FIZZLE(S) #1

This morning I tried to write a thoughtful post about my reasons for using, almost militantly these days, collage (stealing) as a basic premise for working. I couldn’t get anything good going in a reasonable amount of time, so, in the spirit of the public/private ambiguity that books and this blog are partially about, what follows is the two aborted attempts (by the way, I lifted the title for this post from ol’ Sam Beckett):


A regular reader of this blog might notice that I have a predilection for copying text from other books and re-producing it here. It’s true—I’m a collagist, a borrower, a plagiarist, a thief. I always have been.

I initially learned to draw from copying the pictures in comic books. (My interest in comics would eventually lead me into my first forays into self-publishing, with photocopied and stapled books.) Later on, in art school, thinking I was a painter, I almost always based the compositions for the abstract, mixed media/collage paintings that I was doing on another source, either recycled drawings of mine or an art historical reference. What the source was was only of vague importance to me; most of all I needed a place to start. The blank canvas seemed impossible. I couldn’t come to terms with starting from nowhere. Back then (20 years old, on the verge of making my first book), using some sort of source was just part of my process, something I did, like sharpening a pencil—it did not figure into the overall conceptual configuration of any individual piece or into my larger ideas of what I was actually doing (of which there were none, admittedly).

A regular reader of this blog might notice that I have a predilection for copying text from another book and re-producing it here. It’s true—I’m a collagist, a borrower, a plagiarist, a thief. I always have been.

I have my reasons, other than the perverse enjoyment I get from sitting and retyping another piece of text, which is the kind of meditative, hand-mechanical work that is extremely common in bookmaking. How different is it from setting another writer’s work in lead type?