The Age of Wire and String - Hardcover

BEN MARCUS is the author of Notable American Women, The Father Costume, The Age of Wire and String and The Flame Alphabet. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the New York Times, and McSweeney's. Marcus has received a Whiting Writer's Award, a NEA Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. He is an associate professor at Columbia University.

CATRIN MORGAN studied illustration at the Royal College of Art. Since graduating she has exhibited her work internationally and is one of the author illustrators of Phantom Settlements. She teaches on the MA Illustration Authorial Practice at Falmouth University and BA Illustration at Norwich University College of the Arts.

This book is a catalog of the life project as prosecuted in the Age of Wire and String and beyond, into the arrangements of states, sites, and cities and, further, within the small houses that have been granted erection or temporary placement on the perimeters of districts and river colonies. The settlement, in clusters and dispersed, has long required a document of secret motion and instruction—a collection of studies that might serve to clarify the terms obscured within every facet of the living program.

There is no larger task than that of cataloging a culture, particularly when that culture has remained willfully hidden to the routine in-gazing practiced by professional disclosers, who, after systematically looting our country of its secrets, are now busy shading every example of so-called local color into their own banal hues. A catalog of poses and motions produced from within a culture may read, then, like a form of special pleading, or, at the very least, like a product that must be ravaged of bias by scholars prepared to act as objective witnesses. It has, however, been demonstrated by Sernier (and others, although without violence) that the outer gaze alters the inner thing, that by looking at an object we destroy it with

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our desire, that for accurate vision to occur the thing must be trained to see itself, or otherwise perish in blindness, flawed.

It is under such terms that

The Age of Wire and String sets forth to present an array of documents settling within the chief concerns of the society, of any society, of the world and its internal areas. To pretend that there are other concerns is to pretend. Let this rather be the first of many forays into the mysteries, as here disclosed but not destroyed. For it is in these things that we are most lost, as it is in these things alone that we must better be hidden.