IMPROVISATIONS by Vernon Frazer

"This is the sort of book that will be discussed and argued over and analyzed for decades to come. IMPROVISATIONS is a deconstruction of the era of artistic deconstruction, and whatever freedom of thought allowed Frazer to step far enough outside of his own mindset to create it did not empower me to step out of my deconstructionist language and properly review it. But I'll try.

"IMPROVISATIONS is laid out entirely in WordPerfect. I suspect it would've been easier for Frazer to learn Quark, but the symbolism is less cool: this book is about language, and what language can do, and all of its visual aspects were made with a word processor. At first, IMPROVISATIONS is basically textual. The format serves the words. Throughout the book, the form becomes increasingly weird, and reliant on Word's more obscure formatting functions, and a great deal of heavy use of invisible text boxes. By the end of the book, IMPROVISATIONS is rarely using letters that can be deciphered outside of the context of Microsoft Word. IMPROVISATIONS is entirely a textual document. It never uses Word's image function. In a sort of cheeky nod to Dadaism, IMPROVISATIONS uses Wingdings - those fonts that come with Windows that one can use to put a variety of cheap graphics in one's home newsletter or chore lists. As normally used, Wingdings are utterly stupid. You press a key on your keyboard, and a peace sign or pointing finger pops up. Of course, you don't know, in advance, which keyboard key corresponds to which little graphic, because your keyboard is designed for making words, not childish doodles. Frazer uses WordPerfect to progress from words to childish doodles, and does so in a way that, rather than dismissing language, elevates the doodles to linguistically complete monologue. It's totally comprehensible nonsense. "