BYSTANDER An Irreality by mIEKAL aND

What would happen if words, disguised as characters Balboa Pettibone and She-singer, could hallucinate and time travel? mIEKAL aND, one of our most intrepid verbal explorers, takes us into the world of genre fiction and sets it spinning into an “irreality” as iridescent as myth clothed in neon language.   The sideways feints and flourishes of aND's words lead us through a minefield of future decay, artfully finding glimmers of beauty and eros even in the most blasted lang-scapes and bone-scrapes. In a world where “a blackened sky corrupt[s] the horizon,” “snakes of anger” war with “snakes of confusion,” and “there are no curtains between darkness and its opposite,” the beauty of the words themselves offer joy in apocalyptic circumstance. And courtly love wins the day.

—Maria Damon

There is a secret travelogue through the irreal estate of the 20th century, a picaresque that passes down the arcades of the Invisible Cities, across the plains of Flatland, through the Gardens of Priapus to the foothills of Mount Analogue. Between the lines of Bystander: An Irreality, mIEKAL aND has thoughtfully printed you a map for the next leg of the journey. Pack your sieve and your bicycle; it's a long trip.

—Darren Wershler

_Bystander: An irreality_ is indeed an irreality or sobreality so vivd it brings senses to a full function and merges the one into the implications of the text. What I experiencet wasnt prose or poetry in its common definition. Its written just and laconic. Exactly the amount and texture of information needed to hook the right senses and teleport one inside. Psy-fi and a metaphor for the webbed chronology of thought and remembered events, reconstructed map of communication. After digestion i found a brain map that emerged, map of how thoughts are layed and georgraphical x-ray of how they settle and drift with/ within time.   The process of reading or rather drinking pleasantly hurts the neurons, like adrenaline that spreads from the head to appendages. I want to repeat the journey on my own after watching Balboa....

—Alexandra Zavylova

mIEKAL aND is a longtime DIY cultural anarchist & the creator of an infoplex worth of visual-verbal lit, audio-art, performance ritual & hypermedia, all distributed by Xexoxial Editions. His hypermedia works reside at JOGLARS Crossmedia Broadcast (http://www.joglars.org). Recent books with Maria Damon include "eros/ion" (ntamo 2007), "pleasureTEXTpossession" (Zasterle 2004) & "Literature Nation" (Potes & Poets 2003).   New books in 2009 include "How to Spell the Sound of Everything" written with Sheila E. Murphy (Xerox Sutra Editions) & "SEARCHIX: Spampo 2000-2004" (Xerox Sutra Editions) as well as "Anthology Spidertangle"—visual poetry from members of the Spidertangle email group.   With Camille Bacos, he has produced a number of   visual-poetry digital films including "...entré   pyrobiblios..." and "The Samsara Laundry" which have been shown at festivals at Harvard & Notre Dame.

Since 1991, he has made his home at Dreamtime Village a hypermedia / permaculture village project, located in the driftless bioregion of southwestern Wisconsin. And devotes much time to creating edible wilderness indoors & out, growing such things as figs, citrus, cherries, grapes & chestnuts. 1998 marked the creation of THE DRIFTLESS GROTTO OF WEST LIMA (http://www.dreamtimevillage.org/grotto), a permanent public grotto/park/installation which when finished   will feature a bird-operated time machine in a 25 ft blue glass tower.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 130 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 1-934289-63-9