024O3U

numbering of the books changes so the base is where the sequence number of
the volume lies. i.e.
(10) 8 (10) 9 (10) 10 (10) n (10) 12 (10) 13 etc.
Thus sequence is negated AND retained. i.e. the processual is acknowledged
but the narrative diminished.
Hence the sub-title for The Martyrology^ eighth book, Book (10)g:
"basis/bases."
The length of some of the St. Anzas would have prevented their being
accommodated to a (conventional) card size—one envisions readers
picking up a deceptively small card that falls open into a long series of
accordion folds—and this is probably one reason why the shuffle text
idea was abandoned. There is a second, more exciting reason. At some
point in the summer of 1988, Nichol discovered a way of pulling in numerous
earlier texts inclined towards individual saints, or towards the
larger sphere of The Martyrology. Several short "saint" pieces, all previously
published in journals or other books, appear in (as) Gifts. More significant,
however, is the inclusion of Scraptures and Monotones—the former
a subtext, the latter a parallel text to The Martyrology. Nichol first
encountered St. Reat in the fourth sequence of Scraptures, and this important
saint haunts other sequences (all included here). He had tried—
repeatedly, stubbornly and futilely—to include Monotones with the earliest
sections of Book 1, and had voiced the opinion in recent years that he
still thought they should somehow be associated more closely with The
Martyrology. (He told me he had even contemplated publishing Monotones
separately, as Book 0 or -1 of The Martyrology.) The contaminated
(dis)ordering of Books 7 and 8 opened a way for these texts to be adopted—or
dispersed—into this larger context. The ordering of the pieces in
Gifts depends neither on chronology, nor on the numerical sequences by
which some of them had been previously arranged, but rather on what
Nichol called "hinged rime." Part of the joy of reading this text is discovering
the play of this riming—in the largest sense of that word—and of
the "schizophrenic logic" (another of Nichol's terms) operating in and
between the discrete pieces.
So Bo(o)ks yielded to Book(s), and The Martyrology, demoted to subtitle,
gave way to Gifts, and the numerical figuration became "Book(s)
7(VI((10)g)I)," a bracketing reminiscent of
every(all at(toge(forever)ther) once)thing
(Book 5, chain 10).
This gathering should not, though, be regarded as the complete or collected
saints—there are, after all, eight other books of The Martyrology,