Attempt at Erasure #1

in the spirit of my last post, here's attempt number one. original is below, erasure's below that. i took a passage from moby-dick, predictably.

But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over, three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.---It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.---It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.---It's a blasted heath.---It's a Hyperborean winter scene.---It's the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great leviathan himself?

puzzled and confounded , hovering
in a nameless yeast. truly,
Yet indefinite, sublimity
froze , till
a bright but deceptive midnight
blasted --- a Hyperborean winter scene.--- the breaking-up of Time. at last that one portentous something
, and all the rest stop; does it not bear resemblance to
himself?



unfortunately, i don't think the format of this post will let me preserve the exact white space. alas, what can you do. enjoy. or hate. watevs =)

iViva la fiesta!

10am am on a sunday, and i'm at bobst library. with a marketing final and a paper to rewrite on robert burns sitting in front of me, i figure the best thing i can do right now is blog. especially since i haven't documented all of the sweet stuff that's gone on this month. number one highlight of thanksgiving break: bonus eventus cd release of canaceros! i think the night over winter (thanksgiving? i don't remember) break last year when we all went to the studio and sang the back-up vocals for the record was one of the best days at home to date. dave words that night way more eloquently on the new cd.

my computational lit theory course is one of the most eccentric courses i've taken here, and my prof assigned a final project of do-anything-you-want-to-do-as-long-as-it-has-to-do-with-words. i did a "deformance," or a text alteration, of pound's "in a station of the metro" which was pretty sweet. my friend, however, had a way cooler project: he created a bunch of erasure poems, which i had no idea existed until he told me about them. i'm sure i'm the only one who didn't get the memo on this one, but for anyone who doesn't know, an erasure poem is one that is derived completely from a prose passage. you erase the words from the passage that you don't want in the poem, preserving the white space. anyway, i want to do one sometime soon. i just can't think of which text to pick.

marketing calls.

keep the faith, as my dad says.