EVENT sucking on words
An evening of primordial sonatas, to celebrate 10 years of writers’ collective information as material
Venue: Whitechapel Gallery, London, E1 7QX
Date: Saturday 18 February 2012
Time: 7.30pm
Tickets: online here or tel: +44 (0)20 7522 7888
A feast of sonic poetry with performances by Rob Lavers and Simon Morris, Nick Thurston, and a headline set by Dutch avant-garde composer Jaap Blonk. A VJ playlist, put together especially for the night by Canadian poet Christian Bök, will provide sights and sounds between performances and alongside the drinks.
The audience are politely reminded that the ears have no lids.
As Jaap Blonk recalls: “The reception of these first public performances was varying widely. On many occasions I was performing at rock or punk clubs as an opening act for a band, and lots of people were not at all into it. Their preference was either to just talk with their friends or hear their habitual kind of music. So they started to scream and protest, and often throwing things at me, especially beer, which fortunately was mostly given out in plastic, not glass containers. The culminating point of this kind of experience was a performance of the Ursonate, opening for a concert of The Stranglers at Vredenburg Music Center in Utrecht in 1986, for an audience of about 2000 fans. When I was announced, even before I had opened my mouth, people started calling out: “Rot op!” (“Fuck off!”), and when I started, the atmosphere became very much that of a football match, but clearly an away game for me. With massive roaring they tried to drown out my voice, but of course the P.A. made me louder. Six stage guards were working hard to keep people from climbing the stage and hitting me, and hundreds of half-full plastic beer glasses flew about me. But in the course of the performance I managed to win over at least a few hundred people, who were roaring in my favor. The next morning one newspaper had the headline “Jaap Blonk Shocks Punk Audience With Dada Poetry”, which for me was a nice testimony to the fact that Schwitters’ piece was still very much alive, in spite of its age.”
EVENT Man Booker Prize Samizdat warriors
information as material Samizdat warriors, Umi Baden-Powell, Corinne Macdonald and Sasha Litvintseva distributed the Man Booker Shortlist Quiz to guests arriving at the Man Booker Prize Award ceremony at the Guildhall, London, Tuesday 18 October 2011.
Take the quiz online at:
http://www.quibblo.com/quiz/fE
Download the quiz sheet:
EDITION The Man Booker Shortlist Quiz!
THE MAN BOOKER SHORTLIST QUIZ!
FREE
Year 2011
Format online quiz + poster
PDF poster version available on request
The Man Booker Prize will be chosen from a shortlist of six books and announced on Tuesday 18 October 2011. According to the organisers’ mission statement:
“The Man Booker Prize promotes the finest in fiction by rewarding the very best book of the year. The prize is the world’s most important literary award and has the power to transform the fortunes of authors. The prize… aims to reward the best novel of the year written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or the Republic of Ireland. The Man Booker judges are selected from the country’s finest critics, writers and academics to maintain the consistent excellence of the prize.”
According to the Man Booker Prize website, an eligible novel “must be an original work.”
Take our quick online quiz about the books on the shortlist and see what you think. Good luck!
PUBLICATION Freud on Holiday III: The Forgetting of a Proper Name
Freud on Holiday volume III. The Forgetting of a Proper Name
Sharon Kivland
Co-published with Cube Art Editions, Athens.
Greek translation by Eleanna Panagou
Designed by Christos Lialios
Price £12.50+pp
ISBN 978-1-907468-06-3
Year 2011
Edition 400
Pages 56pp
Binding Perfect bound; softback; one colour cover; two b/w illustrations, 16 colour illustrations
Dimensions 230 x 145 mm
The third volume in the series Freud on Holiday describes a number of holiday choices; the problem of deciding where to go and when; plus the matters of cost, convenience, appropriate companionship and correct context. There are descriptions of train itineraries, hotel rooms and restaurant menus, even though the name of one restaurant resists recall for most of the book. There is a surprising connection with hysteria and another name is forgotten en route, accompanied by an embarrassing error in chronology. At last, forgotten names are remembered, although an image that has been talked away is not seen again.
ESSAY DO or DIY
Do or DIY
FREE
Year 2011
Full text below
PDF version available on request
The essay below was commissioned as the catalogue Foreword for the London Art Book Fair 2011. As you’ll read, it is a series of anecdotes that form a potted history of self-publishing by persons now canonised by the literary industry. Next year will mark iam’s official tenth year of self-publishing activity, which has taken a scope and modes that work quite precisely against the notion of a ‘vanity press’. This essay, as a polemical act of para-scholarship by three of our Editors (Craig Dworkin, Simon Morris, and Nick Thurston) has a clear thesis: “Don’t wait for others to validate your ideas. Do it yourself.”
PUBLICATION The Persons
The Persons
Peter Jaeger
Price £7.50+pp
ISBN 978-1-907468-04-9
Year 2011
Edition 300
Pages 54pp
Binding Perfect bound; full colour cover; text only inside
In 2010 the Canadian poet Peter Jaeger celebrated his fiftieth birthday. The Persons is a scrapbook of found texts that have been clipped, archived, and sorted for their parallel grammatical structure, with the proper name and verb always preceding their complimentary parts. Those fragments are then rearranged so that no two consecutive sentences come from the same source. Jaeger’s life, here, is thus written through the words of others: those protagonists who animated his imagination and left their traces in the newspapers, emails, diaries, books (from literature to philosophy), and all the countless ephemera with which the externalized inner drama of our lives plays out.
The Persons presents readers with an alternative form of life writing, taking as it does the autobiographical details of people whom Jaeger encountered in print during the first 50 years of his lifetime:
“Rob leaves. Annie wins the women’s overall title. Nadeem is afraid of the Taliban’s return. José asserts that Robert staged his famous photo. Perry arrives carrying a feather. Ariel wears brown wool. Kash believes the police will follow his orders on tasers. Mitch died of AIDS. Kyozan hears the edgeless sound of the deep night. Rick gave up looking for a job, calling the search a “why bother” scenario. Larry turns to the wall and puts his head against it . . .”
Book launch for The Persons at The London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery, 23-25 September 2011
PUBLICATION An Exercise in Pathetic Criticism
An Exercise in Pathetic Criticism
Kate Briggs
Price £8.99+pp
ISBN 978-1-907468-08-7
Year 2011
Edition 500
Pages Fold out
Binding Perfect bound; one colour cover; text only inside
“What remains after the devastating act of reading a book? What stays with us once a book is re-shelved? A cognitive surplus – what Georges Bataille would recognize as la part maudite – that is somehow from the book but rarely really of it. The text itself, the fine points of style that distinguish it as a work worth reading and remembering, are lost – translated via forgetting into a poor approximation of a paraphrase. And yet, that loss – what we cannot remember and carry with us – is how Coleridge defined essential poetry: “not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return.”—Craig Dworkin, Professor of Literature, University of Utah
EDITION Tote bag for the London Art Book Fair
Have a Peck at Georges Perec
Simon Morris & Nick Thurston
Price £1.50
Year 2011
Edition 400
Materials one-colour print on linen bag
information as material were commissioned to design the tote bag for this year’s London Art Book Fair, and came up with a homage to Georges Perec’s ‘Socio-Physiological Outline’ for reading, thanks to the hungry pigeons of York.
The bag will be available at the Whitechapel Gallery from September 23 for as long as stocks last.
“We read with the eyes. What the eyes do while we are reading is … like a pigeon pecking at the ground in search of
breadcrumbs.”
– Georges Perec, ‘Reading: A Socio-Physiological Outline’, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (London: Penguin Books, 1999)174-185: 175-176.
Edition Howl #16
Howl #16
Eric Zboya
Price Freely distributed at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, July-October 2011.
Format One-colour lithographic print on 250gsm silk paper.
Year [2011] editioned in 2011
Edition 1000
Dimensions 840 x 594 mm
We tend to overlook that mathematics is, in fact, a language; and it is a dynamic system of communication that has been largely ignored as a vehicle for textual translation. ‘Algorithmic Translations’ attempt to acknowledge this vehicular disregard by utlising the mathematical functionality found in graphic imaging software. This utilisation adds an element of dimensionality to a textual work by mutating a text into a kind of graphic, nonlinear entity. Through a series of algorithmic calculations, the computer program expels an abstract image based upon the original topographical placement of the type on the space of the page. This algorithm transforms each letter, each mark of punctuation, into dendrites that extrude into the continuum of the page. Each page is inimitable; the image can never be recreated in the same way twice due to the program’s seemingly aleatory function during the algorithmic transformation. This act of visual creation through mathematical calculation serves to challenge the reader’s notion of comprehension, perceptibility, and language, through visual poetics.
Publication Freud’s Weather
Freud on Holiday. Appendix I. Freud’s Weather
Sharon Kivland
Designed by James Brook
Price £7.50+pp
ISBN
Year 2011
Edition 300
Pages 20pp
Binding stapled
Dimensions 230 x 145 mm
Almost every year Sigmund Freud went on holiday, often accompanied by his brother Alexander, an expert on railway transport, timetables, and travel tariffs. He made a distinction between the holidays he spent with his family during the month of August and those voyages he took later, most often in September, with complicated itineraries. Freud prepared carefully for his trips, consulting tourist guides and other travel literature concerning the places he intended to visit attentively, especially those of the sites of classical antiquity, and of course, the famous Baedeker. The fifty-six letters and hundred and eighty-nine postcards of his travel correspondence with his family between 1895 and 1923 reveal his enjoyment of these holidays, his pleasure in his liberty, in getting a bargain, in the blue skies and the southern warmth, in the beauty of the landscape, in wine and food. From this correspondence descriptions of the weather have been collected.
Publication Reisen II
Reisen II
Sharon Kivland
Price £5+pp
ISBN 978-1-907468-07-01
Year 2011
Edition 150
Pages 20pp
Binding stapled; 2 black and white photographic illustrations
Dimensions 150 x 105 mm
Reisen II is the second in a series of occasional pamphlets, which refer to the trains, train journeys, railway-lines, stations, station platforms, railway timetables, ticket collectors, and train compartments in the life and work of Sigmund Freud. This modest booklet contains details of some of the train journeys of Freud’s holidays, gleaned from his correspondence home, with reference to contemporary editions of Cook’s Continental Time Tables, Tourist’s Handbook and Steamship Tables, supplemented by consultation of the European rail timetables of the present day.
Publication Freud’s Dining
Freud on Holiday. Appendix II. Freud’s Dining
Sharon Kivland
Designed by James Brook
Price £7.50+pp
ISBN 978-1-907468-10-0
Year 2011
Edition 300
Pages 20pp
Binding stapled
Dimensions 230 x 145 mm
Almost every year Sigmund Freud went on holiday, often accompanied by his brother Alexander, an expert on railway transport, timetables, and travel tariffs. He made a distinction between the holidays he spent with his family during the month of August and those voyages he took later, most often in September, with complicated itineraries. Freud prepared carefully for his trips, consulting tourist guides and other travel literature concerning the places he intended to visit attentively, especially those of the sites of classical antiquity, and of course, the famous Baedeker. The fifty-six letters and hundred and eighty-nine postcards of his travel correspondence with his family between 1895 and 1923 reveal his enjoyment of these holidays, his pleasure in his liberty, in getting a bargain, in the blue skies and the southern warmth, in the beauty of the landscape, in wine and food. From this correspondence descriptions of what he ate and drank (and the state of his digestion) have been collected.