Mimeo as Hard Drive

There has been much speculation as to what exactly the C in C:  A Journal of Poetry refers to:  Columbia University, Censored Review, The Comedian as the Letter C, etc, etc.  What is wonderful about Berrigan's title is that it keeps accruing associations decades after its initial publication.  Reading Mechanisms:  New Media and the Forensic Imagination, I associate the title with the hard drive on a personal computer.  The hard copy as hard drive.

Kirschenbaum thrusts the storage device into a spotlight that has been bogarted by the computer screen.  Much of Mimeo Mimeo and RealityStudio highlight little magazine cover art and the isolated page thus promoting this screen ideology.  Interestingly this is largely due to storage constraints.  Yet the little magazine is first and foremost a storage technology.  The focus is not the individual page but the totality of its contents.  Thus the little magazine is not just a single screenshot or an isolated moment in space and time but a library, museum, or archive of poems, stories, essays, paintings, photographs documenting a multitude of spaces and times, which in turn alter depending on when, where and how they are read.

Kirschenbaum also makes the point that digital material is commonly thought of as ephemeral and unstable, yet is in fact just the opposite.  The same could be said of the publications of the Mimeo Revolution.  A dead technology that produced material that threatened to crossover into the immaterial, yet the publications of the Mimeograph Revolution persist despite their ephemeral nature and their exceedingly small print runs.

JB 

Subscribe Now!!!

JB

Old Media and New

I am currently reading Matthew Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms:  New Media and the Forensic Imagination.  A fascinating book that draws on the work of Jerome McGann in Black Riders and elsewhere and applies it to new media and electronic writing.

Jason Davis sent me this image from Matt Schulman's Do It!, a mimeo published out of Cleveland in 1967.  I take it Schulman moved to Cleveland in that years as issues one and two were published out of Omaha.  I do not know much about Do It! at all.  It did not make the cut in Christopher Harter's index.  Jason has a the first two issues listed on his da levy checklist.

The poem above is an example of computer generated poetry from Do It!, in this case an IBM computer was programmed to produce a poem given a bank of words and a set structure, quatrains of 7-7-7-3.

I was struck that the poem came out of Philadelpha as the other computer generated poems I have seen in a little magazine were in Insect Trust Gazette, which was headquartered in Philadelphia in 1964 and 1965.  The computer poems were done by Lenny Belasco under the anagram Conral A. Belano.  This poem appears in the context of concrete and visual poetry along with proto-Language poetry such as Clark Coolidge's The Bond Sonnets.

Here is an early interview I did with Jed Irwin of Insect Trust Gazette for some background on that mag.  See http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/bunker-interviews/jed-irwin-on-the-insect-trust-gazette/

I would appreciate similar information on Do It! if anybody has it.

I wonder if there was a computer poetry scene of some type in Philly at the time.  Maybe somebody can shed some light on that as well.

JB

This just in:

Dear Friends,

The great West Coast poet and publisher Kevin Opstedal (Gas Magazine, Surf Zombie, Blue Press, etc.) is in a pretty major financial pickle right now and needs our help. Please go to www.bluepressbooks.com, buy as many of the amazing chapbooks (everyone from Jim Carroll to Joanne Kyger, Bill Berkson, et. al.) that you can, and consider making an additional donation by clicking the DONATE link at the top of the page. You can also mail any unwanted books to him that he can sell online to 126 Washburn Avenue, Santa Cruz CA, 95060. We'd like to help him raise $4,000 to keep himself and the press afloat after a really grueling stint of unemployment during which he burned through his entire savings, retirement and many emergency grants. Kevin has published many of the greats, but he also gave many young poets, myself included, their starts. PLEASE SHARE THIS EVENT WIDELY. 


Thanks! 


Noel Black

THIS IS IT

We've exhausted our stash of issues 1, 2, 3, & 6. The few copies that remain are at Small Press Distribution. Issues 4 and 5 can be ordered direct from Mimeo Mimeo or SPD while supplies last. Once those are gone, they're gone forever. Meanwhile, we're busy proofing the next issue, focused on the poetry, collages, and publishing activity of Lewis Warsh. Weighing in at 200 pages, this will be the biggest issue to date. More in a bit. KS

And This Is How You Repay Me?

In 1963, Auerhahn printed Diane Di Prima's The New Handbook of Heaven.  Haselwood got burned on the printing costs, and then further burned when Di Prima bootlegged the book on her own Poets Press imprint.  Nice.

There were a 1000 copies of the Auerhahn soft cover and those are floating about online, but Haselwood also had Schuberth bookbindery do a hardcover edition of 30 copies on Arches (see above) and these copies are tough as hell to get a hold of.

JB

Serious Play in the Arcades

One of the theoretical bases for Brad Pitt’s Dog is the philosophy and artistic practice of the Situationists.  Johan peppers his text with a sprinkle of theory to spice things up as if Johan’s hot and salty writing style did not provide enough flavor.  Johan favors Asger Jorn and Raoul Vaneigem to Guy Debord.  I would suspect that Johan sees Debord as the Brian Jones of the Situationists.  Undoubtedly, a talented, even brilliant thinker whose thought was ultimately made fuzzy and blunted by alcohol abuse. Johan privileges Jorn and Vaneigem because of their artistic and poetic sensibilities as much as any philosophical chops.  The philosophy of everyday life is powerful stuff for Johan but the fact that Vaneigem’s slogans appeared frequently on the walls of Paris blurring the lines between graffiti, poetry, advertising, and philosophy does not hurt either.  Johan is hip to such things as his book on the visual aspects of 1968 Paris shows.  See http://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Is-Street-Visual-Uprising/dp/0956192831. 

Yet Beauty Is in the Street:  A Visual Record of the May ’68 Paris Uprising suggests another, and, ultimately I think more thought provoking, philosophical influence:  Walter Benjamin.  Nowhere is Benjamin mentioned within the pages of Brad Pitt’s Dog but his archival practice infuses and drives the entire book, not detournment or derive.  What makes Johan’s various endeavors interesting is the spirit of the Arcades Project not The Theory of the Spectacle.  Let’s set aside Benjamin on photography or art in the age of mechanical reproduction, which also threads throughout Brad Pitt’s Dog, and focus on the building of archives and collections to preserve lost, forgotten or dying subcultures.  This is Johan’s bread and butter; it is the collecting impulse behind his writing that makes his literary licks so tasty.

So why has the writing of Benjamin been scrubbed of the wall in Brad Pitt’s Dog.  I think it gets back to Johan viewing himself as fannish over sercon.  As I mentioned before, Johan is pure sercon, but that it not as cool, fun, or irresponsible as being fannish.  It is pure good times riffing on how great your latest garage rock find sounds; it is hard work finding out the history of these forgotten bands and labels.  To his credit, Johan can do both equally well.  I would suggest that a work like The Velvet Underground and New York Art sounds better than Brad Pitt’s Dog.  As it should, it is a more ambitious and important work.  Furthermore, the philosophy of the fannish Situationists is much more punk rock than that of the sercon and classical Benjamin.  Benjamin can make even the taking of hashish an intellectual exercise.  Debord on alcohol is more of derangement of the senses.  Yet Debord’s philosophical take on alcohol cannot be separated from his prodigious intake of the sauce.  In this case, putting philosophy into practice worked against Debord and, when you get right down to it, turns Johan off.

Johan might talk about taking it to the streets, but it his desire to storm the library, the archive, the museum and the gallery and infect them with the virus of various subcultures (punk, garage, mimeo revolution, outsiders and madmen, commune and alternative living) that really gets his motor running and makes him truly wild.

JB

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

As I mentioned before, Johan Kugelberg is conflicted.  Take his distinction between fannish and sercon.  “Fannish means by and about fans and fandom.  Sercon means Serious and Constructive.”  As Johan notes in another essay, “It will come as no surprise that I vastly prefer the [fannish].”   I am not sure this holds up to scrutiny.  No doubt, Johan comes across as fannish in Brad Pitt’s Dog, but is that really who he is and where his strengths lie?  Surely it is more punk rock, more garage fuzz to be a fannish.  It is no doubt cooler in some respects due to its ironic stance.  The fan does not take his music, art, literature seriously.  Unfortunately Johan does.  And thank god he does, because Johan the Sercon is creating an incredible body of work that demands to be noticed.  Brad Pitt’s Dog is fun and a great read.  Beach reading for hipsters, but his books on the Velvet Underground and the Bronx hip-hop scene are major historical documents.  I would argue that it is in these books that Johan’s heart and soul really lie.  It is all well and good that Johan has a kick-ass garage rock 45 collection.  This stuff is great to throw on at dinner parties as guests enjoy their soft pretzels but what you can really sink your teeth into are the collections he has placed at Cornell University.  To get hip-hop culture into the university is a major accomplishment and majorly important.  See http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/hiphop/  To link the Velvet Underground to the New York art scene through contemporary material objects and documents and then to narrate that link in the form of a scholarly monograph is important.  See http://www.rizzoliusa.com/book.php?isbn=9780847830848  Johan has a hard on for the institutionalization of the culture of the margins.  Now I am not going to lie, I myself am conflicted about such a move.  I would suggest that Johan actually restricts access to his Bronx material by placing it at Cornell.  Sure, grad students can get into the rare book room and sample the samples but is that the best use of the material.  Is that really in the spirit of open source?   I am not even going to touch the economics of institutional placement for the collectible material, which again I am conflicted about.  Similarly, I am not so sure the gallery system is a great alternative either.  Johan has a love/hate relationship with online archives like YouTube, but maybe it is in disseminating his collections on the Net, by himself, on his own terms, DIY style that might be the most true to the material and the most true to what he proclaims as his fannish nature.  This is something to think about and I am sure Johan is thinking about it.  The bottom line is that Johan proclaims in Brad Pitt’s Dog that he is not a Sercon.  He protests too much.  I would not take him seriously.

JB

From a Secret Location to the White Cube

I am going to post some thoughts over the next few days in connection with my reading of Johan Kugelberg's Brad Pitt's Dog.  http://store.boo-hooray.com/product/brad-pitt-s-dog-by-johan-kugelberg.  Consider these posts as some type of review.

Brion Gysin famously said, "Writing is fifty years behind painting."  Well, paradoxically the mimeo revolution is in some respects years behind vinyl records, science fiction, and comic books.  Case in point, digital documentation.  YouTube is just one of the many topics Kugelberg takes on in his book. Go to YouTube and you can find the most obscure garage classic from the 1960s in a variety of sets and settings.  This is to say nothing of all the videos of comic book, science fiction, or vinyl collectors obsessively documenting their collections and finds.

The digital documentation of mimeo revolution items and collections pales in comparision to these other fanatically exhibitionist collecting ecosystems.  I just do not get why, since the mimeo revolution in its prime, as it was cooking, was intimately connected and dependent on the obsessions of the collector's market.  Peace Eye and Fuck You, a magazine of the arts prove this.  The relationship of a host of writers, like Ted Berrigan, with rare bookstores, like Gotham Book Mart proves this.  The role of the Phoenix Book Store, Better Books, Eighth Street Books, and Indica Books prove this.  David Meltzer, Kenneth Rexroth as booksellers prove this.  The selling of mimeo revolution archives and correspondence to fund further publication proves this.  The mimeo revolution limited edition phenomenon proves this.  Gregory Corso proves this.

Kugelberg provides one of the few places to get a good look at the mimeo revolution on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5nyjgEIcu8  .

The impulse to post on YouTube for Kugelberg comes directly from his impulses as a vinyl collector.  This video should be aggressive and punk rock.  Yet Kugelberg is conflicted.  His love of vinyl conflicts with his love of paper.  Note the soundtrack to the video.  This music is totally inappropriate to the material, but Kugelberg reveres print, puts it on a pedestal.  His Baron Corvo collection and how he acquired it are a case in point.  This is courtly love and an arranged marriage.  Punk and garage rock make Kugelberg want to fuck.  He met them slumming in the bargain bids.  That is part of the attraction.  Corvo and book collecting are loves that dare not speak their name.  This love reveals him as an aristocrat, even if one on shaky ground like Corvo.  Yet Kugelberg cannot help talking about it at least once.  That is the vinyl collector in him.

There is a conservatism, a reserve about book collectors (including Kugelberg the book collector), that does not exist with comics, vinyl and science fiction.  As far as I know, there is not an aggressive and prolific fanzine culture around book collecting.  Definitely not one with attitude and gossip.  Mimeo Mimeo is anomaly, if a tweedy one. This is strange since the mimeograph was one of the key technologies for the development of fanzines. Kugelberg rightly points out that fanzine culture and history are ripe for exploration and that fanzines are a primary source for literary and music history.  Most of the magazines associated with book collecting (usually in a glossy, mainstream mag format) stress the market, investment or historical angles.  Book collecting as part of a portfolio, not as a way of life, an worldview, an obsession or a disease.

Are bookseller's catalogs going in this direction? Catalogs with editorial comment and design. Biblioctopus has always done this. Division Leap just made a statement in design.  Where are the magazines on books and book collecting with safety pins for bindings and ripped covers.

JB

Bookselling as Performance Art

If Division Leap demonstrates the rare book catalog as art object, Jon Beacham practices book dealing as performance art. Hermitage captured the idea of the bookstore as alternative art space. True, Hermitage did not last long and it was, on that level, a bad business model, but I do not think that was really the point. Hermitage was an experiment, a performance by Jon to explore issues related to and intersecting art and commerce. Looking at his catalogs, he had great material and a fanastic eye. His shows on Auerhahn, Zephryus Images, and da levy still speak to me today. I am just catching up as my Auerhahn posts prove.

Maybe I am painting a pretty picture but I see Jon selling the works of the Beats, New York School, and other rebels and outsiders on the street as another form of performance art. Buying Bob Kaufman's Abominist Manifesto on the street for example. Book selling as a form of busking. It is a tough way to make a living, but it fits in with Jon's film screenings, his job printing and his other curatorial and art practices.

Taking a look at the pieces above, they really speak to me. They express the idea of art as a way of life. They also say Just Buy a Fucking Book.

JB

The Book Catalog as Art Object

I just got back from the New York Book Fair, an event which is part library, part bazaar, part archive, part museum, part gala, part prom. It is also a business convention. Book dealing is a business. You can talk about the art of bookselling. The art of the deal. The art of opening and establishing markets. The art of making relationships. The art of finding material. In a similar vein, the economics of the art market is well documented on these points. I increasingly find this aspect of book collecting and book dealing fascinating.

Yet as Division Leap shows there are other ways to look at the art of book selling. For example as a work of art. Adam and Kate's latest catalog is full of artist's magazines, little mags, ephemera from art scenes (like stills and flyers). Yet the catalog itself is that which it sells. With its sandpaper cover (Jorn, Debord, Situationists), its supplemental Warhol cover (Fuck You, C) and limited edition, the catalog is a piece of art. This idea draws on conceptual art exhibition catalogs which were works of art in themselves, and I see Ed Sanders' book catalogs as another inspiration.

What makes this catalog even more interesting besides the format is that as Olson and Creeley dictate: Form is never more than an extension of content. The form and format of the catalog provide a context for and enhance the items Kate and Adam are selling. The items in the catalog tie together as in-your-face, confrontational, abrasive, rough-around-the-edges.

I also see this catalog as a de facto issue of Division Leap, the magazine. Both the magazine and the catalog creatively present concepts related to archiving, cataloging, institutionalizing, filing, gathering, assembling etc.

Did I mention that the items in the catalog are kick ass as well? Kate and Adam back up the catalog by actually showcasing items you want to buy. They blow your mind, open your eyes, and hit you in the wallet. That is the core of the business of bookselling.

Place your copy of Division Leap 13 in your bookself next to your more blue blood book catalogs. It will tear them just another asshole.

Get a copy if you can, if not http://www.divisionleap.com/akd52/images/pdfs/catalog13.pdf

JB

Leaping Back Into Scanning

I just got a new computer, which was incompatible with my old scanner. That little snafu is cleared up and the scanner is up and running. I have been meaning to provide some images from Kate Schaefer and Adam Davis's latest magazine offering: Divison Leap #3.

It would fit right in within the pages of Aaron's In Number's or Gwen Allen's book on artist magazines as alternative space. Go back to Dada and Futurism up through Berman (heavy on the Berman) and into conceptual and minimalist mags. As their catalog on Art Terrorism demonstrates, Kate and Adam are also know the song and dance of punk zines as well. They are not students of the history of the little magazine; they are teaching lessons and making their own history as well.

Besides the folder structure which holds the magazine together physically but also with its association to placement in archives, library, and file cabinets, the theme of the mag is simply the concept of place. The resulting artists take that theme and run with it to their own wide open fields of the imagination and/or dark, obsessional corners and closets. Maps, postcards, images of transportation. For a publication, with no staples or sewn wrappers, there are numerous threads that run through the entire project and hold together quite nicely.

Kate and Adam are on a fanastic run right now (More on their latest catalog soon). I can not wait to see what they come up with next.

JB

Business as Usual

The e-book was supposed to flood the market with affordable, accessable texts for everyone. Not so fast. New technology does not mean new business practices particularly when the same old players are behind the controls. Corporate publishing is corporate publishing whether you settle down with the traditional codex or an iPad. The apple does not fall too far from the tree.

http://marketday.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/11/11140844-us-says-apple-publishers-conspired-to-fix-prices?ocid=ansmsnbc11

JB

Sign of the Apocalypse??

Even the most pious are finding religion.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47023234/

JB

"A yellow book by a diabolical devout"

It has become a commonplace that Edward Marshall is a forgotten poet. Canonized in Don Allen's New American Poetry anthology with the printing of the single longest poem included, "Leave the Word Alone," which was earlier published in Black Mountain Review, Marshall was then cast out in The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised). Marshall has generally been left alone, fading out of view since the heady days of the 1960 anthology, and now remembered primarily because the poet and his work have slipped out of memory.

His Nowhere Man status may be because he was seemingly everywhere. At the time of his inclusion in the Allen anthology, Marshall had ties with the Boston Renaissance, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats (Ginsberg stated he relied on "Leave the Word Alone" as a source for the structure of "Kaddish") the New York scene, and Black Mountain. He is included in the catch-all fifth category in the anthology with those poets of "no geographical defintion." One of the easiest ways to get yourself lost in the shuffle is to be tough to label and pin down. Marshall is a mercurial poet in that sense.

Hellan Hellan, Marshall's first slim book of nine poems, links Marshall with yet another geographical hotspot: Kansas. Robert Ronnie Branaman did the cover art. The poem on the Auerhahn flyer does not appear in the collection, so the flyer is a separate publication as well as an announcement.

A must for Edward Marshall collectors. There is not much to collect. Marshall appeared sporadically in periodicals: Black Mountain Review, Measure, Yugen, and The Great Society. Seven poems appeared in Mulch in 1971, which was his last appearence in print according to George Butterick's biography of Marshall in 1983. Marshall read with Michael Rumaker at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's in 1975. Jargon 31 includes Marshall in a collection of 14 poets and 1 artist from 1958.

A second book of poems, Transit Glory, appeared in 1967 from Carp & Whitefish. This was a short-lived printing venture by Irving Rosenthal, who edited Buroughs in Chicago Review and wrote Sheeper. The only other book of the Press is Philip Whalen's Invention of the Letter. Here is Rosenthal: "The Marshall book was a fancy little contraption with a drawstring that pulled the pages up from a pocket. It was to sell for a dollar, and I was hoping to distribute fifty or a hundred copies to each of the half-dozen or so bookstores in New York City that specialized in modern poetry. As I was planning to move to San Francisco, either temporarily or permanently, I was eager to unload as many books as possible in the East before I left. But the first (supposedly hip) bookstore I approached placed so miniscule an order, that I resolved to sell the book on the streets myself, and bought a two-dollar City of New York Peddler's License. But I was too busy collating and binding the Whalen book to sell the Marshall book." Marshall's second book has completed disappeared. No copies on Abebooks. The usual suspects like Buffalo, of course have a copy. Charles Olson possessed a copy in his library (Maud calls it Transit Gloria). Olson greatly admired "Leave the Word Alone," particularly its form. The Pequod Press reissued "Leave the Word Alone" in 1979, with an introduction by Ginsberg.

Hellan, Hellan is a good starter for an Auerhahn collection. Mainly because it is one of the cheapest of the entire Press, but again, like Marshall, Hellan Hellan is a bit out of place. The book has that early Auerhahn feel, but Branaman's comix cover art is a bit ahead of its time. To my mind, that alone makes the book visually interesting but it is not a defining or classic Auerhahn design, maybe in part because Branaman's infernos were printed in the purgatory marking the transition from the McIlroy to the Hoyem period of the Press.

Marshall is a religious poet, a man of "psychoreligious fevor," as described by Butterick. Butterick continues on "Leave the Word Alone, "In structure and style, the poem itself is like preaching on Boston Commons." Marshall from that poem: "Leave the Bible alone it is dangerous."

JB

Death and the Fetish

Further proof of the fetish generated by the death of print:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/05/encyclopaedia-britannica-huge-increase-sales_n_1406639.html

JB

The Power of Print

In the last two days, I have gotten several emails alerting me to an article in the New York Times about the David Kammerer murder by Lucien Carr. All these alerts were sent via email with links to the internet version of the article in the New York Times.

This is all well and good. But there is something to be said about the physical newspaper. Now I am not going to lie, I only read the newspaper when somebody leaves it behind on the MARC train or on the Metro. It turns out that tonight the Lucien Carr article was on the train. And thank godness, as it was an experience to read this edition of the paper.

The Friday April 6, 2012 edition of the Weekend Arts - Fine Arts and Leisure section features a great article on Rembrant, which mentions his mistress Hendrickje Stoffels. So we constrast Rembrandt's "whore" with the dead wife of an Anne Tyler novel, The Beginner's Goodbye. To say nothing of Joan Vollmer, the murdered wife of William Burroughs, lurking behind the Lucien Carr story. And then let's go to the bottom of the page, with the ad for the In the Company of Animals exhibit at the Morgan Library. The featured painting is Jacob Hoefnagel's Orpheus Charming the Animals. We descend to the underworld with Orpheus and Eurydice amongst a page depicting a number of other doomed relationships.

And then there is the kicker. In the small print, it is revealed that the Hoefnagel painting was donated to the Morgan by Sunny Crawford von Bulow in 1978. Two years later Sunny would lapse into a coma and remain so for 28 years. The resulting murder trial involving her husband Claus would captivate the nation and Hollywood.

This is the power of the printed newspaper. All the emailed links would never generate all the connections and associations made possible by the physical newspaper. What a vibrant entity. This was a newpaper left behind and forgetten in a MARC train. This is a newspaper declared dead or dying by pundits everywhere. There is life in the old girl yet. Unlike Orpheus, to give the newspaper another look is not a bad thing.

JB

Collecting the Future

I wonder if there are people out there collecting the history of the e-book. It would be a fascinating collection that would be part library and part technological museum. You would have to be not only a bibliophile but a technophile. The collection would contain any number of works as well as reading devices, floppy disks, early computer models and other gadgets.

William Gibson's Agrippa, A Book of the Dead, would be in the collection. It might be the centerpiece of the collection. I guess it is not properly the Gutenberg Bible of e-books but it may be its First Folio. An amphibian in many ways. E-book as artist's book. The main hook was that the floppy disk erased itself if you read it and the entire piece was designed to disappear or give that impression. Interestingly, Carl Weissner intended this to happen with Klacto #3. When he created it he was sure the ink would disappear in 20 years or so. He was actually depressed that copies persisted over time. The wikipedia page on Agrippa looks pretty good:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrippa_(a_book_of_the_dead)

Here are a bunch of images:

http://www.antonraubenweiss.com/gibson/gallery/agrippa/index.html

Deluxe copies were $2000 when the "book" came out and it is a bit of a mystery how many copies exist. No copies are on Abebooks. They may be impossible to get a hold of. I admit I do not know much on the topic, but it seems to me that at some point in the future there will be an amphibian book dealer who will sell books as a technology and the early technologies of the digital age associated with e-books and the like. I am not aware of such a dealer currently in the ABAA universe. This dealer would exhibit at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair and the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Am I wrong? Please tell me if I am.

JB

If I Win the Lottery...

We all have that conversation, if I won the lottery, I would . . . Well I would become a full time book collector but what I would collect would change a bit. I am hearing that the archiving and collecting of digital archives are a bit of a nightmare. All those author hard drives and flash drives of email are proving difficult for institutions to maintain. Some libraries have stopped taking in hard drives. I heard one author's digital archive arrived with great emails and files but also a set of viruses. You know how tough it is to get rid of a 1993 computer virus?

Acquiring, maintaining, making available and protecting a digital archive is a full time job. Maybe private collectors can play a role in this, but maybe this is a role that a corporation, like Google, Apple or Microsoft, can play. It is early in the history of collecting digital archives but there are signs that the traditional libraries and institutions will not have the resources or inclination to do it.

With $250 million in lottery winnings I could do my part. Yet I have a suspicion that it would lead to disaster. I have visions of me frantically creating jerry-rigged machines like those out of Blade Runner in a desperate attempt to read and access thirty year old electronic data like William Gibson's emails to Bruce Sterling or something. I would be like something out of a cyberpunk novel with me spiraling into madness in a room like outfitted like a set of Terry Gilliam's Brazil printing endless reams of paper in hopeless bid to preserve my Library of Alexandria from vanishing into the ether in a worthless pile of malfunctioning hard drives.

Kind of glad I did not win the lottery.

JB

Brother Antoninus Reading

From William Everson: The Life of Brother Antoninus.

None of these performances was ever quite the same, though all followed a similar pattern. Antoninus titled his reading/talk "Poetry and the Life of the Spirit" because, as he wrote one program director in 1961, "although I do read poems the discourse between the poems is usually not about the poetry but about the general problems of the spiritual and moral life as all men confront it, related to as wide an audience level as I can make it to avoid literary aestheticism on the one hand or religious sectarianism on the other." He would begin with "A Canticle to the Waterbirds," then "start free associations, delving down into the roots of the mind for spontaneous correlations, groping out into unexplored areas, trying to find the creative areas within myself, probe the unknown, find new leaders and terminals, cross-references, intuitions, smokey conjectures, etc. To risk. To suffer exposure, find the cross, the moment of agonized realization. And in the end, to be." And it was primarily for this reason, that these performances were as much intense excursions into the dark well of his pysche, that the poet was forced to allow at least a few days, if not a full week, between each event.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=860&dat=19610524&id=Km5OAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TUsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6626,5150855

Thanks to Ted Dunn.

JB

Wait There Is More

This is from Dave Haselwood Books circa 1966, limited for sure at around 100 copies. I am going to go out on a limb and say this is a tough one. No copies on Abebooks right now. From what I can gather this is a companion piece to Jonathan Williams's Paean To Dvorak, Deemer & McClure, which again is another toughie to get.

This isn't really to my taste but I have to admit that I like the colors. I might have to qualify my initial take that collecting Auerhahn press is a bargain. That may be true for early Auerhahn titles but the later Haselwood stuff shades into book art and it just plain rare to boot. In my opinion the expense is worth it and the challenge of finding the material makes it worthwhile.

JB

GEORGE SCHNEEMAN SITE

Thanks to Harris Schiff for directing our attention to an online gallery of work by George Scneeman in multiple genres: http://www.cyberpoems.com/Babbo/

--KS

In Search of Brand-Name Nostalgia

In his book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control, Ted Striphas discusses the effects bar coding has on the job of an Amazon "picker":

"Still, there's a potentially more pernicious side to Amazon.com's use of the ISBN and Bookland EAN coding schemes. Not only do they allow the company to coordinate complex operations inside its order-fulfillment centers but they empower management to monitor worker productivity to an astonishing degree. Its implementation of these everday - often unnoticed - commodity codes has resulted in a workplace increasingly suspicious of and hostile to living labor."

This got me thinking about the popularity of a show like American Pickers. Part of the appeal of Mike and Frank is that they are portrayed as self-employed free agents who eschew the Interstates for the "backroads" of America searching for "rusty gold." The real joy of their job comes when they are "freestyling" and left to make it or break it on their own instincts. Their deals are made with haggling and a handshake, not a contractual agreement. They deal not in identically packaged products but instead those items that "pop" and "speak" to them. An item with a unique story or history. A piece of industrial folk art for example.

Of course this is all bullshit. Mike and Frank work for a huge media corporation. They rely on GPS surviellance and multi-media networking in order to locate "honey holes." There are reams of waivers and other paperwork signed off camera. To say nothing of the fact that they are plucking the low-hanging fruit of a number of dead or dying industries and picking clean the corpse of the labor of those industries.

Yet it is the illusion of freestyling and the nostalgia for dead industry that draw in eyeballs, stimulate renewed interest in the consumption of repackaged and recycled brand names, and sell advertising time. This is the aura in the digital age of information and the mass media.

JB

Borges's Reward, or What Makes a Rewarding Reading Experience

What was Borges’s reward in English for his literary efforts? Some writers consider a Collected Works the summation of their careers. Allen Ginsberg felt this way. In fact, his desire for a proper Collected drove him away from a lifetime publishing relationship with City Lights into the loving arms of Harper & Row. A lifetime of writing stories like The Bribe bought him the honor of a Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley, published with much fanfare, publicity, and acclaim. The book was a national bestseller.

In a cover blurb, Ilan Stavans writes, “For decades, his fiction in English was less a unity than a multiplicity, it was fragmented and dispersed, translated by one too many hands, anarchically anthologized. Andrew Hurley’s effort to render it in a single voice and volume is nothing short of heroic. This is reason to rejoice.” Harold Bloom seconds this assessment, noting “a particular satisfaction in having all of the stories in one volume.”

This may be true on one level, but it also seems to be true that it is with the Viking Collected that the spirit of Borges gets lost in the labyrinths of the Piggly-Wiggly. The Collected Fictions is “a black-letter Wyclif” and I find myself yearning of The Book of Sand, maddening as that volume proves to be. Does not the essence of Borges’s fictions lie in multiplicity not unity, in fragmentation and dispersal, in the anarchically anthologized, and schizophrenically translated? Are these not the books that fascinate and stimulate Borges’s imagination and give life to his Fictions?

The “particular satisfaction” of Bloom is the "deep pleasure" of one-stop shopping, of instantaneous gratification. This is the appeal of the Piggly-Wiggly, of corporate publishing and bookselling. Supermarkets of the bibliographic selling carefully packaged products designed for mass consumption. There was something, well, Borgesian about sifting through the fragmented and dispersed bibliography of Borges, digging through bookshops and libraries for the odd volume and the missing story, pursuing the maddening elusive appearance in a hard-to-find little magazine in an indecipherable language. Borges’s printing history before the Viking Collected mirrored that of the books featured in Borges’s stories. The diligent reader of this history became a Borgesian character: a librarian, a collector, an archivist. Such an experience was, like reading The Book of Sand, nightmare to be sure, but it was also an obsessive pleasure.

The Collected Fictions is no doubt a “reason to rejoice,” but it is also provides an opportunity to lament that which is lost.

JB

Borges's Bribe

In reading the Collected Fictions, I was greatly interested in those stories, like Guayaquil, which touched on everyday university politics and the relationships involved in building and maintaining a library. Borges’s The Bribe stood out in this respect. In this story from the 1975 collection The Book of Sand, Borges tells a story of the academic games played amongst professors to move ahead in their fields and garner plum appointments and assignments. In the story the narrator mentions that he met Dr. Erza Winthrop, a professor of Old English, in late 1961 at the University of Texas in Austin. The year is a crucial one for Borges marking his arrival on the literary scene outside of Latin America. He shared the first ever Prix International with Samuel Beckett, which put Borges on the map internationally and the same year the University of Texas appointed him to the one year Tinker Chair and a lecture tour in the United States. The lid on Borges would officially come off in 1962 with the publication of the Ficciones and Labyrinths story collections.

As a professional librarian, Borges knew intimately how canon formation and library acquisition worked and the story behind the story in The Bribe is the tango between the University of Texas and Borges. The University bribes Borges with Chairs, publications, and appointments, and in return, Borges bribes the University by mentioning it in his stories and letting the University bask in the glow of his literary reputation. The 1960s was the Golden Age of acquisition for the Harry Ransom and the Library invested heavily in the Latin American Boom eventually becoming the leading institution for the study of Latin American literature. Not surprisingly the University helped create that Boom. Borges’s arrival in Texas sparked a frenzy of interest and study in the author: the beginnings of the Borges industry. This interest would extend to other Latin American authors. The University of Texas published Borges's Dreamtigers in 1964 in the Texas Pan American Series. What we see here is a University building up both its collection and the importance of that collection. This is the game of speculation with literary reputations that libraries, collectors, and authors play. The game that The Bribe documents both inside and outside the story proper. In a sense the University of Texas is involved in price fixing and insider trading. Yet there is a downside with Borges going public so to speak. Take Dreamtigers for example. The collection was originally titled The Maker when published in 1960, but for distribution by the University the controversial theological element was removed and replaced with a more fantastic element. The true flavor of Borges work is rendered more bland for the tastes of a larger audience. The University’s bribe in 1961 would be the gift that keeps on giving. In 1999, the University would score a major coup with the purchase of an important Borges collection that would provide the cornerstone for its world-renowned Latin American collection.

JB

JOE BRAINARD'S BOLINAS JOURNAL

Joe Brainard’s Bolinas Journal is the first book from Bill Berkson's Big Sky Press in Bolinas. Berkson published it shortly after he moved from hometown New York City to the relatively remote beach community north of San Francisco. It's a side-stapled mimeo, classic Lower East Side style, and important link between east and west. Bolinas Journal is a record of Brainard's impressions of the West Coast when he went to visit Berkson and Lewis Warsh (also a New Yorker living in Bolinas at the time). Brainard reflects on meeting Joanne Kyger, Gordon Baldwin, Philip Whalen, Bob and Bobbie Creeley, and their dog Spot. Ted Berrigan came out for a visit and Brainard made a terrific flyer for his reading with Bob Creeley that is reproduced at the end of the book along with two 'rejects.' Kevin Opstedel gives a concise yet wonderfully detailed account of the Bolinas poetry community in his essay 'Dreaming as One.' There's also a special issue of Beat Scene edited by Kevin Ring that covers some of the same territory, and so much more. I've ordered, but have yet to receive, The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard from the Library of America. I'm very much looking forward to this book, as all but the Granary Books edition of I Remember has been out of print for a long, long time. I'll be particularly interested in how the images and illustrations appear in this volume, and will it include collaborations? I don't know. I hear that Bolinas Journal is in there, which makes it well worth the price of admission alone.

-- KS

Piggly-Wiggly of Babel

In Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping, Rachel Bowlby writes, “In the history of shop design, it is bookstores, strangely enough, that were the precursors of supermarkets. They, alone of all types of shop, made use of shelves that were not behind counters, with goods arranged for casual browsing and for what was not yet called self-service. Also, when brand-name goods and their accompanying packages were non-existent or rare in the sale of food, books had covers that were designed at once to protect the contents and to entice the purchaser; they were proprietary products with identifiable authors and new titles – not just any novel, but the latest by such-and-such a writer.”

The concept of books as a mass produced commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace haunts Borges’s Library. For the most part, Borges chooses to ignore this ghost. Yet such a concept is no doubt Borgesian. His is a universe obsessed with capital, exchange, networks, and economies. Yet the marketplace seems the purview of a more profane writer like Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo. The scene of Jack Gladney and Murray Siskind shopping and consuming in a supermarket of ideas in White Noise comes to mind. Borges would never feed his imagination in a Piggly-Wiggly, although as the image above makes clear the Piggly-Wiggly is a Borgesian labryrinth. But reading through the Collected Fictions, it struck me that Borges could not escape the web of economies that link Library-Bookstore-Supermarket-University. (more to follow)

JB

Fantastic Architecture

I just finished reading the Borges’s Collected Fictions. As a book collector, I am always drawn to his story The Library of Babel. Whenever I think of Borges’s Library I think of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. Such an association is no great leap of the imagination. I wonder if Borges was aware of Tatlin’s Tower in the same way he was intimate with Kafka’s castles and prisons. The infinite library of the internet could probably provide me with an answer. In any case, my Borges inhabited Tatlin's Tower as much as he was incarcerated in Kafka's prisons.

Tatlin’s Tower like Borges’s Library is infinite and labyrinthine, spiraling into nothingness. Both have more than an element of madness. The Library of Babel is The Tower gone to seed, the initial fervor of endless possibility and optimism worn away by the passage of millennia and the prospect of more to come.

Yet what I like best about the comparison is that the full majesty of Tatlin’s Tower was never realized. The Tower lives on in theory as The Library lives on in dreams, but that is not quite right. What I mean is that they both were fully realized only on paper. In their essence, they are not eternal or ethereal, they are ephemeral.

JB

The Construction of Boston

A graduate student from Amsterdam emailed me with a request for Allan Kaprow's review of Kenneth Koch's The Construction of Boston. A portion of his review was published in Floating Bear #30. The handwritten draft of the essay is in the Kaprow archive at the Getty.

I post it here as an example of the mimeo mag as critical journal. You think of mimeo as a vehicle for poetry but the medium also provides access to some of the most up-to-the-minute criticism and accounts of contemporary poetry, art, theater, literature and architecture that is available. Much of it I would suspect has slipped through the cracks of the various anthologies, collecteds and selecteds.

Here is the Scott Wheeler's setting of the Happening (initially performed for one night at the Maidman Theatre on 42nd Street in New York City in 1962) to music and Koch's libretto for context:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dgOD0E7i_E

http://www.bostoncecilia.org/prognotes/Constr_libretto.pdf

JB

The Ugly Spirit

In the interim between Auerhahn Press and Dave Haselwood Books, there was Auerhahn Society. Hoyem went all out with Olson's Human Universe, "parchment spine and elaborate colored linoleum prints for the front and back papers." I think the above is the announcement for the book. Apparently there was a dispute between Hoyem and Oyez Press about issuing this publication. The Johnston interview discusses this as the end of Auerhahn as a viable commercial press and Haselwood disses the Grove reprint as "pretty much a rip-off of it, done ugly style."

I have to agree with that. I have never been that impressed with the look of the Grove Press books. For example, the run of Burroughs titles from Naked Lunch through the cut-up trilogy are definitely ugly style. The Olympia Press titles are much better and paperback to boot, which is nice. Both Minutes to Go and The Exterminator are great. The Yage Letters not so much. Personally I love Calder's Dead Fingers Talk. But enough of that, we can talk Burroughs all day and this is Olson's Universe.

JB