Today's pages, however, are highly unusual: an attempt to (in Abel & Madden's marvelous phrase) draw words without the usual addition of written pictures. It's part of a sequence that is interspersed throughout chapter 11, in which one of the characters sits with another in the hospital. Intercutting between that and a conversation, I use different techniques to try to capture this experience. Most of those techniques are visual. This is linguistic — or, rather, linguistic-as-visual. It's an old technique, of course: the first of the page owes much to the work of William Gaddis and similar writers; the one on the left is an example of concrete poetry, which is a whole form with its own traditions, etc.
But the result of this is that I am using more words in smaller fonts than elsewhere in the book. And the way the site that hosts the work works, I have to use smaller file sizes than the book was created in... and thus the words aren't always easy to read. So I am reposting these pages here, full-size:
And if you haven't read Happenstance before, I hope you will check it out. Just go here and click through!
(And don't overlook the helpful little "save my place" button on the bottom of each page!)
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