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THE LOBE

by Lytle Shaw

If you think a blurb is an imploded sonnet, rendered crepe-like and set to the breathless metrics of string theory for the denizens of Flatland, then you will like this book. Still guessing? That’s the point: no graphs. When Phil Rizzuto takes on Henry James because of the "stickler logic" of his "Dude Looks Like The Portrait of a Lady" and O’Hara wrestles with the boys from Korn, you have a right to be scared, very scared. But you recognize this place, just like you recognize the world of Bogart and Bacall in the neon erasures of Japanese anime’s "wit strip" subtitles. Oprah would hate it: too many whales with polka dot tales. I reply: Shaw’s subtle grotesqueries make high/low mean present tense: anthems for misfits. Rarely does the project of reference lead you to so many disparate corners of the universe, from Aerosmith (strictly eight track) to Aeropagitica ("director’s cut") and back before lunch.

"...Lytle Shaw has carried out often disruptive, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes melancholy explorations into the processes through which the world gets made into an object of knowledge. But what is the lobe of the book's title? A lobe is a roundish projection, a part of something to which it is attached by the very fissure that also creates it. A lobby could serve as an architectural example, its fissures the walls, doors, stairs, and elevators which connect it to the rest of the building. But not all lobes are material. Knowledge-creates lobes of a sort (hence the interest in Diderot). More precisely, it is about the fissures that form the known, the fissures that form knowers and that leave them (us) dangling in the wind"
- Lyn Hejinian.