Eric Baus' "Something Else the Music Was"

Noah Eli Gordon just sent me the latest chapbook off his Braincase Press -- "Something Else the Music Was" by Eric Baus. It looks supercool -- 4-color silkscreen cover, translucent fire-engine-red endpapers -- and the work inside is good too.

The 3 short serial works within -- "I know the letters this way," "Something else the music was," and "Waiting for my name" -- all consist of sentences and paragraphs. The first work has a short paragraph the dimension of a stick of chewing gum on every page. The second work is made of running sections of a few one- or two-sentence paragraphs separated by asterisks. The third work is a formal hybrid of the first two. So there's a cumulative linearity to the book.

Reading this little book is like growing up. The I in "I know the letters this way" has a childlike diction and logic in lines like "I learned to read with my hands by accident" and "The man told me I would see him every other day and I did see he was a different man." And there are other enstranging tactics in play: the questions lack question marks ("Is it her I am talking to really.") and the quotations lack quotation marks ("Do you want me to keep on writing was the first thing I ever said or do you want tme to stop."). The awkwardness of the language is always tearing away from its apparent content. Is the child's diction shaped by a developing grasp of logic, or is the child's logic shaped by a developing grasp of diction?

The title series builds upon these kinds of idiosyncratic lines but introduces a flatness in shuffling in statements of fact like "I do not remember that tree" and "The flames far away are red and red." There's a defensiveness-through-clarification behind a lot of the lines that's unnerving because so many of the simple nouns in the work (comb, tree, bird, triangle, paper, title) repeat amidst three characters (man, woman, boy). The relationships between these characters are textual, not emotional or physical, and the artificial language forces you to calculate your own distance from the work as you read it.

The last work is spare, with only a few lines per page. This is the entire penultimate page:

This is natural.

On the appointed day, the sequence completed, she looks up, and he goes to the beginning.

This time no one has a name.

Without the contextual support of the tight, comfortable paragraphs of the first work or the almost-nested permuting sections of the second, these lines seem open and isolated. They simultaneously mean everything and nothing. You've been abandoned with them.

This book does more than point out how meaning falls away from language when context is complicated, shifted, or removed. It supplies enough interpersonal context (never going as far as being narrative) between pronouned "characters" that you're tempted to emotionalize the relationship between meaning and language as you read. You're learning as you read it.

This is the first work of Baus' I've read, though I'm now going to pick up his "The To Sound" which won the 2002 Verse Prize. Kudos to Noah for putting this book out.