Static 001 (EP): Extended Review of Drippy Bone Books

I met Mario Zoots before having any idea that he was involved with the cottage-industry Drippy Bone Books. Mario's complexion, precisely combed black hair, and his/our shared affinity for pugs make meeting him like reading an autobiography of yourself in a smoke-stained room without ever having to open the cover – simply by gazing at it – before realizing that you are far too young to have ever considered the thought of writing an autobiography. Eventually, I was slow to realize, the books that had been disbursed in the most apparently insignificant ways and that activated the most incongruous forms of reading (books that produced their own chiaroscuro after the longest interval of time, passing from hand-to-hand sub- or ultra- culturally as a form of radio transmission or predictive texting knitted into warp and weft of the page) were more often than not of his own imprint.

A Drippy Bone Book does not intervene in one's attempt to read it. It acts on a more intuitive level of animal magnetism. You can hold one of these books, or not. On the surface they are modest, archaic forms of codecs, which is to say, "a video compresses itself and thereby learns to reproduce" or, a puddle of blood forgets it is being filmed or drawn and in doing so forgets itself from the scene in which it was imagined. Their ephemera (chapbooks, zines, postcards, broadsides &c.) are wet sites within which all of the language that was used to compose a version of the novel in the late 19th century has evaporated or congealed into an array of post-, pre-, and para- lingual strategies that come to compose something that is in fact not language at all but rather books disguising themselves variably as: short films, mainstream interior lighting fixtures, trash, JPEGs, a subtitle without a screen to attach itself to, stained glass, or any various foodstuffs, scintillating for a moment in their own aromatic juices. Just as quickly, one of their publications will vanish like a monster one thought one had seen out of the corner of one's eye but which was actually an incredibly delayed artifact of childhood made out of paper– sitting on the bedside table or next to the sink in a house that you have a vague memory of having once dined at.

In this way, what any book that Mario Zoots, or Travis, or Shannon, or Natalie, or Kristy, or Keenan, or John, or David, or Daniel, or Brittany, or Brian, or – Actually – has been involved with, what all of these books demonstrate is the monstrosity of their own thought and the eventual unraveling of their logic. Effectively, the internal organs of reading and subvocalization erase or anesthetize themselves through a series of post-hallucinogenic practices that are not collage, but rather aligned patternings that script themselves endlessly by turning the volume of the text outward into a fax machine into a gallery space my mother tells me she visited in the 1970's while she was preoccupied sewing leaves together, which is another form of bookmaking or TV color bars or a highly compressed form of overheard conversation.

Every page in a Drippy Bone publication should be assumed to be numbered algorithmically, whereby, whenever you read a certain page you are also reading 15 pages ahead of it and three pages prior to to the page you believed yourself to be reading, which, upon closer inspection turns out to simply be a hyperlink to any number of various, outmoded social networking sites (Friendster, Bahu, Mugshot, Pownce, eConozco, Sixdegrees.com &c.). These sites, being high-resolution resemblances of cemeteries, are the sites without which those involved in Drippy Bone Books could not exist. In other words, I ask Yahoo! Answers, "what is a Drippy Bone?" and the answer, which is a screenshot of a Youtube comment posted by user PabloPlacebo 6 hours ago, reads: "it looks much like if it was made with a computer, although computers did not even exist in 1920's." It has not received any thumbs up or thumbs down. Alternately, it is a dream a close friend in Oakland, California tells me of in which the avant-garde composer Anthony Braxton is mistaken for a giant ankh pendant or gold-plated weed leaf necklace.

The books, in their meager size and hence their minimal fluctuation of room temperature, predict a mass of all of the language in any given newspaper existing in one soft block and defy geography, negating the map of itself which is made through its own craft: recto, verso undifferentiated from checking your email or eating a frozen microwave dinner. Drippy Bone Books ask, "what would happen if the room in which this book is sitting took ecstasy?" and induces the response that “Mystery qualifies the Multiple because the Multiple has changed.”