MIMEO MIMEO

"An interior/personal piece"

This is from an unsewn sheet of Michael McClure's Dark Brown, published by Auerhahn in 1961. McClure submitted the poems to Olympia Press for consideration but Dave Haselwood got there first. "A Long Poem of Spiritual Revolution and Sexuality" of which Ginsberg wrote in Big Table, "I don't know anyone else who has gone so far & I think the McClure poem is a landmark . . . It is the moment of breakthru for him and anyone after him." Kerouac writes gushingly of "Pat McLear" in Big Sur and has similar praise for Dark Brown.

Diva

This project with Robert Duncan was on again and off again. This publication is from when it was a go. There could be a documentary about the trials and tribulations about publishing Duncan.

Auerhahn X 4

It's round midnight and I have had a few Pabst Blue Ribbons but I do not see Auerhahn Auerhahn Auerhahn Auerhahn in the Johnston bibliography. It is probably in there. Sue me. I still have my wits about me enough to realize that this is quite the item. A piece like this is why ephemera is where it is at. And flipping through the bibliography there is a ton of ephemera in the Auerhahn catalog. It is with these small details that the history of Auerhahn was written.

Getting a Free Lunch

I give City Lights a hard time, but that's what happens when you are the King of the Hill. People want to knock you down. No matter how much I buy into Jack Spicer's criticism of Ferlinghetti as a profiteer in the Culture Wars, I have to admit that the successful business model of City Lights made possible some great satellite publications. I am thinking of Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach's Beach Books imprint and Jan Herman's Nova Broadcast.

Pelieu, Beach and Herman all worked at City Lights and while working there took advantage of the City Lights resources for their own projects. Nova Broadcast would never have been what it was without the fact that City Lights was a good customer of a local printer. The printer operated a 24 hour shop in part due to the massive printing needs of City Lights. So if there was nothing on tap at 4am on a Sunday night, the printer pushed through Nova Broadcast projects as an added perk.

There is no way Jan could have financed his productions otherwise. The complexity and production quality of Nova Broadcast publications are a cut above the normal Mimeo Revolution fare. Thus, Journal of the Identical Lunch, San Francisco Earthquake and other items have been admitted into the canon of artist's books and magazines.

I am not going to lie I like Jan personally which may influence my strong feelings for his literary productions, but even if I did not know Jan there is something appealing in how he made his connections with City Lights pay off. It is like the commandeering of a photocopy machine for a punk zine at an office or the clandestine running of a little mag on the presses of a corporate printer. This re-directing of energies, this siphoning off of resources from the corporate teat is another part of the economics of the Mimeo Revolution that often gets overlooked.

The Business of the Alternative Press

When it comes to the Mimeo Revolution, I am naive and romantic. This is art for art's sake, creation of a community, life as art, and all that crap, but alternative publishing was also a commercial enterprise. The intertwining of capitalism, entrepeneurial spirit, and the counterculture is so in-your-face in something like the Ed Sanders/Peace Eye catalogs that it cannot be ignored.

That is why it is important to study the alternative press as a business model. How does the alternative press market itself, how does it distribute its product, how does it advertise, how does it interact with customers? I have become interested in this in part because of my experiences with putting out and distributing Mimeo Mimeo and because of my relationships with small presses as a collector. Publishing Mimeo Mimeo, I have been forced to realize what I always knew but suppressed. The design and contents of the little magazines that I see as pure in some artistic or creative way are often dictated by a brutally mundane monetary bottom lines. Let's face it people used the mimeograph because it was cheap not out of some higher calling.

For whatever reason, Auerhahn Press provides an opportunity to collect great examples of the everyday activities of a working press. Business cards, invoices, letterhead, prospectuses, annoucements, catalogs. Sooner or later all this material will come under scholarly attention in order to get a fuller picture of how the alternative press worked on a day by day basis and how the works they produced came to the light of day.

That said, take a look at the Dave Haselwood business card. It is all business, but that essence of Auerhahn design shows through. This business card symbolizes the interplay of creativity and economic bottom line that dictated not only the output and aesthetic of Auerhahn Press, but all the presses of the Mimeo Revolution.

The Auerhahn Menu

The Auerhahn when cooked tastes like turpentine. Dave Haselwood never published the cooked, only the raw. Here is the menu to the Auerhahn Press buffet from 1962. These selections are three-star Michelin ("exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey") all the way.

The Hidden Card

After turning up Venus and the Moon, I found another little known Open Space item. Janet Thormann's The Tarot Suite was printed in 1964 by White Rabbit and included as a supplement to Open Space 5. I am so happy to get a copy that I will show you my hand. Above is the complete Tarot Suite.

Silence To Say Goodbye

Carl Weissner has passed away. For those not familiar with Carl, above is a cut-up autobiography written for the 1969 Intermedia Festival in Heidelberg.

Much more on and by Weissner can be found here:

http://realitystudio.org/publications/death-in-paris/

Venus and the Moon Glimmering on the Horizon

Completeness is the horizon constantly before the eyes of the collector but a place, a state never to be attained. I thought I was approaching the unapproachable in regards to Open Space. From what I could tell I had all the magazines as well as the standalone chapbook publications. In fact, they can all be found on the Mimeo Mimeo blog.

And then Harold Dull's Venus and the Moon come into my orbit. The bookseller's catalog description stated it was associated with Open Space #4. This would be the White Hope Issue not the Taurus Issue. Yes, there were two Number 4s. Open Space is quirky like that.

The publication advertised came from Harold Dull's personal collection so it could be like an offprint for his own personal distribution. Yet Alastair Johnston, author of the White Rabbit bibliography, which features a valuable checklist on Open Space magazine, suggests that there were possibly overrun sheets of the Dull poem and the extras were used to make the above publication, which was printed, like Open Space, "sans serif typewriter litho on cheap bond."

Back in 2006, when Ron Silliman wrote on Dull, he describes this same publication as one of the four Dull items in his possession. As Silliman notes, Venus and the Moon became the opening poem in Dull's 1967 collection The Star Year, "a record of discovery of stars in life and sky, celebrat[ing] the beginning of [Dull's] new life at Drew House with Ila Hinton" (Poet Be Like God). I have no idea how many copies of Venus and the Moon were made or the motive behind it. There is another copy currently available on Abebooks.

All I know is that I had to buy it. Immediately. In order to get one step closer to that ever-receding horizon.

JB

Benjamin's Suitcase

Ever since reading Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library" years ago, Benjamin and his various archives and projects have been my model as a collector. Benjamin serves as a guardian angel watching over Mimeo Mimeo. I highly recommend Verso's Walter Benjamin's Archive. Fascinating insights into a collection and the passion and mind that drove and organized it.

Benjamin makes me feel good as a collector unlike Jean Baudrillard and his essay "The System of Collecting." Who wants to be that guy? It is a fine line between collector (order, sanity) and horder (chaos, madness).

Looking over Benjamin's archive it is easy to see his loving gathering of Russian peasant figurines as a countermeasure to the Nazis ruthless roundup of human beings. One collection preserves and keeps alive and one exterminates. The collecting impulse is both merciful and murderous.

In 1989, I walked through Auschwitz., an experience which I will never forget. When confronted with Benjamin and his archive, I always flash to Auschwitz and a room filled floor to ceiling with suitcases. The fate of an archive is ultimately depressing, leading to an inevitable death and dispersal. I am reminded of the fate of some other suitcases: Benjamin's lost at the Spanish border; Duchamp's institutionalized in the museum.

Il n'ya pas de hors-galerie d'art

I just finished reading Alternative Art New York 1965-1985 edited by Julie Ault, in order to follow up on Gwen Allen's Artists' Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art. Both books are fascinating for documenting how various artists banged their heads against the white cube in an effort to find a way out. Reading the books it remains debatable to me whether these alternative spaces were in fact outside of the art market and whether there is any artistic space or production that cannot be absorbed into today's global economy of information.

Rimbaud, Walser, Roussel, Kafka seem to provide models for an alternative but as David Markson's Reader's Block demonstrates the idea that states of silence, exile, and madness or the act of suicide are the only possibilities for creative freedom in a post-avant garde landscape is pretty bleak indeed.

What is the collector to do with the flotsam and jetsam of the alternative space? It seems to me that it would be worthwhile to gather the postcards, announcements, handbills, stationery, notations, blueprints, diagrams, posters, and other bits of artistic confetti leftover from the party. (Among the other books I have been reading, I just finished a book on Walter Benjamin's Archive.) But this party looks to be already crashed. A signed and unnumbered altered announcement card for "A Work Marjorie Strider / 112 Greene Street / To Nov. 7" sent October 1970 is $750 dollars. The historical account of 112 Greene Street published in 1981 by New York University is around $250. Alternative art spaces in San Francisco and Los Angeles like Ferus Gallery, the Batman Gallery, the Six Gallery and Womanhouse I am sure are getting similar treatment.

To get some fresh air, one will have to head out for the territory. I am out of my element here given that my nose was attracted to the cheese in the San Francisco and New York City mousetrap, but the Detroit Artist Workshop comes to mind. I am sure there were alternative art spaces in Austin, Portland, Seattle, Boston, Cleveland. What were the alternative spaces in the South during the 1960s? I would suspect there is a lot of work to be done in collecting and documenting these scenes.

But maybe to find a true alternative space, if such flora and fauna can still grow in the current climate, we have to go even further out to Main Street. I am thinking of Blair Murphy's Grand Midway Hotel in Windber Pennsylvania, the home of Alan Freed and Johnny Weissmuller. Freed and Weissmuller definitely had their roles in the art of the sellout, but in Windber there seems to be a blurring of art and life (with Beat, silent film, motorcycle, vampire, paranormal and zombie festivals combined with living and art space) without regard to the market. John Fetterman is mayor in nearby Braddock. Jon Beacham's bookstore gallery in Beacon NY comes to mind. Possibly alternative space can take root in the small town. But maybe I am being naive about the true nature of these ventures and betraying a fetish for the pastoral.

In any case, if such an alternative space did exist and flourish, I am sure that a collector like me would quickly take it by the roots, pull it into context, and press it between printed pages.

JB

The Machinations Of: Mimeo Mimeo

An interview with the editors of Mimeo Mimeo at Flying Object.

Cornish Pasty Pate with a Side of Haggis

In honor of the Roussel post today, I decided to cook some French onion soup for my wife's birthday. So here I am stirring up some soup, when the Clash's London Calling comes on my Pandora. Culture clash, what to do??

As a previous post proves, when I think food I think of Lee Harwood the editor. So I ran to my bookshelf and pulled down Night Scene Dada from London 1963, edited by Harwood and dedicated to Tristan Tzara. I turn to the first page and read Harwood translation of Tzara's "The Almost Perfect Man - An Extract," which opens "Who will free us from the encumbrance of possessions and flesh." Then I read the second poem "Way" and with Harwood translating Tzara I can hope that at least one "road that separates us," the cultural divide inspired by the Clash, has been bridged, but here I am being so fleshy, stuffing my gullet with bread and cheese.

Then I see on the title page that I happen to have the copy of legendary Scottish poet Edwin Morgan and things get a little more concrete but still with the flavor of haggis.

The Tropological Space of Locus Solus

The five issues of Locus Solus, edited by Harry Mathews, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch, are yet another example of the magazine as alternative space. If Robin Blaser viewed Pacific Nation in terms of mapping and nations, in terms of open space, I see Locus Solus as a form of Kunstkammer (a Cabinet of Wonder), a closed in hermetic space akin to Cornell's and Duchamp's boxes. A closed space, yet one that opens into an endless labyrinth of choices, options, and possibilities.

Locus Solus was named after Raymond Roussel's 1914 novel. Central to scientist and inventor Martial Canterel's Solitary Place and the novel itself was a large glass box in which eight resuscitated individuals repeated the central moment of their lives. As Foucault makes clear in Death and the Labyrinth that moment is the threshold of life moving into death. This door perpetually open and closed. Later in the book Foucault writes of a similar door,

"In order to put one's hand on the skull with the sonnets, which leads straight to the well hiding millions - a first glimmer of particles of the sun - one must push two doors, one as open as the other (so afraid was old Guillaume that his treasure would not be found), one as closed as the other (so frightened was he that it would be lost from such easy access). Once these thresholds are crossed, the path is the same; two rival groups progress along identical stages. Perhaps also leading to the treasure of the work - to this well, at the same time a mine and a forge, whose glow was shown from the beginning by the poem L'Ame - there are two roads which are the same, two thresholds for the same road, two doors which can be opened with one motion, the first being secret (unveiled, thus becoming nonsecret) and the second being the nonsecret (because it does no need to be uncovered, remaining in the shadow and under the seal of a paradoxical secret)."

In the interview at the end of my edition of Death and the Labyrinth, interviewer Charles Ruas states, "Marcel Duchamp and other artists discuss Roussel only incidentally, there is no attempt to come to grips with his work." With Duchamp, this strikes me a debatable. For if Duchamp's Door 11 Rue Larrey (1927) only addresses Roussel incidentally, the work happens (by chance??) to capture the essence of the Rousselian threshold.

Death and the Labyrinth is Foucault's only full-length book of literary criticism. It was published in France in 1963, thus roughly contemporary with Locus Solus, which ran from 1961 to 1962. John Ashbery wrote an introduction to Raymond Roussel in 1961. It cannot be overestimated just how off the beaten path Roussel was to Americans in the early 1960s. Each issue of the magazine featured a quote from Roussel on the title page: l'ecriteau bref qui s'offre a l'oeil apitoye (roughly translated as "The short notice offered to the compassionate eye"). Ashbery and other editors of Locus Solus were pioneers in their interest in Roussel and the publication of a section of Roussel's Locus Solus in Issue Five (translated by Harry Mathews) probably introduced Roussel to a number of American poets and writers.

In the early 1960s, Roussel was being infused with the vitalium and resurrectine of literary and artistic attention and consideration. The New York School poets, Foucault and French structuralists, the Nouveau Roman writers (like Alain Robbe-Grillet), and the Oulipo writers (like Italo Calvino and Georges Perec) all lavished attention on Roussel such as he had not experienced since the surrealists rallied to his defense when Roussel's plays were being met with hoots and catcalls in the 1920s.

Roussel's work also exerted an influence on art and music. John Cage, Fluxus, LaMonte Young, Jean Tinguely, Allan Kaprow and the Happening scene. Canterel's teeth-arranging art machine surely inspired Tinguely machines, such as Homage to New York, which destroyed itself in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960. That sculpture garden is yet another Locus Solus with Tinguely as a return of Canterel.

Foucault writes of Roussel's play within tropological space, i.e. that instant when the signifier detaches from the signified and becomes abstract, that space between, that space of silence. Is the door at 11 Rue Larrey the threshold into that labyrinthine space? Or maybe it represents the Rousselian process of simultaneously entering/exiting that door? The writing collected in Locus Solus magazine also explores that space and that process and thus the magazine serves as a cabinet of the curiosities to be found there.

JB