All content in the work has its origin in a found book: a yellowed, cloth-bound copy of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, left for trash outside the home of its previous owner.

Found inside the book was an old General Electric pamphlet recommending reading by “Better Light” so as to preserve “Better Sight.” This pamphlet, and the 20 facts it included “about ..Vision / .. Seeing / .. Lighting” gave this work its structure.

All the underlined text and annotations in the found book have been collected and overlaid in two columns on the first twenty pages inside the cover, illuminating the critical introduction to the book, and its title pages: in the right column is the underlined text, and in the left column are the annotations of those passages.

Cataloguing the work is the hand of a conceptual writer-critic/warehouse-salesman, committed to a naive procedural survey that would ‘take account’ of the original book: the book’s 445 pages have been divided by the 20 pages of the work (not including cover and centerfold spreads), and the mathematic representation of every page (i.e. page 2 = 22.25 x 2, page 3 = 22.25 x 3, &c) has consulted the internets to produce further annotation, further illumination.

The work might enact the constraint-based transformation through which pupils must take and make note of an historical particularity of meaning-making, all the while writing under the lampshade of a criticism of no moment. The pupil that is the poet, whose means (aside of intention) to produce an account of a poem or work continue instead to produce means, meaning (aside of desire), continuing risking answering an ask in(g) reading writing, especially in the reflection of its pupils, in particular, the “rhetorical question.” In particular because the interrogation that constrains a reflection produces also the effect of that constraint, the reflection itself (only ever a peer’s), as a strain through a body of flesh or text or pupil or poet.

-Genji Amino