Saturday, June 9, 2007

Substitute the new and destroy the old, thus necessitating but one reference.

The 1975 New York Social Register includes the January 1975 peach-colored insert DILATORY DOMICILES, which contains the above instructions. I found Caroline's and Penelope's families, but oddly nobody named Cohen or Rosenberg...

Matthew Goulish's 39 Microlectures in proximity of performance (signed by author) begins with some important instructions: "When reading this book, please take your time.... Start anywhere; stop anywhere....Don't read the whole book if you don't want to....Read one line repeatedly for two days...."

...With that in mind, you may want to avoid reading this book altogether. Go directly to the source notes, and read the books from which I have quoted or misquoted.

A sidebar in Angus Hall's The Supernatural: Signs of Things to Come is illustrated: "DREAMS FOR SALE: This 18th-century engraving shows a London street peddler with her dream books for sale." We thus learn that

...to dream that you are whistling popular songs denotes that you can't carry even the simplest and easiest tune.

Looking Out For #1, by Robert J. Ringer (author of Winning Through Intimidation), features a cartoon on page 68: the tortoise protagonist is visiting the "People Store", where the people are divided into ROSES (broadly grinning); WEEDS (frowning); and NEUROTICS (making funny faces). The tortoise says to the salesman: "I have two neurotics and a weed in the car. I'd like to trade them in on a couple of roses."

1 comment:

sondheim said...

I'm glad to see my books garner respect in cyberspace, to whitt(le) the microlecture series. I heard him speak at the Openport Festival in Chicago which I participated in - he was great, kind of a performative young David Antin. But then I never heard from those folks again, nor have I heard from Rafi Zabor again and we missed the Steven Colbert show after all. -