Further on ‘things’ kept, and their utility / value.

Pattern Language: The House Mill (2019) turns a corpus of old objects, formerly useful but no longer needed or even comprehended, into a photo book that is also a proposition about heritage sites and remnants, and how they may play a role in new community formations.


The disciplinary context is ‘critical heritage studies’, the locus an 18th-century mill in east London, now a cultural hub and visitor attraction. Artist in residence Cecilie Gravesen focused on its surviving ‘collection of more than two thousand custom-made mechanical patterns, once used for casting replacement components to keep the Mill’s machinery working’ (p. 5). 


Workers and retired people from the local area were invited to view and discuss these objects, their interactions documented in a kind of typological conceptual style by photographer Robin Stein, chosen by Gravesen for his ‘masterly control of still life [and his] experience with the distinct language for directing hands in commercial fashion shoots’ (p. 8). 

The notion of objects redeemed in the hand was explored also by TNWK (see previous post) in ‘How to Handle Things Not Worth Keeping’: http://www.radiotaxi.org.uk/tnwk/thingsnotworthkeeping/index.html. 

While the artist Simon Lewandowski went one further, a while ago, in adding handles to objects http://www.wildpansypress.com/index.php/publications/100-things-with-handles/ )

‘Pattern language’ invokes architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander’s 1970s repertoire of approaches to designing human environments, intended to empower people to design homes and community facilities for themselves. Gravesen’s participants’ own language is also included, in the form of brief conversational exchanges, transcribed in an Appendix. 

Something here in common with a project by Alex Julyan and Bill Gilonis, noticed here nearly 10 years ago, wherein objects were conveyed from one to the other purely through description, to produce new representations: https://theunderfoot.blogspot.com/2011/01/verbi-visi-2010-selected.html .

Cecilie Gravesen with Robin Stein, Pattern Language: The House Mill. Additional text by Dean Scully. Design by Anna Rieger. Printed at Circadian Press, Brooklyn, New York, 2019.

Cecilie Gravesen http://www.ceciliegravesen.com/
Robin Stein http://originaldocuments.net/#PatternLanguage 
House Mill https://housemill.org.uk/
Centre for Critical Heritage Studies https://www.ucl.ac.uk/critical-heritage-studies/

happy new year: books to go over with

Thanks to nearest & dearest, the Oceanographer is equipped for 2012 with:

Simon Garfield, Just My Type: a Book about Fonts (paperback Profile, 2011; first pub. 2010). Journalistic & anecdotal (classified as 'Reference / Humour' ...) but informative; and great that this subject is now popular.

J.H. Prynne, Kazoo Dreamboats, or, What There Is (Critical Documents, 2011). A prose, set in Song type, with a bibliography.

Jacques Rancière (trans. Steven Corcoran), Mallarmé: the Politics of the Siren (Continuum, 2011, first French pub. 1996). 'Mallarmé's problem is linked to the fact that the page is not only the material support of the poem, or the allegory of its obligation. It belongs to the very movement and texture of the poem. The surface of writing is the place of a taking-place.' p. 43).

Martin Rowson, Giving Offence (Seagull, 2009, 'Manifestos for the 21st Century' series). 'A cartoon that isn't knocking copy becomes merely propaganda' (p. 39). Rowson reveals how much hate you draw when you draw politics (Alastair Campbell's gratuitous foul-mouthery on merely seeing Rowson in the street is astonishing, p. 19). A beautifully made little volume by the Indian-based Seagull Books.

The first book actually read in 2012 is:

Susana Gardner, Herso: an Heirship in Waves (Black Radish Books, 2011), an innovative sequence full of wordplay and in a great range of registers and visual arrangements. Versions of parts of this exist in other forms including as an e-chapbook under Susana's wonderful Dusie project http://www.dusie.org/scrawlread.pdf I like especially the near-anagrammatic 'Minarets'.

Finally, here are some more or less visual or material books & publishers from 2011 that we just want to say Hoorah to. (All the terrible omissions may or may not be repaired later ... the one thing learned over the past -- good heavens -- 5 years of this sluggish blog is that only by accepting radical incompleteness is it possible to proceed at all ...). In no significant order:

1. Les Coleman, Afterthunks (Boekie Woekie, Amsterdam).

Looking at so many 'normal' cartoons has finally brought me to appreciate the refinement of the absurdist drawings and miniature poetic utterances of Les Coleman, associate of Glen Baxter, Patrick Hughes and their hero Anthony Earnshaw (as per previous post). This little collection has a foreword by N.F. Simpson, no less; is very simply but perfectly designed (by Colin Sackett).

2. Laurie Clark, 100 buttercups (WAX 366, Fife).

(This is a very bad photograph of) a chunky white book (actually published in 2010) with nothing in it front to back but reproduced colour portraits of one hundred buttercups, one per page, and a minimal colophon. This is not a piece of trivial prettiness, it is an emotionally moving and very robust acknowledgement of the demand to encounter, life and the other. Published by the brilliant David Bellingham. Where would you get it? Try the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, who have the 'special' ed (same, but with an original drawing) -- plus better images on their website.

3. David Miller, Black, Grey and White: a Book of Visual Sonnets (Veer, Birkbeck, London).



David Miller, visual sonnet, picture taken from the Veer website http://www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc/publications/veer-books

 

One might wish higher production values for this very modest stapled pamphlet of beautiful brushed work, but Veer are doing more than any other British press at present for visual poetry. David Miller is a senior figure known predominantly for prose poetry and extended sequences (also writings on art, small press bibliography and other). This outbreak of visual sonnets is enormously consonant with his sensibility and yet very new, exciting.

4. Sean Bonney, The Commons (Openned, London).

More sonnets; all in words, in a perfectly commercially-viable little pocket format -- but done with the perceptiveness and style of everything undertaken by the Openned people. When did you last see a paperback in a hessian chemise -- with a badge! It is the coolest thing ever, and yet still somehow gritty, proper little press. Not to mention that Sean Bonney is now a poet of enormous maturity and depth as well as blistering energy and ideological venom (who has seen his Rimbaud versions issued too, this year, by the Association of Musical Marxists' new imprint Unkant, also in a surprisingly attractive style).

verbi visi 2010 (selected)

Alexandra Julyan & Bill Gilonis, Lost in translation (London: Lost & Found Publishing, 2009. ISBN 9780956287601). An original and thoughtful collaboration: drawings made in literal interpretation of non-explanatory descriptions of objects selected by chance in another country ...

Ed Ruscha exhibition at the Hayward Gallery (closed 10 January). Loved this; hadn't expected to.

Ed Ruscha (postcard)

The year-long residency of KALEID Editions at 23-25 Redchurch Street was an exciting feature in the London artists' books landscape, founded by the dynamic and clever Victoria Browne, herself a very interesting artist. We look forward to all her future activities.


Victoria Browne, Dark matter (2009), photo lifted from KALEID website 

'Publication as practice: a short course on concepts of artists' publications', hosted at Donlon Books, Cambridge Heath Road (spring /summer 2010) by Eleanor Vonne Brown, another energetic and clever woman who makes interesting things happen (noticed in this blog last year). 

Letterpress revival I: Crater Press poetry pamphlets:

Crater poetry pamphlets 3-5: Harry Gilonis, Acacia feelings: the collected poems of Pao Ling-hui (Dec. 2009); Amy De'Ath, Andromeda / The world works for me (Jan. 2010); Keston Sutherland, The stats on infinity (Mar. 2010).

Douglas Gordon text installation at Tate Britain (May). Fragmentary utterances in vinyl. Wish we had gone to Glasgow in the autumn to see the Robert Barry exhibition at The Common Guild. Can anyone out there compare, contrast, comment?

Sol LeWitt: artists' books Exhibition at SITE Gallery, Sheffield (May). Plus: Artists' publications and the legacy of Sol Lewitt: a conference at Sheffield Hallam University. Coordinated by RGAP (Research Group for Artists' Publications). We have a few snapshots on Flickr.



Sol LeWitt wall drawing #960 being executed at Site Gallery, Sheffield, 8 May 2010 (by David McNab, here, and Bryan Eccleshall)

John Furnival: somewhere between poetry and painting. Exhibition of prints and constructions at England & Co. (May)

Poetry Review vol. 65 no. 1 (1974); cover by John Furnival

Art of banking: Susan Johanknecht, baring antebellum (2010).
As one of the participants in an ongoing art project concerning the archives of Barings Bank, Susan Johanknecht published a book of poetry, or text art, based partly on the links she discovered in the archives between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Barings. this work is comparable to some of Susan Howe's books but has a particular beauty and how topical can you get? It is available for a mere £10: further information including contact address for the artist is in the indispensable Book Arts Newsletter no. 60, Oct. 2010, p. 23.

baring antebellum, cover, referencing marbled ledgers, but not quite ...



Susan Johanknecht, baring antebellum, text printed on paper resembling account book pages

 Merlin James: frame paintings Exhibition at Mummery + Schnelle (June-July), including poetry reading in dialogue with the art, on 12 June, by John Freeman, Elizabeth James and Oliver Reynolds.



EJ reading 'poem (frames') with MJ frame paintings (Photo Michele Tocca)

Letterpress revival II: V&A Illustration Awards won by Sarah Carr for images created wholly from type elements, for How to drink by Victoria Moore (Granta, 2009). (The publisher's website makes no mention of the images; and the book itself is not printed letterpress of course ... )

Sarah Carr, illustration [espresso machine], from How to Drink

Mulfran Miniatures: sweet new series of small-format illustrated poetry pamphlets from Cardiff-based Mulfran Press:


Roy Morgans, The sychbant, with images by Marion KV Kenning (Mulfran, 2010)

And here's the biggest book of poetry I own:




J.H. Prynne, Sub songs (Barque, 2010)

Women's Innovative Poetry and Cross-genre Festival, University of Greenwich, 14-16 July. Susanna Gardner's review is in Openned Zine 3. We only managed to get to a few performances, but bought many items at the excellent student-staffed book table. To obtain the following books, try contacting West House books (even though they are not listed).

Christine Kennedy / David Annwn, Dadadollz (ISP Press, Wakefield, 2010 ISBN 0953389758)

Christine Kennedy gave a great performance at Greenwich of her Hobby Horse: a Puppet Play for Cabaret Voltaire, complete with cast -- Hannah Hoch, Emmy Hennings, Sophie Taeuber Arp and others -- as a clothes-line of articulated puppets, brilliantly ventriloquised with the Monty-Pythonesque expedient of wiggling two fingers through their mouth holes. Generically Kennedy's text is a performance script, mixing in 'looking glass' Alice (the Cabaret Voltaire having been appropriately located in Spiegelstrasse), first-world-war combat medicine and the Large Hadron collider at Cern (particle physics being of course the most dada of sciences), and including images (Christine is equally poet and artist). It is published in this book alongside a text by David Annwn also inspired by the DaDa mammas and their use of dolls and puppets.
 

Tilla Brading & Frances Presley, Stone Settings (Odyssey Books / Other Press ISBN 9781897654002)

Frances Presley and Tilla Brading launched the publication of their long-standing project on Exmoor's standing stones and archaeology at Greenwich with a slide presentation with animation to do full justice to the visual and intermedia contributions of both poets. I missed this, but a few weeks before heard Tilla do a part of it at the Hay-on-Wye Poetry Jamboree -- a low tech version, where the audience had to improvise the part of a rain stick. The field is wide open, including prose (the passage 'Triscome Stone' is one of my favourite bits), diagrams, music, abstract shapes, colour, breaths of subtle humour. Stone settings in print is presented as a completely integrated collaborative whole (like Frances's and my Neither the One Nor the Other (1999), and all the writing has a kind of tolerant co-existence, as well as a quiet but distinct energy. Every page or opening is different and striking in a justified (composed) mature way. I really like this book.

No-one is more innovative or cross-genre than the fabulous Jennifer Pike (Cobbing), who turned 90 years old in 2010, unbelievably. Veer Press are due great credit for bringing out books of her visual poetry, SCRUNCH, which went into a second edition this year:

Jennifer Pike Cobbing, SCRUNCH (Veer, 2009/10)

and the new Conglomization of Wot. Meanwhile on July 10th there was a birthday launch by Writers Forum of a new number of AND -- the magazine founded by Bob Cobbing in 1954, still now only on its 13th number -- essentially a festschrift for Jennifer, edited by Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer. I'm not sure how you can get a copy, but try contacting Adrian Clarke via Veer. Videos of readings from that day are on the Openned website (including our own).

Talking of Veer: all their books are worth buying, but here are the 2010 titles from two of our favourite poets:


Veer books: Harry Gilonis, Eye-blink, from North Hills, with cover painting by David Rees, ISBN 9781907088209; Jeff Hilson, In the Assarts, ISBN 9781907088186

In October Allen Fisher gave a series of 3 slide talks on 'The Complexity Manifold', weekly at 3 different locations in London. They were fascinating overlapping compilations of aspects of his long-time poetics. Notes from the talks (sans images) are linked from this page on Allen's website. Shortly thereafter he published a new book of work: Proposals: poem--image--commentary:


Allen Fisher, Proposals (Spanner, 2010 ISBN 9780856520891)

The cover image resembles a Blake title page; the 35 tri-partite 'proposals' are somewhat like emblems:

Proposals 11

The images are (reproduced from) diptychs of paint and collage, apparently made on the pages of an art history book from which captions are occasionally visible; this book does not seem to appear in the customary AF list of 'Resources' at the back, which runs from Badiou toWittgenstein, via Milton Friedman, Amartya Sen, &c. To generalise vastly: the left-hand images concern fire & power, the right-hand ones more suggest imaginative transformations, 'the artist'. But this book deserves far better than disconnected observations, and yields much to a dedicated reading, of which I have only given it my first over the Christmas break. Allen Fisher is a truly exemplary artist, in his lifelong address to the, uh, key issues of living, thinking and making today. Read this book for 2011! Get it from Spanner website.

When he becomes clearly lacking in confidence in the work in the connection in any / efficacy he begins to understand the confluence of becoming that is being proposed (Proposals 29, commentary)



Shandy Hall is by now a top vortex for literature + art in England. The Perverse Library was a great exhibition organised by information as material of visual and material books and objects based on the personal library of the brilliant Craig Dworkin, anthologist and archivist par excellence of avant garde writing, with a closing vernissage on 30 October. Here we picked up (bought) a copy of a wonderful anthology of visual text: Louis Lüthi, On the self-reflexive page (Roma Publications, 2010 ISBN 97877459478): "a typology of self-reflexive pages: Black Pages, Blank Pages, Drawing Pages, Photography Pages, Text Pages, Number Pages, and Punctuation Pages" from over 60 texts, authors including: Paul Auster, Samuel Beckett, Douglas Coupland, Mark Danielewski, Umberto Eco, Jonathan Safran Foer, Alasdair Gray, Steven Hall, B.S. Johnson, Richard Kostelanetz, Reif Larsen, Harry Matthews, Vladimir Nabokov, Don Paterson (yes really), Raymond Roussel, W.G. Sebald ... i.e. authors by and large of significant mainstream/highbrow recognition ... and now we come to look at it, only 2 women: Christine Brooke-Rose and Madeline Gins.

The self-reflexive page, pp. 18-19: from Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud ... [etc] p. 284; Steven Hall, The raw shark texts, p. 421.

In November bookbinder and jeweller Romilly Saumarez Smith hosted an exhibition of remarkable photographs by Verdi Yahooda of bookbinding tools.


Verdi Yahooda: this image taken from a postcard: for best views see the artist's website

To the lay person such tools may be slightly enchanting, but here they become numinous objects, through various techniques and materials including the use of slide film and rag paper. Some of the photographs are now also published in an inexpensive book by Trace Editions.
Romilly's tools: an incomplete set (2010) ISBN 978-0-9550945-4-5

At Sophie Schneideman's book and print shop in Portobello Road, an exhibition in November-December of early books and prints by Ronald King's Circle Press, probably the foremost artist-press in England of its kind, that is to say, based on original printmaking and letterpress, marrying (usually) new poetry of a non-conservative kind with superb illustration, often technically innnovative. The Oceaographer here learned an expensive lesson: at the private view, we fell for and bought, for over £100, the following:

John Christie, Listen (Circle Press, 1975)

"a word and image sequence related to, and suggested by, lines [the artist, John Christie] particularly liked in Erik Satie's 'Sports et Divertissements' ... the complete text appears at the end of this book in an English translation by Simon Cutts". As I write, there is a copy of this book on Abe for £15 (and a couple in North America at under £50). Ouch!!

Tom Lubbock, best known as an inspiring and scrupulous critic of contemporary and historical art, is also a sometime artist himself. From 1999 to 2004 he was commissioned to produce a weekly collage for publication on the editorial page of the Saturday Independent newspaper, in the position that is typically given to a cartoon. A selection of these works has just been on show at the Victoria Miro gallery N1 7RW (December) and is viewable through January: on Saturdays 15th and 22nd, and otherwise by appointment: +44 (0)20 7336 8109.

Post script: sadly, sadly, Tom Lubbock died yesterday (9th Jan.), after 2 1/2 years fighting cancer. I owed him, and I liked him. He was a remarkable person, and so is his wife.

Letterpress revival III: Reverting to type exhibition at Standpoint Gallery, Coronet Street N1 6HD

(this is still on through January 2011)

Finally, something comic, though we do not usually make heh-heh: a close relative has invented a new verse-form, the 6-line literary limerick. His book is I'll say this ... : seventy-six (six-line) literary limericks, by "Ingli" [G. Ingli James] (Carn Ingli, 2010). Contact me via Comments below for info on how to obtain it. Here's one relevant to our interests in this blog (my own copy also boasts, in holograph, a great one on Marshall McLuhan) -- note that some of the poems also have footnotes ...:

I'll say this for Cummings, E.E.*

he has fun with the

                     ty

                          po

                               gra

                     phy 

    and employs lower case

    in an upper case place --

as if rooting for

                     de

                          moc

                               racy

(What on earth can one say  but tee hee?) 

*referred to by Edmund Wilson as 'hee hee cunnings'

 

short return (for ian w, peter f & alicia c)

At the Small Publishers' Fair, London, 12-13 November 2010



seekers of lice, notes/ohms; books by Antoine Lefebvre; Maria White, alphabet week; Helen Douglas, A Venetian Brocade; Lindsay Adams, Fluviatile


Most interesting exhibitor
Antoine Lefebvre's La Bibliothèque Fantastique "une maison d'édition virtuelle des livres d'artistes, dont les livres sont gratuits" also constitutes the éditeur's PhD project on the Book, and appropriates / decimates most of his academic reading, in a series of simple black & white photocopied stapled pamphlets on ordinary typing paper, all of which are downloadable for free; but (like me) many people prefer to pay the £3 a go. Many titles are by other artists; one ongoing collaboration, with Jérémie Bennequin, performs the erasure of Mallarmé's 'Un coup de des ...', syllable by syllable, each next one selected by -- you guessed it. Each performance works right through the version partially erased by the last, and they will continue until there are only 5 syllables left (since the next throw of the dice risks being a six ...). Even this is being done in the most dematerialised manner, at a computer (though Bennequin's more habitual practice involves pages and rubber erasers -- he is working through Proust, as you might imagine. I love the French: "Quelle allure! Des intellectuels!")

Most "Are you actually a fine artist or a poet"?*
Seekers of lice publishes Japanese-style-bound pamphlets, often including semi-transparent pages, of what I would call 'innovative poetry' by its singular proprietor. The Oceanographer selected Notes / Ohms (2010), in which words and phrases from the first 3 pages are redistributed throughout the text which is divided into several sections by painted leaves.
(*SoL was asked this in a radio interview)

Favourite performance
Didier Mathieu (of the Centre des livres d'artiste at St-Yrieix-la-perche) and Nick Thurston (of Information as material reading together / simultaneously, selected passages from Beckett's Watt, rewritten, replacing all substantive words with the name of their part of speech; respectively in French and English (available as a set of 3 large prints in each language -- the English versions are published by IoM and were on display recently at the very wonderful Perverse Library exhibition they organised at Shandy Hall. cdla publish the French translation.

Plus of course (O declares an interest): Harry Gilonis reading from Eye-blink, his new book of 'faithless' (but genuine) translations of Tang Dynasty poems, published by the excellent poetry press Veer, with a painting by David Rees on the cover.

Most perfect book
1. Alphabet Week, by Maria White (Essence Press [Julie Johnstone, Edinburgh])
A little white job, 7 cm square, printed in blue with the names of the days of the week, one name per page, in alphabetical order.

2. Erica Van Horn and Simon Cutts, After Brancusi (Coracle)


(detail) "all furniture is sculpture ... all sculpture is furniture"

Two beautiful photo books
1. Helen Douglas's new book from Weproductions is A Venetian Brocade, which, by contrast with Queene and Belle (2008), returns to the lush page-filling and subtle syncopation of earlier books. It's a bold subject: colour photographs of Venice, digitally manipulated, could be a recipe for cliché but it is done superbly. It is tempting to flick, but the book needs and deserves proper 'reading', as the sequence is integral. It includes a short fiction by Marina Warner, the subject of which is the visit to Venice in the late 16th century of a pious young Japanese Jesuit, and his exposure there to visual pleasure and the erotic intimations of art. This is certainly relevant to Douglas's almost voluptuous opening of/to the city itself. Free of the novitiate's religious inhibitions, the artist's desire is however tempered by an aesthetic discipline which has sought, and hidden in these pages more, I think, than meets the casual eye.

2. Fluviatile, by the painter Lindsey Adams, reproduces almost 50 remarkable rich and ambiguous abstract images that are in fact unmanipulated photographs taken of (and in) a running stream, Hartshay Brook, near her home in Derbyshire. The book's design and sequencing are handled with care, the blank and text pages tinted in varying watery whites. There is a thoughtful introduction essay by Rebecca Fortnum but Adams like Douglas has also invited an imaginative contribution by a writer, Michelene Wandor (same initials! spooky ...), and since the images here are (mainly) printed as a discrete series on recto pages only, Wandor's poem can penetrate throughout them. The poem is given to Ophelia, and under its influence one begins to discern her cloudy figure in the water ...

Apples
A small jar of apple jelly given me by Ceri Buck, with a copy of What is Action? (2006), her poem based on the parts of an apple. A diary of apple labels, by Anne Rook.

(off-topic) besoin de vélo

Paul Fournel at the Calder Bookshop this evening read from the English translation of his Besoin de Vélo. He read these short, autobiographical, light-philosophical pieces crisply, without comment but with expression. He elaborated with props -- moving little model cyclists around the table -- and eventually took off shirt & trousers to reveal the lycra beneath, and mounted his new Condor titanium bike which stood on a roller, pedalling gradually harder gears, climaxing with the much-quoted piece on Mont Ventoux:The Ventoux has no in-itself. ... It's yourself you're climbing. If you don't want to know, stay at the bottom. It was wonderful and I much cheered up. As he signed my books I blurted out my two (so far) non-attempts at the Ventoux: summer 1990, the planned (and indeed booked) trip abandoned when R & I split up; and March 2009 when, in no physical state to even attempt it, I was gratefully relieved of the challenge:


"You must go back", said M. Fournel. "Ride 28 x 28."

The audience seemed entirely composed of cyclists rather than literary types (apart from the venerable John Calder himself), and no sufficiently coherent question framed itself in my mind about the relation between the cycling writing and the Oulipo, of which Fournel is President (truly, the complete Frenchman!). Méli-Vélo is a dictionary text, but are there more elaborate constraints governing these books? Fournel himself has written: "When it comes to their personal work, the members of the Ouvroir have differing attitudes with regard to constraint. Their use of constraint varies, ranging from shows of virtuosity to the greatest of discretion. The debate “Should one reveal one’s constraints?” enlivened the Ouvroir for a considerable time during the 1970s and 1980s, and responses to this question have been and continue to be diverse and paradoxical. From absolute mystery to partial revelation to total transparency, all the gradations have been put into practice, all reasoning validated."

One question at least elicited the assertion that cycling & creativity are deeply connected: "When I ride I write.". In presenting a sublimely elegant defence of Bernard Hinault as, among the greats (Merckx, Anquetil) his ultimate favourite racer, Fournel said "I think he was a writer".

pomes and gardens

The splendid Two Rivers Press in Reading have just published Her Leafy Eye by Lesley Saunders: a collection of poems inspired by Rousham (a garden in Oxfordshire landscaped by Bridgeman and then William Kent), with illustrations by Geoff Carr, a present-day garden designer. The book launch was held at Rousham, where Geoff led an informal guided tour, and Lesley read some of the poems in situ -- for each is motivated by a particular feature, although (refreshingly) the motif generally does not constitute the subject. The poem for the 'Dying Gladiator', for instance, entitled 'Hero', apparently ignores the striking statue and instead evokes a Handel composition (1738, contemporaneous with the garden) sung, sublimely, by a castrato, 'sexless ... winged' ... And yet, it also offers a challenge to this figure of the all-male fighter, defeated by mortality, the head drooping. The singer by contrast is 'lifting his face', the voice soars 'ever-upwards' mixing into the branches of 'an oasis-tree' so that the 'clamber and whoop-calls' seem those of a daredevil boy. And on another level again, this 'angel' in the 'heavenly air' might after all offer comfort to the warrior contemplating death. (The Dormer brothers who owned Rousham and commissioned the gardens were both soldiers, and at its completion both had died.)

Great breadth and subtlety of thought and construction inform the whole collection, together with a huge sensuous energy: this is partly a matter of reference and image, stimulated no doubt by being in the fresh air with trees and water and artfully activated vistas, as well as the poet's evident acquaintance with early-mid-18th-century culture; but it also seems to spring through the language. 'The Genius Loci // would carry words like thicket and covert ...' as well as its other functions. The title of 'Acre' (an elegy for that unit of land measurement), tangles through the poem in a somewhat Muldoonian fashion: 'you can watch the earth curve' ... 'not scaring the longhorns' ... 'like the kora tuned to its own scale' and finally in the brilliant 'carpets of light'.

The illustrations, a notable feature of Two Rivers books, are very various, quite light, sometimes playful, and distinctly subordinated to the poems. One black and white image suggested a more restrained, perhaps conservative option for a more unified book, which I might have preferred; but which was evidently eschewed in favour of colour and variety, which is fine.

At Rousham, the 'sinuous rill' was a pleasing discovery, though a surprise that it's a sort of flooded tramline or mini-canal, not a Romantic stream.

A couple of weeks later, at Little Sparta:

This (badly photographed) straight channel surely harks back to the Rousham rill, acknowledging the charm of its 'sleeve of silk' (Lesley Saunders, 'Rill') while adding explicit reference to the transport canal. That succession of words, ending with the heavy glide of 'lade', is a whole moral philosophy. [Just looked it up in Chambers though, and 'lade' is a mill-stream in Scots... Either way though, it's about working water?]

Obviously there is no end to what could and should be said about this amazing garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Can't possibly do justice right now. Actually the plants struck me this time too; the beautiful interplay of different leaves; and indeed lots of flowers, mostly wildflowers.


Remembering Little Sparta is a rather astonishing exhibition on in Edinburgh this month. Janet Boulton knows the garden intimately and has made many watercolour paintings of it. These are one might say subjective documentary records, presenting true views in a way unlike any photograph; and they are also really fine paintings. Not just set pieces, but behind-the-scenes storage areas. And Boulton also became a good friend of (and occasional artistic collaborator with) Finlay himself, and there are paintings too of the interior of his house; close-seeing, respectful, but in some cases quite numinous views, of his collections of model boats for instance. (My photograph -- with apologies to the artist for the poor image -- shows one of the suite of views of the interior of the Temple; and also the beautiful fitness of this exhibition being installed in the enormous Sculpture Court of the Edinburgh College of Art, with its plaster casts of classical statures and reliefs.) Nothing anecdotal or biographical; no people.

There are also works in paper relief, an unusual medium that Boulton has made her own, in which she meditates upon and responds to Finlay's work in a more like-for-like way, rather than by re-representing it. Likewise she has installed sculptures and inscriptions in her own small and lovely garden (there's an account in the magazine The English Garden, Sept. 2006), with references and homages from her distinct artistic lineage -- to the Cubists in particular, for instance. And then there is an actual group of Finlay's precious boats in the room, some letters and ephemera, and -- real treasures -- some of the little painted wooden toys he made in the 1960s. All in all, not to be missed; but even for those who can't get to Edinburgh there's an excellent catalogue, and images on the artist's website: click first link, above.

Finally, one for the gladiator:

book from the sky

To Bernard Quaritch's, the booksellers, this evening, for the launch of a book they have published about the artist Xu Bing, specifically his Book From the Sky), a 4-volume work written in 4,000 imaginary Chinese characters, printed using moveable type. There is acute (not to say obsessive) attention to the formal codes of book, whereas its content is, in a sense (sic) nonsense. One of the main authors of this new critical work, Tianshu: Passages in the Making of a Book, is John Cayley, who has considered Xu Bing's work often: here's a useful piece http://www.hanshan.com/specials/xubingts.html . There is an exhibition in the basement of Quaritch's, showing copies of the Book from the Sky, with earlier versions, printing blocks and sorts, and installation photographs of full-scale gallery installations, which seem very grand and theatrical. Some of these images are on Xu Bing's own website. The critical book has a notable materiality of its own, being bound in a flexible transparent cover through which its structure can be seen.

Typeset by Ian Whittlesea

Here's an extraordinary thing: a 1954 judo manual, translated into English and produced in a loving typographic facsimile which resembles as far as possible the visual and material properties of the original, with the same illustrations placed in the same position on the page and so forth, published by an artists' book press. The original book was by the artist Yves Klein, he who signed the sky, patented a colour, painted with women's bodies and 'leapt into the void'. Klein was also (I now learn) a serious and advanced judo practitioner, even prior to being an artist. But is this new edition a judo book or an art book? The translator is Ian Whittlesea, an artist of fascinatingly rigorous refinement noticed previously by the Oceanographer, the publisher is The Everyday Press, "founded by artist Arnaud Desjardin to publish the work of visual artists as printed matter". Whittlesea took up judo himself alongside the translation, has achieved a black belt ranking, and it now appears to be a lifetime commitment for him.
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The book's launch brought me for the first time to Donlon Books, a great new art & arty bookshop in Bethnal Green. It seems to stock the best stuff you'd find in the shops at the Serpentine, ICA or Tate Modern, but in an uncramped and somehow more personal environment that reminded me more of the wonderful bookartbookshop; and also to have an eye to rare and special books, the sort of thing you look to Marcus Campbell for.
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I came away with a copy of Tutu Muse, a recent (2007) book published by Fly By Night, of poetry by Marianne Morris. Marianne was just Donlon Books' writer-in-residence for a month! sorry I missed her. Can't report on a reading yet but Marianne's work is never less than exhilarating; materially-speaking this sturdily made substantial (47pp) pamphlet/paperback features a cover image by Marianne, and an index, of proper names, and key words mostly classified under concepts e.g. 'insects', 'food items' etc. 'love' is the most frequently occurring term (13), followed by 'death' (10). But there are numerous single instances in the 'animals', 'birds', 'fish' and 'food' groups, and quite a lot of 'colours' too (p. 19, 'terrific blue sky').
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Also associated with the establishment is Eleanor Vonne Brown's excellent project The Newpaper, "a newspaper about artists and writers who make work using the language, visuals or structure of newspapers", e.g. (in issue 2) Kenneth Goldsmith and his retyping of an entire New York Times, Michalis Pichler's Bild collages, Vonne Brown's own project '100 days', about the journalist Alan Johnston kidnapped in Gaza in 2007, and many more; as well as an article on John E. Allen, claimed as the first theorist of newspaper design. Issues are available for download from the website, but the thing itself, in tabloid format on proper newsprint is a pleasure to see and hold -- and the ink doesn't come off on your hands ...

can you hear the colours of autumn?

Fresh Fruit + Tables is a book of -- what d'you call'em: thought constructions maybe, or language drawings -- by the artist David Bellingham (who was recently featured in the V&A display Certain Trees). Bellingham is a kind of micro explorer of language, non-verbal signs and marks, his short trips yield specimens and anecdotes often witty, but rarely slick or slight.

Consider the 2-page spread (where the obliques are line or page breaks):
INTERIOR / an absence of most things // EXTERIOR / a presence of most things.

Or a little thing where the words MORNING and EVENING are handwritten to the same physical length, one above the other, two line-spaces apart. On the intervening lines, the letter O, between the first instance of letter N in each word, thus reading NOON vertically (I can't make the html here hold it). You can see these, and indeed download the whole book: http://www.freshfruitandtables.com/ Lots of the pieces are about how apparent opposites are not unlike in the same way. Quite a few are about mensuration (a long-time DB theme), especially, in this case, of time. They use type, drawing or writing (sometimes a mixture), and it would be interesting in each case to decide why. The combination of means, and tenor of the ideas, are enormously original I think.

Fresh Fruit & Tables was launched today Saturday 13 Sept. at The Changing Room, Stirling (Scotland) on the triple occasions of the Stirling Book Festival, the celebrations of 500 years of printing in Scotland, and an exhibition by David Bellingham. The book is being distributed free to selected libraries in the UK, a few of whom have been supplied with many copies so that individual readers can take away a copy for themselves. The only ones outside Scotland are in London: the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Poetry Library at the South Bank Centre. Come to the NAL during the month of September, and hopefully there will be a copy left for you.

2007, some books (6)

J.H. Prynne, Field Notes: 'The Solitary Reaper' and Others. (Cambridge, available from Barque.) This book (of which due to other pressures my reading is currently suspended half-way through) looks like a scholarly periodical issue or (e.g.) an on-demand dissertation: plain dark blue paper wrappers with nothing printed except the title on the spine (albeit that in silver); the text inside photographically reduced directly from authorial copy. It lacks the common articulations of most either standard or academic books: contents page, chapters, even footnotes (let alone an index). Its 134 pages contain in fact 54 numbered sections (of very variable lengths) in 3 Parts, of which the first is the point by point 'Commentary' on Wordsworth's poem, preceded by contextual notes; the second is a series of commented quotations from a range of sources including historic documentary and modern criticism that can be brought to bear on the poem; and the third expands by way of analogue a rural encounter in W.H. Hudson. It is surprisingly difficult to establish these contents: this is not a book one can get any sense out of by just flicking through. Fruit of a massive immersion in all the associations and implications focussed by its subject, the study resists consumption by any less diligent appetite. It brings to bear a huge amount of reference on agricultural life and practices, folksong, acoustics, and much else. The critical reading of the poem is imbricated in all of this, rather than merely supported by it: there's no 'Conclusion'. Thematically it speaks slightly to the Oceanographer of oral-aural / literal-visual boundaries of language and intelligibility, but the thoughts on work, and on the potentialities of listening to music returned me to thoughts of my poem for Roger Smith's & Adam Bohman's CD last year; while the question of obscurity and receptive meaningfulness ("will no-one tells me what she sings?" etc) have been related (e.g. in Seamus Perry's review, TLS, 25 Jan.) to issues of poetics around Prynne's own poetry. For the scanning eye however there are two illustrations, of reaping scenes in wood-engraved vignettes (enlarged). In that on the title page, the reaper is indeed 'solitary', close-up amid wheat stalks nearly as tall as he, but the tail-piece shows two -- again male -- working together, and a view of their village beyond the field. The other plain thing is the fold-out text of 'The Solitary Reaper', which can thus be kept in view simultaneously with any other page.

For those of us who have not had the privilege of being taught by Prynne, this absorbing book might suggest why his influence seems so strong on those who have. It makes reading a poem an investigation of real life.

2007, some books (5) ('you want marks')

Frances Kruk, dig oubliette. Hackney: yt communication, 2006 (OK, out of time, that's in the spirit of this tardy blog).
Frances is a virtuoso of dreck, working with an Elite-face typewriter (12 characters to the inch), fingers and other inkable objects, bits of torn paper and/or other flat media that can overlap or stop-out. Moving everything around so the 'writing' is rarely merely perpendicular to the page-edge, scratting, splurging and defacing texts that are themselves full of uncontrolled organic matter, squirting, rotting, staining, oozing, encrusting, filth ... One series is called 'Spillages', another consists of 8 purely visual (finger painted?) pages. Rather in the spirit of Bob Cobbing's work with Xerox, but (in this book anyway) the copying process is I think transparent to the autographic page (I culd be wrong about two or three pages near the beginning). Pierre Garnier does 'dirty' typewriting like this sometimes. The covers (thick texured orange paper) are I think individually hand-decorated, with black ink streaks and splashes. And yet 'smudge fest' is not the whole of it. There is actually a very 'clean' sense of design, so each page blooms a constellation. Some text is mirrored (using acetates then?). The 3-page sequence 'pretty:' is a classically Concrete minimal pair reiterated ('blood' 'flood'), but staged toward illegibility through overlay, and also dynamically impinged with splodged and then flowing (or tentacular?) graphic matter. It would be a mistake to underestimate this work just because it seems visually and thematically readily recognisable. Actually I think it is distinctively and valuably poised in an unusual space between poetry and drawing; and I'm coming to appreciate these pages -- like 'Spillage 3' and 'plunge ... PLUG for your LIFE' -- more every time I look at them.

2007, some books (1-4)

So, this is a slow blog. (And I haven't even finished reading most of these.)

Emily Critchley, When I say I believe women ... (London: Bad Press). (2nd corr. ed.)
The title piece might seem like a 'personal poem', anachronistic outcry, but dressed as an essay, neat side- and footnotes (albeit neurotic scratchouts). But I think it is the converse, an experiment in thinking, through a pain object of indignation that should damn right have currency. Print can be in conflict and have manners and style. The poem sequence also should be read. (I might talk about the tilde-dash and parentheses.) Very nice production by Bad Press, striking cover by Marianne Morris.

Simon Cutts, as if it is at all. (New York: Granary Books & Coracle [Ballybeg], UK distr. Cornerhouse.) 'Some poems 1995-2006'. Working in a long tradition that grew out of and against Concrete, minimalism is more apparent than attention-seeking layout, with analogues in the continuing practice of Thomas A Clark and Eugen Gomringer. Many pieces are I think 'found' -- isn't that a reductive misnomer for the processes of sensibility and transformation involved? -- perhaps one might rather say 'encountered'. Here the process seems especially to reduce and concentrate, a culinary analogy. The Coracle website quotes Jamie Oliver, something like, 'This isn't cordon bleu, this is din-dins'. But it entirely depends what you think is chemically and nutritionally fundamental; in this case it's pretty refined. (In a good way.) There is some deep discovered thinking in things like: what looks like a contents page in fact indexes the words of the book's title through the poems. The blurb is an apologia for the 'selected' nature of the contents, 'whose format, type and space may present an ideal unification for the new accumulation'. Few poets would scruple so. An absolutely happy book to have & hold.

John Hall, Couldn't you? poems for pages. (Exeter: Shearsman). Another poet and artist scrupulous of the relation between word and support. Some poems here too had previous instantiations in other media but they land lightly on the page and arrange themselves, as a flock of dancers runs onstage and accurately scatters. 'Here and There' for instance is a short prose sequence designed for the precise width of this published page (so each ends with a full line, giving the impression of a possibly random cylinder of text extracted from a continuous sequence, but not actually so). The design and production processes that enable Shearsman to put substantial and materially very decent books by under-read writers into the world, though they can accommodate extended techniques including images and non-typeset elements sometimes -- e.g. in Frances Presley's wonderful Myne (2006) -- can leave them (the books) a bit kind of affectless, to my mind. Still, mustn't grumble.

Lynsey Hanley, Estates: an intimate history. (London: Granta.)
A history-with-autobiography of post-war social housing in Britain is totally out of scope here, but the Oceanographer inhabits an 8th-floor flat in a council estate block ... The author's particular interest however is the huge green-field developments mainly of houses such as she grew up in, and the relation to modernist architectural aspirations isn't really analysed. It is a pessimistic view, with little hope that public housing estates as such can be redeemed from the stigmas and problems associated with them. But to live in a quiet, off-road, treed environment in London transport zone 1/2 feels like a privilege (and living up high can powerfully counter depression, though associated with the reverse).

More to follow, tomorrow maybe.

Two from Sheffield (transatlantic)

In Nineteen Nights in San Francisco Christine Kennedy takes a series of guidebook asessments of hotels (or rather, bed-and-breakfast places -- the caste of facility doubtless subtly determining the resultant linguistic register) and transforms them, by extraction and typographic embellishment, into, what? models, or portraits, anyway verbo-typo-visual pieces which bring these addresses to life in the imaginary. Reconstituted out of banal, uncommitted prose, they become suffused with human presence and quiddity, intentional art experiences distributable like poetry (rather than, for instance, merely 'documented' as installation -- though Kennedy does too sometimes derive and re-inscribe her work in situ). Alongside these is a set of pictorial images derived from one relevant symbolic object, a hotel desk bell, somewhat Warholian but rendered through several different techniques. Another analogue and possible influence might be Ed Ruscha's serial photobooks (Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, etc), but the artist proposed by Christine as the chief inspiration for this book is Joseph Cornell, many of whose assemblages evoke European hotels. Some of her pieces propose objects that could be incorporated in such a collage, and often there is a breath of the surreal in her refractions:
While you sip / your complimentary evening wine / fills the rooms ...
But she has thoroughly transmuted what she derives from forerunners. Christine is one of relatively few real artist-poets active in Britain today (as far as I'm aware), and I greatly admire her rather original syntheses. As well as part of what I see as her ongoing project in -- what to call it? intermedia poetics (pace Dick Higgins)?, Nineteen Nights is also an enjoyable and amusing book. Here's a picture.
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The Salt Campanion to Geraldine Monk is out!! at least it will be within the next couple of weeks. I have an essay in it on various kinds of visuality in Geraldine's poetry, and am gratified to find that her latest book, Raccoon is all about seeing and not seeing things, on a real trip in North America (not, like Des Esseintes and Christine Kennedy, a travel in a book). In the 'Ode to a Nightingale', Keats's sense of 'what flowers are at my feet' and 'what soft incense hangs upon the bough' is achingly redoubled precisely when, in the dark, he 'cannot see' them. When Monk fails to see whales, raccoons, elks and even mountains, sometimes she responds sardonically ('O you're so big / invisible mountain'; 'I looked everywhere ... Nada'); sometimes she defiantly delights instead in things that present themselves unlooked-for: a humming bird, 'the old moon / in the new moon's arms / in Idaho' (cf Coleridge's epigraph to the 'Dejection' ode), even a non-native faunal specimen: a giraffe in the shape of a brooch. But in 'Never Seeing Raccoon (I eat its words)' the poet undertakes a ritual invocation of the evasive beast in language, including native-American words ('magic one with painted face ... weekah tegalega / gahado-goka-gogosa'). Monk has been sparing of this kind of thing before: I can only remember it in 'Beacon Hill' in Long Wake, the very beginning of her acknowledged oeuvre. I look forward to a performance. It seems to be in some way efficacious, as the sequence ends with some dubious sightings or sensings: 'shadow-beasts' in the dark; 'another scent ... a zip of bones and ginger'. And all that is only the half of this book.
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Christine Kennedy, Nineteen Nights in San Francisco. Sheffield: West House Books & The Cherry on the Top Press (from SPD in U.S.), 2007. ISBN 978-1-904052-22-7.
Geraldine Monk, Raccoon. Free Poetry, vol. 2, no. 2, March 2007. For distribution contact mcsmith(at)boisestate.edu.