My friend, Richard Kostelanetz is writing (actually, revising) an essay dealing with, among other things, appropriated art.  When he asked something about Tom Phillips’s A Humument, I remembered other superior examples of appropriation art such as the work on a dictionary of Doris Cross, and the following appropriation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells” by Michael Basinski, which I thought worth posting here:

   

Here’s the original:

Hear the sledges with the bells–
Silver bells–
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells,–
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Hear the mellow wedding-bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight
From the molten-golden notes!
And all in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gust of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells–
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells–
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

In the essay I quoted Mike’s poem in, I called it “an amazingly loud-though-silent jangle of . . . Poe’s famous poem.”  I’d add here that Basinski’s version gave me the thrill that Poe’s version, I’m sure, gave many of its first readers.

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Wednesday, 7 December 2011, Noon.  I’ve partly recovered from having accidentally deleted my blog entry for Monday.  A semblance of it is back up.  I also posted an entry for today.  I’ve done nothing else yet, but hope soon to go out to buy some frames and a pad of good-quality large paper.

Later note: I succeeded in finding two reasonably-priced frames of the kind I wanted (able to be stood up on a counter) that I bought.  That took care of my pledge to do something of value for my exhibition every day, barely.  Meanwhile, I sketched a new mathemaku.  Then took care of this entry.

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