*
[click to enlarge]
Don’t Sleep
Don’t sleep –
There are snakes, bugs,
Creatures of the earth
In the shadow of man:
Mythmakers and lawbreakers
Defining the world.
*
With thanks to the authors: Daniel Everett, Theodore Roszak, John McGahern, Jane Goodall, Margaret Killjoy, and Henry Hitchings; and special thanks to Nina Katchadourian for her Sorted Books project.
Lots more of these in the bookmash archive, along with links to other people’s. Let me know if you join in, and I’ll update accordingly.
Updates:
Martha Barnette did me the honour of reading this bookmash aloud on A Way With Words, the public-radio language show she co-hosts with Grant Barrett.
Adrian of The Outer Hoard had the marvellous idea of rearranging my older bookmashes to make two “stanmashes”.
Laura E. (aka @Soulclaphands) made a lovely bookmash beginning with the line “All these voices.”
Olivia (@peeriepics) shared her first bookmash, evoking a nature walk in winter.
Debbie Bambridge’s (@caret_top) first bookmash is very funny: “This charming man…“
Sentence first 
Love this, it’s so creative and also gives value to the book as an object, transforms it into a piece of art to be remembered, in the digital era. It has to do with memory, loss and change.
Thanks, Alice. Yes – the fun is mainly in the physical rearranging of the books. If it were just titles on a digital screen it would not be nearly so appealing.
Here is my very first bookmash :
Stan, as you may recall, I’ve never met a ‘bookmash’ I didn’t like.
(I believe my first-ever post was one of your fun open “bookmash” affairs.)
(Since I’m not on Facebook, I’ll e-mail you my ‘short stack’ visual, toute suite, and you can hopefully add it to my post.)
My ‘mash’ entitled, “The Edible Woman”, is as follows:
The edible woman
Surfacing
Knee deep in paradise,
Wordstruck,
The agony and the ecstasy.
Thanks to authors Margaret Atwood (first two titles), comedian/ actress Brett Butler, veteran expat Canadian news journalist Robert MacNeil, and last, but hardly least, novelist Irving Stone.
Alice: C’est chouette, ça, et c’est un plaisir de voir un bookmash en Français – merci! (P.S. Ce n’est pas l’idée d’un anglais, je crois.)
Alex: Thanks for joining in. I’ve always enjoyed your bookmashes too, and I’ve added your latest one below:
Merci, Stan.
I echo your sentiments re/ Alice’s excellent offering en Français, aussi. A nice change of pace.
Sadly, as an expat Canadian Anglophone, I must confess I likely couldn’t muster more than a few books written in French from my voluminous, yet scattered library. C’est triste, non?
J’adore la lange Francais écrit et parle, but have forgotten most of my Fr. grammar. For some reason much of my public school Fr. vocabulary has stuck with me. So if I’m obliged to speak French (say with my Walloonian, expat Belgian girlfriend), I tend to speak mostly in serial, choppy phrases with little regard for proper grammar. (Those tenses always give me fits.) Oh well.
Hmm… I feel another “bookmash” coming on, so perhaps later today I’ll send it along, with a separate attached emailed ‘short-stack’ photo.
Thanks again, Stan, for this periodic, fun exercise in ‘brain
aerobics’.
Ah bon, c’est l’idée de qui ? (merci)
The first person I saw doing it was the American artist Nina Katchadourian; her ‘Sorted Books’ are linked in the post. (Et je suis Irlandais, pas Anglais.)
Ah ok, merci, je rectifie immédiatement !
Stan,
As promised, here’s my followup ‘bookmash’ for today, titled, “City of Quartz”:
City of quartz,
Barcelona, the great enchantress.
Palace of desire
Feeling good.
Love… where the nights are long.
Clearly, an ode, of sorts, to amorphous sensual/ erotic/ exotic pleasures, and longings. (I can almost smell the wafting incense and rose oil. OK… let’s not get too carried away, here. HA!)
Author credits, in order of appearance (top-to-bottom), include, Prof. Mike Davis, the late, great scribe Robert Hughes, revered Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, psychologist David Brooks, M.D., and the long-deceased seminal Canadian poet, Irving Layton.
(‘Short-stack’ visual to follow, with a little added sculptural twist.)
Thanks, Alex. Here’s your photo, resized to fit:
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