"Achilles Rizzoli, Draftsman and Scribe"
by Roger Cardinal. From the book
A.G. Rizzoli, Architect of Magnificent Visions
"....Such semiregulated babblings give off an air of purpose yet manifestly fail to achieve any sort of plain communication. The reader has the impression of an amnesiac who wants to say something yet keeps on losing the thread. and in emvarrassment, improvises without ever getting to the point, in a kind of linguistic strumming. Reading the text aloud several times over one senses that its author is not really behind what is being said: here is a species of vacuous ventriloquism, a speaking for the sake of speaking, an activity of irresponsible semiosis-without-referent. Rizzoli is wallowing in words rather than bending them to a meaning. The literary parallel is not so much the poetry of dadaism--where incoherence thrives on an air of eventual meaning--as the freewheeling absurdity typical of the writings produced by mental patients with a reduced capacity to communicate.
To press the point further, I would say that the broad sweep of Rizzoli's verbal production betrays a fundamental narcissism, since to make things sound impressive seems so much more important than to make any actual statement."
(And in summary)
"....The fact that I have on occasion found Rizzoli vexing by no means implies that I dismiss his achievement at large. I see two things to be indisputably impressive about his work. One is the meticulousness with which, in the early pictures and plans, he went about visualizing and annotating a project he must have known would never materialize. The other is the sheer obduracy with which, across two decades, he added page upon page to the A.C.E Bulletin, that unfinishable dossier of inspirations which only death would close. We have seen that, much like other outsider mythographers, Rizzoli revels in the narcissistic thrill of absolute imaginative potency, whether savoring the prospects of a skyscraping phallism or constructing abstruse textual defenses that keep the outside world at bay. Yet unless we assume that a supreme schizoid conviction can totally override actual circumstance, we would do well to remember that Rizzoli died both an undiscovered autodidact and a sexual failure. As so often happens in the context of Outsiderdom, our final assessment of a splendid creative endeavor may not be easy to disentangle from our knowledge of existential sacrifice. "Now there's no more any longer any reason for feeling lonely" is the announcement on the cover of the A.T.E. Portfolio: clumsily strung out, the maxim has a callow gaiety that betrays its hollowness."
"....a rueful note dating from 1966 admits that "graphic deliniation" requires "the sacrifice of being in the mood, a form of living with one foot on earth, the other in heaven, that is, stretching the imagination to the breaking point--a practice not recommended while payment of bills is pending" (ACE Bulletin, sheet 381, page 829B) Uplifted by spiritual and erotic visions, and disguised by pseudonyms and neologisms, Rizzoli could claim the status of Celestial Architect; all the same, as recluse and celebate scribbler, he remained earthbound in the suburban anonymity of San Francisco's Bernal Heights."
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