GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 8, Epilogue

So here we establish a provisional end [1] to this series of posts. What exactly has been going on here?

On a basic level, the “Gleaming the Cube” posts were a series of responses to Daniel Scott Snelson’s essay “Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions,” published in Mimeo Mimeo 3. The responses were more creative than critical, focusing on elaborating on ideas constructed or described in the essay.

The posts were an exploration of what it can mean to, and one way a reader can, engage creatively with any given text. The original essay was entered at various points, cut apart, re-presented, recombined, and placed in juxtaposition to new images and texts. I would not call it a “critique” or “deconstruction.” Perhaps the neutral word “response” is the most fitting. Perhaps. But the most important thing (to me, as I built those posts) was to elaborate on the source essay productively, to make that essay do more work. This is, after all, a blog focused on and of production, not reproduction.

What is reproduction in this sense? Are there two (or more) types of reproduction—one type that copies the object in question simply and transparently, and one type that re-produces or re-constructs the object in order to position it critically?

1. A “provisional” end because we will inevitably come back to it. The kind of engagement undertaken in the “Gleaming the Cube” posts provides a weird ownership of the source text, albeit in a distorted and personalized form. Although those texts have distorted “me’ as well, have changed the shape of this blog. Every time we enter or use an object it does the same to us.

OLD FRIEND

The following poem is from one of Jack Spicer’s notebooks, written around 1964. It is reprinted as the epigraph to Robin Blaser’s essay “The Practice of Outside,” which is a part of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, published by Black Sparrow Press in Santa Rosa, CA (I have the 1999 version). (One of my most prized, most weathered and beat-up books).

With fifteen cents and that I could get a
subway ride in New York. My heart
Is completely broken. Only an enemy
Could pick up the pieces.
“Fragments of what,” the man asked, “what?”
A disordered devotion towards the real
A death note. With fifteen cents and real
Estate I could ride a subway in New York. No
Poet starved. They died of it.

I CHOOSE NICE

Several months ago I had the good fortune to see Jim Sherraden of Hatch Show Print (see video above) give a lecture in San Francisco. It was a really great lecture. Jim said that Hatch’s success (they have a Smithsonian show traveling right now, they are probably the most well-known letterpress shop in the country) came down to one simple thing: they are nice to people. Supporting that niceness is, of course, years and years of very hard work. But those two things in tandem are exactly what the world needs.

As time goes on and I meet more and more great people that are involved in the same weird little world as me, I am constantly reminded of how much community means. So to all the nice people out there, a few things: a) thank you, b) I hope I have the presence of mind and grace to do the same, and c) I’m looking forward to meeting you if I have not already.

Posts will be sporadic from here until Jan. 4th. I hope All is Well.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: PART 7c

So we decide to listen to Brecht and begin building from the assumption that form and content are not mutually exclusive, that when they are held in tension they can activate a critical awareness in the author and/or reader.

Arranged below are a series of diagrams that represent the ways in which and artwork’s relationship to form and content can be viewed. The diagrams do not so much represent “stages” that are moved through progressively as they do “available modes” that can be navigated at will by a viewing subject (author and/or reader), depending on the nature of their dialogue with any given artwork.

Figure 12.09.09
Form and content locked in binary opposition.

The first diagram represents the idea of a form/content relationship that is the most basic; that is, there is only form and content, and an artwork is either a divisive screen between the two, breaking them both into mutually exclusive areas, or the artwork is an anchor, holding them both in tension.

Figure 12.09.10
The fixed or stable artwork in the expanded field. The space of the field eats away at the work’s edges.

The second diagram shows “the expanded field,” where an artwork is seen to exist in a larger field of practices, simultaneously mediated by both the author and the reader (and their ideas of each other). This diagram is a specific elaboration that comes out of working with books, where issues of process/production and display/reception come to the fore (when they are considered against conventional forms of visual art).

Figure 12.09.11
The work expanded, making it spatial, like the field itself.

The crucial difference between Figs 12.09.10 and 12.09.11 is the imagining of the artwork in each. In Fig. 12.09.10 the artwork is a fixed point in the field, holding the different poles in tension. In Fig. 12.09.11 the artwork is not a fixed point but a mutable zone that changes as the author/reader navigates the various channels or lines of meaning of the artwork. The artwork, then, literally is a kind of work or movement, as opposed to a fixed object for contemplation, and for sale.


Figure 12.09.12
The work exceeds the field. The field exceeds the work. These are moments where discourse is shaped and channeled.

And when we really get them going they start to exceed their or our own frame, and we find ourselves radically reoriented to the discursive parameters that allow the functioning of the work.

(Notice how in Fig. 12.09.12 the artwork still is bounded by another invisible frame on one side. It is possible for multiple frames to be exceeded simultaneously, but that’s when they really take us apart, when we have those experiences of sublimity, standing before the turbulent oceans of language and structures.)

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 7b

Figure 12.09.07
El Lissitzky, page from Pro Dva Kvadrata, Skythen-Verlag, Berlin, 1922.

Part 7b, where we continue yesterday’s questioning of formalism—the “restricted” formalism of shape and the “expanded” formalism of structure, of structuralism. [Thought: what happens when all this attention to structuralism runs into its post?]

The second main complaint against “formalism” that one often hears (and this is the criticism that I am most sympathetic to) is that it is apolitical and anti-social—that it does not look beyond the artwork, that it retreats into the old “ivory tower” of aestheticism, that to concentrate on an artwork’s form is to concede it its autonomy and cut off art from life.

And art-cut-off-from-life is something for rich people to buy and professors to argue about.


Figure 12.09.08
El Lissitzky, Propaganda Board in Street, photograph, 1920.

There are some of us who refuse that state of affairs. And there are some of us that believe, as part of a deep commitment to making art relevant and useful, that work on form is always necessary.

Our friend Brecht was one of them:

alienation-effect A translation of the German Verfremdungseffekt, coined by the dramatist BRECHT (1949, 1962) to describe the effect produced by his EPIC theatre and the style of acting appropriate to it.

Brecht’s dramaturgy breaks with the traditional values and conventions of naturalism and psychological realism, rejecting empathy, suspension of disbelief and unity of action on the grounds that they are expressions of a bourgeois IDEOLOGY that has no place in a scientific modern society. In order to create a revolutionary socialist theatre, a new style of writing and acting is essential. Brecht’s objective is encourage the audience to take a detached and critical attitude towards what they see on stage. The audience must be made aware that they are watching a reproduction of incidents drawn from real life, but must not be allowed to forget that they are in a theatre. The spectator’s attention is drawn to the artificial theatricality of the play by the songs that interrupt the action, by the slogan-painted placards that are brought on stage, and by the actors who step out of character to address the audience directly. The audience [is] thus encouraged to think about what has caused the incidents they are watching.

[…] To the extent that it involves an ALIENATION from theatrical conventions that are so familiar as to appear natural, Brecht’s theory has something in common with RUSSIAN FORMALISM’s concept of OSTRANENIE or defamiliarization. Written at a time when he was actively promoting Brecht’s theories as a model for popular theatre (1956), BARTHES’s demystifying studies of the MYTHOLOGIES of everyday life (1957) are intended to produce a cultural alienation-effect. [1]

This appears to be going around in circles. TO BE CONTINUED, as always, as we try to break these linkages and get to a larger picture…. [I think I see the aforementioned POST up ahead.]

1. David Macey, Dictionary of Critical Theory, (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 8.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 6b

And speaking of primary information, there is also another amazing archive of mimeo era publications at the Eclipse archive. The description from the site:

Eclipse is a free on-line archive focusing on digital facsimiles of the most radical small-press writing from the last quarter century. Eclipse also publishes carefully selected new works of book-length conceptual unity.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: PART 7 (FORMALISM)

Figure 12.09.04
Frank Stella, installation shot of Aluminum Paintings, at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1960.

From Daniel Scott Snelson’s “Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions:”

[…] Importantly, for Brecht, Barthes, and many writers and artists to follow, the anti-neutrality of language led to an emphasis of artifice (for Brecht, the lights, set, and material of the theatre, for later Barthes, the Text) always charged with political significations (against the woozy seamless instrumentality of Nazi rhetoric, for example). From this Brechtian formalism, we can derive Barthes’s famous dictum: “a little formalism turns one away from History, but a lot brings one back to it.” Bois correctly points out that this distinction of the two “formalisms”—Lukacs's “restricted” morphological formalism, versus Brecht’s formalism of historical-structural signification—is “essential to a retrieval of formalism (as structuralism).” […]

The work of the NewLights Press could be labeled “formal” or “formalist.” And indeed it has. Some would apply that label negatively. But let’s be clear about which kind of formalism we’re talking about here (and so into Danny’s source text for the above passage):

[…] Thus the term “formalist” was an insult that Lukacs and Brecht tossed at each other, but the word did not have the same sense for each. For Brecht, a formalist was anyone who could not see that form was inseparable from content, who believed that form was a mere carrier; for Lukacs, it was anyone who believed that form even affected content. […] The antiformalism that was prevalent in the discourse of art criticism in the seventies can thus be explained in great part by a confusion between the two kinds of formalism, one that concerns itself essentially with morphology (which I call “restricted” formalism) [Lukacs], and one that envisions form as structural—the kind embraced by Brecht when he sorted out the “continuity” of Goering’s and Hess’s speeches as an essential part of their ideological machine. […] [1]

[More on the political agency that attention to form allows later.]

There are two main complaints about formalism in day-to-day art discourse. The first is that if a work is formal, or pays attention to form, then the work must be devoid or scant on “concept” or “content” (these two terms are often used interchangeably, but do not in fact mean the same thing). And if a work is devoid of “concept” or “content” then it must be devoid of thought, it must be merely pretty, it must be decorative. (“The decorative” has always been the evil twin of abstraction.) This complaint rests on two (false) presuppositions: 1) that a formal artwork, if decorative, is not and can not be theoretically rigorous; and 2) that form and content are mutually exclusive areas that an artwork can engage, that paying attention to one necessarily excludes the other (and now we’re back to Brecht). I have two answers, and both can be used for both of those presuppositions:


Figure 12.09.05
Pablo Picasso, Bowl with Fruit, Violin, and Wineglass, mixed media, 1912-13.



Figure 12.09.06
Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, enamel on canvas, 1959.


1. Yves-Alain Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Hal Foster, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 33.


TO BE CONTINUED: the second complaint to formalism, that of political agency

OH WHAT TO DO

There are so many books to design, signify, de-signify.

TWO HUNDRED, AND ONE

This, the 200th post of the IDE(A/O)(B)LOG(Y/UE), marks the one year anniversary of the IDE(A/O)(B)LOG(Y/UE).

I don’t know about you, but I am still having a lot of fun.

Thanks for reading.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 6a

One of the resources cited in Daniel Scott Snelson’s “Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions” is an organization/project called Primary Information. The description from their site:

Primary Information is a non-profit organization devoted to printing artists books, artist writings, out of print publications and editions. Primary Information was founded by James Hoff and Miriam Katzeff, who met while working at Printed Matter, a non-profit artist bookstore in New York. United by their mutual interest in artist publications, they formed Primary Information to foster intergenerational dialogue as well as to aid in the creation of new publications and editions.

They have some really interesting projects up there. Check them out by clicking here.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 6

Figure 12.09.03
Pablo Picasso, Glass and Bottle of Suze, pasted papers, gouache, and charcoal, after 11/18/1912

Danny Snelson’s essay, “Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions,” focuses on publications from the 1960s and 70s, publications that are 30-40 years old. But is the essay a work of literary history, an attempt to describe and contextualize these publications in the larger temporal flow? Or is the essay something else?

The essay does, beyond a doubt, describe the contents of the publications, bringing them to light for new generations of readers. It places them in context. The essay explains, describes. But it also does something much more compelling, much more urgent—it reopens the discourse that was being developed in those publications. And such a reopening makes that discourse available again, makes it available to critique, challenge, and change the way we work in the present, making room for new work.

Figure 12.09.04
Pablo Picasso, Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass, pasted paper, gouache, and charcoal, after 11/18/1912.

This function is vital.



Figure 12.09.05
Pablo Picasso, Maquette for Guitar, construction of cardboard, string and wire (restored), 1912

And that is what has been fueling these “Gleaming the Cube” posts. They are an attempt to activate the ideas and critiques that “Simultaneously Agitated…” has culled from history. At what point is theoretical or scholarly production actualized? As text? Or in its reconstitution in objects and practices of production and reception? These posts are a link in the chain of production and reception, in the chain of signifiers and signifieds. The meaning of our history is determined by the work we do in the present. And so our perpetual labor.

FORM LETTER/LETTER FORM

Form Letter/Letter Form
Letterpress printed from photopolymer plates
8.5” x 11”
Unlimited edition (first printing: 402)
2009

Image shows front and back.

This is a form that is used for correspondence of the NewLights Press. It can be filled out by hand, with a typewriter, or with a computer. The original version was entirely digital, typed and printed on a computer. But we decided to add a more personal touch to our communication.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 5 (The Personal Touch, or Form Letter/Letter Form)

Another overlapping reading:

[…] Bois recalls Barthes’s distinction between two formalisms. Focusing on Brecht’s “extreme attention to the form of Nazi texts, [the seamless flow of their rhetoric]

Figure 12.09.01
Bruce Nauman, Pay Attention, Lithograph, 1973. One of the best prints ever made.

which he followed word for word in order to elaborate a counterdiscourse,” up against Lukacs’s “fetishization” of realist novels, that more “restricted” formalism that “remains at the superficial level of form-as-shape,” much like the autotelic texts written by New Critics like Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Clement Greenburg. [1]

More on that tomorrow, but to continue this fissure:

Brecht’s formalism—hand in hand with the self-reflexivity and anti-illusionism of modernism—demonstrated that “language was not a neutral vehicle…but had a materiality of its own and that this materiality was always charged with significations.” [1] […]

Figures 12.09.02a and 12.09.02b
Form Letter/Letter Form
This is as real as it gets. Structures do penetrate, regulate, and administer the world. It is time to let the institutions of the world embrace us with their paperwork, blandly.

[…] Bois correctly points out that this distinction of the two “formalisms”—Lukacs’s “restricted” morphological formalism, versus Brecht’s formalism of historical-structural signification—is “essential to a retrieval of formalism (as structuralism).” [2] […]

1. Yves-Alain Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Hal Foster, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 33.

2. Ibid. “The parentheses belong to Bois.”

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 4

Figure 11.09.03
Sol Lewitt, Floor Structure Black, 1965, painted wood, 18.5” x 18” x 82”.

Terms, movements, ideologies:

[…] demonstrated that “language was not a neutral vehicle…but had a materiality of its own and that this materiality was always charged with significations.” [1] Importantly, for Brecht, Barthes, and many writers and artists to follow, the anti-neutrality of language led to an emphasis of artifice (for Brecht, the lights, set, and material of the theatre, for later Barthes, the Text) always charged with political significations (against the woozy seamless instrumentality of Nazi rhetoric, for example). From this Brechtian formalism, we can derive Barthes’s famous dictum: “a little formalism turns one away from History, but a lot brings one back to it.” […]

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&


Figure 11.09.04
Page spread of Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook, Vol. 8, 1965, 80-1.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

[…] ostranenie The Russian term can be translated as “making strange” or “defamiliarization,” and is an important feature of the poetics of RUSSIAN FORMALISM. It is especially associated with Viktor SHKLOVSKY (1917, 1925).

Ostranenie denotes the poetic use of devices such as disrupted metrical patterns, long descriptive passages, METAPHORS and other figures of RHETORIC to produce a semantic shift which makes the habitual appear strangely unfamiliar, rather as though it were being perceived for the first time. The distortion of form produced by the poetic device destabilizes the relationship between the perceiving subject and the object of perception, slowing down the act of perception and making it more difficult. It thus serves the poetic function of promoting seeing, as opposed to recognizing something that is already familiar and known. […]

Although […] making strange is intimately bound up with the poetics of formalism and FUTURISM, it is not difficult to relate it to BRECHT’s ALIENATION-EFFECT or to the analysis of mythologies undertaken by BARTHES in the 1950s. In all three cases, there is an implicit contrast between the AVANT-GARDE or experimental work of art which challenges received perceptions by forcing the reader or viewer to perceive its formality or artificiality, and the conventional work in which the formal devices are concealed in such a way as to make it appear natural and ahistorical. […] [2]

Towards a concerted effort of deferred action. We move back so that we can move forward (or at least to the side a little bit, for some air, for some space to breathe, some room to think amidst all this racket).

1. Yves-Alain Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, ed. Hal Foster, Yves-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, and Rosalind Krauss (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 33. This looks like a great book. Thank you, Danny.

2. David Macey, Dictionary of Critical Theory, (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 284-5.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 3

All things are pierced. All things are permeable. We collapse. We turn outward.

[…] The first editorial line of Form launches the arc of argumentation that the magazine will follow over its robust three year run. This compact credo resonates unidentified among the three editors: geometric architect Philip Steadman, translator and concrete poet Stephen Bann, and avant-garde historian Mike Weaver. In italics, the trajectory of the magazine is then repeated in every subsequent issue:

“The aims of Form are to publish and provoke discussion of the relations of form to structure in the work of art, and of correspondences between the arts.” [1]

[…] Distinct from the pell-mell variety of articles in the common periodical, Form stands as a coherent whole, a meta-magazine, an argument through commentary, arrangement, and citation: exploring the relations of form to structure in the periodical work of print. […]

No thing is ever simple.

The cuttings above become an editorial challenge. Suddenly the periodical is no longer just a collection of work that the editors think is “good,” perhaps loosely arranged around a subject or theme, but the magazine becomes a specific, sustained investigation, developing in time, in a single issue and over a series of issues. What are the necessary/essential (or better yet potential) qualities of a magazine?

We collapse. We turn outward.

[Second Idea, Related & Released: This is also a potential model for a rigorous curatorial practice. (What is the difference between editing and curating? Is it simply a matter of the objects arranged (textual or physical) or the final outcome (magazine or exhibition)? Where, or what, is the exhibition catalog?)]

Some sort of fog, or cloud, grinds against our eyes. The implications remain uncertain. A feeling of dread pervades.

[1] Editorial Note, Form, no. 1 (1966): 3.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 2

Different readings of the same text yield different results. These multiple readings overlap, connect to new things, and connect to each other. They cluster and disperse. Time moves, time is re-covered in the reading and remembering subject. All that fall from Monday + thinking through images differently + the text continues to render = a new reading opens out, the living reading expands. Deferred action. The trauma of the text.


[…] this inherent medium, the flow of renegade bodies in the “mimeo revolution.” […]

The phrase “renegade bodies” makes this all sound a lot sexier than it usually does. The pleasure of the text. Where and how does the reader’s desire intersect with the “renegade body?” What are you looking at, reader?

[…] the only way to approach Language poetry is via a close reading of the periodical—its formal characteristics and structural cohesion, how it relates texts in space-time, and the questions of distribution and editorial vision proper to the space of the little magazine. […]

form + content + production + reception

[…] From this it follows that the spectator space will become part of the film space. The separation of the “projection surface” is abolished. The spectator will no longer observe the film, like a theatrical presentation, but will participate in it optically and acoustically. […] [1]

1. Theodore van Doesburg, “Film as Pure Form,’ trans. Standish Lawder, Form, no. 1 (1966): 7-8. Quoted in Danny Snelson's Mimeo Mimeo essay.

GLEAMING THE CUBE: Part 1

I spent this past weekend reading Daniel Scott Snelson’s contribution to Mimeo Mimeo #3. It’s a really interesting article, and, like all good essays, it spurred my thoughts on its subject (“little magazines”) in new directions, particularly about what I can and will do with the NewLights journal-to-be Et Al. I would like to spend the next few posts here (during this blissfully short, gorgeous, holiday week) dwelling on and in sections of Danny’s essay. The goal is not to perform a close, critical reading, but to use collage, notes, and hyperlinks to elaborate on the ideas that I have found compelling.

BUT FIRST, a brief description of the overall essay:

[…] In Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions, Daniel Scott Snelson discusses the relationship between structuralism and the poetries of the mimeo era by presenting a detailed analysis of Form (a Cambridge-UK magazine published in 1966) and Alcheringa (a journal published by Boston University in 1975), two exemplary gatherings that brilliantly illuminate the historical, material and social circumstances under which theory informed art (and vice-versa) in the early works of some of today’s most celebrated experimental writers.

Any day now, any minute now, the NewLights Press will be starting a new journal, a journal that will hopefully deconstruct and expand the idea of what a journal is or can be. Some ideas on the operating table: how it operates as a decentered, nomadic community. How it arranges, orders, and materializes a variety of texts, suturing together a sort textual-mechanical monstrosity. How it identifies and authorizes its contributors. How it is disseminated, dissipated, and continuously rebuilt among its readers.

The problem is, I have no idea how one is supposed to edit a journal. Oh well, I guess I’ll make it up, conjure it, carefully. I can already feel the water in my lungs.

First Idea, Random: change the title of Et Al to TIME MAGAZINE.

[…] the most accurate and concise definition of a Language poetry “group” is the consistent roster of writers who published each other in a relatively closed economy of independently produced magazines—This, Hills, Tottel’s, 100 Posters, Sun & Moon, La-Bas, Roof, Joglars, Tuumba Press, and later, critical journals like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Open Letter, and Temblor—these publications wrote, carried, and delivered the definition of the Language movement. The poetics of Language cannot be extracted from this inherent medium, this flow of renegade bodies in the “mimeo-revolution.” More precisely: the only way to approach Language poetry is via a close reading of the periodical—its formal characteristics and structural cohesion, how it relates texts in space-time, and the questions of distribution and editorial vision proper to the space of the little magazine. […]

YESTERDAY I DECIDED THAT

to use on occasions just like this one.

[The above face is Placard Condensed.]

That should be relatively simple, right?

Right?

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (2): WHAT YOU WILL (2)

Figure 11.09.02
The manuscript. An auratic object in the age of endless, disembodied reproduction?

I received the manuscript for What You Will in physical form, not as a digital file. This is unusual nowadays, and my first thought was to ask Kyle (the author, Kyle Schlesinger) to send me the files. But as I was asking for the digital copy, I realized that maybe I didn’t want or need them, that retyping the poems would give me a (productive) chance to get to know them a lot better.

From Karl Young, “Notation and the Art of Reading,” A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections about the Book & Writing, Steven Clay and Jerome Rothenberg, eds. (New York: Granary Books, 2000), 40:

[…] A certain aura would have surrounded a manuscript fascicle of Donne’s poems coming into a reader’s hands in 1620. […] He would first read through them quietly, perhaps silently. He would try to get a general sense of the poem, then concentrate on details. He would probably commit some of them to memory, and might make copies of some or all of them. Copying was a form of reading in those days: a way of becoming one with the text, of tracing its graphic form, much the way art students have copied paintings and drawings as part of their apprenticeship. In 17th century Europe there were still monks who copied scripture as a form of prayer: they spoke the words as they wrote, touched the sacred energy of the script, and created more copies that could be used to save other souls. Transcribing also aided memorization. […]

[I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about the relationship(s) between scribing/copying, writing, and reading. Those thoughts may play a role in the development of this book. At the very least, it will spawn some blog posts.]

So I retyped all of the poems. While I was doing it, I noticed new things, important things that had not come to my attention yet. I paid more attention to structure, to punctuation, to capitalization, to spelling (Kyle uses some purposely misspelled words in these poems), and to all of those “physical” factors that go into determining the manuscript of the poems.

[It occurs to me in writing this that this is the same sort of relationship with the text that setting type by hand fosters. The advantage to the initial retyping is that it happens earlier in the process, before any design decisions have been made. I’ve been considering setting this book by hand anyway. But we shall see, as my access to type is very limited these days.]

& THE NEW MANIFESTO &

The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press was produced in a theoretically unlimited edition. 250 copies were made in the first printing. I figured that it would take awhile to sell 250. But as the year draws to a close, the numbers are dwindling, and it’s time to start to thinking about the second installment.

[The Manifesto was important for NewLights from a production standpoint in the sense that it was the first book produced in such a way as to make letterpress printing it in a large edition just as economically feasible as digitally printing it. And now that I have the films & plates already, all I need to buy is the new paper.]

The plan from the beginning was to reprint the Manifesto when it ran out. This goes against the general NewLights policy of NO REPRINTS, so for the first time the idea of the reprint has to be considered. And of course we can never leave anything alone. A simple reprint? Why not force that work to do more work?

This problem is particularly important for this book because of the idea that keeping the same manifesto, reprinting it over and over again, will keep the press locked into the same theoretical framework. And this is important because the Manifesto itself is about resisting such ossification. A specific example: the NewLights mission statement is printed at the end of the Manifesto, but I’ve been thinking about rewriting the mission statement. So how does a new mission statement fit into a second, or third, or fourth, or n printing? How can a book like this sustain the idea of an infinite amount of printings?

Many books are revised from printing to printing, from edition to edition. So why can’t the Manifesto function in a similar way? Why not make The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press perpetually new? Make the book the living, growing, changing, dynamic object that this very text describes. Actualize, damn it.

MIMEO MIMEO #3

The new issue, #3, of the journal Mimeo Mimeo is out now, and I am particularly excited about it (for reasons explained below). Here's the official description:

Mimeo Mimeo #3
Autumn 2009

Mimeo Mimeo is a forum for critical and cultural perspectives on artists’ books, typography and the mimeograph revolution. This periodical features essays, interviews, artifacts, and reflections on the graphic, material and textual conditions of contemporary poetry and language arts.

We are especially pleased with this issue, our first devoted to the work of a single author. In Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions, Daniel Scott Snelson discusses the relationship between structuralism and the poetries of the mimeo era by presenting a detailed analysis of Form (a Cambridge-UK magazine published in 1966) and Alcheringa (a journal published by Boston University in 1975), two exemplary gatherings that brilliantly illuminate the historical, material and social circumstances under which theory informed art (and vice-versa) in the early works of some of today’s most celebrated experimental writers.

This issue includes a special insert, The Infernal Method, written, designed and printed by Aaron Cohick (NewLights Press).

Reserve your copy today by sending $10 (plus $3 for shipping in the US, $5 for shipping to Canada or $10 for shipping overseas) to: Kyle Schlesinger | UHV A&S | 3007 N. Ben Wilson | Victoria, TX | 77901-5731.

Using Paypal, direct payment to kyleschlesinger [at] gmail [dot] com.
Also available from Small Press Distribution

And check out our recently restored blog: http://mimeomimeo.blogspot.com/
Paypal orders can also be placed via the Mimeo Mimeo blog.

Jed Birmingham
Kyle Schlesinger
Mimeo Mimeo eds.

You can view the NewLights insert, The Infernal Method, here.

THE INFERNAL METHOD

This is an essay about legibility, about legibility in printing. This is an essay that seeks to examine the notion of legibility, of readability, and to open it out onto a productive way of thinking through process in printing.

This is an essay about printing, about “good” printing and about “bad” printing, about how printing can articulate and make legible different modes of reading.

This is an essay about reading, about how things are read, how printing affects reading, and about multiple threads of reading in a multiply legible text.


This is an essay about writing, about writing for maximum and multiple legibilities.

This is an essay about writing-printing-reading as a single cluster of interconnected activities connecting and opening out onto other clusters of other activities.

This is an essay that attempts multiple legibilities, that is aware of itself as an act of writing-printing-reading as a single cluster of interconnected activities connecting and opening out onto other clusters of other activities.


Text/object by NewLights Press: Aaron Cohick, et al.
12 pages, no cover, saddle stapled, 7” x 5.5”
Letterpress printed on newsprint, with additional elements added by hand
Edition of 350
2009
Released as part of Issue #3 of Mimeo Mimeo. Available here.
 

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION (1): WHAT YOU WILL (1)

Figure 11.09.01
The first page of notes/brainstorming for What You Will.

What You Will is a book of poems by Kyle Schlesinger. It is scheduled for release in February 2010.

One of the first things that I do when planning a book is make a bunch of notes and sketches, just to get some ideas down. You can see in the image above that there are sketches for a general page layout, for the main title spread, and some vague ideas about some new ligatures for the title type.

These poems pose an interesting visual problem in that they are very long and narrow. Does one make the pages long and narrow to accommodate the poems, or make them short and squarish to provide contrast? The sketches here show an idea for wider pages.

The final book always changes from these initial ideas. The point is to let them grow and develop, and to learn something new along the way. But you have to jump in somewhere.

THIS IS A GOOD BOOK

Lettering & Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces, by Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals (the gentlemen of Post Typography), Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2009. As one might guess from the title, it’s a book about type. But it’s not just another book about type, it’s an accessible book about designing and drawing letters and type, which is something I’ve been thinking about lately. I’m working my way through it right now. It will have some bearing on the next book….

PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION 1: ABOUT

Soon, soon there will be a new feature, called PRODUCTION IS RECEPTION, running on this blog. This new feature (which grows out of the documentation of the new NewLights broadsides) will demonstrate, explain, and comment upon the various steps of the various processes that go into producing books. I have a few hopes for this new feature:

A) That it will show and make accessible (and thus demystify) steps and processes that usually remain hidden.

B) That it will help to generate ideas and discussion for other producers of book-text-objects.

C) That it will help me and the readers of this blog connect the manifold activities of making to larger practices and ideas, allowing us to elaborate an investigation and critique of the modes of production of meaning(art?)-objects, and of how those modes are rendered and inscribed in the final form and distribution of the object(s) in question.

D) That it will give practical “how-to” oriented tips and techniques (an ongoing demo).

E) That it will be interesting, entertaining, and maybe even educational.

F) That these posts will not explain away or close off the process, but that they will break open, occupy, and explode it. Everything generative, always.

This feature will be starting up soon, as I finish off one piece and begin another, a series of an-Others from here on out.

And speaking of process, here is a really fun bookmaking process stop-motion animation made by Abigail Uhteg about her recent project at the Women’s Studio Workshop:

ADAM ROBISON AND OTHER POEMS

By Adam Robinson, the proprietor of Publishing Genius Press. It’s on pre-sale now, over at the Narrow House.

PROCEED AND BE BOLD, part 2

So now I finally get a chance (have made myself a chance) to sit down and write about the film Proceed and Be Bold, (trailer below, or here). The film is a documentary about the letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr., about the challenges that he’s faced in his career and life, and how he has met them—aggressively, intelligently, and with a sense of humor and play. This film knocked something loose in my head.

(Aside: the whole experience of seeing the film was wrapped up in an amazing convergence of events. The movie was playing as part of the SF Doc Fest, and my friend James and I were talking about going to see it. Then an hour or two later, Amos himself randomly walked through our studio door. It seems he was walking down the street, saw the presses in the window, and decided to stop in and say hello. A great surprise on an otherwise regular day. We showed him around the studio, and chatted about presses and other printerly things for a bit. He gave us some gorgeous posters. We went to see the film on its opening night at the Fest, and he and two of the filmmakers (editor and director) were there, and they answered questions afterwards, which was every bit as incredible as the film itself. I am grateful that things proceeded the way they did, to put me in that theater at that moment in time.)

(A loop back to the beginning: So now I finally get a chance (have made myself a chance) to sit down and write…. It’s amazing when you see or hear or read something that fires you up, that gets your mind going quickly, that makes you expand, and it’s amazing how the quickly the stone fingers of “real life” (the ever-solidifying movement of fear through our minds) get a hold of you again, and hold you down until all of those wonderful things that you thought and dreamed are as distant as the film itself now, flickering images, only dimly remembered, abstract. This is the constant struggle of those of us who refuse to give in. This relates to the film.)

It doesn’t seem appropriate to write out a full synopsis of the film, of Kennedy’s life. What’s important about it to me, at this moment, is how, through the example of Kennedy’s work and career, it challenged some ideas that I’ve held, that I’ve felt myself slipping into, about art and what it does and how it works and how one can get it made.

Kennedy did not discover printing until he was in his forties. He left a “good” programming job to pursue this new thing that he felt so strongly about. He worked hard, went to school, taught for a bit, and moved his studio many times. He currently lives in Gordo, Alabama. He sells his posters, printed in many runs from handset lead and wood type on chipboard, for $15 for one, $20 for two. Twice a year he packs up his Vandercook, puts it in his pickup, and drives it to a festival where he shows people how to print. He lets interested people come and work in his studio. After the film he talked about generosity, about how it makes us human.

(At least a few times I have written about the shape that art makes out in the world. Here is one such tracing of one such shape, in one in which it has rendered deeply.)

[I wanted to put the link to the film site here, but it doesn't seem to be working at the moment. My apologies. I will check back and hopefully update that later.]

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE COPIED

The editors of the journal Mimeo Mimeo, Jed Birmingham and Kyle Schlesinger, have begun to post to the Mimeo Mimeo blog on a regular basis. (Prior to this it just had ordering information for the first two issues.) What is Mimeo Mimeo? The text from the site:

Mimeo Mimeo is a forum for critical and cultural perspectives on artists' books, fine press printing and the mimeograph revolution. This periodical features essays, interviews, artifacts, and reflections on the graphic, material and textual conditions of contemporary poetry and language arts.

There are already some pretty interesting posts up there. Add it to the list!

A BRIEF DISRUPTION

Figure 10.09.05
An excerpt from the essay-insert currently in production. An example of (mostly) analog disruption. But the two of you are not so easy to separate these days.


Figure 10.09.06
An excerpt from the essay-insert currently in production. An example of (mostly) digital disruption. But the two of you are not so easy to separate these days. But the two of you break apart in the same language.

PROCEED AND BE BOLD, part 1

Hey letterpress and book people, all art people, really (in San Francisco). Go see this movie tonight at the Roxie. I saw it on Saturday and it was really great. There will be a longer post about it tomorrow….

w00t, &, ETC.

A series of things, sparked by conversational collision. [Citations at the end]:

W00t: W00t is a Leet corruption of the exclamation "Woot!", meaning "Hooray." The term rose to popularity sometime during the 1990s and is popular on the Internet, especially in MMORPGS. Both the exclamation and the Leet spelling are of uncertain origin.

Leetspeak: A form of chatspeak characterized most strongly by its alphanumeric substitutions.

Chatspeak: The blend of informal language, conventional abbreviations and emoticons typical of chatrooms. [1]

&&&&&&

These questions have relevance to an interesting test case: Bill Bissett’s special attention to the spelling of words. Bissett’s idiosyncratic orthography and the resultant effects on that minutest level of reading—the single word—has already enjoyed a large influence inside Canada. Yet the writers who have gone on to orthographic modifications in their own work have been judged as mere copiers of Bissett, rather than valourized as individuals adapting to their own purposes Bissett’s singular insight: that spelling should be an individual decision and not an imposed norm. Accordingly, the work of these writers is in danger of being ignored through the effects of an attitude that sees formal innovation as a novelty and, by extension, as unrepeatable. In the background of such an attitude lurks the hulking form of traditional literature as a pre-established, easily subsumed and hence “safe” finite number of technical solutions. [2]

&&&&&&&

Poetry that circulated in manuscript, of course, shared with printed books the current freedom from the standardized orthography. Shakespeare, for instance, spelled his own name half a dozen different ways. In “The Good-Morrow,” John Donne could render the word “be” three different ways (bee, beest, be) on the same sheet of paper. For Shakespeare and Donne and most of their contemporaries a written word was not confined to a single orthographic form: it could change according to the writer’s intuitive sense of how it should look or sound, showing shades of emphasis, intonation, color, perhaps even pitch in his own pronunciation. Written language maintained the fluidity, even volatility, of speech: a phrase or line was something a poet created with his mouth, not an arrangement of standardized parts that could be precisely interchanged. [3]

&&&&&&&

on Ellophants head with the teeth In it very large
on River horses head of the Bigest kind that can be
gotton
on Seabulles head with horns
All sorts of Serpents and Snakes Skines & Espectially of
that sort that hathe a Combe on his head Lyke
a Cock
All sorts of Shining Stones or of Any Strange Shapes

[…]

Any thing that Is strang.

[4]

NOTES
1. These definitions are from Wiktionary.
w00t: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/w00t
Leetspeak: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/leetspeak
Chatspeak: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chatspeak

2. Steve McCaffery and bpNichol, “The Book as Machine,” Rational Geomancy, (Vancouver: Talon Books, 1992); reprinted in A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing, eds. Steven Clay and Jerome Rothenberg (New York: Granary Books, 2000), 24.

3. Young, Karl, “Notation and the Art of Reading,” Open Letter, (Spring 1984); reprinted in A Book of the Book: Some Works & Projections About the Book & Writing, eds. Steven Clay and Jerome Rothenberg (New York: Granary Books, 2000), 37.

4. A transcription of part of letter written by Tradescant the Elder to Edward Nichols, the Secretary of the Navy, in 1625. Tradescant was making a list of things to be gathered for his “cabinet of curiosities.” Excised from: Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 95.

THE NEW MANTRA

Fig. 10.09.04
A photo of the wall in front of my desk, with inspirational signage.

The year is not officially upon us, but it’s best to prepare for these things before they happen….

THE DANGERS OF BINARY THINKING

Fig. 10.09.03
Photographer unknown. A view of the “Exposition Internationale,” Paris, 1937. On the left is the German pavilion by Albert Speer and on the right is the Soviet pavilion by Boris Iofan (sculpture by Vera Mukhina). Hitler's Germany facing off against Stalin's Soviet Union: the two ultimate ends of the left vs. right political spectrum, right before the war that would tear them both to pieces.

Whenever I see myself thinking, speaking, acting in a way that pits “Accepted Idea #1” vs. “the Opposite, Accepted Idea #2,” where both of those ideas are unchanging, oversimplified, locked in steel, and poised to destroy each other, I meditate on the photograph above. The way we think, the structure of how we frame, represent, and articulate ideas, has severe and disastrous consequences in the really real world. In the end, the differences between the two sides are arbitrary, because their effect in the world is the same. From George Orwell’s 1984:

[…] Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain. […] always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever. […]