The definition of Glamour (June 2011)

I used to like to read lady mags, but now I mostly enjoy cutting them up. Here's a little collage series I worked up last night with the help of the June 2011 issue of Glamour and a funky old copy of Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language from the 1970s.

From the top, and left to right: Glare of Glamor, Secondhand Secrets, Brassiere Bravado, Bright and Brisk, Pukka Pucker, Cheerful Chatter, and We'd Wedge.

For bonus points, here is June 2011 Glamour covergirl Olivia Wilde inviting you to take a peek at the magazine's new iPad app. There's something vaguely nightmarish about it to me, but such are the wonders of technological advancement.

Glamour June 2011 (iPad) The Secret Issue - Olivia Wilde from Fashion Copious on Vimeo.

Sculpting a story

Highly anticipated: Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes, a work made by selectively removing passages from Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles (Foer's favorite book). Produced by Visual Editions, Tree of Codes officially comes out today. Here's what Olafur Eliasson says:

Jonathan Safran Foer deftly deploys sculptural means to craft a truly compelling story. In our world of screens, he welds narrative, materiality, and our reading experience into a book that remembers that it actually has a body.

I'm always a sucker for writers practicing the art of eloquent erasure: titles in a similar vein include Austin Kleon's Newspaper Blackout, Tom Phillips's A Humument, Ronald Johnson's Radi os, and Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow. (Many of these are inspired explicitly by William Burroughs's (or is it Brion Gysin's?) cut-ups, but there's a long history of assemblage in music, art, and literature.) For bonus points, here's a Paris Review interview with Burroughs from the fall of 1965 that discusses the technique.