Floating Bear

Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham’s library began with his William Burroughs collection. After he obtained all the books, he started to research and obtain any periodical that Burroughs contributed to, but quickly realized that the small press culture of the little magazines was just as interesting (if not more) than Burroughs’ contribution, and that’s how our little magazine, Mimeo Mimeo, got started. The poets, artists, printers, paper, collating parties, distribution, associations, manuscripts, postcards, and, letters are all part of the overall aesthetic and culture of the Mimeograph Revolution, brilliantly documented in Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips’s A Secret Location on the Lower East Side. There are few people who take the art of mimeo as seriously as Jed, whose attention to detail is more common amongst bibliophiles specializing in incunabula and antiquarian books. In addition to sharing his research, he also shares aspects of his collection and others online in the Bibliographic Bunker at Reality Studio. Check out the Floating Bear archive, for startes, which includes a free, downloadable spreadsheet mapping the recipients of Di Prima and Jones' legendary mimeo magazine.

April 10, 2012

Recently in Jacket2

Tom Leonard does the revolt of Islam in different voices, 1978

Al Filreis

In 1978, Tom Leonard recorded “Three Texts for Tape” at his home in Glasgow using his Teac A-3340S tape recorder. One of these three “texts for tape” was a performance piece, a chanting of another poet’s verses — a multiple reading of a half canto of Percy Shelley’s “The Revolt of Islam” in many voices. Here is that recording (with thanks to the Archive of the Now): MP3 (4:37).

May 22, 2013

A gumbo of mumbo jumbo or a sub-rumba via Christopher Columbo

The visual creole of John M. Bennett

Gary Barwin

1. "All human cultures are creole," John M. Bennett writes. Our language and our world view are hybrid, influenced by and adapting influences from the global village and our post-global home. They are inevitably syncretic and creole.

Absolutely. But Bennett’s use of the term ‘creole’ brings to mind the other meaning of creole. Creole as in the ‘creolisation’ of languages. How the language of a colonizing or dominant culture devolves into a pidgin and then develops into a creole, a rich communication tool with its own grammar, form and traditions, though often with a vocabulary based on the dominant language. So: Haitian Creole and its relationship to French.

May 22, 2013

Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Aldon Nielsen

Among the readings for the graduate seminar in black philosophy and theory that my students and I completed not long ago were the collected writings of philosopher and artist Adrian Piper, in which, among so many other projects, she reproduces the calling card she had printed up for use in one of her on-going projects from the 1970s. Because Piper is, as we so deftly put it in America, a light-skinned black person, she has had the experience of being in a group of white people and hearing one of them tell a racist joke. She had cards printed up that she would present to the tellers of such jokes, cards that explained that she was in fact a black person and that she found the telling of the joke objectionable. This was not merely a personal campaign, you must understand, but was a sort of philosophical theater, for the presentation of the card was not simply a means to carry out a personal fight with racism.

May 22, 2013