Re: !!! * highly interesting recommended book * !!!

I got to just glance through that book for a few minutes at the New York Public
Library once (it's non-circulating) and tend to agree with what you said...not
much on conlangs per se, but they've definitely got some of the conlanging
attitude. ;)

eli . ishmael@pocketmail.com
gone to croatan
<- Original Text ->

    I just received this book today:

    _Imagining Language: An Anthology_ edited by Jed Rasula & Steve McCaffery.
MIT press, 1998.

    Lotta good resources, ideas, etc. here.
    definition of literature: ' the exploration and exercise of tolerable
linguistic deviance'  :D !!!

    ON THE PLUS SIDE: extreme (!!!) range of materials...from 8th Century
B.C.E. Easter Island "rongo-rongo" optical syntax writing to Madeline Gin's
Helen Keller book (1994 C.E.)...
    nearly everything language can im/possibly do & not supposed-to no can
do!!!

    ON THE MINUS SIDE: Kinda disappointed that more conlang-like materials
were not included ... at least, where are J.R.R.Tolkien, Paul Celan, Thomas
Merton's last 2 epic poems, StarTrek languages (esp'ly Klingon & Borg), and
the "CyberPoets" and "HyperTextualists"? Include these & one has a better
more rounded anthology IMHO.
    (& that Marina Yaguello, that author of _Lunatic Lovers of Language_,  is
prominently in the index, "General Bibliography" & notes for "Further
Reading")

    Despite the minuses, this book is highly recommended
(...as with Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris' two-volume _Poems for the
Millennium_, which is like the less academic, more-rounded-avantgarde
anthology counterpoint to the above-mentioned anthology).

    =)
    zHANg