the book of Misshapen Forms

Not long ago, I spent time with William S. Burroughs, interested in the “cut-up” practice he adopted from Brion Gysin. I won’t claim to fully understand the method, nor the aim. But it has the power of a magic trick, wonderful if sleight. While these redactions are loosely inspired by Burroughs and Gysin, I am less interested in the mystical play of chance than in the workings of the unconscious, or, more correctly, in the dialogue evoked when my unconscious tangles a text’s. My method has a few rules. I extract at least one meaningful utterance, expression, or phrase from each paragraph of the source document. Every word or phrase occurs in the order it appears in the original manuscript. Finally, I do not read the source paragraphs. Instead, I scan them, looking at each as a whole, and letting my eye gravitate toward significant phrases and words. This process is neither entirely random, nor entirely intentional, but something more like a daydream. After completing these redactions, I add one more editorial layer, printing them beneath broken glass. Fissures intersect with deletions, suggesting meaning through visible marks of absence. 

This production process is entirely analog. The text is typed on onion skin, and contact copied beneath broken glass using an ortho-litho negative. The resulting negative “plates” contact print the text as cyanotype on fabric. 

The pagination and the sequence of this edition cannot be successfully reproduced using still photographs. Moreover, as a tactile, material experience,--and only as such--this codex comes nearest to satisfying the redaction's unintentionally prophetic insistence. Nonetheless, I present the facsimile, more to intrigue than to satisfy. 

The redactions below emerge from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Fate" (1860).  I have removed marks, phrases, and sentences, as a censor might with a sensitive government communication.  

The book of misshapen forms cools and dries, is born, comes no more. 

March 2026