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25 July 2005: I just got two neato chapbooks from Carlos Luis, Traptexts I and Traptexts II, published by eIghT-pAGE pREss in Finland (which has a website here). Among the pages I most liked was the following one, which is the third page of Traptexts II--and the cover-work of Traptexts II:
I have not yet figured out how to describe this piece in words--and I do feel I need to before I can be sure it's as good as I believe it is. (If you can't pin down what you like about a work of art, it's only the gush precinct of your mind that likes it.) One thing the piece "means" to me is Archaeology--or archaeology and history. Generations--of people and civilizations. . . . The cut-into circle suggests a crescent that in turn suggests the Tigris/Euphrates Origin of Civilization (or Western Civilization), but also a bronze age weapon. The placement of the black language in the upper two-thirds of the picture seems meaningful to me, but I'm not sure why. The upside-down text, which I for a longish time took to be hieroglyphics of some sort, baffles me but seems right where it ought to be. Aside from all that, the piece is wonderfully well-wrought as a pure illumage--i.e., as a work of visual art that pleases because of the way its elements interact, repeating and varying off of one another, regardless of whatever narrative one might find in it.
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