Christian Bök

Christian Bok

Poetry. Fiction. Cross-genre. Bok has delighted awestruck readers everywhere by crafting five stunning stories - each of which uses only one vowel! - and, in the process, he has gone on to claim the prestigious Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence (2002). Sit back and listen to the "Dada bard" himself as he performs with acrobatic precisions the full text of his bestselling masterpiece. Bok's CRYSTALLOGRAPHY is also available from SPD.

Eunoia

"'Crystallography' means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, 'lucid writing.' This book of avant-garde literature features the intersection of poetry and science, and explores the relationship between language and crystals - looking at language as a crystal, a space in which the chaos of individual parts align to expose a perfect formation of structure."--Provided by publisher.

Crystallography

Christian BOK

"This anthology of Canadian experimental writers evokes the rich and unexpected heritage of current Canadian fiction. It contains groundbreakingly ruptured, side-splittingly excessive, weirdly lucid, and above all, endlessly interesting writing. Contributors include Michael Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen, Graeme Gibson, Christopher Dewdney, George Bowering, and Matt Cohen, as well as innovators such as Ray Smith, J. Michael Yates, Gail Scott, Andreas Schroeder, Audrey Thomas, and Robert Zend."

Avant-garde for Thee

Ground Works

The word ‘eunoia,’ which literally means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a French writers’ group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram – the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter E, etc. Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (including a retelling of the Iliad!). Stunning in its implications and masterful in its execution, Eunoia has developed a cult following, garnering extensive praise and winning the Griffin Poetry Prize. The original edition was never released in the U.S., but it has already been a bestseller in Canada and the U.K. (published by Canongate Books), where it was listed as one of the Times’ top ten books of 2008. This edition features several new but related poems by Christian Bök and an expanded afterword.

The Upgraded Edition

"Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials."—The Guardian Internationally best-selling poet Christian Bök has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of "living poetry." After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can, in turn, "read" his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization. Book I of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of "demonic grimoire," providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts, and illustrations. A Virgilian welcome to the Inferno, Book I is the "orphic" volume in a diptych, addressing the pastoral heritage of poets, who have sought to supplant nature in both beauty and terror. The book sets the conceptual groundwork for the second volume, which will document the experiment itself. The Xenotext is experimental poetry in the truest sense of the term. Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (1994) and Eunoia (2001), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

Book 1

The Xenotext

Jorge Luis Borges in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ imagines a novel by the Chinese writer Ts’ui Pen — a novel that features a hero named Fang who, when faced with a variety of potential, narrative outcomes for a decision, does not simply select one of these paths, thereby eliminating all others; instead, Fang can pursue the storylines for each of his decisions simultaneously. The novel thus retells the myriad fables that branch away from each of these crucial moments in the life of the hero — hence: ‘all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings.’Jorge Luis Borges depicts such a novel as a lost maze — ‘a labyrinth of labyrinths,’ whose complexity verges on the Infinite, encompassing the entirety of the Universe itself in ‘an invisible labyrinth of time.’ Each passage branches off into ‘diverse futures,’ all concurrent with each other in multiple, but parallel, worlds. Each fable has innumerable digressions from its storyline, as some forkings converge on a certain outcome, while other forkings disperse from each other, resulting in radically different endings, despite having originated from this same line of events.‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Christian Bök imagines an alternative possibility for such a tale by Jorge Luis Borges, doing so by citing the English version (written by Donald A. Yates), converting this translation into a series of ‘floor plans’ for mazes. Segments of the text (200 characters in length) have been converted into HRQR codes, each of which constitutes a work of nearly asemic, visual poetry, decodable by an automated, robot viewer, if not by a diligent, human reader. Each letter in the text thus becomes a partition in what Borges might describe as ‘a labyrinth of symbols.’The hardcover is limited to an edition of 25 copies for sale, after which the book is going to be discontinued. The book is a collectible item, perfect as a gift for bibliophiles, who might love the work of Borges.

The Garden of Forking Paths

Jorge Luis Borges in “The Library of Babel” imagines a hellish archive of books — a macrocosmic columbarium, whose infinite chambers provide an exhaustive repository for all the permutations of the alphabet. Inside this endless library, nonsensical texts so drastically outnumber any intelligible books that a coherent phrase must seem tantamount to a wondrous mishap. Poets within such a prisonhouse can no longer contribute anything innovative to literature, because literature itself has already anticipated and inventoried in advance all the anagrammatic combinations of every text. The librarian who narrates the story notes that, on a shelf in his hexagon, there exists a volume entitled AXAXAXAS MLO.Christian Bök has rediscovered this volume in The Library of Babel (curated by Jonathan Basile). AXAXAXAS MLO is published to the specifications described by Borges, who imagines a book of 410 pages, with 40 lines of text per page and with 80 characters of text per line. Bök has typeset the book in Panoptica (a font designed by Nick Shinn, who has created a set of monospaced characters, according to the “prisoner’s constraint,” meaning that none of the letters have either ascenders or descenders). The hardcover is limited to an edition of 100 copies for sale, after which the book is going to be discontinued. The book is a collectible item, perfect as a gift for librarians and bibliophiles, who love the work of Borges.Read “The Library of Babel” here:https://archive.org/details/TheLibraryOfBabelVisit the Library of Babel here:https://libraryofbabel.info/index.html

Axaxaxas Mlo

Jorge Luis Borges in “The Library of Babel” imagines a hellish archive of books — a macrocosmic columbarium, whose infinite chambers provide an exhaustive repository for all the permutations of the alphabet. Inside this endless library, nonsensical texts so drastically outnumber any intelligible books that a coherent phrase must seem tantamount to a wondrous mishap. Poets within such a prisonhouse can no longer contribute anything innovative to literature, because literature itself has already anticipated and inventoried in advance all the anagrammatic combinations of every text. The librarian who narrates the story notes that, on a shelf in one of the hexagons, there exists a volume that consists of only “the letters MCV, perversely repeated from the first line to the last,” like a cryptogram corresponding to no language.Christian Bök has reproduced a facsimile of this volume from "The Library of Babel." Entitled MCV, the volume is published to the specifications described in detail by Borges, who imagines a book of 410 pages, with 40 lines of text per page and with 80 characters of text per line. Bök has typeset the book in Panoptica (a font designed by Nick Shinn, who has created a set of monospaced characters, according to the “prisoner’s constraint,” meaning that none of the letters have either ascenders or descenders). The hardcover is limited to an edition of 50 copies for sale, after which the book is going to be discontinued. The book is a collectible item, perfect as a gift for librarians and bibliophiles, who might love the work of Borges.Read “The Library of Babel” here:https://archive.org/details/TheLibraryOfBabelVisit the Library of Babel here:https://libraryofbabel.info/index.html

Jorge Luis Borges in “The Library of Babel” imagines a hellish archive of books — a macrocosmic columbarium, whose infinite chambers provide an exhaustive repository for all the permutations of the alphabet. Inside this endless library, nonsensical texts so drastically outnumber any intelligible books that a coherent phrase must seem tantamount to a wondrous mishap. Poets within such a prisonhouse can no longer contribute anything innovative to literature, because literature itself has already anticipated and inventoried in advance all the anagrammatic combinations of every text. The librarian who narrates the story notes that, on a shelf in his hexagon, there exists a volume entitled THE COMBED THUNDERCLAP.Christian Bök has rediscovered this volume in The Library of Babel (curated by Jonathan Basile). THE COMBED THUNDERCLAP is published to the specifications described by Borges, who imagines a book of 410 pages, with 40 lines of text per page and with 80 characters of text per line. Bök has typeset the book in Panoptica (a font designed by Nick Shinn, who has created a set of monospaced characters, according to the “prisoner’s constraint,” meaning that none of the letters have either ascenders or descenders). The hardcover is limited to an edition of 25 copies for sale, after which the book is going to be discontinued. The book is a collectible item, perfect as a gift for librarians and bibliophiles, who love the work of Borges.Read “The Library of Babel” here:https://archive.org/details/TheLibraryOfBabelVisit the Library of Babel here:https://libraryofbabel.info/index.html

The Combed Thunderclap

Jorge Luis Borges in “The Library of Babel” imagines a hellish archive of books — a macrocosmic columbarium, whose infinite chambers provide an exhaustive repository for all the permutations of the alphabet. Inside this endless library, nonsensical texts so drastically outnumber any intelligible books that a coherent phrase must seem tantamount to a wondrous mishap. Poets within such a prisonhouse can no longer contribute anything innovative to literature, because literature itself has already anticipated and inventoried in advance all the anagrammatic combinations of every text. The librarian who narrates the story notes that, on a shelf in his hexagon, there exists a volume entitled THE PLASTER CRAMP.Christian Bök has rediscovered this volume in The Library of Babel (curated by Jonathan Basile). THE PLASTER CRAMP is published to the specifications described by Borges, who imagines a book of 410 pages, with 40 lines of text per page and with 80 characters of text per line. Bök has typeset the book in Panoptica (a font designed by Nick Shinn, who has created a set of monospaced characters, according to the “prisoner’s constraint,” meaning that none of the letters have either ascenders or descenders). The hardcover is limited to an edition of 100 copies for sale, after which the book is going to be discontinued. The book is a collectible item, perfect as a gift for librarians and bibliophiles, who love the work of Borges.Read “The Library of Babel” here:https://archive.org/details/TheLibraryOfBabelVisit the Library of Babel here:https://libraryofbabel.info/index.html

The Plaster Cramp

Jorge Luis Borges in “The Library of Babel” imagines a hellish archive of books — a macrocosmic columbarium, whose infinite chambers provide an exhaustive repository for all the permutations of the alphabet. Inside this endless library, nonsensical texts so drastically outnumber any intelligible books that a coherent phrase must seem tantamount to a wondrous mishap. Poets within such a prisonhouse can no longer contribute anything innovative to literature, because literature itself has already anticipated and inventoried in advance all the anagrammatic combinations of every text. The librarian who narrates the story notes that, on a shelf in one of the hexagons, there exists a volume, “a mere labyrinth of letters, but the next-to-last page says ‘Oh time thy pyramids.’”Christian Bök has found this volume in the Library of Babel (curated by Jonathan Basile). Entitled LXUM,LKWC, the volume is published to the specifications described by Borges, who imagines a book of 410 pages, with 40 lines of text per page and with 80 characters of text per line. The phrase “Oh time thy pyramids” appears on page 409. The book is typeset in Panoptica (a font designed by Nick Shinn, who has created a set of monospaced characters, according to the “prisoner’s constraint,” meaning that none of the letters have either ascenders or descenders). The hardcover is limited to an edition of 50 copies for sale, after which the book is going to be discontinued. The book is a collectible item, perfect as a gift for bibliophiles, who might love the work of Borges.Read “The Library of Babel” here:https://archive.org/details/TheLibraryOfBabelVisit the Library of Babel here:https://libraryofbabel.info/index.html

Christian Bök

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