~ Unsubstantiated Insubstantiality ~

Portrait from Memoir of the Honorable Abbott Lawrence.

In this haunting, Laurence’s ghost appears four times, three of which resemble film negatives. Note also that the scanning machine has graced Laurence’s portrait with a striped aura.

Shooting a serpent in a stone circle: an illustration from a 1900 issue of The Strand magazine (story here).

"It is not a good idea to combine symbols; the forces that stand behind them can easily start to mingle."
—The Angel in the West Window, Gustav Meyrink's novel of the Elizabethan magus John Dee (our own 9th cousin)

I love the way Conley creates these series of what I want to call visual poems, only by default--only because there is no proper designation for a novel form. [In The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine] we experience juxtaposed images of historical and not-so-historical personages cleanly engraved and then suddenly disappearing in a xeroxial fog of reproduction, a Banquo's feast of mirrors. These visual-textual series allow Conley to create the visual analogues of the serial poem, and into these delicious confections he works some of the best quotes in the English language (and many others, translated) to create an almost Midrashically complex, anachronistic interplay between image and text that often leads the mind to question the impossible interface that occurs daily--i.e., to ask how it is that words and objects could ever even come to a sort of harmony in the first place? It begins to seem beyond us. And beyond us is the metaphysical. So the circle runs, chasing its tail like the cat in that Siouxsie and the Banshees song. —W. B. Keckler, author of Sanskrit of the Body

~ Unsubstantiated Insubstantiality ~

Portrait from Memoir of Eli Whitney.

"A faint shadow stole over the room; while the countenance of the Medium had become so gloomy that the shadow seemed really only a reflection of it.” —Blackwood’s Magazine

The Shakespeare Papers dedicated an entire issue to one-letter words, and here's one of the pages we contributed.  See our One-Letter Words: A Dictionary.