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Fluke ©1987,  7 x 5 x 1 inch closed. Collage on watercolor paper painted with acrylics. The title was inspired by an article in the San Jose Mercury News titled "Universe may have been fluke." The text of the article title is "hidden" in the collages. Since I didn't know anything about book binding I just tied the pages together with a painted gros-grain ribbon. This book is rather sarcastic in content, and I remember feeling a lot of anger in those years. The idea of the whole universe being a fluke seemed so fitting then. I do like to get these old books out and study them. They hold a lot of ideas and have a playful freedom that I have to struggle to get to now.

Yes, there is really a dead salamander. It is in the tracing paper stapled to the page.

The bent bottle cap and the clicker with the monkey face are wired to the page. On the other side of the pages, the wire is hidden by the little envelope (previous page), and a collaged-on piece of paper (the page below).

Here you can see the "ave" of "have" on the left, and "be" of "been" on the right. The heavy paper with the stork (?) on it hides wire holding on the bottle cap on the previous page. I think the stork got here by looking good on the red page. The drawing on the right is by a kid.

What could be more of a fluke than a pelican? I think the drawing on the right was from a picture of Mark Twain, who probably would have liked the idea of the universe being a fluke. The little fish shape is a piece of metal that sprayed out of a casting and landed on a cold surface. A fluke fish. Sorry, I'm probably being way too obvious.



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