Marylin R. Rosenberg -- "Stories from the Everyday World" a Book Mobile"
Stories from the Everyday World:
It Happened That Way
1995

A Book Mobile by
Marilyn R. Rosenberg

Like Shadowland, this book opens down, and was designed to be read fully opened. Closed it presents an interesting set of angle and curves protruding from standard rectangular form. Bound by a string, pages of the opened book change relation to each other as they are moved by such forces as thermal differences between the lower and upper areas of a room in which it hangs; and they change their relation as viewers move around it. The current presentation begins with two photos of the piece in different configurations. The shadows cast by mobiles can be among their interesting features.

Handling cut out and torn sheets from another piece gave Rosenberg a starting point for this piece. She developed both the succeding page shapes and the texts from these left-over papers. The progression of pages can come across as pleasantly rhytmic or agressive depending on changes in their relative positions, and with the nearness or distance of the reader. The brief texts begin with "QUIET SCREAM." Other texts, in both large and small letters, include "I DIDN'T SEE IT." "I DID SEE IT," "JUST YESTERDAY?" "IT COULDN'T DID," "SEE THAT THERE IT," "YOU CAN BE SURE," and other phrases that might be written or spoken during the course of virtually any day. Some might reinforce the idea of a quiet scream, but others seem to work in just the opposite direction, neutralizing anxiety and working it into the variety of quotidian experience. The angles and curves, the torn edges and those cut neatly reinforce the sense of the varried texture of life, as do the sometimes oddly fractured or ambiguous phrasing, and the way things appear, disappear, and recombine according to their movement and the reader's movement. After the first two photos, the rest present details of the mobile in different positions.

- Karl Young

Begin here.


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This is a cooperative project of Kaldron and
Light and Dust Mobile Anthology of Poetry.