Stingray Clapping

Reprint of a handbound edition
Paperback, 62 pages B&W
ISBN 13: 978-0-9961696-9-1
Dimensions: 5" x 7" x 0.15"

Of his new book, Stingray Clapping, author Andrew Choate says: In 1999 I got a job working for Crain's Business Insurance magazine, proofreading entries in their Directory of Corporate Buyers of Insurance. I was primarily responsible for editing the half-sentence to one-sentence long descriptions of corporations. Never having been so intimately exposed to technical language before, I fell totally in love with the quality of the writing required to convey the much-vetted specificity of a corporate description. The fact that the words were crafted for the sake of clear legal and bureaucratic meanings, rather than for the sake of literature, encouraged me to read them as if they were both specific and evocative.

Considering the glut of language we're inundated with, it's difficult for a writer sensitive to that inundation to want to generate more text to send out into the world. My writings here attempt to do what those corporate descriptions do: be exact and polyvalent.

I like short texts that respect the reader's ability to read rather than pander to their manufactured desire to be overloaded. I like texts that avoid narrative, plot, concept, character and structure; texts that focus on these things feel like they are trying to dominate the reader. That's not what I am trying to do at all, I'm trying to give the reader an opportunity. Rather than explain every little thing, can't we consider words like colors to put on the page to savor. I mean actually generating (imagining/writing) phrases that can be read the way one listens to a favorite record: at different times of day and with different desires actively in play.

The words in Stingray Clapping are simply words without any kind of justification: not conceptual, narrative or otherwise. I imagined them and arranged them and was pleased and surprised by them.