in the book you're holding is built from scans taken from the original letterpress pages, and so honors typos not caught before production during proofreading, but does not honor the final runs of production which overprint eight typos and overprint one duplicated "no." The text here stands as an uncorrected and reformatted transcript of the letterpress-printed pages, since all "characters must be clear and sharp. Smudged, indistinct, or blurred letters are not acceptable." The present format cannot ask (at least not in the same way) if the techniques and repetitive labor of hand printing can be read just as one might read any of the other more familiar small crises in a work: the line break, the influence of a culture or history on that work, anagnorisis, exegesis, etc. The present format doesn't seem to ask questions like: what happens to a love song when you can't read it or hear it? How does a line or letter make itself mean when cast in metal, stood up and pressed onto paper? Still, the present format is concerned with how a line sits on a page and how a line is like love is like highs is like sand. The text all these formats contain is a love song with a one-note melody, no instrumentation and no meter. A love song so long as a love song marks a missing person. Each paragraph is composed from a number of radiating lines that cross and pattern as sound, as image, and as a content. Lines that, when they intersect, are triangulating the assemblage of a proliferating and shifting continent. So a line of text might contain narcotics, a desert, a(nti)theism or grass or a curtain, a child, things that no longer fly, a tower: a line can be what it says, a line can be an idea had or put down. And a line can be a stripe of letters all standing on their feet, sharing a baselines across the page; or a pen dragged across paper: a line can be an image, or part of making one. And when spelled or sounded, a line is a person's name, how that person came to that name and how that name emits or omits itself as a word from a landscape that a person is unwilling to inhabit. A line like this is an escape route that won't lead to any havens, but will hide a body. |
