Dead/Books

BLANK

BLANK is a 200+ page novel whose text offers only 20 enigmatic chapter titles —’ A Character Broods ‘ and ‘ They Encounter An Animal’— with audio remixes by Dj Spooky.

“I received my copy of BLANK yesterday, and began reading it last night in bed. I am accustomed to reading a few pages from a book, then turning out the light as soon as I become drowsy. But BLANK was a different experience: I could not put it down until I had read it from cover to cover. And now it is burned in my memory. I feel certain it is a book I will read again and again.” — H. L. Hix, National Book Award poetry finalist

[SIC]

“A masterpiece. A cry from hell, a brutal, terrifying, and savagely funny book that swings between uncontrolled hallucination and fierce, exact satire. An absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life. Schneiderman is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” —Marcus Boon, author of In Praise of Copying

“[SIC] elegantly draws our attention to a fortuitous coincidence: that 1923, a crucial year for U.S. copyright law, happens to be one of the high points of Anglo-American modernism, a movement which, according to one understanding, profoundly transformed literature through radical practices of collage, appropriation, and textual sampling. By applying the bold technique of what Borges’ narrator of “Pierre Menard” calls “erroneous attribution” to a range of varied texts—from The Canterbury Tales to a transcription of the moon landing, from Ulysses to the Emergency Broadcast Test—Schneiderman has made a fascinating contribution to this tradition and has created a rich and strange mosaic that delightfully raises important questions about authorship, cultural literacy, intellectual property, canonicity, and what constitutes “the literary” in the twenty-first century.”— Michael Leong, author of The Philosophy of Decomposition/Re-Composition as Explanation: A Poe and Stein Mash-Up

“[SIC] calls to mind projects by diverse artists from Steve Tomasula and Flann O’Brien to Buzz Spector and Chris Marker to the video for Howard Jones’s 1989 ick-hit, ‘Everlasting Love’. But amid this litter of auteurs and artistes, I found my attention was mostly pinned to that white glowing hominid. This figure is a somatized cursor, the embodiment of the Internet’s most dynamic worker, the ‘chooser’, whether that chooser be a human consumer or the algorithmic plectrum of the search engine itself. This figure, whose relentless whiteness does not seem incidental, embodies the digital verb ‘click’ in its imperative form. For this reason, ‘SIC’ is more of an ‘artist’s book’ than a novel–the text is there as a screen for this cursor-figure to come into visibility. Since Conceptualists claim they aren’t looking for readers, what is the blurber’s role in the Conceptualist transaction? Is it just to provide keywords for Search Engine Optimization? In that case, three words: Dan Brown’s Inferno.”— Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Red Bird (2002), winner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poetry Series.

INK

INK. (Spring 2014) is a book hand-dipped in ink. INK. erases, redacts, and overwrites itself, ink extending and overtaking its surface.

INK. contains loose photos from visual artist Tim Guthrie and music.

The fine-art edition ($24,999.99) will be hand-dipped in human ink: Davis Schneiderman’s blood.

Further, Schneiderman will also put his library at risk. Any person who buys INK. may choose a book from Schneiderman’s library, which Schneiderman must then destroy.

He will send evidence of the remains to the purchaser.

Purchase the DEAD / BOOKS trilogy at Jaded Ibis Productions
See all of Davis Schneiderman’s novels / creative works

Visit davisschneiderman.com for access to other projects.
dschneid@lakeforest.edu