In his recent virtuoso reading here, Joe Amato passed around a book entitled VAS: An Opera in Flatland by Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell. His ostensible point was something about how e-writing is changing the relation of word and image, but in truth I got the sense that he carried the book around with him like a totem, and because he's clever he simply invented a pretext for circulating it. As a poet, Joe seems to live in his intuitions, and here they served us very well.
If you ever want to make an argument for why books should stay books, just hand someone VAS. I had the same instantaneous reaction simply on touching it as I did to another "graphic novel" but oh-so-different, Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth: I fell in love instantly and my little voice inside roared "Get me this!" [I'm ordering a copy as soon as I tuck in the covers on this post and give it a kiss goodnight.]
VAS is gorgeously printed with fine, incised lines and compelling art from Stephen Farrell, although not all pages are as raucus as the one above. I can't testify to the prose, but reviews are uniformly positive, and one reviewer even mentioned that he read the book while waiting for a hair cut, a moment of high post-modernism refracted in the mirror of a Spike Lee film. It seems a good omen. For $35 it's a steal, and only 750 or so were printed.
Joe writes: "In some sense VAS picks up where Richard Powers's groundbreaking The Gold Bug Variations leaves off: assume that the structure of language is reflected in the double helix, and assume further that print technologies are an analog for body technologies, words and images and book materials made flesh and blood and bones. Now imagine a narrative orchestrated around characters whose symbolic proportions resonate with the latter two assumptions, and you have some idea of the staggering visual sweep and poetic beauty of VAS, perhaps the first graphic novel (term used advisedly) in which both "graphic" and "novel" are given their full due as contemporary art forms, thus reinventing the genre while re-novelizing the novel of ideas. VAS stitches personal reproductive drama to social-scientific controversy to illustrate the challenges facing our species, a species wedded to its incorporations. Author Tomasula and designer Farrell have set the bar very, very high."
He also sends a link to a raft of poet's blogs just assembled by the Electronic Poetry Center.
Carol Donelan described Joe as "an intellectual Al Pacino on speed"--what do you think?
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