MOLLUSKS OF JEALOUSY or The Unshaven Veranda of the Iguana's Heart
This piece was a chapbook and then part of my first book, CRUELTY TO FABULOUS ANIMALS. It's based on images from The New England Primer. One of the things that it plays with is the idea of what each image is supposed to represent for each letter of the alphabet. The fact that there aren't 26 images for the primer added to the play.
Comments
And Craig, yeah, I never researched what was going on with these.
Lately, I've been thinking about taking an old alphabet book and doing the images backwards: having them stand for other things. Or giving several people the images in random order and having them create an alphabet book.
I'd image in the past, many kids had a stronger sense of E being elephantine than the elephant as an actual living, breathing creature.
Scroll down to see the images:
http://www.cslib.org/stamford/pp_ed.htm
I think this is a smidge after the ampersand had a trial run as its own letter, which sadly didn't quite work out.
The ampersand is fascinating: it almost made it into the alphabet even though its function was different since it was not a representation of a single sound but a word (unless you use it like jwcurry's "curved h&dz" press).
Do you know the piece A-Ronne by the Italian composer Berio ?A fantastic exploration of vocal sounds and various poetic quotations.
Evidently "A and Ronne were the first and last characters of the ancient Italian alphabet — the three signs ette, conne, ronne coming after the final letter zeta. The title A-Ronne is there the ancient Italian equivalent of A-Z.
It's
I didn't know about the Berio piece, but it sounds interesting. (I did know about the extra three letters that were given a brief trial run for a few decades, though. There's a nice write up on the wiki.)