Eunoia - Softcover

Bök, Christian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1552450929 ISBN 13: 9781552450925

Publisher: Coach House Books, 2001

Synopsis

'Eunoia' which means 'beautiful thinking' is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels. This book also contains them all, except that each one appears by itself in its own chapter. A unique personality for each vowel soon emerges: the courtly A, the elegiac E, the lyrical I, the jocular O, and the obscene U. A triumphant feat, seven years in the making, this uncanny work of avant-garde literature promises to be one of the most important books of the decade.

About this title

About the Author:

Christian Bök is the author of Chrystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a 'pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for Best Poetic Debut. 'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press, 2001. Bök has created artificial languages for Gene Rodenbery's Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley's Amazon. His conceptual artwork has appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter A

For Hans Arp

Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh - a handstamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a mark that sparks an ars magna (an abstract art that charts a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark saga (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and Kafka, Marx and Marat. A law as harsh as a fatwa bans all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark.

About this edition

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1552450929
• ISBN 13: 9781552450925
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112