< zine:words >
CLIP TART #1
(Susan Boren / PO Box 66512 / Austin, TX / 78766 USA)
Review by Randy Osborne
With the bright, striking, Oz-in-color cover, Susan Boren’s
ClipTart is the creation of a woman behind the curtain: She wants you to pay little or no attention to her, but to the gifts she has mined from books, magazines, newspapers and – in one case – an online clearinghouse for press releases (PR Newswire). Boren herself appears only in the introduction, and then just long enough to explain her modus operandi: She “stares into the writing like a fortune teller, trying to uncover the author’s essential message,” then distills findings by way of various excerpts intended to “encourage and entertain” as well as provide “raw material for your own projects.”
It works.
You get something of the overall idea … I mean, of what Boren herself might be like … when you know she takes pieces from the writings of Adorno, Marx, Sartre, and Guy Debord, among others. Her choices may make you want to revisit books you thought you’d left behind in college, or in the days when you planned to burn everything down. Offerings also investigate hypnotism; the hypnotism of everyday life (and the need to break out of it); cubism; cubism and its triumph over three-dimensional reality; and fourth-dimensional reality, of which our world might be a shadow. All interspersed with scissor-made collages. Read from start to finish, the 35 segments cohere in an unexpected way, like stones melted together by lightning, re-routing synapses and probably altering your brain chemicals.
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