Homomorphic Converters, the second pamphlet in the series 13 Writhing Machines, has just come out from Proteotypes in Brooklyn. 13 Writhing Machines is a series of instruction manuals in the various techniques of constrained composition. (The first pamphlet, Administrative Assemblages, is being reprinted and will be available in about a week.)
Homomorphic Converters takes a look at a variety of procedures that fill a pre-existent form with new content. For example, in "homoconsonantism" you take a sentence (the one you're reading, for instance) and reuse the consonants in the same order but with different vowels.
So: f/r/x/m/p/l/n/h/m/k/n/s/n/n/t/s/m etc. To practice "allosyntaxism" (also known as "homolexicalism" you reuse all the words from the original in a different order. There's a section on "homoikonism" about putting prexistent images to different use. For example Arcimboldo painted a bowl of vegetables that becomes a man's face when you turn it upside down. All the forms of the man's features are vegetables.
Proteotypes is also publishing Wendy Walker's Blue Fire, which also will be available in the next couple of days. Blue Fire is the first full-length poetic nonfiction produced by the application of constraints. It is the record of Wendy's fascination with the case of Constance Kent, a famous murder case in 1860s Britain. As a fifteen-year-old girl Constance was accused of murdering her four-year-old half-brother. Four years later, under the influence of a priest, she confessed to the crime, although all the evidence pointed to a manslaughter committed by her father and the boy's nursemaid. Having tried to make a novel of this material, Wendy came to see the fictional use of it as unethical. "After all, Constance had already fictionalized it." Instead she created a two-directional text, one part a poetic text derived from the first account of the crime by using one word from every line of that book and thereby extracting and exposing the patriarchal discourse of its author, Joseph Stapleton. Having composed those words into blocks of text, she then went to books that Constance is known to have read, and to books about the case, and to books published in the 1860s, and extracted from them passages of as many lines as there were words in a block of her derived text. The result gives a picture not just of the case but of the whole mentality within which it unfolded.
Order these books on Amazon or through the Proteus Gowanus webstore at www.proteusgowanus.com.
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