Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet” in Shreds
Posted on Dec 29, 2007 in preambulatory | Permalink
“Kill yr idols” said Sonic Youth. Or at least cut ‘em up and reuse them. Here is Durrell’s Justine (first of The Alexandria Quartet) shredded and assembled. Textual montage, a bit of concrete poetry.* Decontextualized to a point—but, of course, I can’t quite shake the wholeness of my memory of the text. Regardless, this stuff is gonna make great packing material for some things to take with me to Alexandria.
* More on concrete poetry. This term was coined in the 50s, but such works pre-date that (Tristan Tzara and dada, for one). Coincidentally, there is an Alexandria connection to such “pattern poems“:
This style of poetry originated in Greek Alexandria during the third and second centuries B.C.E. Some were designed as decoration for religious art-works, including wing-, axe- and altar-shaped poems. Only a handful of examples survive, which are collected together in the Greek Anthology. They include poems by Simias and Theocritus. (wikipedia)
I’ll be looking for some of these texts in the Bibliotheca, no doubt…