I love the publishing work of Jan Herman, particularly his Nova Broadcast Series. I have written on RealityStudio about this work at length. His uses of the fold in his chapbooks and broadside pamphlets are especially appealing. For me a brightspot is William Burroughs's The Dead Star (Nova Broadcast 5), which shines like a switchblade opened in broad daylight.Yet Herman's perfect bound efforts are less than perfect. I am thinking mostly of Carl Weissner's The Braille Film. The text crawls into the gutter and dies there. Although Herman published this work in an act of friendship and love, to read it is is an act of rape. It is bound to tight and a complete reading would destroy the binding at the opening. Thus the appropriately named Braille Film remains a book I can only fondle but never read.
JB
MIMEO MIMEO #8: CURATORS' CHOICE features 16 bibliophiles on 6 highlights from their personal or institutional collections. Contributors include Steve Clay, Wendy Burk, Tony White, Brian Cassidy, Thurston Moore, J.A. Lee, Michelle Strizever, Adam Davis, Michael Basinski, Joseph Newland, Alastair Johnston, Tate Shaw, Michael Kasper, Steve Woodall, Molly Schwartzberg, Nancy Kuhl, James Maynard, and the Utah posse (Becky Thomas, Marnie Powers-Torrey, Craig Dworkin, Emily Tipps, Luise Poulton, & David Wolske)
MIMEO MIMEO #7: THE LEWIS WARSH ISSUE is the first magazine ever devoted in its entirety to poet, novelist, publisher, teacher, and collage artist Lewis Warsh. Warsh was born in 1944 in the Bronx, co-founded Angel Hair Magazine and Books with Anne Waldman in 1966, and went on to co-found United Artists Magazine and Books with Bernadette Mayer in 1977. He is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction and autobiography, the Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn, and as you’ll soon discover, so much more. Includes an introduction by Daniel Kane, an interview conducted by Steve Clay, 10 new stories, 5 new poems, dozens of photographs and collages, and an anecdotal bibliography.
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MIMEO MIMEO #6: THE POETRY ISSUE is devoted to new work by eight poets who have consistently composed quality writing that has influenced and inspired generations since the golden era of the mimeo revolution. Contributors include Bill Berkson, John Godfrey, Ted Greenwald, Joanne Kyger, Kit Robinson, Rosmarie Waldrop, Lewis Warsh, and Geoffrey Young. Cover art by George Schneeman.
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MIMEO MIMEO #3: THE DANNY SNELSON ISSUE examines the relationship between structuralism and the poetries of the mimeo era by presenting a detailed analysis of Form (a Cambridge-UK magazine published in 1966) and Alcheringa (a journal published by Boston University in 1975), two exemplary gatherings that illuminate the historical, material and social circumstances under which theory informed art (and vice versa) in the early works of some of today's most celebrated experimental writers. Also includes a special insert, The Infernal Method, written, designed and printed by Aaron Cohick (NewLights Press).
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MIMEO MIMEO #2: features Emily McVarish on her artist's book Flicker; James Maynard on poet Robert Duncan's early experiences as an editor and typesetter; Derek Beaulieu on the relationship between the influential Canadian poetry journal Tish and Black Mountain College; and an extensive interview with Australian poet and typographer Alan Loney conducted by Kyle Schlesinger. Cover is by Emily McVarish.
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1 comments:
thnx for the shout-out. as to the flaws of TBF production, your reaction no matter how awful wld not even register on a nanometer compared to mine when i first held the thing in my hand. i was, to put it mildly, horrified. i wanted a somewhat thicker paper stock than usual, so as to give the book the heft i thought it deserved. but i had no idea the paper wld not be flexible and wld feel like cardboard.
becuz the Nova B books were being entirely financed at that point by an industrial printer, i had no leverage in terms of the production. once i sent off the designed pages the production was out of my hands. the printing company used its own resources to produce the books -- that is, downtime on its unionized presses and whatever spare stock it had available.
this is not to make excuses. i took my lumps, cuz the only alternative would have been to tell the printer to trash the edition. & that i absolutely did NOT want to do.
one further note. let me correct any impression that i published THE BRAILLE FILM out of friendship and love. Well, sure, I feel both for Carl. But I would NEVER have published TBF if I had not valued the text, which I thought was the best piece of writing that Nova Broadcast had issued. Bar none. & by the way, Carl never once complained about the TBF production. even when i told him i regretted the production flaws. he simply waved my concerns away. which tells you something about his character and lack of vanity, esp. when you know about his own meticulous sense of craft. -- JH
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