From Richard Grossman’s website, about his latest book, Breeze Avenue, which, when finished, will be only 3 million pages long. These will be available in the easy to read format of 750 individual volumes. It should be easy enough to read for those who read English, provided you also read Latin, Yiddish, Orkhon, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Chinese, Hieroglyphics, American Sign Language among other writing systems and languages. Interestingly, the mere 750 volumes will not be available for sale. Instead, they will be installed in a “reading room” where I guess anyone can go read them, providing one has nothing better to do, that is. I don’t understand how he is going to write this 3 million page work, unless Richard Grossman is not a human. If he is a computer, ok, I understand. Or maybe he never sleeps? Maybe he is a committee, a collective, a corporation, or a secret society?
Breeze Avenue can best be described as a massive, highly integrated literary form that disgorges music, architecture, art, dance, theater, video and a large variety of books and digital projects in prose and verse.
Sections of the work draw upon information from geology, screenwriting, software development, Vedic, Greek, Egyptian, Chinese and Hebrew studies, astronomy, politics, urban development, graphic and product design, quantum mechanics, meteorology, metaphysics, linguistics, literary and social theory, material science, musical instrumentation and composition, computer animation, cryptology, deaf theater, sleep theory, mathematics, choreography, photography, engineering, archaeology, business practice, zoology and lexicography.
Documents are produced in Latin, Yiddish, Orkhon, Hebrew, Fraser, Sanskrit, Chinese, Hieroglyphs, American Sign Language, various original forms of symbolic notation, and English.
The purpose is to provide a work that will revolutionize notions of how literature is conceived and operates, and of its intentions and effects. Breeze Avenue contains 45 “elements,” or distinct groups of texts. Its first manifestation will be as a one-volume 3,000,000-page book available in early 2009 for reading in beta version at www.breezeavenue.com. Once thoroughly vetted, the work will ultimately appear in printed form. Installed in a reading room in a location yet to be determined, the set will consist of 4,000 case-bound volumes, each consisting of 750 pages, that will be displayed on shelves surrounding a central reading area. The work will also be published in an abridged version, a trilogy entitled American Letters, consisting of eight volumes totaling 6,000 pages. Almost all of the Breeze Avenue elements consist of sub-elements of various lengths. Some of these carry titles. For example, there are a number of individual essays that form an element called Tractates. One of Tractates’ sub-elements is entitled, “Branded for Life.” There are, as a rough estimate, 1,800,000 unique sub-elements. The elements adopt different approaches to expression and in some cases are constructed on technical principles from the past (as examples, ancient literatures, Japanese travelogues, Renaissance sonnetry and neo-classical verse essays). Others are based on sophisticated methods of computation, process and organization that are unique in their formulations and far removed from anything that has ever been written. www.breezeavenue.com will permit readers to interact with, purchase, and be included in the work. As currently planned, the only printed sets of Breeze Avenue will be the reading room copy, a proof copy, five editions offered for sale as individual volumes and three reserved for other uses. Additionally, seventeen books, ten forms of visual art and music, three additional interactive websites, and various performance projects, all derived from the elements, will be produced. Breeze Avenue is open-ended, and the work will alter over time.
