Customer Reviews

Crystallography

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I forget what I paid for it--$12? $16? Something like that. Cheap. It has paragraphs you'll never read anywhere else, using long strings of words that have never before been next to one another. It's a testament to what can be done--because Christian Bok did it--if one goes off in a hole somewhere and focuses, and that's a good lesson any ol' time.
How much is one fantastic, comprehensible, and yet on the surface bizarre sentence worth to you? In entertainment or inspiration or education? I'd say--for me-- a dollar at least, and five at most. Applying that standard, this book is worth hundreds of dollars. I'm no intellectual, and I'm no freak, but I like language and words, and I like this book a lot.

This is a fascinating book exploring language through crystallography that fits nicely into the Oupilo experiments. In general the book is accessible - word squares, concrete poems, charts and, yes, some poetry as "commonly understood." The most personal poems are under "Diamonds" which explores the relationship with his father, a diamond cutter. The layout of the poems in this section remains a puzzle to me. As I do Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover", I found myself wanting a crib sheet to point out what I felt I was missing of the author's intent.

The linguistic "games" that I found most interesting were the classification of letters by their axis of symmetry and the "dripping line" (think of water dripping from a cave ceiling). (Unfortunately the web removes multiple spaces so it is not easy to give an illustration - just think of fewer and fewer letters falling into the next line, always spelling out meaningful clauses, phrases, words.)

This book is a major tour-de-force of experimental writing. It will get under your skin. You'll read and reread digging deep to find the underlying principles. You may even become obsessed. Or you may read through it quickly dismissing it as a mere experiment.

I am a geology major and I usually tend to avoid poetry, however, this book is quite an exception. This book took the science of geology and the art of poetry and combined them into a masterpiece. This analysis of these two fields of study is incredible and is a definite must read.