"Tim McLaughlin's Notes Toward Absolute Zero is a lyrical meditation on the geographies of space, time, and desire. . . . Like the hypertext form of the novel itself, memory here is fragmented, indeterminate, and elusive. The men and women of Notes Toward Absolute Zero carry out their expeditions into the past not to retrieve the people they have lost but to discover them all over again, to make them anew. McLaughlin excavates this terrain . . . . with aphoristic precision and lyric tenderness. With its philatelic obsessions and shifting narrative voices, the reader feels like she has been let into the dead-letter office after hours, free to roam among the remains of unread love letters and postcards from unimagined countries." - Christopher Keep, University of Alberta
Tim McLaughlin's stunning Notes Toward Absolute Zero interweaves historical documents of the ill-fated Franklin expedition with the personal reminiscences of a woman in search of her hypnotist uncle and of the the man who, in turn, searches for her. Follow Jericho, Magel, and Winter as their lives intersect and diverge across an eerie landscape dotted with relics, forgotten lists, train wrecks, scraps from journals, ghost ships, poetry, postage stamps, Mesmer's propositions, and -- of course -- The Six Failures of Love.
In this garden nothing falls so slowly as the rain. Sitting beside the chinese roses and cilantro I loosen the ribbons that hold the letters together, separating page from envelope, all the generous correspondence unpacked. As the drops strike the pages some of the letters crumple further. Under the dampness the ink fades. Photos come unglued. Words move into the fabric of the paper until what remains is a texture. A roughness in my hands.
. . . .
That was the year I stopped answering his letters.
Notes Toward Absolute Zero
by Tim McLaughlin
for Macintosh or Windows
ISBN 1-884511-24-4 ..... $24.95
About the author:
Tim McLaughlin
Don't miss:
Unnatural Habitats by Kathy Mac expresses the poetry of twelve unnatural habitats, from primitive submarines and basement apartments to crippled spaceships.
We Descend by Bill Bly, like Notes from Absolute Zero, is an
artifactual hypertext. Where McLaughlin uses postcards and stamps, Bly constructs a story from scraps memoirs and documents from a distant, half-remembered past.
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