Mother Goose Eggs Sunnyside Up

When I began to write this book, I was thinking very much about the geometry of short story collections. Many modern short story collections have a larger structure that provides continuity and makes them read like novels. They are conceived as whole books and have a unity beyond a simple miscellany of tales. Characters or ideas progress through each subsequent story until the final story provides a resolution, or at very least a point of perspective from which to look back and re-evaluate the previous stories. Frequently these collections have a cyclical geometry, where ideas introduced in early stories are resolved or recast in the final story. I wanted to produce something that shared many of these qualities. Each chapter was to be as self-contained and whole as any short story. Like a story cycle, each story would cast a new light on the ones that preceded it, and promote novel like unity of themes. What I did not want to write was a cyclical book, in which the final story is the final word, a story with more authority than all others, one that casts a sort of judgement on the rest. I was aiming for something more ambiguous than that. From the start, my intention was to write a book on the subject of perspective, a book in which any one of the stories could be taken as the starting point or the endpoint of the collection, in which each was capable of exerting that conclusive judgement usually the sole prerogative of the final chapter. I wrote a book based not on the geometry of the circle, but on the geometry of the dodecahedron. I'll get back to that, but first a word from the French. This book is constructed on mildly Oulipien principles, that is on the principles of the Ouvroir de la Litt[e']rature Potentielle (OuLiPo). OuLiPo is a group of mostly French authors who create literature based on highly arbitrary constraints of their own making. Amongst the most famous of these are Georges Perec's La Disparition, a novel written entirely without the letter E and Raymond Queneau's Exercises de Style in which the same object is described over and over in different rhetorical styles. The most obvious model for A Frame for Frames is another Oulipien text -- Italo Calvino's Se Una Notte D'Inverno un Viaggiatore, a novel composed of a conspiracy frame story and ten first chapters of hypothetical books. The arbitrary constraints I put on myself while writing A Frame for Frames emerge from the geometry of a dodecahedron. I envisioned a book in which each of the twelve chapters or stories represented a face of the dodecahedron. A dodecahedron's faces are pentagonal, each a five sided polygon. In A Frame for Frames these sides represent a relationship to an adjacent story. This was the first constraint. Each story must refer to or be referred to by each of the five stories adjacent to it. These references to and from adjacent stories provide the shifting perspectives of this book. Any face of the dodecahedron may be taken as a starting point from which to evaluate the adjacent sides. A dodecahedron has twenty vertices, points where three sides meet. In A Frame for Frames these vertices are represented by certain repetitions and recurrences in each of the three stories that meet in these points. If the elements that represent the vertices were extracted and placed in the order of their first appearance, they would form another text of sorts, which might provide another perspective for evaluating the whole. The order in which the stories unfold is somewhat arbitrary. Any one could have been the first story, but once that choice was made their sequence was governed by a predetermined pattern. I considered only two patterns. The most obvious was the 'orange peel' sequence, using the pattern by which you can remove the peel of an orange in a single strip, by proceeding around it in a spiral. This would have produced a spiralling away from the themes and subjecWestergard, Jim is the author of 'Mother Goose Eggs Sunnyside Up' with ISBN 9780889842694 and ISBN 0889842698.