Between 2006 and 2008, San Francisco author Britta J. Austin typed a collection of prose pieces that fit onto 3 X 5” index cards, using a Royal Quiet De Luxe manual typewriter. The result was over one hundred tiny, self-contained, prismatic, magical stories. Austin titled her project: notecards: a living museum and rubber-banded them into an unassuming stack that could have been languished like a holsterless rolodex or recipe cards gone AWOL.

Enter Watchword Press, a bay-area small press “dedicated to producing, publishing, and disseminating cutting-edge literary works to a wide audience.” Watchword has developed a unique idea: each year it holds the Wholestory competition. The story selected from this competition then becomes the focal inspiration for a group of writers, performers, dancers, and visual artists to create their own work in response. The entire project culminates in a two-day show where all the work is brought together in one space.

In June, 2008 notecards: a living museum became a flexing, groaning, breathing curiosity cabinet, at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, with participation by performance group elastic future, dancers Mo Miner and Nina Haft, original painting and animation by Rebecca Whipple, works by local Mission visual artist George Pfau, and many others. Austin’s new book, Artifacts, is a selection of the notecards which inspired this enthusiastic collective response.

Artifacts is best understood as a literary Wunderkammer: a box (or originally a room) packed to bursting with objects of wonder. These objects are both natural and unnatural, hoaxes and oddities, relics, antiquities, works of art, animal parts, gems, weapons, images, shards, icons, keepsakes, and spoils. A cabinet of wonder is meant to arrest the viewer, at first perhaps overwhelm the senses, but eventually lead us to investigate, question, look closer and then even closer. Austin’s collection of stories—all no bigger than a 3 X 5” notecard—are microcosms of experience. Her topics are both everyday and fantastic—one often erupts into or out of the other—but this is because Austin recognizes that the everyday is full of phantasms and zephyrs, and that what divides or unifies us is perception. Through the seeming limitation of these small spaces, Austin seems to have created a kind of quantum literary physics, where story cannot be contained, expanding until it overflows.

In one notecard, we are on a public bus, mashed together and lurching forward: familiar, frustrating. But then, “that night, the usual bus rules were abolished… The eight facing seats became a women’s quilting circle... A man cradled an infant that suckled and spoke… business people yanked out their blue teeth … and scrawled messages in the condensation on those windows… Somewhere on that bus, a boy was falling into love like a warm gopher hole….when the personhood of my person can touch the personhood of your person, then my dear, we’ll really be getting somewhere. When we ask “how are you,” and it has nothing to do with getting paid.”

In another, sea lions “bark just like dogs, and their teeth are just as sharp. They vomit steaming piles of partially-digested fish guts for the gulls to pick through. They bite each other, lumping along the dock.” Austin’s images are sharp, then supple, visceral then dizzy, magnanimous, then appalled. She is “halfway to a sizzling commotion” and then, just as suddenly, "in a place where sorrow is but a muted mythology.”

Each notecard is a window into a world both familiar and alien. Each notecard is an antidote to monotony. Each notecard is the head of a pin which promises dancing (or maybe hockey-playing) angels, if you peer close enough. To call this book "Artifacts" is an interesting choice, as the buried objects, observations and insights here are by no means obsolete lodged in the past—they are very much living observations of the now. They are “Monsters in the closet gnashing teeth. Bone powder. Moonshine, window open a sliver. Silver night air. Mourning dove. Parents arguing in the next room. Dawn.”

Artifacts
by Britta Austin (65 pages/ Watchword Press, 2009)
Cover and interior artwork by George Pfau
ISBN: 978-0-9842280-0-3

Come to the book release reading and party!
January 22, 2009
7:00 PM
Space Gallery
1141 Polk Street, SF
www.spacegallerysf.com
Featuring readings by Jennifer Hasegawa, Dustin Heron and Zulema Renee Summerfield, and musical guest Ali Lanzetta.

reviewed by LJ Moore editor.moore(at)gmail.com