No. lll 2.7.93-10.20.96

[Dave Monroe]

Goldsmith, Kenneth.  No. lll 2.7.93-10.20.96.
   Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1997.

http://www.ubu.com/111/index.html

http://www.ubu.com/111/contents.html

   "The Figures proudly announces the publication of
Kenneth Goldsmith's No. lll 2.7.93-10.20.96, the long
awaited 606 page book of conceptually uncategorizable
brilliance by one of New York's most unpredictable
young artists.
   "Made up of literally thousands of short phrases
and hundreds of long phrases, carefully crafted full
sentences of great eloquence as well as typographic
rant of total gibberish, Goldsmith's book is a trove
of found and formally fudged language. Ordered by
syllable count and alphabetic rigor, as well as by
sound, the material in No. lll invites the reader to
browse, scan, read aloud, howl, goof and wonder at the
impossible juxtapositions of diction, reference, and
attitude.
   "In the words of Marjorie Perloff, 'Goldsmith's eye
and ear for contemporary argot is near perfect,' and
Charles Bernstein adds, 'In this useless collection of
perishable information, this wily catalog of everyday
life, Goldsmith has written what could be the longest,
and maybe the last, list poem of the 20th Century.'"

http://www.ubu.com/111/info.html

Making Book by John Strausbaugh
New York Press, May 14-20, 1997

Sculpting With Words: It Figures

   Kenneth Goldsmith's new book begins at what looks
and sounds like the beginning of language itself: 

"A, a, aar, aas, aer, agh, ah, air, är, are, arh,
arre, arrgh, ars, aude, aw, awe, Ayr, Ba, ba, baa,
baaaahh, baar, bah, bar, bard, bare, barge, barre,
Bayer, beer, bere, beurre, bier, bla, blah, Blair,
blare, bleh, blur, boar, board, Boer, boor, bore,
bored, Boz, bra, bras, Brer, brrrr, bur, burr..." And
so on, C to "Za, zha, Zsa." 

Section two begins with "A door, à la, a pear, a peer,
a rear, a ware, A woah!" and proceeds to "Zima,
zinger, zonder, zoospore, zooter, Zsa Zsa, zuder."
He's up to three syllables in the next section
("...off center, off color, off kilter, oh brother, Oh
mother!, oh yes there, old geezer, old timer, on
vapors, on welfare..."), four in the next ("...Dr.
Bronner's, Dr. Pepper, Sr. Sphincter, drain the
monster, draw & quarter, Drew Barrymore..."), seven (A
baby eating razors, a baby in a blender, a baby in the
nuker, a bitcher and a moaner...") and so on--to
38-syllable "phrases" in section 38, 89 in 89, then
137, 232, 356, 601, 1193, 1887...
   Until the final section, a single "phrase" that's
exactly 7228 syllables long. And just happens to be
the entire text of D.H. Lawrence's "The Rocking Horse
Winner." And just happens to fit the rather rigorous
rules by which the entire book is organized, something
about every passage having to end with some variation
on the "R" sound--ar, er, ur, etc.
   Along the way, the book's stuffed with quotations
from limericks and commercials, books and the
Internet, pop songs and magazines, TV and movie
dialogue, telephone conversations, journal entries,
the National Enquirer and The New York Times and
NYPress and, finally, apparently, everywhere else.
It's a 606-page tour de force of ... something.
Linguistic OCD maybe? As a colleague here said on
leafing through it, if all of Dublin could be
recreated from the pages of Ulysses, America could
maybe be rebuilt form this. It's like this guy
Goldsmith has tried to collect and put into some sort
of intuitive poetic-logic order every sound, idiom,
and rhythm of contemporary English-in-praxis.
Organized by sound and syllable count, it all quickly
takes on the roly-poly, humpty-dumpty rhythmical
ridiculousness of doggerel and children's rhymes.
Which is okay with Goldsmith, who laugh at it himself,
calling it "a useless encyclopedic reference work" and
"a rhyming dictionary taken to obscene lengths." Other
points of reference range from Walter Abish's
Alphabetical Africa to those cabalists using
computer-programmed Gematria to unlock the
alpha-numerically coded secret messages in the Old
Testament.

[...]

   The result is a kind of mosaic map of Goldsmith's
world, and ours, during the time he's collecting. For
a project that could seam so meaningless, it has a
strange immediacy, a kind of documentary feel. 

[...]

... he's got a corner of FMU's site
(wfmu.org/~kennyg/) and keeps up his own really
elegant site (www.ubuweb.com/vp), dedicated to the
"largest visual, concrete, and sound poetry archive on
the Web--and it's also the most beautiful," he smiles.
He's right--it's a pretty amazing site. He's got
dozens of RealAudio downloadable files of historical
recordings by guys like Appolinaire and Kurt
Schwitters performing their experimental poetics;
concrete poetry by contemporary names like Dick
Higgins, Alison Knowles, and Janet Zweig; a bunch of
Clark Coolidge and Philip Guston's Picture-Poems, and
a lot more....

http://www.ubu.com/111/nypress.html

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