Small Presses
In the aftermath of the conglomeration of book publishing companies into large multi-media corporations a variety of small presses have sprung up — arguably to fill the voids left by the monstrosities — and divided to some extent the geography of culture into the seen and unseen. For those willing to look, treasures that as few as ten years ago would have floated on the surface, can still be found, but it takes a bit of work, a bit of patience, and a bit of luck.
Greybull focuses “on photographic books with singular topics ranging from the examination of heroes, to obsessions, subcultures, rituals and ceremonies. Each title visually documents the expressive world of its subject be it rodeo queens, a photographer, architect, hero or icon. Greybull is committed to exploring, celebrating, and preserving the original, the unconventional and the found.”
Mike Sarki’s Rogue Literary Society has begun producing a small arsenal of beautifully simple hand made books. He currently has three titles available: Ryan Davis’ Problems and Miracles, his own Mewl House, and Barton Allen’s June in the Drawer of Lowboy.
Jessica Helfand and William Drentell’s Winterhouse Editions “publishes literary works, books on design, and cultural criticism. Recent projects include a history of quackery, a survey of the movies that Kafka saw, a new typographic novel, a collection of circular interfaces, and the printing of the U.S. government’s national security strategy. Also available are works by Paul Auster, Thomas Bernhard, André Brink, Paul Celan, Jessica Helfand, James Salter, Leon Wieseltier, and Richard Wilbur.”
Emigre books used to distribute a wide range of books and periodicals from a variety of contemporary designers but now they seem to be focusing on Rudy Vanderlans’ photography books.
Triple Press, run by Kathryn Rantala, Cooper Renner, and myself, uses print-on-demand technology to make available first run contemporary literature. So far we have books by Norman Lock, Daniel Borzutzky, Faruk Ulay, Jane Unrue, Thomas Wooten, and Garth Buckner.
(A side note, I will catalog other small presses and their specialties as time allows. If there are others you are aware of, please leave them in comments.)
Gopherus agassizii
As a child in the Mojave Desert, I grew up with this creature Gopherus agassizii, more commonly known to us as the Desert Tortoise. It was a hardy, long lived, survivor of the severity of the “high desert” environment. They were not plentiful then, and they are diminishing today, but we found them to be great pets and endlessly fascinating.
I recently learned from a new study in biology that individual tortoises may indeed have their own personalities—a controversial trend in animal behaviorism. I was immediately intrigued.
In an Los Angeles Times article, Far More Than Creatures of Habit, Louis Sahagun writes about the recent research of U.S. Geological Survey biologist Kristin Berry who, along with her team, has come to new and startling conclusions.
Louis Sahagun writes that dawn to dusk observation has led to the provocative conclusion that:
Gopherus agassizii is anything but a slow, dull homebody. Tortoises don’t just demonstrate behavior, she says, they show personality.
“They are not the same inside their shells; they are individuals interacting in complex communities,” she said. “And there may be behavior occurring in ways we haven’t yet learned to observe, or interpret. How does a tortoise exhibit joy, or play, or express frustration?”
Asking such a question was once heresy in scientific circles. But Berry and a growing number of researchers are rejecting the decades-old notion that nonhuman creatures are instinctive automatons devoid of feelings.
Where even some skeptical scientists were comfortable acknowledging that dogs, dolphins and chimpanzees show signs of personality, this new field sees a spectrum of temperament and emotions among almost all animals: octopuses and lizards, crayfish and spiders. Even fruit flies.
The implications are interesting. The world around has far greater depth than the flat surfaces we have been led to believe were there. The article goes on to challenge the old stimulus-response viewpoint concerning animal behavior that made humans alone the arbiters of emotion in a soul-less cosmos, and reintroduces a world of enchantment that we have lost for too long.
If we are ever to restore the environmental balances, and leave the earth a habitable planet for future generations, we do well to begin with the simple recovery of a perpetual sense of wonder about the living world all around us.
Amazement
The researcher, Michael Denton writes:
Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 grams, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.
found in John Herlihy’s Borderlands of the Spirit: Reflections on a Scared Science of Mind
Deron and Aaron 11/07/04 – 11/10/04
Deron: suggestion. replace Vs at the beginning of words with Ws when you — specifically you, not ‘you’ as in ‘one’ — speak
wanessa
wagina
etc.
Aaron: you mean like:
wivacious
?
Deron: yes, but I suppose I’ll have to amend my suggestion to all Vs replaced with Ws
wiwacious
with perhaps a dash of pinash
chameleon screenplay
write a screenplay about a person whose art is transforming himself so that people’s expectations of him shift. none of the characters he creates are who he is and they are neutral in terms of being an advantage for him; he simply crafts persona depending on where he is, and the persona don’t necessarily correlate with the environment. i.e. goes to yoga as a gay man with a headband.
Top of my Christmas list
Right after leaving the airplane, Yves Rossy pulls something, but not the strings to open up the parachute, he does that much later. He operates a valve through which compressed air enters his wing made of coated high-strength fibres. After approximately two seconds, the wing reaches its maximum strength, the falling movement turns into a gliding movement, and Rossy is flying. FLYING MAN has been optimized by Ukrainian scientists for aerodynamics and features a wingspan of 8.2 feet. It does not carry like a glider, but still at an impressing glide ratio of 4 to 5. Assuming a vertical height of 1.2 miles, Yves can cruise horizontally for about 5 to 6 miles before he has to open the traditional parachute for a safe landing.
Prospective Concepts, on to which my bud Warren turned me, has several other amazing “toys”.
Hillman Curtis, Designer Series
Hillman Curtis has created a series of beautiful, insightful short films on designers and design. Anyone interested in design, aesthetics, process, or excellence will find them useful.
The First Book I Designed
The first book I designed was a festschrift for Gordon Lish. Cooper Renner suggested the idea and got a handful of writers who had been associated with Gordon to participate. I will give a few pictures and excerpts at the end of this post, but for now I want to focus on the design of the book.
The title of the book is Gordon! Those of you familiar with Lish’s work will recognize this conceit from the text of his books. It served both as an honor to the person and a reference to his work.
The title was my first conscious attempt at letter spacing. The font I chose was Monotype Garamond, as I was fixated with it at the time. As a typographic novice it served as a ‘gateway’ into my continuing search for a readable, neutral, text font.
The sub-title of the book was A Tribute to Gordon Lish, which I made as small as I could and spaced proportionally bellow the title. Each adjustment created such pleasure in me until finally I had achieved what I was then capable of.
Julian Pozzi
Julian Pozzi will be contributing to this blog. Here is a link to some of his drawings.
Keeping it Simple
From 37signals:
Fast Company’s The Beauty of Simplicity talks about how companies are beginning to see that “making things simple is the new competitive advantage” (which was the whole thrust of my talk at Web 2.0 — it was even called “Less as a competitive advantage”).
The article mostly focuses its praise on Google, Intuit, Apple, and Philips. It’s great to see these enormous companies putting high value on simplicity, but the real simplicity and less movement is happening way lower down the chain with the smaller companies. Companies of 1 or 3 or 5 or 10 — they’re staying simple on purpose.
The big guys have to force simple. The small guys are simple by default. Staying small is the real competitive advantage. That’s real business intelligence — understanding your advantage and milking it.
The big guys are discovering what the small guys have always known. The small companies leading the way and have been for years. The big guys are following the small guys. The Less movement is bottom up, not top down. There’s a big story here. I wonder which journalist will grab it.
Serious Business?
An interesting aspect of contemporary culture is the ease by which we ridicule what we cannot comprehend. The following article seems incomprehensible to a society nursed on the idea that we are “home alone” in this region of the universe, and that anyone who says differently is a “certified nut.”
Could this be serious business? Or is it another example of a professional, suddenly and for whatever reason, having “snapped” and uttered the ridiculous? In addition to the oddity of his statements, there are the obvious consequences to public policy as well as their political and psychological impact.
A Former Canadian Minister Of Defence Asks Canadian Parliament To Hold Hearings On Relations With Alien “Et” Civilizations
November 24, 2005 — A former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau has joined forces with three Non-governmental organizations to ask the Parliament of Canada to hold public hearings on Exopolitics — relations with “ETs.”
By “ETs,” Mr. Hellyer and these organizations mean ethical, advanced extraterrestrial civilizations that may now be visiting Earth.
On September 25, 2005, in a startling speech at the University of Toronto that caught the attention of mainstream newspapers and magazines, Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defence Minister from 1963-67 under Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Prime Minister Lester Pearson, publicly stated: “UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head.”
Aesthetic Accessibility
At some point, any creator of objects or texts must answer the question of how much accessibility is important to their sense of the object or text they have created. It’s a difficult subject, as specialization and excellence in any arena by nature creates a path toward complexity. At some point, the audience for a particular item will necessarily be left behind as the creator follows the logical(?) progression of their craft. What happens then? Should they turn back, creating an item that can be grasped immediately? Or continue in the hope that what they create will survive until an audience can craft an understanding based on the sophistication of their progress over time?
Pliny Fisk
Pliny Fisk, the force behind The Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, heads a collaboration in Central Texas that focuses on influencing sustainable building methods. One of the systems they’ve created allows for the expansion — and contraction — of the footprint of a building as the needs of the users of the building shift. He estimates this building system can be implemented for around $70 a square foot. Here’s a description of the CMPBS’ Advanced Green Builder Demonstration Building in Austin:
This demonstration project, which serves as our office and studio, links building design and construction to the central Texas region, integrating the supply and use of water, food, energy, waste, and material resources with local and regional businesses and utilities. At the building scale, it represents the best example of how our Eco-BalancePlanning™ methodology operates reflecting the spatial footprints resulting from the life cycles of sustainable technologies incorporated in the project.
Some things I want to consider further and possibly write about
- Quantum entanglement: In a brain the size of the universe, would information move at the speed of imagination?
- A history of philosophy in three minutes: The story of big problems artfully set aside
- How George Bush’s handlers exploit the “Hell, I could do the boss’s job easy” syndrome
- The tragedy of not opening a letter sent to you from your future self: Why we should read Shakespeare
- How humans are wired to conserve mental energy: Why people dismiss difficult art
- Why Poetry Magazine should use some of its $100 million to set up a subsidized small press distribution center
- Why do I believe what I believe?: Discovering the origins of defining ideas in one’s basic appetites and fears
- Why no paper copy generated by Ohio voting machines?: What it means when a problem is deliberately not addressed
- Philosophy meets neurochemistry: Does thought arise from matter or does thought move matter?
- How the impulse to lash out shapes public policy—and why we fail to see it as a weakness rather than a strength
- Road rage as a model for understanding present American policy
- Indeterminism vs. Foundationalism: How to regard necessary truth
- On torture: Beginning with what You will not do
- Do specific forms and genres of literature “own” certain effects—or might anything done in one be closely approximated in another?
- The power to forgive, and why so few American Christians have it
- Bad form: How aesthetic considerations inform moral decisions ….
Brainslide
Here’s another remarkable site Alek Lindus has directed me to:
The Interface: Religion and Spirituality
You often hear it said, “I am spiritual, but not religious.” In modern culture, this makes sense. Philosophically, it may be a false dichotomy. Culturally, people have left institutional and traditional religion en masse, but that has not dampened their spiritual pursuits, nor the need to find personal meaning deeper than what is provided by common culture. The result is not only new hybrids of older western religious traditions, but the introduction of non-western traditions into western culture as well as the emergence of new religious manifestations which purport to be a fresh departure. What are we to make of this culturally and philosophically?
One can make the case that from a philosophical point of view (the viewpoint taken by the philosophy of religion); a religious tradition is a philosophical tradition in religious guise. If philosophy is understood to be a search for meaningful relationships in the cosmos and among the ideas that sentient beings have about those relationships, then clearly, religious traditions manifest this philosophical trajectory. Also, in a philosophical sense, a spiritual or sacred dimension exercised as a pattern of thinking or a way of life (i.e., spirituality) is both philosophical and religious by definition.
It is warranted, therefore, to place religion as a subset of philosophical thought, and spirituality as a personal practice within those dimensions. However, within this general context one might “slice this interesting pie” somewhat differently, and see these in another cultural framework. From a sociological point of view, religion can be understood as the formal, exoteric, surface-structure that the experience of the sacred takes when it is translated into a social order. Conversely, spirituality is the inner, esoteric dimension, or the deep structure of the same experience which individuals to come know by direct, personal knowledge that can be translated directly into life. The two are connected like opposite faces of the same coin. Traditionally they have acted in concert, but, like every other entity, they can change.
As a catalyst for the social order, a formal religious tradition becomes the lens through which a society (or individuals within it) sees and makes sense of the world around it. (Philosophies work in a similar way, but with less social formality). Around this common religious seeing, societal values are organized and their capacities and potentials put to use. Then there are those individuals who use the symbolic systems within a formal religious tradition as a way to plumb the depths of their own personal meaning. Often these individuals (sometimes called mystics) who practice religion as a form of personal spirituality make discoveries that deviate from the normative patterns, or challenge the accepted language of religious formalism and are viewed, therefore, with suspicion though they remain faithful to the tradition to which they belong.
However, when any religious tradition begins to shift, lose hold, or decline, many of these same members take the freedom to disengage from the formality of its surface structures, and continue their inner pursuits without reference to the exoteric tradition. This leaves a split in culture, which is where we appear to be today. In many cases, the formal structures appear to be empty. Personal spirituality is on the rise. It can be hoped that at this point of bifurcation, some higher-order complexity will emerge which reunites the two halves of religion and spirituality once again, creating greater coherence in the surface and deep structures that make up the philosophical fabric of civilization.
3
I honestly have had between 25 and 30 chicks. But I live in a tourist town. I meet new people every week. Ive only loved 3 women in my time. I have had more fun than I should’ve. Multiple partners and 1 nighters R fun, but not fulfilling. I wouldnt trade my experiences 4 anything though! Im fantastic in the sack. Thanx 2 all you ladies who vacation on the Gulf Coast. I’ll never forget U!
From the Message Board
weegingeralastair: 6’4. suck it, shortarse. if you want to gain those ellusive two inches, take it from me; rubbing mustard on your bollocks makes you taller.
partly because you’re walking on tip-toes for a few days after application.
but still.Glasgow_Hotty: I’m 6ft – how big is ur penis? Lets have a poll… Wink
weegingeralastair: surely you mean a pole.
Glasgow_Hotty: The Polish are dirty people
weegingeralastair: on the contrary; i know several polish types, and all are lovely and smell of flowers. i was referring, rather, to my willy.
Glasgow_Hotty:That’s just an act so they can steal your passport my man
Your willy would never treat you that wayweegingeralastair: wee weegingeralastair once got a case of NSU, and he stank of pickled onions for two weeks until the cream started working. i swear, like pickled onion space raiders. every time i went for a piss, i was drooling.
Thanksgiving
Happy clusterflock.
Meditation
Clean the broom.
Cooper Renner and Mario Bellatin
Cooper Renner, a contributor to this blog, and poet, editor, translator, and writer, is working on a translation of three texts from the Mexican writer Mario Bellatin. Below is a brief description from him describing the texts he is working from:
“Hero Dogs” is almost an allegory, written in a sequence of snippets, but he avoids making direct connections between his two announced topics*. He also uses terminology in a sort of deliberately clumsy way, always referring to his main character, for example, as “el hombre inmovil” [the immobile man] as opposed to “paralyzed man” or something that sounds more natural, and he doesn’t vary it. “Chinese Checkers” is full of bits of story, characters telling other characters what they are doing, the narrator telling us what he is doing, but it doesn’t “add up”, as it were. There is no artificial direction imposed onto the various narratives. And I still don’t know what the new one is going to do. If I remember correctly, he told me that it had not even been published in Spanish yet.
*He doesn’t make any direct connections between his two motifs once the story gets going, but the subtitle of the book and the initial paragraph tells you that the connection is there: then you have to decide how to play the “narrative” against his announced “meaning”.
Climbing
I used to be a climber. The climb I remember most was a relatively easy climb compared to what I became capable of but for the first and only time I can remember I climbed without fear, focused on a circle of rock around me, almost climbing past my protection, forgetting for a moment to clip in.
The SHRIMP
From Vestal Design (specializing in rapid and affordable product, graphic, and multimedia design and research):
The SHRIMP (Sustainable Housing for Refugees via Mass Production) is an attempt to bring housing and other relief to large displaced or homeless populations, especially those who have suffered in a natural disaster. Providing shelter to a family of four, it folds up into 1/4 of a shipping container for efficient deployment.
Jimmy Carter
Crooks and Liars has a video clip of Jimmy Carter talking about the changes in American public policy in the last five years.
Deron and Aaron 11/07/04
Deron: ‘what can brown do for you’ strikes me as overtly dirty
Aaron: totally. filthy. either that or racist.
also what about coors light ‘the coldest tasting beer in the world’. like i have the biggest looking cock in north america. it’s either cold or it’s not, right? unless maybe there’s menthol involved? with the beer, i mean. with my dong there’s always menthol involved. wait, i’ve got the coldest tasting cock in the world!!!
Deron: lecherous. I should have said lecherous. and congratulations on your cock. I can smell it from here.
