“We imbue books with such personality and individuality that it’s nearly impossible to picture them as the mass-produced objects that they are. Try this: look at your bookshelves. Now ask yourself: aside from autographed editions and owner-introduced variations like marginalia or food stains or dog-eared pages, how many of these books are truly unique objects? How many hundreds — more likely, thousands — of copies of each of these books exist out there in the world? Perhaps this is why autographed copies of books and author readings are such an important part of literary culture: they help to imbue the object with its totemic individuality.”

“I never read the work I erase, at least not completely. But in this case, it was hard to ignore; every sentence was an imperative! As it happens, “Everyday Manners” was written by a headmistress of a South Philadelphia academy for girls. For this project, I considered the book’s topic of manners alongside my invisibility as a bisexual woman. The book’s language reminded me of how my stepmother considered putting us girls in a finishing class when we were young so that we could learn how to be “good girls”. I thought about all that, and then I thought about how pretty soon I won’t be able to afford my IUD, and how I won’t even be able to get one at a Planned Parenthood, and how I should’ve really kept my legs and mouth shut and gone to that finishing class if I am expected to live in America nowadays. I thought about all that, and then I thought, how can I defile this book into something beautiful? That’s when I pulled out my porn, glitter, and scissors. And I scissored the shit out of it. ”

“Bresner is the raging id of the South Philadelphia High School for Girls in 1923, unleashed on the page. She has glued photographs of topless women riding horses and drawn giant phalluses over passages. She transforms the charm-school manners lectures into declarations of freedom: “Outsiders judge you / more than they / help.” She frees the individual from the crushing expectations of others: “with a stranger / you / may secretly feel / ashamed / Never allow any feeling of awkwardness to keep you from doing what you know to be correct.”
ERoS is a book that is exorcising itself. A reader can’t help but imagine the faculty of the high school tut-tutting their way through this Sharpied text, with Bresner’s illustrations of gushing vaginas and charges to “allow your curiosity to lead you” and “give / oral,” above a cartoon of two women in a science-fiction sex rig fellating a man as their own erogenous zones are plugged with what one assumes to be suction devices. It’s a bawdy, sexy explosion of hormones and enthusiasm and empowerment.”

“The original novel, Marie, follows the “heroine” as she marries a man she is initially afraid of and is “tamed by him.” The husband thinks Marie is a heathen, as she plays the violin. I loved this about her, and her music was beautiful. Removing the violin and giving Marie a voice as MAR was an act of violence, but also an act of agency // kill your darlings // don’t let men kill you. ”

“In her notes on the novel supplied by Mount Analogue, Crew calls her act of erasure “an act of violence, but also an act of agency.” In the original novel, Marie is a violinist who is “tamed” by a willful man who believes her music makes her a “heathen.” In Crew’s telling, there is no violin, but also no man. There is just Marie, stripped down to Mar, given her own free choice between heaven and hell.
While Bresner joyfully tears apart her book and reconstructs it as an act of liberation, Crew finds the heart of her book and exposes it to the world. It’s as though you’re listening to an orchestral piece and every instrument is silenced save one soloist. In that one isolated instrument, you can hear the heart of the piece and the themes of the larger piece. It’s a single voice, amplified and clarified.”

“The original book, As a Man Thinketh, is a weird relic: an otherworldly self-help manual that feels like it could have been written any time between the 1850s and the 1990s. It focuses a lot on manliness, confidence, and discipline as methods for crafting a worthwhile life, and it loves describing the life of the (honed, masculine) mind in big, melodramatic language. As I was erasing it, I focused on two things. First, I tried to hijack its abstractions and wrestle them down into a set of (partially) coherent images (to varying degrees of success). Second, I tried to subvert its rhetoric of power and discipline, imagining a world where freedom stems from weakness, and where the fragmented, wandering mind topples a focused weapon of self-improvement (to varying degrees of success).”

“In person, this copy of Thinketh is impressive. You can see each line in each brushstroke that McAlpine made as he went through the book. That hand-crafted act — some would call it defacement — lends the book a special power of its own.

It’s impossible not to imagine McAlpine taking a liquid scalpel to the words, and commenting on his own process as he does it: “the / useless / perfection / of / this / process /reveals / racy / elements / shaping / a / harmonious / state.” If a printed book is a closed system, a harmonious state, the artist committing the erasure is tipping that harmony into dischord, upsetting the system in search of something more raw and jagged and personal.”