Showing posts with label printing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label printing. Show all posts

Monday, April 23, 2018

Solitary Book

She's a solitary book. She
wants a shelf all to herself.

She's well printed inside
and bound with a durable,

beautiful cover. She's full
of ideas, pathos, and humor.

Sometimes she invites me in.
There it is a local heaven.

From her name and table
of contents through to the

colophon, back and forth
I go along innumerable paths,

knowing her story in some
of its endless ways. It's never

long before she sends me away.
She likes a shelf all to herself

and is most comfortable when
closed.



hans ostrom 2018

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Scholars disagree; they are disagreeable.
According to Jeb Nolocimis, Distinguished
Three-Legged Chair in Social Podiatry at
Bandsaw University, a hallucinating German
printer presided over the marriage of Period
and Comma in his shop, located in
Mainz-am-Rhein, circa 1498. However,
Dr. Lola Doirep of the Toots Institute
rejects Nolocimis's account as "surreal
historicism." She argues periodically
that the semicolon should be interpreted
semiotically first as inhabiting a liminal
zone vexed by indecision (stop or continue?)
and second as the right and left eyes
of an iconic emoticon, which more deeply
represents "winking post-modernity"
and "the rise of Cyber-cute." Meanwhile,
Argentinian-American poet Rexi Vivaldo,
in his long poem, "Stubby's Quest,"
alludes to the semicolon as "a sad
period's single tear, frozen in time
and space--a lament
for the mortality of clauses . . . ;"





Copyright 2008/2017 Hans Ostrom