Michael Maranda

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“Books: Parasitic Dick Shrinkage.”
Eye Magazine, 1 March 2007
Brian Joseph Davis


Apparently, editing Moby Dick down from over 700 pages to 284 isn't as arduous an ordeal as it may seem. As new, Toronto-based art-book publishers Parasitic Ventures Press discovered, it's as easy as running each chapter through the auto-summary function of Microsoft Word. That simple act has resulted in Four Percent of Moby Dick (284 pages, $25), one of five titles the house issued this winter. It's not really an appropriation. By politely having the now-public-domain author retain credit, “conceptual editing” seems a more apt category for a book as elegant and readable as it is abbreviated.

While any semblance of discrete plots or arcs have been obliterated, the text doesn't become a Burroughs-style cut-up and it's far too poetic to act as Cliffs Notes. All of Chapter 37 now reads, “I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye dead Burkes and blinded Bendigoes. Ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves.” Chapter 107 is likewise terse, and no less evocative, with “An oarsman sprains his wrist: the carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark bone ear rings: the carpenter drills his ears.”

If you've never finished the original, that's probably the best state to approach a conceit like Four Percent of Moby Dick (and the conceit extends to layout, with text set at a quarter of standard size). You can read it as free association poetry on blubber – a lot of blubber – or let it act as a Roget's “sailor talk” thesaurus. Either way, projects this simple but satisfying are rare. As the company name implies, recalibrating the classics may be the main concern of Parasitic Ventures (also in their catalogue is the two volume, 1,136 page set All the Names of In Search of Lost Time, which edits out everything Proust wrote, save for proper names). But the house has also released several artists editions, hovering somewhere between books you read and books you look at. One of those titles is the mostly textless, and very intriguing, whereabouts (96 pages, $20) by Toronto's Sandra Rechico.

Rechico spent much of 2004 mapping her daily paths with quick sketches and arrows and those drawings constitute the whole of whereabouts. They're not maps – they lack any kind of orientation – but rather navigations with the urgency and obliqueness of grocery lists (see image below). There are occasional hints. “Dinner and a opening” leads one entry that looks like it could be Toronto (the path is oppressively rectangular). “Water/ studio/ frills” is another. Considered individually, one imagines an alternate universe where Sol LeWitt works at Rand McNally. Flipped through fast, the effect is akin to trying to describe a year of your life through small talk. Words always fail in that situation but, as Rechico's work shows, scratchy, general shapes might do the job admirably.

Parasitic Ventures press titles are available from www.artmetropole.com. [1998].