WE HAD A READING HERE IN THE SPRINGS ON FRIDAY NIGHT & IT WAS FUCKING AWESOME & IT FEELS SO GOOD TO BE HOME

It was the first reading in a new series called “Say Hello to Your Last Poem.” The readers were Matt Potter, a promising & motivated Colorado College student, and Corina Copp, a fantastic poet from Brooklyn & author of Pro Magenta/Be Met (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011). The series is being organized by Noel Black (author of Uselysses, also Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) and myself, and it was held at the home of Noel and his wife, artist/curator Marina Eckler. They have this incredible house with a backyard that extends up to a red rock outcropping, like a mini national park, and that’s where we did the actual reading, with crazy colored lights and the vastness of the sky & mountains behind the readers. It started with a potluck dinner and just the right amount of people came out. Everything synced.

So why am I making such a big deal out of a little house reading? It’s not a novel format, even here in the Springs, which has a thriving house-show-music scene. And one would expect a good reading from two good poets. Hey, no big deal.

& “no big deal” is absolutely correct, which is why it was awesome, and which is why I am excited about it & the future of doing this. Because these things don’t have to be a big deal, and they’re often better if they’re not. All one needs is an interested & loving & awesome local community. & we’ve got that here in Colorado Springs, believe it or not.

The people, the place, the work, the event itself. It’s all there, shimmering, and on top of all that I realized what’s been missing from the work of the NewLights Press for far, far too long—being anchored in a community, one that is both local & reaching out & welcoming in. (It’s been since the early days in Baltimore, when we were organizing readings, making chapbooks, and having a great & terrible time all of the time.) I’ve often said, on this blog and elsewhere, that one of the most important & vital parts of small press publishing is the community, the community already established, and the community that the making & sharing of work is constantly building. But in all of my transience over the last 8 years (!) I had forgotten that literally bringing people together is one of the best parts, one of the most important parts.

I had somehow forgotten about the interplay between the work produced (the writing, the books) and the local-right-there-and-giving-you-hugs audience, about how important those flesh & blood & laughing people are, and about how work made in that environment can become an anchor point for a shared, lived experience.

More readings? Yes.
More books? Yes.
We hope to see you all here soon.

AN ACCIDENTAL IMAGE OF THE BOOK

COMMONPLACING

From the essay “The Mysteries of Reading,” part of The Case for Books by Robert Darnton (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 149-150:

Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it; and if they did not have access to his popular De Copia, they consulted printed models or the local schoolmaster. The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end (unless they are digital natives and click through texts on machines), early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.

It will be interesting to see (this will be a while, maybe this will just be a blip) how the “networked commonplace book” of contemporary people will be archived and studied. Blogs, tumblrs, tweets, Facebook posts, etc. all show one way in which we move through, read and write through, the world. Social media are, perhaps, fundamentally different than the traditional commonplace book in the sense that they are inherently public, and the material gathered and broadcasted there is used to create an image of ourselves (however subconsciously) through “communication.” The traditional commonplace book was essentially private, meant only for the maker (although who is to say that they were not composed with a future reader in mind). But regardless of intent, of how “honest” they are, all of these social media broadcasts will be useful to researchers in the future.

I know that some libraries that have purchased the archives of still-working artists are making copies of hard drives and emails. I assume that someone has found, or is trying to find, a way to (efficiently) archive social media. I wonder if there are already papers being written that document and analyze the construction of a public figure through social media. We are, perhaps without even being fully aware of it, creating a collective treasure trove of information for researchers in the (near and far) future.

MORE DEMOCRATIC MULTIPLES

On this mind-blowing tumblr.

ALMOST ADOLESCENT

A recent acquisition, as we gear up to print The Heads by Justin Sirois. This is the theme of YEAR 12.


This past Saturday (05/05/12) was the twelfth birthday of the NewLights Press. To be perfectly honest, the anniversary came and went and I barely noticed. Always too much to do in the day to day, and always too many year cycles to keep track of—the “real” year, the academic year, the NewLights year, the year of the lease, etc. But this seems like an appropriate time to ruminate on what happened, and what will happen….

Not a bad year! The one before, 2010, was the slowest (read: impossible for me to find time & energy) for NewLights ever, so last year, and a whopping two publications, makes me feel like things are heating back up again. In some ways this work moves glacially slow, but in other ways I feel like I can never keep up. I learned a great deal last year—I’m sure I will always be “figuring this out” for as long as I am making books.

I still have no idea what I’m doing.

But the most important question is, as always: what is NewLights doing?

More books! Definitely this year The Heads by Justin Sirois, and hopefully something by j/j hastain, Divya Victor, and a New Manifesto. More other things! A new (non-delaminated) broadside/poster series called “Words to Live With.” Maybe some short run chapbooks in conjunction with a still-forming reading series here in the Springs. Maybe a little magazine. Definitely a presence at the Codex Fair in February 2013, and it looks like a gallery show, the first for NewLights since 2007, in March/April. Which brings back the question of just which “art world” this work participates in….

And more digital archives of out-or-print books, including redesigned, re-edited, and newly accessible versions of the DIY Books.

That other press is coming along too.

I’m getting nauseous just thinking about all of this. This kind of fun is so unsettling.

Thank you all for reading. Thank you all for giving this a purpose.

FROM THE ARCING AIR

This image is a shot of a broadside by Ugly Duckling Presse, on display as part of a chapbook show, curated by Marina Eckler and Matvei Yankelevich, at the Coburn Gallery at Colorado College. Photo by our new friend Jeanne Liotta.

A valid question: where have I been? I often ask myself that same thing.

There are of course no good answers. I have been away from this space for awhile now, because I am in over my head teaching a class about DIY/small press publishing with Matvei Yankelevich, poet and (one of the) editor(s) of Ugly Duckling Presse. It has been amazing, and as we move into the last week and a half it’s just going to get better. There will be more details about all of that on The Press Blog, eventually.

But the class and the events of the past couple weeks will stretch beyond their casual boundaries. Things are stirring here on the front range. In the next couple of weeks on this blog look out for some more digital editions of out-of-print NewLights titles, in particular the fully realized and downloadable DIY Books.

A good friend who I don’t get to see very often anymore told me about going skydiving, and there was one aspect of the experience that had never occurred to me—the profound quiet of it, of drifting slowly through the empty air. The thought of actually skydiving terrifies me, but there’s something about the idea of that quiet that I can’t let go of. Once I can find the courage to jump everything that NewLights does will emerge from that quiet. It’s always this.

SPACE TO WORK

A couple of years ago a good friend let me borrow a copy of Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), which is about The Museum of Jurassic Technology in LA. I recently bought my own copy, mainly because of the following passage, mainly because I think a great deal about finding or making the necessary space to do the necessary work. The passage in question (p. 59 – 60) talks about Hagop Sandaldjian, a microminiature sculptor from Armenia:

[…] I ended up speaking with the master’s son, Levon, who explained that there was in fact something of a tradition of such microminiature art back in Armenia (he knew of two or three other such instances), although, as far he knew, his father had been the world’s only microminiature sculptor. “He would wait until late at night,” Levon said, “when we kids were in bed and the rumble from the nearby highways had subsided. Then he would hunch over his microscope and time his applications between heartbeats—he was working at such an infinitesimal scale that he could recognize the stirrings of his own pulse in the shudder of the instruments he was using.” […]

That is an excellent description of what it takes to find the necessary space. I often think about, try to imagine that infinite quiet, just a brief interruption in the unstoppable flow of the world.

A PORTRAIT OF FALCONS ON THE FLOOR AS ST. BARTHOLOMEW

Flayed. Get your complete copy here.

A FEW THINGS THAT I WOULD LIKE YOU TO KNOW ABOUT, ABOUT INDEPENDENT PUBLISHING AND BOOK ARTS AND WAR AND WHAT YOU WILL

Texts/essays about independent publishing have been on my mind a great deal lately, probably because I will soon be participating in a class about independent publishing, probably because that’s what I do. The librarian in me wants to archive these things, but this is the best I can do for now. Two texts, one a post by Roxanne Gay on HTMLGiant, the other from Derek White of Calamari Press (brought to my attention via HTMLGiant). These are a bit old now. They are still good, of course, and worth sharing (and archiving):

Roxanne Gay on Tiny Hardcore Press
Derek White on Calamari Press

The fifth anniversary of the bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad just passed, and there has been a lot of activity among the members of the Al-Mutanabbi project, which was recently expanded to include artists’ books. You can read about and see some of the books here. Here is an article in The Huffington Post about the project as a whole. In the article Beau Beausoleil, the driving force and organizer, talks about why he felt it was important to do the project, and why he thinks it is still important. Sometimes it is crucial not to look away.

In other news about the intersection of book arts and war, the Combat Paper Project is trying to raise some money through Kickstarter. The drive is almost over, and they have already reached their goal, but every little bit helps. Here’s the link to the site and the video:




And finally, finally, speaking of war, speaking of the end, speaking of peace, there are only THREE COPIES of Kyle Schlesinger’s What You Will left for sale. And then that’s it & that’s it.

WAKING, CATCHING UP, WAKING

My apologies for the lack of posts lately. The NewLights Press has been very busy, to the point where these silent mornings of writing had to be used for catching up on sleep or for going in to work early. But now a new book is done, the book labeled As-Of-Now Untitled in the last few “Production is Reception” posts, the book made to be an insert in JAB 31. It has a title now: Clerestory. The images above and below are from the binding. 600 copies, our largest edition yet. They should be going out with the new issue by April 1st.

Maybe it’s Daylight Savings Time, or maybe it’s the winter slowly receding, but I feel like this somehow marks a turning point for NewLights. A subtle one, for sure. A turning point that will almost certainly only be perceptible to me. We shall see. Somewhere in here is a new beginning. Maybe because that last book was essentially about new beginnings, the new beginnings given to us all each day. We all have our own ways of marking time.

The tests that I conducted for the printing of Clerestory were also secret tests for the next book, The Heads by Justin Sirois. The tests determined that my idea for the book was not going to work (see above). So it’s back to the beginning on that. Always these new beginnings, but what a great place to be.

And it seems appropriate to leave this morning’s meditation with the message that has been sitting on my desk for a few weeks now, that will soon be added to the wall in front of my desk so that I can see it everyday. It’s from the ILSSA, and it speaks for itself:

[A quick note about the image above: the scan doesn't really do the actual object justice, as that orange you are seeing is actually fluorescent ink on the real thing. These screens have their limits.]

KNOWLEDGE/POWER

Open publication - Free publishing - More artists books

INFORMATION!

PLAN B

Spent the morning working on the PDF for the digital version of The Infernal Method, only to realize when I got to the end that all of the images had been converted to grayscale (for another project). Alas, it looks like re-scanning will be necessary before that goes up on the web. In the meantime, you can’t go wrong with a Hennessy Youngman video, this one is about Damien Hirst:

GOOD YEAR

6:46 AM on a Wednesday morning and it feels like snow outside, and the fact that it’s 2012 is beginning to sink in. That familiar feeling that it’s time to get things together and move ahead. I’m back now, back at home, back at work. What now?

The College Book Art Association conference was wonderful, as always—great people, thoughtful presentations, interesting and fun conversations. I always wish those things weren’t so short.

There are not very many copies of What You Will left. It’s always so elating and so sad to see them go. But a book’s got to live its life....

What now? The next project is an artists’ book insert in the next issue of JAB. The offset/letterpress book mentioned in some earlier posts. The offset portions are done, beautiful, and here in CO in stacks and boxes, waiting patiently. And then after that there is The Heads, a book of poems by Justin Sirois, and an as-of-yet-undetermined book with Divya Victor. And who knows what else. The usual, I suppose. But what that is—who knows what else.

Will 2012 be a good year? I think we can make that happen. It’s the only reasonable thing to do.

HERE & BACK AGAIN

& tomorrow it’s off to the CA, for the College Book Art Association conference. Below is an excerpt from the talk I’ll be giving with Mr. Kyle Schlesinger:

Reading is an experience that unfolds in time—the letters build up into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into a text. That text is at once continuous and fractured. We see it as a line, moving relentlessly from the beginning to the end, but that line is precarious—shot through with cracks, fissures, breaks, white space. The line is an accumulation of fragments. The line is an accumulation of voids. The largest gaps occur in the transition from page to page, through the gutter or around the fore-edge. These are the crucial non-spaces of reading, when the technology of the book rushes up to meet our attention, when our conception of time asserts its artificiality; yet we, as readers, steadfastly ignore it. The lines of text and the blocks of the pages divide and spatialize time—sometimes arbitrarily, always artificially. Artificially because we don’t read like that, we don’t experience books in the way that the things themselves like to imply—in a straight line of perfectly divisible units in strict sequence. The text does not pass by our fixed viewpoint like the frames of a film. We read, we stop reading, we get distracted, we pet the cat, we back up, we start again, we read, we start to fall asleep, it’s a little warm in here, we read, we stop, we read, did you remember to?..., we flip to the end of the chapter to look at an endnote, we read, we stop, a word or phrase reminds us of something, we read, it’s time to eat, we grab a bookmark and wedge it into the space of the gutter, we close the book and now it’s all fore-edge again, now we’re back at the beginning. We walk away. We come back hours later. We walk away. We come back days later. We walk away. We come back years later. The text does not change, but it’s a different book every time we pick it up.

POSTING WILL BE EVEN MORE ERRATIC

for the next week. Hitting the road this morning and heading back to the PA. We'll be back to it (at least for a bit) on the first.

THANK YOU

We will be back to our regular erratic blogramming soon, but first I just wanted to thank everyone for the support, compliments, and kindnesses last week. It was our strongest release-week yet in terms of sales (just about half the edition). But even better than that was all of the communication, with friends both old and new, that surrounded the release. It’s always so enjoyable to be a part of the swirling world once again. Distribution, and the creation of a community through that, is definitely one of the most fun and most important parts of this endeavor.

Here is a nice, thoughtful review of What You Will by Michael Cross, on his blog, The Disinhibitor. Michael is a poet, editor, printer, and publisher from Oakland, CA. & he’s a really smart guy.

& I think we’ll end with a pre-viewing of the next book. The offset pages came in the mail last week:

"SPEAK OF THIS TO NO ONE"

http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/VIGILANCE/

DON’T DETERMINE ON ME

The following excerpt is from the article “The State of the Book: A Conversation,” by Johanna Drucker and Buzz Spector, which is in the printed Printeresting edition of The California Printmaker (the journal of The California Society of Printmakers), p. 20. [Ed. Note: Totally worth buying and reading and owning.] This particular part is Johanna Drucker:

But as we shift towards the multi-platform possibilities that the current media environment offers, what changes will it make to our work? I find it very useful to use all media for their distinct capacities—aesthetic, production, distribution, affordability, etc.—but know […] that media only offer opportunity, they don’t determine anything. As I’ve said many times, the technical ability to produce avant-garde typography (i.e. Futurist and Dada compositions) was present in Gutenberg’s shop. The cultural disposition towards such innovation did not exist. Such work could not be conceived. Sure, shaped poetry has a long history, into antiquity, and all written language makes use of graphic affordances, but mixed font, diagonal, radically cut-up typographic work has as much to do with the bombardment of the senses in urban spaces by polyglot and multi-modal communications in verbal forms (radio, posters, newspapers, journals, advertising, film) as with technical innovation. [emphasis added]

I think that the point that Drucker is trying to make here is an important one: that any media in and of itself has no “natural” state, no “natural” progression that the work in that media inevitably follows. “Media only offer opportunity” to human and institutional agents. This is also the whole point of The Nature of the Book, by Adrian Johns, which talks about how everything we take for granted about books & print was not always so, and were constructed over time, differently in different places, through an extraordinarily complex set of conversations, arguments, laws, and practices. To cite a modern example, the Internet is not inherently and naturally “democratic,” and could/can/is be used for insidious and/or overt social control—all in the name of justice, of course.

What does this mean for us, now, in the opening stages of a possible shift from print to electronic text? It means that we shouldn’t let corporate/media/money interests tell us what the future is—it means that we must share in the active shaping of it. Which is why this is such an exciting time to be doing all of this writing, publishing, making, designing, shaping, becoming, occupying, sharing, talking…

AFTER MATH

It’s always a strange thing to finish a large project. Suddenly an absence, and not-knowing creeps back in, nestles under the covers. But there is rest. Hopefully today What You Will will arrive in Austin, and I can hear what the author thinks. We’ll see.

Ordinarily we would release the book as soon as it’s finished. With this one we’re waiting a bit, mostly because of Thanksgiving. (The release will be Monday, Nov. 28.) Which is good, because it will give us more time to coordinate the release and promotion. And promotion is something that NewLights need to work on, as noted in some earlier posts. And also distribution logistics—I’m still not happy with how shipping options are set up with our PayPal buttons. But there is time to work all of that out, and it’s not necessarily interesting to anyone but me.

This morning I was thinking about a “book trailer,” which is something that I’ve seen other small presses doing, for at least a couple of years (maybe more?) now. Usually they’re videos. We’re not really set up for video production, so maybe if we do a trailer it will be in digital book form, images and text from the finished piece, plus images and text from the process of making it.

But perhaps the most important question at this point is, “Now what?” Not in the sense of what book is coming next, because the publishing schedule is set for at least the next year, but in terms of what NewLights can be/do. Where do we take things from here? That question, of course, is always there, but sometimes it is repressed by a series of tasks-at-hand, only to come rushing back in every quiet moment, hanging, a filter through which all of our breath gathers, a window through which all of this sunlight passes. A new day shivers. It is winter, the air around us is cold. And so warmth blooms in action.

EVERY DAY

OCCUPY the places and channels of power. The spaces in which power is exercised. The means by which we are subjected to their objects. OCCUPY the role of producer. TAKE IT BACK and show the world that we have been producing all along. OCCUPY the channels of meaning and knowledge. DISTRIBUTE everything you have ever loved and could love. TAKE CONTROL of what you consume, BREAK IT APART and show the shattered surface to the rest of the world. KEEP LOOKING for more cracks in everything and OCCUPY them. TAKE CONTROL of every possible media, show us what it is, what it can carry. DO NOT STOP until we can see that we DO NOT UNDERSTAND IT ANYMORE. There will probably never be any rest. GIVE IT ALL AWAY. The sunlight is the only model. OCCUPY your life in such a way that it is continually BURSTING, overfull. TEAR OFF THE TOP OF YOUR SKULL and LET YOUR MIND TOUCH SPACE & HISTORY. There is no such thing as GENIUS. There is no such thing as BOREDOM. IT IS ALL IN YOUR MIND. OCCUPY your language and the way that it MOVES IN THE WORLD. BURN AWAY the hardened, dried, blackened EXOSKELETON OF YOUR SOUL. It does not belong to you.

LOOK HARD.
LOOK AGAIN.
PAY ATTENTION.
LAUGH HARD.
WORK HARD.
WORK LATE.
SLEEP WELL.

BE GENEROUS

BE KIND.
LOVE FIERCELY.
OCCUPY EVERYDAY.