Breeze Avenue

Breeze Avenue is a dynamic 3,000,000-page “wind” that disgorges prose, poetry, art, music, dance, architecture and theater through a large variety of books, artworks, videos, performances and digital content. It constitutes the third book of the trilogy, American Letters, and is an attempt to redefine the nature of literature and expand radically the areas of its concerns: how it is conceived and operates; and its direction, contents and effects.

Its texts draw upon information from geology, screenwriting, software development, Vedic, Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Chinese, Japanese and Jewish studies, astronomy, politics, urban planning, graphic and product design, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, economics, meteorology, metaphysics, linguistics, cultural studies, material science, musical instrumentation and composition, computer animation, cryptology, Deaf culture, comic book illustration, residential architecture, sleep medicine, mathematics, choreography, literary theory, photography, theater, engineering, archaeology, business practice, zoology, cosmology, ophthalmology, art and film history and lexicography. Besides English, documents are produced in Latin, Yiddish, Orkhon, Hebrew, Fraser, French, Sanskrit, Japanese, Chinese, Hieroglyphs, American Sign Language, the International Phonetic Alphabet and various original forms of symbolic notation.

Breeze Avenue was written over a period of 41 years. In addition to the American Letters printed set, the following will be published or produced: 10 book-length literary works (containing 778 poems as well as novels and essays); 23 editioned art books; a comic book; 13 categories of “poetic objects,” which constitute a new type of visual construct; and a form of eternal music based on sleep speech and audible brainwaves. A sapphire ball inscribed with the Ten Commandments has been buried near the peak of a Colorado mountain and a musical automotive instrument is being used as a parade vehicle, among other activities. Containing 15 terabytes of information in its digital manifestation (more than in the entire Library of Congress), Breeze Avenue currently comprises 34 literary elements, although more may be added.

Most of these elements are composed of sub-elements, some of which carry titles. For example, there is a group of philosophical essays and academic treatises, Tractates and Recantations, that forms a small part of a relatively large textual element entitled Short Works. One of the tractates, a sub-sub-element, is a three-page essay, “Branded for Life.” There are approximately 1,700,000 sub-elements, many of which are composed of such sub-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 neoclassical verse essays). Others are based on sophisticated methods of computation, process, visualization and organization that are unique in their formulations and far removed from anything that has ever been written.

Traveling through an endless noetic space as if they were the ingredients of an unbound channel of wind-borne thought, most of the novel’s pages continuously change position, and often content, with some appearing as others disappear. Consequently, Breeze Avenue is actually a “breeze avenue,” an evolving band of meaning that arises from and is impelled by forces analogous to those that undergird physical reality and determine the character of the human mind. 

The comprehensive digital version of Breeze Avenue will be launched in the fall of 2013 at breezeavenue.com. At twelve-day intervals, the continuously changing order and composition of its pages will be captured in a “snapshot,” and this new work will supplant its previous version in all digital and newly printed forms. This process of reification and reiteration will continue for precisely a century.