Tag Archives: review

"Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom", Mel Bosworth

 
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Grease Stains, Kismet, and Maternal Wisdom : A Novel By Mel Bosworth. Reviewed by Lynn Alexander. Published at Prick of The Spindle, Vol. 3.2.

“They quickly learned that we were the King and Queen of the bar. They were our servants. They worked for us. We were Gods. Our ears and noses were red and our lips wet. We were drunks. We were in love.”

Mel Bosworth is a sweet romantic bastard, who knew?  This is a love story, lines of love: crazy love, nervous love, public love, mother love, writing about love to remember love. And it’s funny.

Bosworth’s character, David, spends chapter after chapter ogling Samantha while becoming more and more powerless in her presence. He covets her gun panties, delights in her classy sipping of shots, tells her about his period in a baby voice, and promenades with her as a monster. Continue reading →

The Giant's Fence, by Michael Jacobson

 
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The Giant’s Fence by Michael Jacobson. Reviewed by Lynn Alexander.

The Giant’s Fence is a visual novella by Michael Jacobson, eighty pages of something many people have not experienced before: asemic writing.

I’ll get back to what “asemic writing” is and what it isn’t to the extent I can, but The Giant’s Fence is an asemic work comprised of what Jacobson calls “trans-symbolic script”. The symbols are laid out in rows as many traditional texts might be, and eyes prone to English habits might indeed follow their paths in a linear way. They don’t have to, however, as there is no natural beginning or end outside of those habits or defined by the binding, the author has said that it is not intended to progress in a way that coincides with pages, to start at page one and proceed. You could start in the middle and come back around if you wanted to or experience the symbols in blocks, aggregate. The manner of “reading” and approaching the text is individual and the meaning is derived intuitively, the experience is subjective.

Discussing such work cannot be undertaken in the same way as we might start other reviews. It is necessary to explain some of the background of asemic writing right at the onset, in order to try to talk about what Jacobson is doing- as best we can. Continue reading →