A blurb for Craig Dworkin's Strand

June 15, 2004

The ever-present alliterative skip of Dworkin's "conceptual" writing makes these enactments of linguistic "tectonic shifts" fun, but also frightening, to read: there is something monastic yet sensual in the surrender to limited, fixed vocabularies and recombined grammatical blocks which suggest endless mazes that never pass "Go" - can one say "Piranesian" here? - and that make a saunter in this prisonhouse seem like Sunday in the parse with Ludwig. The pathos is in the process, which is never so elaborate as to leave its readers behind - we all know what a "geology textbook" is even if never having read one so puckishly effaced - and the more high-falutin' references are grounded by the aleatoric ploys of the up-sized Everyday. "Norway" and "Smithson" are two other words that come to mind, the barren vacation spot of dear W. himself trespassed by the New Jersey quarryman and procurer of spirals - coy references, of course, fittingly stranded at the tail end of this giddy expanse of extreme reading.