[…] 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
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.
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 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.
[…] 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.
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.” […]
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Figure 11.09.04 Page spread of Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook, Vol. 8, 1965, 80-1.
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[…] 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.
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.
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.
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. […]
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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….
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:
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 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!
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.
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….
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]
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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]
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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]
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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
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.
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. […]
A strange excerpt from a new piece in and on process:
Here, like this, now.
In that image that you once had. In that image that you once had swallowed. Somewhere the world grows. Our objects fall from our hands. We swallow things, we drop things, thus they mean. The constructed book-objects of the world are the spaces that hold it together. Books are emptiness, not form. They are channels, moving time and moving through time. Impossible places. Shabby apartments in which we blink slowly with tremendous headaches. All the lights are on. Terrible places to live, terrible places to sleep, the spaces in which we speak and write. In the dark all of these ghosts of the Book cough at once. One thousand hands with one thousand fingers. No way to stop. It is under these lights that we labor.
There are those that would preserve the book forever in the silently singing crypt of authority and stability. And there are those would establish a new authority by burning the books in the pulsing tides of digital technology. But the Book will not rest and it will not die. The Book is the object that we cherish and the metaphor that guides the construction of its technological rivals. The Book is continuously between, it draws the past up to the present and flows out into the future. It is our job to be sure that no force manages to close the Book. Now is perhaps the best time yet to be making books, to be engaged with books, because their future, and the future of the culture at large, is so uncertain. There is more at stake here then just the preservations of traditions and/or the development of new technologies. What is at stake is the flow of information, the flow of power, and the construction of new, radical languages of objects, whatever objects, that we are engaged in, from which we constitute our images of ourselves and of others.
It’s a collection of artists’ versions of the “black page” of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, an ur-artists’ book and/or postmodern text, however one wants to see it (though elements like the black page help to make the case for “artists’ book," but is it even worth worrying about?).
It’s a pretty good example of variations on a theme, and of some hand-mechanical processes. Many of the descriptions are underwhelming, but there are some interesting ones as well.
I don’t know if I’ve said this before. I’ve been preoccupied with economics lately, with trying to make this thing go, however slowly. Part of that plan has been a move toward placing some of the larger books with libraries around the country. And that is part of it, an important part, and I think that maybe public collections are the best place for the unique books. But I will do my best to archive them digitally and make those archives as widely available as possible (anyone want to host that party?). And I will make, make a concerted effort to make sure that I am always making NewLights books that you can make your own for $20 or less. From here to the end. There are several on-deck right now.
Figure 10.09.02 The NewLights Press Inspection Slip, shown front and back. Another free gift with every purchase.
Another cancerous extension of the Bureaucracy of One: the NewLights Press Inspection Slips. They are digitally printed forms that are cut down by hand and rubber stamped on the back. Before a book is packaged for shipping the slips are filled out and put inside the pages of the books, to be discovered by the owner/reader. The slips are a kind of social hand-mechanics, bringing that classic human-as-machine element back into these anonymous transactions.
The NewLights Press is an independent publisher of experimental writing and artists’ books, concentrating on where the two can and do overlap. Use the links in the sidebar to view and/or purchase any publications.
Questions, comments?
Contact Aaron Cohick at: newlightspressATgmailDOTcom.
The NewLights Press is not accepting unsolicited submissions for books at this time. We are however, accepting submissions for REAEDR: a magazine of one word poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. (click here for more info)
Figure 12.09.04
Figure 12.09.05
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