+|'Me'S-pace book

+|'Me'S-pace, Les Figues Press, 2007.

Juliana Spahr says: “Written in a time when many are questioning if we still need formalism and feminism, Christine Werthiem’s +|’me’S-pace, doc. 001.b is a spirited and fun defense of both. Written, in part, as a didactic instructional manual that cannot keep itself from constantly going astray into beautiful and challenging language play, this is a book that asks crucial questions and reconfigures recent histories. It is essential for its arguments.”

Chris Kraus says: “|’me’S-pace begins with a simple proposition: select 9 letters of the English language (6 consonants, 3 vowels); arrange into words; and then, for enhanced flexibility, add an apostrophe. But nothing is as simple as it seems. Wertheim’s manipulation of these characters flows in a certain direction, so that particular words assert themselves, recurring. Other, mother, me, another, not other—language ends up where we want it to be. As William S. Burroughs once remarked on the cut-up method of text composition, “Random? Yes—but it’s my random.” Certain wills will out. (Language it seems is a matter of will, and the unconscious is not so inchoate. What happens, asks Wertheim, when language shifts from the impersonal to the personal mode? How do we ever do anything? These linguistic experiments yield results sometimes reminiscent of Ezra Pound’s forays into Old English within the Cantos. | Me is “wruptin‚ the space between” herself and another until the “I” erases itself, becomes love, becomes nothing. |’me’S-pace is an ambitious project, disclosing the spiral of language and being.”

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