A photographer called Mark Edwards has published a book of photographs, each illustrating a line from Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’. I opened it at ‘I met a young child beside a dead pony’, with a picture of exactly that (a scene of drought in Namibia) and picked up a general objective of concern about climate change and concern for ‘sustainable development’, in essays by Edwards and Lloyd Timberlake. Mostly I was transfixed by the story of Edwards, lost in the Sahara in 1969 (at the very moment of the moon landing), rescued by a Tuareg tribesman who made him a cup of tea and played him a cassette of Bob singing that song. Well, it would change anyone’s life, wouldn’t it? I shelled out the extravagant £15, some of which hopefully goes to some related good cause, but few of the images have that wow factor as illustrations to the lyric, and they are variably related to the socio-economic theme (e.g. the ‘white man who walked a black dog’ is in a grainy picture captured anonymously at Abu Ghraib, and the ‘girl [who] gave me a rainbow’ is Edwards's little blonde god-daughter on a trampoline in her green, (presumably English) garden, shaking out irridescent bubbles from a pot. I don’t really care for the enterprise artistically: it doesn’t add up to much for anyone other than the person who has made a hobby of collecting of images that resonate with the lyric, and it’s clunky to insist on finding some literal correlative to every one in this series of dreams. As for the association with a Cause, that is against Dylan’s spirit, as we understand it, no?
*
Coincidentally, Len had reminded me when we visited him & Judith a couple of days before, of the Getty Museum book (that I also own) which juxtaposes details of James Ensor’s painting, ‘Christ’s Entry Into Brussels’, 1888, with the lyric of ‘Desolation Row’. It’s also naff in some ways, especially the Word Art-style text design, but at least has a certain speculative aesthetic coherence, in that (of course) neither element can be thought of as illustrating the other.
*
Still, the pictures in Edwards’s book are mostly good and interesting, the project’s fervent good intentions are infectious; the texts are informative about the current state of international progress (lack of) and policies on development and the environment and there’s a useful bibliography. Then, this book overtly invites the reader actually to take action as a result of reading it, and includes suggestions about what and how: inform yourself, change your own lifestyle, campaign.
*
Mark Edwards, Lloyd Timberlake. Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision With Nature. London: Still Pictures Moving Words, 2005. ISBN: 1-905588-00-3 http://www.hardrainproject.com/
In Biggar (where they have moved the Ian Hamilton Finlay sundial again) the independent, nice bookshop is called Atkinson-Pryce.
Sunday, 20 August 2006
Explicating Joyce in Edinburgh
In a hot room above a pub, fitted out with church pews, a typical Fringe venue, an American called Adam Harvey performs Finnegans Wake Chapter 7, 'Shem the Penman', all the way from, ‘Shem is as short for Shemus as Jem is joky for Jacob’, to, ‘Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq’.
*
The style of rendition was to my mind rather ‘RSC’, lots of enunciation and mime, squeezing out every drop of sense. The set is two chairs of contrasting design, the actor wears (and eventually removed most of) a black suit and underwear; there is much business (all of it to the interpretative point) with a bowler hat and some white handkerchiefs. But the text is after all picturesque and theatrical, and Harvey’s programme note cautions sagely, ‘any attempt to confine this extraordinary language to a single interpretation threatens to violate its author’s intentions. So please enjoy this performance as the abstraction it is intended to be. Think less about what you’re not understanding than what you’re experiencing’. A tour de force certainly, to me it seemed more an educational / reading aid than a true piece of theatre, but thoroughly meritorious on those terms, and very enjoyable. Harvey has studied and memorised no less than 5 chapters of the book, ‘working on one phrase, one word, sometimes one syllable at a time’, and apparently presents them often at Joyce conferences. It would be great to have them on DVD.
*
The style of rendition was to my mind rather ‘RSC’, lots of enunciation and mime, squeezing out every drop of sense. The set is two chairs of contrasting design, the actor wears (and eventually removed most of) a black suit and underwear; there is much business (all of it to the interpretative point) with a bowler hat and some white handkerchiefs. But the text is after all picturesque and theatrical, and Harvey’s programme note cautions sagely, ‘any attempt to confine this extraordinary language to a single interpretation threatens to violate its author’s intentions. So please enjoy this performance as the abstraction it is intended to be. Think less about what you’re not understanding than what you’re experiencing’. A tour de force certainly, to me it seemed more an educational / reading aid than a true piece of theatre, but thoroughly meritorious on those terms, and very enjoyable. Harvey has studied and memorised no less than 5 chapters of the book, ‘working on one phrase, one word, sometimes one syllable at a time’, and apparently presents them often at Joyce conferences. It would be great to have them on DVD.
Thursday, 17 August 2006
Linda Stillwagon at Pittenweem
“Neon in daylight is a / great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would / write, as are light bulbs in daylight”
*
Projected on a white wall in white light, somebody’s name appears, then slowly fades, followed by another, and then another, and over the next few hours, had you the leisure, hundreds. Some are famous in European and American art / literary modernism, others rang a bell; many went unrecognised and may be practically unknown, giving rise to associations based more on the shapes and sounds and (where applicable) meanings of the words in their names, and not on anecdotes and images we already have in mind. It was everybody Gertrude Stein (or, in other versions, Frank O’Hara or Peggy Guggenheim) ever met, in chronological order; a piece of text art, blank and teeming, but synchronic not simultaneous -- by contrast with the blankness of teeming, and, too, with the fantasy that biography (as a literary form) evokes: that a life is a party where everyone is always present. Possibly even with the idea of society: a proper name erases a real face, if only momentarily. Did we meet? if at all, it was in the space quietly left behind each name, unhurried, but too briefly to become attached. For half an hour or so this was rather satisfying; I wish we could have stayed to see whether the long durée would eventuate in some sort of transcendence, or a restless insatiability (Derain, Matisse, Picasso, who else is there?), or something else again, perhaps some usefully recovered memories.
*
This work is accompanied solely by two posters (a third is in the other room), with texts derived from (as it happens) Hans Christian Andersen’s fear of being buried alive. He kept a note on his pillow, that read (if I recall) “I only appear to be dead”. This is printed in black letters on one large sheet of paper that bears crease marks of having been neatly folded up small; its pair reads, “I only appear to be alive”. Resonant in themselves, these lend a further depth of field to the projected names, the majority of whose owners (do you ‘own’ your name?) are by now technically dead. But pace Lynne Truss, add a comma half way through each sentence: no sooner (in the grand scheme) do we appear in the world, than we are dead; but then again, the sight alone of our name can in some sense bring us back to life. Further readings again would be possible.
*
The artist’s name is Ian Whittlesea. The show at the Cairn Gallery, Pittenweem, Fife, ends this week (20 August), but there are some great installation shots on his website:
http://www.ianwhittlesea.net/
*
Projected on a white wall in white light, somebody’s name appears, then slowly fades, followed by another, and then another, and over the next few hours, had you the leisure, hundreds. Some are famous in European and American art / literary modernism, others rang a bell; many went unrecognised and may be practically unknown, giving rise to associations based more on the shapes and sounds and (where applicable) meanings of the words in their names, and not on anecdotes and images we already have in mind. It was everybody Gertrude Stein (or, in other versions, Frank O’Hara or Peggy Guggenheim) ever met, in chronological order; a piece of text art, blank and teeming, but synchronic not simultaneous -- by contrast with the blankness of teeming, and, too, with the fantasy that biography (as a literary form) evokes: that a life is a party where everyone is always present. Possibly even with the idea of society: a proper name erases a real face, if only momentarily. Did we meet? if at all, it was in the space quietly left behind each name, unhurried, but too briefly to become attached. For half an hour or so this was rather satisfying; I wish we could have stayed to see whether the long durée would eventuate in some sort of transcendence, or a restless insatiability (Derain, Matisse, Picasso, who else is there?), or something else again, perhaps some usefully recovered memories.
*
This work is accompanied solely by two posters (a third is in the other room), with texts derived from (as it happens) Hans Christian Andersen’s fear of being buried alive. He kept a note on his pillow, that read (if I recall) “I only appear to be dead”. This is printed in black letters on one large sheet of paper that bears crease marks of having been neatly folded up small; its pair reads, “I only appear to be alive”. Resonant in themselves, these lend a further depth of field to the projected names, the majority of whose owners (do you ‘own’ your name?) are by now technically dead. But pace Lynne Truss, add a comma half way through each sentence: no sooner (in the grand scheme) do we appear in the world, than we are dead; but then again, the sight alone of our name can in some sense bring us back to life. Further readings again would be possible.
*
The artist’s name is Ian Whittlesea. The show at the Cairn Gallery, Pittenweem, Fife, ends this week (20 August), but there are some great installation shots on his website:
http://www.ianwhittlesea.net/
Friday, 4 August 2006
First books: A
Alyson Torns launched her first book a month ago, with a couple of readings, one of which was at Crossing the Line, the series (now at the Plough, Museum Street, first Fridays) where we probably first met, a few years ago. From the Lost Property Office contains work by a 'quartet' of personae: Stella Stein has an eating disorder, Alice Band a painful empathy with children hurt or destroyed; Eunice Pessoa exists through emotional relations but is insightful and reflective; Maria Pimenta engages (or at least 'watches') a wider world outside, and is alive to language as the material of perception and construction. Maria's poems are built on the page in rectangular chunks, while those of the other three are for the most part
intermittently stanzaic free verse. As a whole, the book reads like a growth and development, and that impression was reinforced at the reading, where Alyson presented some newer work again, which was more fractured and abstracted. It'll certainly be interesting to follow her trajectory; but this book is meanwhile a serious, consolidated achievement. The piece that touched me most in fact is one of Alice's, a little one:
Legs dangling
in the air
from energy
of my father's feet
exhilaration of
leaving my seat
flying away
for a moment.
The dangling is typical: these poems start and end in medias res -- they don't purport to resolve anything. The book ends with a piece by 'Alyson Torns', an account of a weekend in Lisbon 'In search of Pessoa'. The poet's experience and love of Portugal suggests itself as theme for wider work, and her prose style is engaging in quite a subtle way. I thought, She should do more of this! (and I rarely enjoy prose).
*
Alyson is a lovely, open-hearted, vivid being; she's been holding her breath for this book, and it's brilliant to see it out, and see it good. (Visually too: she was allowed to do the design, and it's attractive & readable.)
*
Alyson Torns, From the Lost Property Office: a Quartet for Pessoa (London: Hearing Eye, 2006) 1-905082-08-8
intermittently stanzaic free verse. As a whole, the book reads like a growth and development, and that impression was reinforced at the reading, where Alyson presented some newer work again, which was more fractured and abstracted. It'll certainly be interesting to follow her trajectory; but this book is meanwhile a serious, consolidated achievement. The piece that touched me most in fact is one of Alice's, a little one:
Legs dangling
in the air
from energy
of my father's feet
exhilaration of
leaving my seat
flying away
for a moment.
The dangling is typical: these poems start and end in medias res -- they don't purport to resolve anything. The book ends with a piece by 'Alyson Torns', an account of a weekend in Lisbon 'In search of Pessoa'. The poet's experience and love of Portugal suggests itself as theme for wider work, and her prose style is engaging in quite a subtle way. I thought, She should do more of this! (and I rarely enjoy prose).
*
Alyson is a lovely, open-hearted, vivid being; she's been holding her breath for this book, and it's brilliant to see it out, and see it good. (Visually too: she was allowed to do the design, and it's attractive & readable.)
*
Alyson Torns, From the Lost Property Office: a Quartet for Pessoa (London: Hearing Eye, 2006) 1-905082-08-8
Monday, 24 July 2006
Plantarchy
What would plantarchy be? the rule of plants. A new poetry magazine with this title carries the motto 'every molecule an orchid', and no pious Green-ness is suggested by shocking pink covers. Something about the ineluctable luxuriance of plant life in all but the most privative conditions? that leaves the wielder of hoe and secateurs wondering which party governs the cultivation ... There seems to be a sense of spawning (when looked for) in quite a lot of the work in this issue, a strongly generative emphasis or drive, but also a shaping aesthetic that results (for instance) in really nice, clean production and editorial choices.
*
When Martin Buber looked at a tree he knew the 'constant opposition of forces ... continually adjusted', but saw also its 'stiff column in a shock of light', perceived its 'suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves' and entered into 'mutual relation' with it (but 'the tree is now no longer It'. Among the good visual work here, Jeff Hansen's 'I & Thou' is a sequence of 'layered responses' to, I think, specific contemporary aggression that turns 'thou' into 'IT'. It has the dirty-concrete look of copier-collage, but the text also circle-dances. Each piece is paired with a magnified detail of itself, as if you moved closer and began to know someone. Geof Huth by contrast appears to be grafting various species of typographic figure -- archaic characters maybe, symbols, or kerns -- to grow original unitary images which are designated poems (like Ian Hamilton Finlay's one-word poems) that genuinely stretch the potential of poetic signification, by being (brilliantly) titled: 'Sound's First flight', 'The Muscle memory of Meaning', etc.
*
Another Jewish philosopher, Alan Sondheim, is flooding with effluvia, desire, the infinite, mourning enormously, never far from death, in five smeary proses, one quite long. Everything he produces is exciting to read, despite its absurd quantity. Not being on any lists any more that he posts to daily, the regular hits are missed ...
*
The magazine's dimensions are generous to writing that wants to stretch the poetic line. 13 pages of Matthew Klane’s ‘re Republic’ sequence spread right across their width, but (as well-trained espalier appletrees) with very deliberate visual patterning. The well-spaced lines belie their lexical density; you can see them grown from seed: ('I text parley / Malcolm X y Karl Marx / atomism y Islam') [17]; 'for the Other, a / the-O-ry // for my mother / myrrh' [23]. Taking time to read into this work, it's exuberant and rewarding.
*
In these pages, language sometimes seems psychedelic. In Camille Martin's sculpture-landscape-poem (let's call it that for now) words cut out from magazines vibrate, tucked into an informal trellis: 'volcano', 'telephone', 'Believe' -- a kind of concentration that could go minimalist but here bristles. Likewise, William Howe lets off fireworks with no expense spared: these stanzas are #671-682:
Thief puker -- fever bloke -- / Narwhal fell -- lichen plumb -- / Revel bison -- assay label / Office-pro ground toucan --/
Oh God, they're not 'his Emily Dickinson' are they? (the sequence title is 'translanations'). If so, is it beside the point to go off and try to specify the relationship, noticing en passant Dickinson's own hallucinatory formulations (reticent volcanoes with pink plans, indeed!), as well as the bits in Howe that could be by her (Fever space ... dim / Immortality ... piece paucity ... Fructified instant [except it's actually 'Fuctified', hopefully a typo ...].
*
'Plantarchy' the title is acknowledged as an indirect reference to a certain English punk song ... jUStin katKO, the editor, was in London last year, at e-poetry 2005; and there are some Brits in the mag: it opens in fact with 8 pages of outrageous rhyming verse by Jow Lindsay, who's no tree hugger ('gaia, the coyote, restructures this / forest for hansel'). Here too there's a sense that it's all made from the transformation of waste (or into it); and also a systematic interruption of flow (in this case with the names of now obsolete Anglo-Saxon letters). There's a shortish Tom Raworth extract from 'Caller', whose opening could be another rubric for the whole issue: 'nature corrupt nature / romped bound constituency'. And the one critical essay here, by Stephen Perkins, is about Stuart Home and Neoism, asserted as 'the last of the historic avant gardes of the 20th century'. It's quite interesting, but Perkins's association of plagiarism, a basically desperate strategy, with collage, is I hope resistable ...
*
This post has been in draft for a week and must be let go. I've enjoyed reading everything in this excellently produced and edited magazine, and would love to comment on them all -- Maria Damon's 'decrepit text', pathetically unstable; Chris Stroffolino's unsettling unreliable polemicist, and plenty more. The next issue is out now.
http://www.plantarchy.us/home.html
*
At last, it's raining.
*
When Martin Buber looked at a tree he knew the 'constant opposition of forces ... continually adjusted', but saw also its 'stiff column in a shock of light', perceived its 'suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves' and entered into 'mutual relation' with it (but 'the tree is now no longer It'. Among the good visual work here, Jeff Hansen's 'I & Thou' is a sequence of 'layered responses' to, I think, specific contemporary aggression that turns 'thou' into 'IT'. It has the dirty-concrete look of copier-collage, but the text also circle-dances. Each piece is paired with a magnified detail of itself, as if you moved closer and began to know someone. Geof Huth by contrast appears to be grafting various species of typographic figure -- archaic characters maybe, symbols, or kerns -- to grow original unitary images which are designated poems (like Ian Hamilton Finlay's one-word poems) that genuinely stretch the potential of poetic signification, by being (brilliantly) titled: 'Sound's First flight', 'The Muscle memory of Meaning', etc.
*
Another Jewish philosopher, Alan Sondheim, is flooding with effluvia, desire, the infinite, mourning enormously, never far from death, in five smeary proses, one quite long. Everything he produces is exciting to read, despite its absurd quantity. Not being on any lists any more that he posts to daily, the regular hits are missed ...
*
The magazine's dimensions are generous to writing that wants to stretch the poetic line. 13 pages of Matthew Klane’s ‘re Republic’ sequence spread right across their width, but (as well-trained espalier appletrees) with very deliberate visual patterning. The well-spaced lines belie their lexical density; you can see them grown from seed: ('I text parley / Malcolm X y Karl Marx / atomism y Islam') [17]; 'for the Other, a / the-O-ry // for my mother / myrrh' [23]. Taking time to read into this work, it's exuberant and rewarding.
*
In these pages, language sometimes seems psychedelic. In Camille Martin's sculpture-landscape-poem (let's call it that for now) words cut out from magazines vibrate, tucked into an informal trellis: 'volcano', 'telephone', 'Believe' -- a kind of concentration that could go minimalist but here bristles. Likewise, William Howe lets off fireworks with no expense spared: these stanzas are #671-682:
Thief puker -- fever bloke -- / Narwhal fell -- lichen plumb -- / Revel bison -- assay label / Office-pro ground toucan --/
Oh God, they're not 'his Emily Dickinson' are they? (the sequence title is 'translanations'). If so, is it beside the point to go off and try to specify the relationship, noticing en passant Dickinson's own hallucinatory formulations (reticent volcanoes with pink plans, indeed!), as well as the bits in Howe that could be by her (Fever space ... dim / Immortality ... piece paucity ... Fructified instant [except it's actually 'Fuctified', hopefully a typo ...].
*
'Plantarchy' the title is acknowledged as an indirect reference to a certain English punk song ... jUStin katKO, the editor, was in London last year, at e-poetry 2005; and there are some Brits in the mag: it opens in fact with 8 pages of outrageous rhyming verse by Jow Lindsay, who's no tree hugger ('gaia, the coyote, restructures this / forest for hansel'). Here too there's a sense that it's all made from the transformation of waste (or into it); and also a systematic interruption of flow (in this case with the names of now obsolete Anglo-Saxon letters). There's a shortish Tom Raworth extract from 'Caller', whose opening could be another rubric for the whole issue: 'nature corrupt nature / romped bound constituency'. And the one critical essay here, by Stephen Perkins, is about Stuart Home and Neoism, asserted as 'the last of the historic avant gardes of the 20th century'. It's quite interesting, but Perkins's association of plagiarism, a basically desperate strategy, with collage, is I hope resistable ...
*
This post has been in draft for a week and must be let go. I've enjoyed reading everything in this excellently produced and edited magazine, and would love to comment on them all -- Maria Damon's 'decrepit text', pathetically unstable; Chris Stroffolino's unsettling unreliable polemicist, and plenty more. The next issue is out now.
http://www.plantarchy.us/home.html
*
At last, it's raining.
Monday, 17 July 2006
Bookscapes (1)
Journey to the Lower World is a book, with DVD, documenting a shamanistic performance by the artist Marcus Coates, in a council flat in a condemned tower block on a housing estate in Liverpool. It seemed pretty offputting: was this some Beuys epigone with a community arts grant, patronising innocent citizens with a half-arsed orientalism, or was it a fatuous po-mo joke? The publicity postcard shows Coates draped in a deerskin (complete with head and hooves) standing in front of a lift with a small, slightly nonplussed-looking resident and a shopping trolley.
*
The foreword, by Mark Wallinger, didn't help, with its casual dismissal of 'that symbol of man's folly, a tower block'. What's wrong with tower blocks is not the architecture, imo, but other kinds of structures. Drew Milne has a great sequence of tower-block-shaped poems that treats something of this subject (would't like to say what his precise opinions are though). I live on the top of a mid-rise council block, with views of the Lyons estate at World's End. I love it.
*
Anyway, this book eschews conceptual formalism, with a large-ish landscape format allowing for the wide range of types of content inside: whole-page stills of the ritual in progress (blurry reaction shots of the audience of residents), prose, verse, screenlike or down-the-White-Rabbit's-hole images of animals like those Coates met on his trips into the Lower World, sequential frames of a demolition. As well as by Coates and Wallinger there are texts by the book's editor and publisher Alec Finlay, and extracts from anthropological accounts of shamanism. One of Coates's has been lineated into verse by Finlay. As art publishing goes, this is slightly out of the ordinary. If it seems a bit 'everything but the kitchen sink', that may be appropriate to the event, when large, unwieldy, potentially wild animals and possibilities enter small, domestic, contained lives, to activate, but perhaps also to discharge and convert their anxieties.
*
After reading the whole book, and watching the video, I was won over. Marcus Coates was alive to all the possibilities for discomfort of his activities; he also cared (or appeared to) in an unpretentious and exploratory way, for ordinary people and for society. And the shaman thing didn't come from nowhere, or merely from the weekend course in Notting Hill(!): apparently he has been doing things with nature always. Learning to imitate animal cries, for instance. This mode of art practice came to seem a genuine if experimental attempt to contribute and discover, or uncover, something on behalf of a real world. The residents were about to be rehoused. They were looking for a comforting image, or omen perhaps; they were not deluded, but understood the nature of the avatar; and their paticipation, including embarrassment and defensive amusement, seemed really to be an observance of community, or of the desire for it, on the part of a self-consciously tiny minority of local inhabitants.
*
Around the time of getting this book, in April, I attended a performance by the brilliant Chris Goode of his one-man show 'We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg', in the North London home of Sue F's friend Jonathan. This by no means purported to be a sacred ritual, and I am certain (I trust) Chris would run a mile from the word shaman, but there were solemnities, as well as sillinesses, and the gamut of stuff in between, and he is after something real. Chris presents with total theatrical command yet a resolutely 'normal' and even slightly diffident manner. And then he goes away, evading applause.
*
Anyway, this conjunction left me musing a bit about, well, blokes doing strange things in other people's houses, I guess; and the potential social functions of performance ... But the aim here is to write about the book really. 'Bookscapes' is a new series of publications by Alec Finlay, under the 'Platform Projects' rubric, though his former press, Morning Star, is listed as co-publisher. I guess I first met Alec at small press fairs years ago, when he'd be hawking his exquisite little poetry publications, or you could say minimalist artists' books -- pamphlets and cards -- or sometimes minding the stall for Wild Hawthorn. Back then too I remember him giving a lecture at an art librarians' conference, about Little Sparta. With 'pocketbooks' though, Alec made a significant move into the trade press arena, and did some brilliant anthologies in particular, but also small classics by individuals, all working within an attractive unified 'brand'. Libraries of Thought and Imagination, about books and what they mean to people, and Helen Douglas's photo book Unravelling the Ripple, are my top favourites. 'Bookscapes' seem to be pushing the bounds of the bookshop book again by using a range of formats this time, and taking the multimedia further. I'll write about some more of them.
http://www.alecfinlay.com/bookscapes.html
(An account of the earlier pocketbooks: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr93-2/kelly.htm )
*
This post is different from yesterday, because of wanting to write something potentially public about the bookscapes.
*
The foreword, by Mark Wallinger, didn't help, with its casual dismissal of 'that symbol of man's folly, a tower block'. What's wrong with tower blocks is not the architecture, imo, but other kinds of structures. Drew Milne has a great sequence of tower-block-shaped poems that treats something of this subject (would't like to say what his precise opinions are though). I live on the top of a mid-rise council block, with views of the Lyons estate at World's End. I love it.
*
Anyway, this book eschews conceptual formalism, with a large-ish landscape format allowing for the wide range of types of content inside: whole-page stills of the ritual in progress (blurry reaction shots of the audience of residents), prose, verse, screenlike or down-the-White-Rabbit's-hole images of animals like those Coates met on his trips into the Lower World, sequential frames of a demolition. As well as by Coates and Wallinger there are texts by the book's editor and publisher Alec Finlay, and extracts from anthropological accounts of shamanism. One of Coates's has been lineated into verse by Finlay. As art publishing goes, this is slightly out of the ordinary. If it seems a bit 'everything but the kitchen sink', that may be appropriate to the event, when large, unwieldy, potentially wild animals and possibilities enter small, domestic, contained lives, to activate, but perhaps also to discharge and convert their anxieties.
*
After reading the whole book, and watching the video, I was won over. Marcus Coates was alive to all the possibilities for discomfort of his activities; he also cared (or appeared to) in an unpretentious and exploratory way, for ordinary people and for society. And the shaman thing didn't come from nowhere, or merely from the weekend course in Notting Hill(!): apparently he has been doing things with nature always. Learning to imitate animal cries, for instance. This mode of art practice came to seem a genuine if experimental attempt to contribute and discover, or uncover, something on behalf of a real world. The residents were about to be rehoused. They were looking for a comforting image, or omen perhaps; they were not deluded, but understood the nature of the avatar; and their paticipation, including embarrassment and defensive amusement, seemed really to be an observance of community, or of the desire for it, on the part of a self-consciously tiny minority of local inhabitants.
*
Around the time of getting this book, in April, I attended a performance by the brilliant Chris Goode of his one-man show 'We Must Perform a Quirkafleeg', in the North London home of Sue F's friend Jonathan. This by no means purported to be a sacred ritual, and I am certain (I trust) Chris would run a mile from the word shaman, but there were solemnities, as well as sillinesses, and the gamut of stuff in between, and he is after something real. Chris presents with total theatrical command yet a resolutely 'normal' and even slightly diffident manner. And then he goes away, evading applause.
*
Anyway, this conjunction left me musing a bit about, well, blokes doing strange things in other people's houses, I guess; and the potential social functions of performance ... But the aim here is to write about the book really. 'Bookscapes' is a new series of publications by Alec Finlay, under the 'Platform Projects' rubric, though his former press, Morning Star, is listed as co-publisher. I guess I first met Alec at small press fairs years ago, when he'd be hawking his exquisite little poetry publications, or you could say minimalist artists' books -- pamphlets and cards -- or sometimes minding the stall for Wild Hawthorn. Back then too I remember him giving a lecture at an art librarians' conference, about Little Sparta. With 'pocketbooks' though, Alec made a significant move into the trade press arena, and did some brilliant anthologies in particular, but also small classics by individuals, all working within an attractive unified 'brand'. Libraries of Thought and Imagination, about books and what they mean to people, and Helen Douglas's photo book Unravelling the Ripple, are my top favourites. 'Bookscapes' seem to be pushing the bounds of the bookshop book again by using a range of formats this time, and taking the multimedia further. I'll write about some more of them.
http://www.alecfinlay.com/bookscapes.html
(An account of the earlier pocketbooks: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr93-2/kelly.htm )
*
This post is different from yesterday, because of wanting to write something potentially public about the bookscapes.
Sunday, 16 July 2006
in these ends my beginning
Yesterday afternoon a small bookshop trawl. Through the Brompton Cemetery (a picture would be nice, wouldn't it?) onto Fulham Road, and into John Thornton's for the first time. They had a little poetry, including a practically mint copy in glassine wrapper of a lovely Cape Goliard book from 1968 (another picture wanted), Gael Turnbull's A Trampoline, for the ridiculous price of £1.50. Who designed it? Tom Raworth had moved on by then. For the same price I left behind the first pamphlet publications in the early 1940s (but second impressions) of The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding (the latter on hand-made deckle edge paper). There was also a copy of the old magazine Tlaloc (ed. Cavan McCarthy), with some great typewriter poems by d.a. levy, among other things. Bizarrely by contrast that cost £2. I'll maybe pick it up if it's there next time. The shop actually specialises in Catholic theology.
*
After a ciabattina, the bookshop at World's End, where having finished with the main shelves I spotted this little brown job in the glass cabinet: Down Where Changed by J.H. Prynne! £15 less 20% discount (this seems to be a permanent offer there). Slightly dented and damp-stained on the outside, but really OK. The clever thing then would have been to put back The Marginalization of Poetry (£6) but I didn't, I stuck with it ...
*
Finally at the Picador bookshop (new books) I saw Alasdair Gray's recent Book of Prefaces, a terrific anthology of paratexts, brilliantly designed and illustrated. I'll get this, in due course.
*
And all this time I should have been at Tim's and Chiaki's wedding, but we had the date wrong.
*
I'm not really sure yet what I'm doing here. There's an urge to gloss (which would have the merit of increasing and reinforcing what I know) and to illustrate (I do intend eventually to get a scanner again -- the old one wasn't compatible with the new PC-- and/or a digital camera) . But this whole thing may be nothing more than a strategy to stop failing to keep personal records. Writing offline's come to seem no fun.
*
"I Never read the book you gave me twentyfive years ago. I want you to know that I have Now, and that it is remarkable" (WCW to Reznikoff, quoted in Perelman, 'An Alphabet of Literary History', in MoP. I am hoping this practice, if it takes off, might reduce the interval between book acquisition, reading and articulated response.
*
Read DWC slowly and tiredly, yesterday, liking the large round type on the small pages; tonight skimming it rapidly brings it alive more: predominantly I get amazing weaves of sound (such as I have also noted all over my copy of the much more recent Acrylic Tips) as well as glimpses of a specific occasion, the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall (1979).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)