Daily Archives: October 23, 2004

Cobralingus is a book by Jeff Noon. I read an interesting review of the book:

To summarize: Each work begins with an “Inlet”, a starting text (most often an out-of-copyright text such as pieces of Shakespeare or Dickinson). That piece of text is then put through a number of “filter gates”, transformation processes. These processes are listed at the beginning of the book but with such ambiguous definitions as: “Control: Brings text down to earth. Forces language to behave itself.” or “Ghost Edit: Kills the text. Calls up a ghost to haunt the language.” (14) As far as the work of constraint goes, these gates are closer to such ideas as the “haikuization”, wherein the process is not explicitly systematized, but rather subjective in use. Occasionally other texts are “sampled” into the process. After each “filter gate” we are given the text created from it. After a number of “filter gates” are gone through we are left with the final text, the “outlet”. Each work consists not just of the “inlet” and the finished “outlet”, but also the intermediate texts, as Noon states in the instructions: “From inlet to outlet, the journey is the goal.” (13)