Print publication

N & OZ is a novel of art, love, auto mechanics, and two places: the actualities of the here and now and the desire for somewhere better. Five men and women – an auto designer, photographer, musical composer, poet/sculptor and mechanic – find themselves drawn together when they begin to suspect that the thing lacking in their lives might be discovered in the other place. Against the tension between idiosyncratic art and mass-marketed taste, each works to bridge the gulf between IN & OZ by using the medium of their trades: light and darkness; sound and silence.

"A stunning new collection of stories by a master fictionist, Once Human shows the ways to go beyond standard maps of simple understanding. A manga artist who is afraid that she herself is slipping into a cartoon version of life, a lab technician who makes art with the cloning technology she uses at work, a sociologist hunting for the gene that makes some people want to take risks--these are some of the characters that populate the stories in Once Human. Exploring the spaces where life is shaped by science and the technologies we bring into being, Steve Tomasula's characters often find that the harder they look at the world, the less they can say. The map that emerges from these stories charts the territory of human longing and the failure of poetry, science, and technology to explain the "why" of the world, if not its "how."

‘’ was derived from Gertrude Stein, . It was first published in Picador New Writing 1995.

"Neuromancing Miss Stein" was freely adapted from a from a loose draft resulting from computer-aided analyses [using Brekdown] of letter-group frequencies in two samples of text, one from Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, and William Gibson's Neuromancer. The index and frequency tables from these analyses were then blended, and the draft text regenerated from the resulting combination. First published in the 1995 print book Picador New Writing 1995, the story was later posted to the web by the author.

"Carousel" was freely adapted from a from a loose draft resulting from computer-aided analyses [using Brekdown] of letter-group frequencies in two samples of text, one from Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and the other from Yasunari Kawabata's The Master of Go. The index and frequency tables from these analyses were then blended, and the draft text regenerated from the resulting combination. First published in the 1998 print book _Different Hands_, the story was later posted to the web by the author.

Up until now, everyone alive on earth was bound to one another through African Eve, our last common ancestor, who 5,000 generations ago passed her genes and language to sons and daughters who did the same as they gradually populated the world. Today, however, Square, Circle and the other inhabitants of Flatland have the opportunity to step outside this lineage. To rearrange the bodies of animals, plants, and even themselves. VAS: An Opera in Flatland is the story of Square’s decision to undergo an operation that will leave him sterile for the good of his wife, Circle, for the good of their daughter, Oval, and for the good of society, including the unborn descendants he will never have. VAS is, in other words, the story of finding one’s identity within the double-helix of language and lineage—and Square’s struggle to see beyond the common pages of ordinary, daily life upon which he is drawn.

Utilizing a wide and historical sweep of representations of the body, from pedigree charts to genetic sequences, this hybrid novel recounts how differing ways of imagining the body generate differing stories of knowledge, power, history, gender, politics, art, and, of course, the literature of who we are. It is the intersection of one tidy family’s life with the broader times in which they live.

VAS will be of interest to anyone concerned with the futures we are now writing into existence.

(Source: http://www3.nd.edu/~stomasul/VAS_homepage.html)

Flocks of books open and close, winging their way web-ward. A reader is cast adrift in a sea of white space veined blue by lines of longitude, of latitude, of graph, of paper. The horizon extends far beyond the bounds of the browser window, to the north, south, east and west. Navigating this space (with track pad, touch screen, mouse or arrow keys) reveals that this sea is dotted with islands… and by islands I mean paragraphs. These fluid texts are continuously recomposed by JavaScript files calling upon variable strings containing words and phrases collected from a vast literary corpus – Deleuze’s Desert Islands (2004), Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Bishop’s Crusoe in England (1971), Coetzee’s Foe (1966), Ballard’s Concrete Island (1973), Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries (1598–1600), Darwin’s Voyages of the Beagle (1838), and many other lesser-known sources including an out-of-date guidebook to the Scottish Isles, and an amalgam of accounts of the classical and quite possibly fictional island of Thule. Individually, each of these textual islands represents a topic – from the Greek topos, meaning place. Collectively they constitute a topographical map of a sustained practice of reading and re-reading and writing and re-writing on the topic of islands. In this constantly shifting sea of variable texts a reader will never wash ashore on the same island twice… and by islands, I really do mean paragraphs.

(Source: Author's description)

About this work, Strickland writes, "Dragon Logic wonders where have we gone … as our face-to-face world threatened from so many directions slips into potentially infinite virtual spaces. The slippage happened suddenly, worldwide, and we don’t know whether it makes us irrelevant, provides an escape from apocalyptic problems, or could be welcomed as a new direction for human life. These poems are where I wrangle this increasingly invisible dragon-in-the-room."