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Texto entraña
En tus manos hay un organismo viviente. Texto entraña siente temor, dolor y deseo. Dentro de él viven cuatro entidades distintas que se forman en la página, que buscan trascender los límites de su existencia mientras se comunican con el lector.
En este libro, Mike Corrao crea una inquietante y retadora exploración de la identidad, y las maneras en las que se manifiesta en el mundo físico. Texto entraña no solo está vivo: crece, aprende, se ajusta a su restringida ontología.
Sé testigo del texto creándose a sí mismo, una concepción partenogénica.
En este libro, Mike Corrao crea una inquietante y retadora exploración de la identidad, y las maneras en las que se manifiesta en el mundo físico. Texto entraña no solo está vivo: crece, aprende, se ajusta a su restringida ontología.
Sé testigo del texto creándose a sí mismo, una concepción partenogénica.
152 pages, Paperback
First published March 29, 2019
1 person is currently reading
282 people want to read
About the author
Mike Corrao
24 books91 followersMike Corrao is the author of numerous works including Gut Text (11:11 Press), Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede (11:11 Press), Desert Tiles (Equus Press), and Smut-Maker (Inside the Castle). His work often explores the haptic, architectural, and organismal qualities of the text-object.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
August 1, 2024
I feel, sentience. In the valley, the labyrinth of letters, words, desires and thoughts are swept through my body, anatomical. Cohesion, growth, appetite and ego, concentric yet impossible to predict. I fed and I ate it all up, appetite. I'm sad because it is over, intensity.
February 24, 2019
I rate this without bias
December 13, 2021
The word "singular" gets overused these days. I should know, I definitely overuse it. (The rhetorical tactic of prefacing the use of a word by first stating that it "gets overused these days" is also overused, but whatever. Turtles all the way down). (Turtles all the way down is probably also overused). Unlike author-cum-mad-scientist Mike Corrao, I take comfort in such familiar turns of phrase. My lexical self-awareness only runs so deep. His operates on a molecular level. Not unlike Smut-Maker, Corrao's other book I reviewed here earlier this year, Gut Text is a verbal and sensory carpet bombing - a freewheeling, stream-of-emergent-consciousness tour de force whose level you decidedly have to get on to enjoy, because it will not be stooping to yours.
Ostensibly narrated by a quartet of entities (or perhaps more accurately, four stages in the life of a single, evolving entity) designated nn, yy, ff, and vv, what the book is actually "about" (whatever that might mean in this "singular" instance) is hard to fathom. For me, it recalled the opening segment of Arthur Clarke's 2001, and how those ingenious chapters both functioned on their own as part of the story, while also serving as a living document of the author's own struggle to employ language in describing the lives of pre-lingual beings. With this imperfect touchstone in mind, I saw Gut Text as a book that charts its own evolution, crawling out of the primordial ooze, dragging itself up on its scaly hind legs, and gurgling through a wasteland of guttural shrieks and yawps until it achieved the ability to speak directly to me of its own free will. nn reads like the first moments of life - yawning and stretching into the vaguest awareness of light and sound. yy presents as physical growth - corporeality, really - and through its punctuational glyphs and walls of overlapping text, the tactile sensation of occupying an increasing amount of space in the world. ff gets a little cocky as a result, playing around with sentence fragments - asking questions, seeking answers - and abandoning its preestablished physical limitations in pursuit of higher callings. And finally vv arrives, something close to sentient, speaking with authority and poetry of itself and its desires. What it might grow into next is anybody's guess, but it seems doubtful that the end of these few unnumbered pages means Gut Text is done growing.
You only get to write something like Gut Text once. If it fails, you're probably the only person who ever knows. If it works, you're a god (and maybe still only a handful of people ever know). If this review hasn't made it clear already, Corrao pulls it off in spades (and from what I can tell, I'm pretty late to the party, as Gut Text is already something close to legendary amongst fans of esoteric fiction). It's a magnificent experiment in language - both its immediate limits, and its unexplored outer reaches - and a must-read for any writer looking to expand their understanding of the form. I knew before I was even halfway through that this would be one of those books I come back to again and again, not even necessarily to see how I feel about it a few years down the line, so much as just to make sure it hasn't quietly morphed into an entirely different book on my shelf in the interim. To read it is to to read a book that pens itself into existence; a book actively struggling to slither out of its binding; a book that is perhaps not a book at all. A singular achievement indeed.
Ostensibly narrated by a quartet of entities (or perhaps more accurately, four stages in the life of a single, evolving entity) designated nn, yy, ff, and vv, what the book is actually "about" (whatever that might mean in this "singular" instance) is hard to fathom. For me, it recalled the opening segment of Arthur Clarke's 2001, and how those ingenious chapters both functioned on their own as part of the story, while also serving as a living document of the author's own struggle to employ language in describing the lives of pre-lingual beings. With this imperfect touchstone in mind, I saw Gut Text as a book that charts its own evolution, crawling out of the primordial ooze, dragging itself up on its scaly hind legs, and gurgling through a wasteland of guttural shrieks and yawps until it achieved the ability to speak directly to me of its own free will. nn reads like the first moments of life - yawning and stretching into the vaguest awareness of light and sound. yy presents as physical growth - corporeality, really - and through its punctuational glyphs and walls of overlapping text, the tactile sensation of occupying an increasing amount of space in the world. ff gets a little cocky as a result, playing around with sentence fragments - asking questions, seeking answers - and abandoning its preestablished physical limitations in pursuit of higher callings. And finally vv arrives, something close to sentient, speaking with authority and poetry of itself and its desires. What it might grow into next is anybody's guess, but it seems doubtful that the end of these few unnumbered pages means Gut Text is done growing.
You only get to write something like Gut Text once. If it fails, you're probably the only person who ever knows. If it works, you're a god (and maybe still only a handful of people ever know). If this review hasn't made it clear already, Corrao pulls it off in spades (and from what I can tell, I'm pretty late to the party, as Gut Text is already something close to legendary amongst fans of esoteric fiction). It's a magnificent experiment in language - both its immediate limits, and its unexplored outer reaches - and a must-read for any writer looking to expand their understanding of the form. I knew before I was even halfway through that this would be one of those books I come back to again and again, not even necessarily to see how I feel about it a few years down the line, so much as just to make sure it hasn't quietly morphed into an entirely different book on my shelf in the interim. To read it is to to read a book that pens itself into existence; a book actively struggling to slither out of its binding; a book that is perhaps not a book at all. A singular achievement indeed.
March 4, 2019
Fascinating, weirdly beautiful and filled with strange yearnings. There is a sort of religiousness to Gut Text, like a creation myth for all of corporeality.
February 25, 2019
Gut Text reminds me of the sort of fiction I absolutely love to read; one where there is no knowing exactly what is going to happen next—everything and nothing, all at the same time, makes absolute sense. Think of it as a sort of chewing up and then spitting out of whatever you can think up and / or imagine (covered in bitumen and bile, of course)! Seriously—in Gut Text, Corrao creates an anthropology of the parallel dimension that exists only on the periphery of what we know / perceive as normal. I hope that after the world has ended and we’ve all melted back into a primordial goop, Gut Text is also destroyed; only because it paints the portrait of a terrifying place and time no one should ever desire to exist. Conceptually, there is an interesting sort of ruin that occurs, as the novel progresses—and you begin to realize that what is actually happening is a derealisation / collapse of reality. I could see someone saying, “Read between the lines and you’ll begin to understand the text,” but after page 13, there are no lines! It’s like howling at the moon, except the moon doesn’t exist and you are something that shouldn’t even be. I would say this is surrealist literature with a purpose, but it’s more than that even (as Surrealism itself can be so limiting). It’s a David Markson-style mashup (which I love) with bits of Roberto Bolaño sprinkled about and then doused and set afire in an extremely well-contained but severely smoked-out John Ashbery-esque kerosene fire. I experienced pareidolia multiple times while reading Gut Text—some of the more abstract moments caused allowed me to see images where images were not! The idea of multiple discovery assumes there is no such thing as the original idea from just one individual. For any great work or discovery, there has to be that other person (or set of persons) doing the same thing. Well …I don’t know that I have yet seen or read anything else out there that is quite like Gut Text by Mike Corrao.
July 31, 2019
Gut text is a literary experiment documenting the changing form of the text itself. It is a living, breathing being that must be fed daily, walked, and cared for. You’ll ask “what is it trying to tell me?” But if you pay attention and listen closely, you’ll maybe begin to understand.
January 19, 2021
if language is a technology then it's subject to the technological growth of other technologies as we approach the singularity, where advancement and evolution becomes exponential due to self awareness; gut text is a book that lives, the language inside of it struggles for an identity, evolving over the course of the text and asking us what makes a body and what makes a personality and what is human. if all problems are problems of language and all constructions are so because of the context of that language, meaning defining use, then the text's struggle is a very real one, conceived and birthed through the origami of language itself - self justifying, self aware: terminator 2 meets Wittgenstein like how abbot & Costello met Frankenstein.
September 16, 2022
Letra carne (Reseña, 2022)
(También disponible en: https://cuadernosdeunbibliofago.wordp... )
Escribir un hígado. Conjugar dobles los verbos que se necesitan para crear un riñón y lograr así que sean dos riñones. Aprender la caligrafía del páncreas o del duodeno (que es en sí misma un poema: duodeno). Practicar una plana de vesícula biliar, vesícula biliar, vesícula biliar hasta que filtre correctamente para prevenir la melancolía. Marcar los acentos sobre la palabra estómago según sea la intensidad del hambre. Buscar sin hallarla una traducción donante para concebir un útero. Perderse en el lenguaje de la entraña, mancharse con su fango de tinta y secreciones, no poder tachar el apéndice inflamado, la vejiga obstruida por un cálculo (X=(a2-2ab+b2). Pulir la escritura peristáltica. Ver nacer: vísceras que flotan deseando un cuerpo que las contenga.
Texto entraña es un génesis. Un ejercicio autopoiético donde personajes/autores/caligramas se esmeran en darse vida. En el comienzo Dios dijo: “Hágase Dios”. Y Dios se hizo. En el comienzo la entraña escribió sea la entraña y la entraña fue. Luego aprendería sobre signos de puntuación. Lo que Mike Corrao tenga que ver con el proceso poco importa. A lo mejor no importe para nada.
Estamos ante un laboratorio en el que el lenguaje pone al lenguaje en una placa de Petri para observar sus multiplicaciones. Estamos ante una red neuronal que se pregunta que pasaría si a una red neuronal le diera por crear una red neuronal. El resultado de ambas cosas es una perspectiva cuádruple sobre la existencia real y material de esos seres virtuales que llamamos personajes y a los que amamos leer en situaciones desesperadas.
Aquí no. Aquí no hay un cabalgar contra molinos ni un atravesar el infierno ni un acompañar la hiedra en un balcón ni un disparar a un árabe ni un arrojar un anillo a un volcán. Tampoco hay un ir en busca del autor o un revelarse ante la injusticia de las elecciones de un dios infame. Nada de eso. Aquí hay el deseo de existir y la búsqueda de la existencia en la alquimia lingüística que pretende eliminar la diferencia entre significado y significante, entre material y contenido, entre novela y ensayo.
Ensayo. Tubo de ensayo. In Vitro. IV. Cuatro. Cuatro personajes que cruzan. Límite imaginario y la página. La página es real. La página son. Rostro. Superficie. Y bajo la superficie los órganos que sostienen la vida. Pulmones, páncreas, corazón, hígado, riñones. Y todos los demás. Entrañas. Texto entraña. Eso. Algo así, pero otra cosa, porque esto son palabras y elles son además caligramas y otra cosa. ¿Son? Son. Sean. Incluso si no leo. Especialmente si no los leo.
Texto entraña es uno de los mejores conjuros que he leído. Su tema (la realidad de los seres de ficción) se aborda desde una lógica que no había visto. No es Niebla de Unamuno, ni Los difuntos de Carrión, ni la grandiosa Westworld de HBO. Aunque puede conversar con las tres, y con Wittgenstein, y con el Manifiesto ciborg. Es otra cosa. Son otra cosa. ¿Existen? Quiero que existan. Pero no depende de mi voluntad sino de la suya. ¿Lo lograron? ¿Lo lograrán? ¿Lo están logrando?
Esa es una pregunta que cada lector o lectora deberá responder en la honestidad de sus sueños. Yo creo que sí, y lo celebro. Su cuerpo es frágil y el tiempo lo disolverá. A quién le importa. También disolverá el mío. No somos tan diferentes.
Letra o carne. Letra y carne. Letra carne. Texto entraña. Léanlo. Sean. Sean.
(También disponible en: https://cuadernosdeunbibliofago.wordp... )
Escribir un hígado. Conjugar dobles los verbos que se necesitan para crear un riñón y lograr así que sean dos riñones. Aprender la caligrafía del páncreas o del duodeno (que es en sí misma un poema: duodeno). Practicar una plana de vesícula biliar, vesícula biliar, vesícula biliar hasta que filtre correctamente para prevenir la melancolía. Marcar los acentos sobre la palabra estómago según sea la intensidad del hambre. Buscar sin hallarla una traducción donante para concebir un útero. Perderse en el lenguaje de la entraña, mancharse con su fango de tinta y secreciones, no poder tachar el apéndice inflamado, la vejiga obstruida por un cálculo (X=(a2-2ab+b2). Pulir la escritura peristáltica. Ver nacer: vísceras que flotan deseando un cuerpo que las contenga.
Texto entraña es un génesis. Un ejercicio autopoiético donde personajes/autores/caligramas se esmeran en darse vida. En el comienzo Dios dijo: “Hágase Dios”. Y Dios se hizo. En el comienzo la entraña escribió sea la entraña y la entraña fue. Luego aprendería sobre signos de puntuación. Lo que Mike Corrao tenga que ver con el proceso poco importa. A lo mejor no importe para nada.
Estamos ante un laboratorio en el que el lenguaje pone al lenguaje en una placa de Petri para observar sus multiplicaciones. Estamos ante una red neuronal que se pregunta que pasaría si a una red neuronal le diera por crear una red neuronal. El resultado de ambas cosas es una perspectiva cuádruple sobre la existencia real y material de esos seres virtuales que llamamos personajes y a los que amamos leer en situaciones desesperadas.
Aquí no. Aquí no hay un cabalgar contra molinos ni un atravesar el infierno ni un acompañar la hiedra en un balcón ni un disparar a un árabe ni un arrojar un anillo a un volcán. Tampoco hay un ir en busca del autor o un revelarse ante la injusticia de las elecciones de un dios infame. Nada de eso. Aquí hay el deseo de existir y la búsqueda de la existencia en la alquimia lingüística que pretende eliminar la diferencia entre significado y significante, entre material y contenido, entre novela y ensayo.
Ensayo. Tubo de ensayo. In Vitro. IV. Cuatro. Cuatro personajes que cruzan. Límite imaginario y la página. La página es real. La página son. Rostro. Superficie. Y bajo la superficie los órganos que sostienen la vida. Pulmones, páncreas, corazón, hígado, riñones. Y todos los demás. Entrañas. Texto entraña. Eso. Algo así, pero otra cosa, porque esto son palabras y elles son además caligramas y otra cosa. ¿Son? Son. Sean. Incluso si no leo. Especialmente si no los leo.
Texto entraña es uno de los mejores conjuros que he leído. Su tema (la realidad de los seres de ficción) se aborda desde una lógica que no había visto. No es Niebla de Unamuno, ni Los difuntos de Carrión, ni la grandiosa Westworld de HBO. Aunque puede conversar con las tres, y con Wittgenstein, y con el Manifiesto ciborg. Es otra cosa. Son otra cosa. ¿Existen? Quiero que existan. Pero no depende de mi voluntad sino de la suya. ¿Lo lograron? ¿Lo lograrán? ¿Lo están logrando?
Esa es una pregunta que cada lector o lectora deberá responder en la honestidad de sus sueños. Yo creo que sí, y lo celebro. Su cuerpo es frágil y el tiempo lo disolverá. A quién le importa. También disolverá el mío. No somos tan diferentes.
Letra o carne. Letra y carne. Letra carne. Texto entraña. Léanlo. Sean. Sean.
February 24, 2019
This book comprises pyrotechnics of text that retain a solid eelevation to severe displacements of space and time. This books contains cadavers on a thrillride who are mining the alphabet to take pleasure in ... and endorse ... the unpredictability of meaning. Submerge yourself ... dear reader ... in redacted text that acts as possible photography ... the author requests you to view him through black ink ... through potential black smoke that turns as a scrying assistant. Mike Corrao has written a great book ... my kind of book ... a book that is on the verge of collapse where various pages depict asemic pictograms ... where scrapings from past art and literature manifestoes assemble a new structure that defiles the past.
February 24, 2019
Gut Text is ALIVE!
Check out an interview with the author here: https://www.1111press.com/blog/interv...
Check out an interview with the author here: https://www.1111press.com/blog/interv...
February 24, 2021
"three murders happened here" ... "and then I disappeared into my dreams" ... "which is where I am now" ...
A lost soul in a spaceship, all alone, hallucinating with the dead crew (turned into ghosts) on the game Among Us (or maybe I'm just playin' it too much and I’m starting to lose it).
Post-Beckettian.
I loved it.
Thank you, Mike.
Thank you, 11:11 Press.
A lost soul in a spaceship, all alone, hallucinating with the dead crew (turned into ghosts) on the game Among Us (or maybe I'm just playin' it too much and I’m starting to lose it).
Post-Beckettian.
I loved it.
Thank you, Mike.
Thank you, 11:11 Press.
February 5, 2025
A work of art. Beautiful and haunting. The ink on these pages seep into your skin, agitating the body and soul, conversing with the limits of physical form. A mutation through text.
April 5, 2023
Poetic corporeal text crying out in a mythologized plane. I spent a lot of time digesting the formatting and use of space on the page. Attempts to break down the space that was empty and the space that was consumed by text led to breaths of pause, moments of flow resembling religious prayer.
November 11, 2021
a book pushing print media to the absolute limit with some wonderful prose (if it can comfortably be called that) along the way
June 17, 2022
Es un libro diferente. No apto para "corazones débiles" o lectores tradicionales. Es experimental, intenta llevar el texto, el libro-objeto, a nuevas dimensiones. ¿Lo logra? Debe ser el lector quién lo decida.
Encontré especialmente interesante cuando los entes se cuestionaban, se preguntaban. Texto entraña tiene cientos de lecturas, muchas de ellas más allá de mi análisis literario o artístico, pero desde lo experiencial y sensorial fue todo un suceso desarrollándose en tiempo real, extendiendo sus rizomas frente a mí al tiempo que lo leía.
Interesante aproximación novedosa.
Encontré especialmente interesante cuando los entes se cuestionaban, se preguntaban. Texto entraña tiene cientos de lecturas, muchas de ellas más allá de mi análisis literario o artístico, pero desde lo experiencial y sensorial fue todo un suceso desarrollándose en tiempo real, extendiendo sus rizomas frente a mí al tiempo que lo leía.
Interesante aproximación novedosa.
September 5, 2021
I don't know what was so alluring about this. It was, to use a term loosely, post-modern, in the sense of being highly abstract and formally weird, more poetic. And yet it had a gripping sense of narrative development. Like a mathematical formula for how a certain type of novel should work, with the characters struggling to form, or rather forming against their will.
July 28, 2019
Absolutely awesome. This text will have you considering what consciousness without flesh could be. It will confuse you, it will make you uncomfortable, and it will leave you anxious about what it means to exist in a space without places.
January 15, 2023
Demasiada expectativa.
Retador, experimental, interesante
Retador, experimental, interesante
March 7, 2021
Utterly brilliant exploration of language and thought.
What might happen if we could watch as internal singular subjective language went through the process of growing into external widespread plurality? I'm reminded of the nickname that the guys had for Burroughs' routines as they assembled them into Naked Lunch--they called it the "word horde." Here, we watch a seed grow into a worldwide forest.
Is it a novel? Is it poetry? It's both and neither at the same time, and consumes all other forms as it grows and changes.
Postmodern fractured narrative and at the same time coherent, powerful...
If you're a writer, get this book immediately and study every page.
What might happen if we could watch as internal singular subjective language went through the process of growing into external widespread plurality? I'm reminded of the nickname that the guys had for Burroughs' routines as they assembled them into Naked Lunch--they called it the "word horde." Here, we watch a seed grow into a worldwide forest.
Is it a novel? Is it poetry? It's both and neither at the same time, and consumes all other forms as it grows and changes.
Postmodern fractured narrative and at the same time coherent, powerful...
If you're a writer, get this book immediately and study every page.
May 30, 2021
Ein interessanter, experimentell(-postmoderner) Text, in dem die Bewusst-Werdung avant la lettre auftritt. Der Auftritt der einzelnen Zeichenkombinationen droht sich hier und da zwar zu erschöpfen, aber es besteht genug Bewegung um das Spiel am Leben zu erhalten.
July 18, 2023
when vv became I cheered
this was a little hard to get into at first, very abstract. but when the text begins to grow and learn, you really feel like the words are moving from visual to visceral. nothing else like this book
this was a little hard to get into at first, very abstract. but when the text begins to grow and learn, you really feel like the words are moving from visual to visceral. nothing else like this book
Read
February 15, 2024No puedo calificarlo. Aún no entiendo arameo 😶😶
Read
September 28, 2024Me: Mom can we get It Then at the bookstore
Mom: We have It Then at the MFA seminar
The It Then at the MFA seminar:
Mom: We have It Then at the MFA seminar
The It Then at the MFA seminar:
September 2, 2025
3.5 maybe? grew to enjoy it, but had to power through to get there.
August 26, 2025
materialization myth that wears it's sci-fi and philosophy influences on its sleeve. no question where corrao is coming from, but so many proposed possibilities of the direction this (and other) work might go to. expertly pared to include enough language for a brooding sense of consideration at its limit, but not enough to open the floodgates fully to an unmanageable conversation for one person to have. a piece of a body, knowledge of more.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews