&c., or Fragments from the Tolstoy Erasure Project
by Joseph Nicolello
The text below is a fragment from my Tolstoy Erasure Project, which is a poetic erasure of Anthony Briggs’s War and Peace executed last autumn. Its title is & c , or &c. The work was conducted by night, examining the text syllable by syllable, strategically selecting, erasing, cutting up, revising, scanning, preparing. The transcription process was about 15% complete when other, more pressing tasks arose. The project is thus currently on hold. In case anyone is wondering about Syllogistic: a Novel in Syllogisms, or The Interior Life of St. Joseph, no publisher will touch either. This is fine, as it’s given me time to dedicate myself utterly to the life and work of Robert S. Fitzgerald. But as time allows in the future, a limited publication of the full Tolstoyan poetics of erasure will be carried out in either one enormous volume or multiple volumes. This will be followed up by an erasure-coda which picks up where Ronald Johnson left off, that is, an erasure of Milton’s Paradise Regain’d. For the time being, the fragments thus far:
