[ToC]

 

Wendy Collin Sorin and Derek White

4 from P.S. At Least We Died Trying to Make You in the Backseat of a Taxi

(clockwise from upper left:

1. (– 1/89) = Ever(y)day is Today

2. 1 + 1 = Subconscious, Yet Familia(r), Game Plan

3. 55 + 89 = Sapling Canopy Ceiling]

4. 3+5=Algae-sheen Shelter Axiom

)

(1/89)

(2)

(8)

(144)

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(-1/89) BeBe learns to crawl on the everlasting event horizon (the pump is perpetually being primed). Seven red dwarves and five blue fish are divisible only by themselves and one. Mud-clot Boy stands on the shoulders of the red giants before him. BeBe perches within Mud-clot Boy's limbo.

(2) As she sets the table for breakfast (of lobster and plantains), she (feeling something is missing) tells him (her father who art) she is leaving home (via phylo-taxis) to link up 1/2 of 1/2 of him and 1/2 of her and 1/2 of 1/2 of her mother (that died during childbirth) to recapitulate the phylogeny of heir morphology.

(8) In the shadow of the synapse pond, Mud-clot Boy builds their palm-thatch hut to keep out the dodos and cuckoo noises of extinction. But Darwin's finches take many shapes, serving as a contiguous reminder that of all the possibilities we could have been, this is the form we take.

(144) BeBe takes after his father's father. Rather than stay rooted, he climbs, ignoring the temptation of kingfisher taxes and a bodice half-life. It's in his nature. Past the chaffed udders and irradiated milk to get straight to the source. Always trading the milking cow for something better.

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These pieces are from a pending collaborative chapbook entitled P.S. At Least We Died Trying to Make You in the Backseat of a Taxi, that evolved as follows:

1. Derek White sent his thesis "Phyllotaxis: A Mathematical Model of Plant Morphology" (written for the satisfaction of the requirements of his B.A. degree in mathematics) to Wendy Collin Sorin.

2. Wendy chopped up the text; deleting, rearranging and whittling 55 pages down to 55 words. Within the framework of the new story-within-a-story, she embedded some drawings into a flipbook made of translucent paper that didn't really have anything to do with the thesis.

3. He added some haphazard text and sent random images that didn't really have to do with the original thesis or her drawings, but was more a reflection about an island off the coast of Panama.

...

5. She did another iteration of weaving text into the images and vice-versa, all while making preparations for her daughter's wedding.

...

...

8. This continued back and forth, the roles changing and blending, until it morphed into what it is: a warped illustrated children's book about birds and bees and the trees they live in.