queeze together the pages of Heidie Giannotti’s book a tale of a maiden or two + an animal streak and look at it sideways: that’s where you’ll see markings that resemble wood grain. (She might call it an animal streak.) Flip the pages of the book with your thumb front to back, back to front and the grainy moiré pattern springs to life, shifting rhythmically up and down, back and forth, from one page to the next, from thick to thin to blurry to positively cinematic stripes. (She might call it a minimal streak.) The undulating linear tracks activate the book’s interior architecture, which is built to house a streaming surplus of fi gurative images and colloquial speech. Small talk, tall talk, all talk all the time. (Check the index at the back of the book. The entire text is crunched into a stack of subject headings and type faces that read like a long shorthand prose poem composed of phrases caught in passing, snatched out of context, and salvaged in fragmentary form.)
“Who speaks,” I ask her. “Is it one voice?” “No, it’s millions,” she answers and smiles. I reconcile my desire to see her in the compendium of fast-talking, wise-cracking, soft-spoken observations that tumble into play in the pages of this book, with the inevitable invasion of all those other “maidens” (and their attendants) who lodge in her verse. Like the man said, “What’s a girl to do when she can’t?” That’s where the tale begins again and again, specifi cally from a zone of privacy that surrounds the self on the verge of a breakthrough, or is it a break-up, or a breakdown? (She might call it an epic quest.) Did someone say subjectivity? Let’s enjoy it while we can.
Jan Avgikos, New York

Heidie Giannotti
A tale of a maiden or two+ an animal streak
Published April 2005

This entry was posted on Friday, April 1st, 2005 at 7:52 pm and is filed under afterartnews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.