Excerpts here: http://littleredleaves.com/LRL1/beaul... I have recently completed a page-by-page response to E.A. Abbott’s Flatland, a Victorian science-fiction satirical novel which posits a two-dimensional universe inhabited by entirely by polygons. For each page of Abbott’s novel I have traced, by hand, a representation of each letter’s occurrence across every page of text. The generated result is a series of superimposed seismographic images which reduce the text in question into a two-dimensional schematic reminiscent of EKG results or stock reports. This project builds upon my previous work in concrete poetry, and a theorizing of a briefly non-signifying poetic, where the graphic mark of text becomes fore-grounded both as a rhizomatic map of possibility, and as a record of authorial movement. Much as the Victorian novel A Human Document gave rise to Tom Phillips’ ongoing graphic interpretation A Humument, Flatland has resulted in a book-length interpretation of the graphic possibilities of a text without text. Derrida, writing on Blanchot, asked “How can one text, assuming its unity, give or present another to be read, without touching it, without saying anything about it, practically without referring to it?” Each page of my graphically-realized Flatland is a completely unique, diagrammatic representation of the occurrences of letters. By reducing reading and language into a paragrammatical statistical analysis, content is subsumed into graphical representation of how language covers a page. Flatland attempts – much like Simon Morris’ Re-writing Freud (2006), Vito Acconci’s “Transference” (1969) and other texts of conceptual literature – to flatten the plane of text.
Author
From wikipedia: Derek Alexander Beaulieu (born 1973) is a Canadian poet, publisher and anthologist. Beaulieu studied contemporary Canadian poetics at the University of Calgary. His work has appeared internationally in small press publications, magazines, and in visual art galleries. He has lectured on small press politics, arts funding and literary community in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Iceland. He works extensively around issues of community and poetics, and along those lines has edited (or co-edited) the magazines filling Station (1998–2001, 2004–present), dANDelion (2001–2004), and endNote (2000–2001). He founded housepress in 1997 from which he published small editions of poetry, prose and critical work until 2004. The housepress fonds are now located at Simon Fraser University. In 2005 he founded the small press no press. In 2005 he co-edited Shift & Switch: new Canadian poetry with Angela Rawlings and Jason Christie, a controversial anthology of radical new poetry which has been reviewed internationally. Beaulieu has shifted his focus in recent years to conceptual fiction, specifically visual translations/rewritings. His book Flatland consists of visual patterns based on the typography of Edwin Abbott Abbott's classic novel Flatland and his book Local Colour is a series of colour blocks based on the original text of Paul Auster's novella Ghosts. How to Write, a collection of conceptual prose, was published by Talonbooks in 2010. Beaulieu lives in Calgary, Alberta.
