The first in this series was “Hand, Machine & Mind: Molly Springfield’s Translation“ in which we posted a complete work that is only available in the It Is Almost That limited edition and which converses with the work she included in the collection. This second one, for Unica Zürn (whose House of Illnesses is excerpted in It Is Almost That), is different in that we aimed to gather disparate information and create a kind of collection so that readers new to her work might become better acquainted with it and those who know it might find something unexpected. And when I say “we” what I really mean is Siglio intern Jasmine Francis who created and shaped this entry to be an excellent alternative (in both content and spirit) to the traditional Wikipedia page. Look for more entries in the coming months: up next Charlotte Salomon!

—Lisa Pearson, publisher, Siglio

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UNICA ZÜRN: From my earliest childhood, the first woman’s eyes I encountered conveyed the same uncontrollable anguish spiders cause me…This is why I very soon divided myself into two halves. (1)

Left: Photo of Zürn  Right: Drawing by Zürn, 1961

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A LITTLE ABOUT UNICA ZÜRN

Unica Zürn was born in 1916 in Berlin-Grunewald as Nora Berta Unica Ruth. Her mother was Helene Pauline Heerdt, and her father was Ralph Zürn, a writer and editor and cavalry officer who was stationed in Africa; he often brought Zürn exotic, ephemeral gifts he had collected in his travels. Her parents divorced in 1930. During her childhood, Zürn often dreamed of a male fantasy figure she dubbed “the man of Jasmine.” She left school at the age of fifteen, and in 1933, after a stint at business school, she worked at the studios of Universum Film AG in Berline as a shorthand typist. From 1936 to 1942, she wrote for commercials.

In 1942, Zürn married Erich Laupenmühlen and had two children with him, Katrin (born in 1943), and Christian (born in 1945). After divorcing her husband and losing custody of her children, she developed a relationship with the painter Alexander Camaro, who introduced her to painting. Around this time (1949-1955), she wrote short stories, reports for journals in Berlin, serials for newspapers, radio plays, and skits for a cabaret called “The Bathtub.” She separated from Camaro in 1953, the same year that she met Hans Bellmer in Berlin during an exhibition at the Galerie Springer.

Bellmer, a German Surrealist, encouraged her to pursue “automatic” drawings and to work on her anagrams (poems resulting from the rearrangement of the letters of a word or phrase in order to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters only once). Zürn also experimented with oil painting, but quickly abandoned the pursuit. Her drawings and anagrams were presented under the title Hexentexte by the Springer Berlin Gallery in 1953. In the same year, she had her first solo exhibition of automatic drawings in the Galerie Le Soleil dans la Tete in Paris (where she also had another exhibition in 1956). In attendance were well-known artists, writers and philosophers such as Breton, Man Ray, Hans Arp, Joyce Mansour, Victor Brauner, and Gaston Bachelard.

I was allowed to accompany Bellmer during all the portrait sittings: Man Ray, Gaston Bachelard, Henri Michaux, Matta, Wilfredo Lam, Hans Arp, Victor Brauner, Max Ernst…There are those who must be adored and others who adore. I have always belonged among the latter. Being full, constantly full of wonder, admiration and adoration. Remaining in the background, watching, looking—that is the passive manner in which I lead my life. (2)

In 1954, Zürn moved to Paris with Bellmer and met Man Ray, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, and Max Ernst. In 1958, she participated in a series of  photographs with Bellmer, who tied her up with ropes so tight that they cut into her naked body. The photos were called “Unica Tied Up,” and Bellmer’s 1959 exhibit Doll (La Poupee) that included these photos were a success. In 1959, Zürn’s own work was included in the large surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Cordey in Paris.

In 1957, Zürn met Henri Michaux, identifying him with “the man of Jasmine” from her dreams and took the drug mescaline with him. Zürn’s mental health began to deteriorate that same year. After stays at multiple clinics prompted by a nervous breakdown and schizoprenic crisis, the administration of psychoneural drugs, and two suicide attempts, she returned home in a wheelchair, where she destroyed many of her works. Later that year, she was then taken to the Sainte-Anne clinic in La Rochelle (and remained there for three years). Henri Michaux brought her drawing materials so she could continue to work. After this, she was interned in various other psychiatric clinics, including “La Fond” in La Rochelle (1966) and Maison Blance at Neuilly-sur-Marne (1969 and 1970). One of her doctors was Gaston Ferdiere, who was considered a friend of the surrealists.

Her illness provided inspiration for much of her writing, including The Man of Jasmine, which was written between 1963 and 1965 and a sketchbook of drawings, created from 1963-1964, entitled “Oracles and Spectacles” (one of her unpublished works). She published Dark Spring in 1969, while The Man of Jasmine was published posthumously in 1971. An expanded section from The Man of Jasmine, entitled The House of Illnesses, was published in 1986.

On April 7, 1970, Bellmer, now paralyzed from a stroke in 1969, informed Zurn that he could no longer be responsible for her. On October 18, 1970, she was discharged from La Chesnaie de Chailles, an asylum. The following day, she committed suicide by jumping from a sixth-story window in the apartment she shared with Bellmer. Bellmer, who died in 1975, was buried next to Zürn at his request at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Their grave is marked with the words Bellmer had written for Zürn’s funeral wreath, five years prior: “My love will follow you into Eternity.” (3)

Sources:

• (1)   Unica Zürn, Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1988). Cited in: Unica Zurn: Dark Spring, curated by João Ribas, edited by Jonathan T.D. Neil and Joanna Berman Ahlberg, Drawing Papers 86 (New York, NY: The Drawing Center, 2009).
• (2)  Unica Zürn, Notes of an Anaemic, 1957, published in Das WeiBe mit dem roten Punkt (Berlin, 1981). Cited in: Introduction to The Man of Jasmine by Malcolm Greene (London: Atlas Press, 1994).
• (3)  This biography assembled from the following sources:  Ubu Gallery, Wikipedia “Unica Zürn,” Wikipedia  France “Unica Zürn,”  Art Brut, Atlas Press, and the essays by João Ribas and Mary Ann Caws in “Unica Zürn Dark Spring” (from The Drawing Center catalogue).

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ZÜRN, THE ARTIST

In a letter to Gaston Ferdiere, the doctor who Zürn shared with Hans Bellmer (and Antonin Artaud), Bellmer writes:

During a relaxed after-dinner conversation at my mother’s house, Unica was doodling distractedly (the way one does while on the telephone). With my clearly experienced eye I immediately recognized her remarkable gift for automatic drawing. I pointed it out to her: after two or three days, she was making, with intense delight, drawings of which each one was of good quality. (1)

1954

.More of Zürn’s early work can be found here.

On May, 1956, Zürn has her first solo exhibition in Paris at the Gallery “Le Soleil dans la Tête.” She sold four paintings:

So my show is over [...] The drawings were sold, like something like this: the first was like a rabbit, with breasts on the chest, with bones and a ghost in the stomach (ink China black). The second was, as said Hans, a sort of “buffalo-bug” [...] The third was a “sole traveler” attached to a repulsive octopus [...] The fourth was [...] kind of a big bell, from which emerged other insects.  (2)

1956

1956

. Zürn writes in an excerpt from her novel The Man of Jasmine: 

One day at Wittenau the head doctor had called her to a room in which a group of students and psychologists from other clinics was assembled, and asked her to comment on her drawings as he showed them to the others. The drawing Recontre avec Monsieur M (ma morte) prompted a discussion, and she was asked: ‘Why did you cover the entire surface of the paper right to the edges? On the others you’ve left the space around the motif white.’

And she had answered: “Simply because I couldn’t stop working on this drawing, or didn’t want to, for I experienced endless pleasure while working on it. I wanted the drawing to continue beyond the edge of the paper – on to infinity…” (3)

The pen ‘floats’ tentatively above the white paper, until she discovers the spot for the first eye. Only once she is ‘being looked at’ from the paper does she start to find her bearings and effortlessly add one motif to the next. (4)

Bellmer and Zürn in their apartment

HANS BELLMER: The female body…is like an endless sentence that invites us to rearrange it, so that its real meaning becomes clear through a series of endless anagrams. (1)

UNICA ZÜRN: If woman is to put into form the ‘ule’ [Greek: matter] that she is, she must not cut herself off from it nor leave it to maternity, but succeed in creating with that primary material that she is [...] Otherwise, she risks using or reusing what man has already put into forms, especially about her, risks remaking what has already been made, and losing herself in that labyrinth. (2)

In 1958 Bellmer took photographs of Zürn after wrapping her nude body with twine. It was printed in Le Minotaure and titled “Keep in a cool place.” (3)

1958

1958

A portrait of Hans Bellmer by Zürn, 1965

.Untitled by Hans Bellmer

I always need a companion to tell me what to do…They just have to say “now you do this, now you do that.” (4)

Sources: 

• (1)Webb P.& Short R., Hans Bellmer (New York: Quartet Books, 1985). Cited in: Miranda Argyle, “Hans Bellmer and The Games of the Doll” (Online Publication, 2004).
• (2) Quote cited in: Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Gardex by Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 
• (3) Miranda Argyle, “Hans Bellmer and The Games of the Doll” (Online Publication, 2004).
• (4) Unica Zürn, Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1988). Cited in: Unica Zurn: Dark Spring, curated by João Ribas, edited by Jonathan T.D. Neil and Joanna Berman Ahlberg, Drawing Papers 86 (New York, NY: The Drawing Center, 2009).

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ZÜRN, THE WRITER

Hexentexte (The Witches’ Texts) (1954)

“ANAGRAMS are words and sentences resulting from the rearrangement of the letters in a given word or sentence… Man seems to know his language even less well than he knows his own body: the sentence too resembles a body which seems to invite us to decompose it, so that an infinite chain of anagrams may re-compose the truth it contains. At close inspection the anagram is seen to arise from a violent and paradoxical dilemma…What is at stake here is a totally new unity of form, meaning and feeling: language-images that cannot simply  be thought up or written up. They enter suddenly and for real into their interconnections, radiating multiple meanings, meandering loops lassoing neighboring sense and sound.” —Hans Bellmer, Afterword to Hexentexte

Dark Spring (1970) 

It is a very beautiful day. The woman looks around and thinks: “there cannot ever have been a spring more beautiful than this. I did not know until now that clouds could be like this. I did not know that the sky is the sea and that clouds are the souls of happy ships, sunk long ago. I did not know that the wind could be tender, like hands as they caress – what did I know – until now? (1)

She wants to look beautiful after she is dead. she wants people to admire her. Never has there been a more beautiful dead child. (2)

She steps onto the windowsill, holds herself fast to the cord of the shutter, and examines her shadowlike reflection in the mirror one last time. She finds herself lovely. A trace of regret mingles with her determination. ‘It’s over,’ she says quietly, and falls dead already, even before her feet leave the windowsill.  (3)

An assessment: “Preadolescent sexuality merges with depressive fantasy—to devastating (if ineffably morbid) effect in this once-notorious novel by a German writer and artist (1916–70) who, like this novel’s young protagonist, took her own life shortly after its (1967) publication. She’s a nameless suburban girl who’s provoked, by her slovenly mother’s indifference, her beloved father’s long absences from home, and her own claustrophobic self-absorption, into masturbatory daydreams and tentative baby steps toward adult sexual expression. The story’s (expertly caught) tone and rhythm are indeed hypnotic . . . and Zürn caps it with a marvelously bleak, brisk final scene. Unusual and memorable fiction.” (4)

Sources:

• (1)(2)(3) Unica Zürn, Dark Spring (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1970)
• (4) Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2000

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The Man of Jasmine: Impressions from a Mental Illness (1971) 

Someone travelled inside me, crossing from one side to the other. I have become his home. Outside, in the  black landscape with the bellowing cow, someone is maintaining that they exist. From his gaze the circle closes around me. Traversed by him inwardly, encircled by him from without — that is my new situation. And I like it. (1)

From the introduction: Zürn’s texts suck one into her world; it is as difficult to break loose as it was for the writer herself. This despite, or perhaps, because of her use of the 3rd person (Zürn’s original manuscript of  The Man of Jasmine even attributes the book to “the wife of Hans Bellmer”). Her agency is removed in these texts, like that of the central character, almost as if she has become a medium to her own self. But sometimes she hits back. The Whiteness with the Red Spot, in which she writes in the first person, is a damning condemnation of her contingency, her “training,” the illusions of hope and happiness she had projected onto the other, the man, and in the short texts The House of Illness and in the short Les Jeux a Deux she employs a subversive, laconic humour. Her anagrams even reveal overt aggression…And if her main texts seem strangely subdued by comparison, it should not be forgotten that they were written under a strong inner compulsion, against the advice of others…which jeopardised her ‘normal state.’ (2)

Henri Michaux

Sources:

• (1) Unica Zürn,The Man of Jasmine (London: Atlas Press, 1994). Automatic Woman: The Representation of Women in Surrealism by Katharine Conley (Nebraska: The University of Nebraska Press, 1996) 
• (2) Malcolm  Greene, introduction to The Man of Jasmine (London: Atlas Press, 1994). 

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The House of Illnesses: Stories and Pictures from a Case of Jaundice (1986) 

Since yesterday I know why I am making this book: in order to remain ill for longer than is correct. I can slip in a fresh page every day…My better half, which is clever and wise, wants me to remain ill for sometime, for it knows that one can gain from an illness such as mine. My worse half wants me to return to my few duties, yes, feels that it is time for me to show some consideration for my surroundings, which, incidentally, are not large…Perhaps I should now quickly smuggle another couple of empty pages into this book? Forgetting one’s duties has for me the taste of sweet cream. (1)

A description: Written and drawn during a bout of fever induced by jaundice, The House of Illnesses (Der Haus der Krankenheiten) traverses a kind of mirror world in which happiness is torment, traps are set to improve one’s health, and mortal enemies attack their enemies with virulent love. The narrator’s ailment was caused by her mortal enemy, a sharpshooter whose bullets removed the hearts of her eyes. Her stay in the House of Illnesses is supervised by Dr. Mortimer—adversary, stooge, the embodiment of her “personal death, and ultimately the figure that releases her. Zürn writes at the end of the work that she began the book on the twelfth day of her own illness, Wednesday, April 30, 1958, and she finished it ten days later. (2)

Sources:

• (1) Unica Zurn, The House of Illnessses (London: Atlas Press, 1977). 
• (2) Lisa Pearson, introduction to “The House of Illnesses” excerpted in It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists and Writers (Los Angeles: Siglio, 2010) .

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Other Writings

Pierre Joris translated a few of Zürn’s Anagrams, which can be found on his website:

IN THE DUST OF THIS LIFE

Pale sieves a tired
Ax in the tree’s bosom.
In the foliage’s broom there is
Seed-blood-silk. Bites
in the lovenest of the building.
Sweetly fogs in its ice-bath
the Ibis’s blood. Masses
in the dust of this life.

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ONCE UPON A TIME A SMALL

Once upon a time a small
warm iron was alone. No
Noise, no wine let in.
Lightly at the sea ran, while no
Ice was, thrush-pink in a
See-egg. All wink: tear
like all seeds. Sink in,
watergerm, no, alone -
in a pillow. All warmth
once upon a time’s a mall.

Montpellier 1955

More of Zürn’s anagrams can be found in this excerpt from Anagrams, taken from the complete edition, volume 1 (1988).

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ON UNICA ZÜRN

“Zürn’s life reads a bit like a Freudian case study…Zürn was herself equipped with a vivid imagination and, inspired perhaps by Oedipal yearnings, developed a rich interior fantasy life that is evidenced in her later drawings.”—Valery Oisteanu, artnet

“”The muffled scream that issues from Zürn’s drawings is surely the cri de coeur of a woman denied: deprived the love of her monstrously distant mother and the companionship of her absentee father, separated from her two children and refused possession of her own body by its transformation into a pot roast, among other things, by Bellmer. Her revenge is assimilation of the deformities these deprivations caused—her adamant presentation of herself as the twisted and manipulated creature that others have imagined. …Zürn’s virtuosity is that of an artist willing her madness to manifest itself on paper, rather than a mad person exuding symptoms in the form of pictorial expression”—Gary Indiana, Art in America

“Zürn’s body of work opens up the interior of a perceptual system of madness. The texts are located at an intersection, a point of transfer. Madness becomes the supplier of literature, literature transports madness. Both drawings and texts show the “image processes” (Zürn) or hallucinations haunting her. “I’m haunted as though I were the only home for something unknown” (4/1:36). It is not she who writes or draws, as images “stream in” or “arise” (4/1:53). A dictation she feels compelled to take down circumvents “sublimated elaboration” (Kristeva). For Zürn, some thing or other–what Lacan calls extimacy (“extimite,” a foreign body, composed of what is intimate)–seems to take charge in the missing place of authorship and sublimation. She is remote-controlled and the rote observer of a delirium that runs on ahead like a movie. She writes down what can be caught. The notes resist, as pure record, the inaccessibility of madness.” —Rike Felka, The Memorien of Unica Zürn

“For Zürn her body is an imaginary construct, capable of reconfiguration, like the anagrams she loves. This view is in keeping with Bellmer’s contorted dolls, who with their surrealistically flexible body parts represent distorted corporeal anagrams.” —Katharine Conley, Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism

“She drew phantasmagoric creatures, chimerical beasts with transparent organs and multiple appendages, plantlike abstractions, oneiric forms, amoebic shapes whose fractal membranes are filled in with multiple recurring motifs: spirals, scales, eyes, dots, beaks, claws, conical tails, leaflike indents. Some early and late drawings are sketches, loose, spare, and barely formed, containing multiple, differentiated, quasi-representational figures; others, often on larger paper, have a more “finished” quality, offering a clear inside to the entity, and an outside expanse of unmarked paper. Another batch, the most depressing, crowd out the picture planes with clusters of Munch-like heads, eyes, and mouths, set against cloyingly patterned backgrounds. These images were produced during one of the frequent institutional internments that followed Zürn’s being diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1960.” —Bartholemew Ryan, Artforum

“In the art of Unica Zürn, the known is rederranged, the red-eared angel is crushed into a thousand eyes, as if in Tantrik diffraction, cranial shapes break into heads in telescopic profiles, with eye lozenge clusters of hanging pods. Abyss weevils percolate with seed energies.” (from “Unica Zürn” in Reciprocal Distillations 2007)

Blog entry by Jasmine Francis.

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Complete info about both events is at the end of the post. Hope we’ll see you at one or the other.

—Lisa Pearson, publisher, Siglio

BENJAMIN WEISSMAN

ARAM SAROYAN

CONNIE LEWALLEN & BILL BERKSON

COLTER JACOBSEN

LISA PEARSON

MAC MCGINNES

LARRY RINDER

MAXINE CHERNOFF

ARA SHIRINYAN

WEDNESDAY, MAY 9

In BERKELEY at the Berkeley Art Museum Theater, 2625 Durant Avenue, at 5:30 p.m.

A Celebration: The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, hosted by Bill Berkson, with featured readers Maxine Chernoff, Dick Gallup, Colter Jacobsen, Joanne Kyger, Constance Lewallen, Mac McGinnes, and Lawrence Rinder. At 6:30 p.m. there will be a special screening of Matt Wolf’s film I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard. Admission to the evening’s event is $7. Free for BAM/PFA members, Cal students, faculty and staff, and with same-day theater or gallery ticket.

In LOS ANGELES at Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Avenue, at 7:30 p.m.

Los Angeles Celebrates Joe Brainard, hosted by Lisa Pearson, featuring readings and visual presentations of Brainard’s works by Bernard Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Lewis MacAdams, Aram Sarayon, Ara Shirinyan, Michael Silverblatt, and Benjamin Weissman. The event is free. More info here.

You have said that the aural and visual aspects of a poem are equally important and that the medium through which a work is read changes the reading experience. Could you talk about how this manifests in Between Page and Screen?

What I mean when I say the medium changes the reading experience is that our media are not transparent. We’ve known that since McLuhan, but we sometimes gloss over that fact. We treat printed books (and e-readers) as though they were all the same—as though they were simply vehicles for content. But of course that’s not true. We read differently when we’re piecing together Dracula on an iPhone (as I am during my commute to MIT) or holding a fine press edition in our hands. I’m not just talking about the cultural value placed on these different technologies, but how the physical experience of holding the “book” (how close is it to your face? what does it smell like? how much does it weigh? how do you mark your place?) and interacting with it influences our experience of the text.

I think Between Page and Screen wouldn’t be the same book if it were not presented in augmented reality. If printed on the page, then the text would seem to privilege the book object. If only on the screen, then it would seem computers had won out. Even reading the poems from the book in a screen capture, like those included here, takes a fundamental aspect out of the text—that uncanny feeling of holding an object in your hands while looking at yourself onscreen. Of moving your hands and body around in order to figure out how to make the words appear. Of getting used to the mirroring effect of the screen. Of seeing yourself and the text at once. You are constantly framing and re-framing the poems as you read. All of that is part of the reading experience.

Amaranth reads “A screen is a shield, but also a veil…”

You have also mentioned that there is a fluidity and a continuity— a kind of “give and take”—between the visual and the aural. When you take ones of the senses away, what’s potentially lost or gained? Particularly in Between Page and Screen, how does the visual presence of the language persist in sound?

In a broader sense, both the sound play and the visual shaping of the poem are closely bound up in the work’s content. The fluidity is probably most overt in the book’s puns and etymological wordplay, which draw the reader’s attention to the way words with a similar sound might actually share a common root, despite their different meanings. The visuals in the book play with those same etymologies. The pig poem, for example, is a collection of anagrams of the word “charcuterie,” which comes from the same Indo-European word root as screen. They seem worlds apart (cured meat and a gossamer veil?), but they are bound by etymology through things that shine. It’s a visual/concrete poem, but it’s also really fun to read out loud because of the way the anagrams bounce off one another sonically. Conceptually, they are all different ways of slicing “charcuterie.”

There is always a connection between the visual shape of the poems and their content, even in the prose poems, actually, which start out highly contained and eventually open up. But even in the most overtly visual pieces, like the pig, I’m interested in language behaving in playful ways that reward reading too. There’s one poem that looks like a stock ticker, for example. It scrolls across your screen from right to left, like a chain of market data. But if you voice the symbols, you piece together a little poem. It begins like this:

BE_-2.41 TWE_-1.02 EN^+4.20 PAG_-1.14 E_-2.34 AND_-0.34 SCR^+.67 EEN^+3.30a_-1.19 book^+0.38 spx_-1.24

These are actual stocks—BE is Brompton Equity Split Corp, PAG is Penske Automotive Group, etc.—and the numbers are the stocks’ value change on the date I wrote the poem. Even though the poem appears in one long scrolling line, there are little rhymes and puns within it. And much of the language in it doesn’t mean anything unless it is sounded, unless the reader connects the pieces into words. To go back to the question of the visual presentation, I don’t think the poem does the same thing when it’s presented in lines on the page (where would you break the lines?), nor would it have the same effect printed in large scale on the wall of a gallery. It wants to move through the space between page and screen that the reader has opened up, the space where the book is allowed to speak.

Amaranth reads “Page don’t cage me. Why this mania…”

S and P attempt to define their relationship/the nature of their connection throughout Between Page and Screen. They almost come to a concrete definition (the “trellis”), yet P insists it is nevertheless a metaphor. I found something both climactic and resolving about this exchange because of the tension between the approach to and the retreat from the concrete. Does this tension define the book itself?

That’s a lovely reading. Certainly tension is at the heart of the book, or the hinge, or the spine. To be between is to be in a state of tension, isn’t it? Between means both separating two objects and joining them. Because the book is so much about our own relationship to reading and to the idea of the book, the tension between them is in a way our own—our relationship with page and screen is as fraught as their relationship with one another. We all have props, don’t we? I believe P’s claim that the trellis is a metaphor, that P isn’t entirely invested in order and training. I’ve seen many wild, unruly pages.

Amaranth reads “Dear S, that trellis is…”

Between Page and Screen is a love story, which is complicated by the inclusion of the readers’ face—what are we supposed to make of ourselves on the screen, alone in the background, watching ourselves read? Where do we fit?

It’s a bit voyeuristic, I guess, to watch this affair play out against your own face, but it also forces you to play both roles, to get between P and S. As much as it serves to highlight the tension, when I read or perform from the book and see my face behind the text, it’s also a reminder for me that any book, no matter the platform, is written for a reader—that without someone there to pull the book off the shelf, turn on the Kindle, boot up the computer or what have you, the text remains inaccessible. For me, given my own interest in how books are changing in light of recent technological shifts, that fact provides some sense of stability. I find it reassuring. As a reader is given a choice between these platforms, I don’t feel I need to take one side or the other—the death of books or deadening pixels of screens—instead, I can enjoy the juncture and move back and forth between the two, as most of us already do.

One of the things I love about using people’s webcams is that each reader sees something different when he or she opens the book. The context is completely different. A few friends have sent me screen captures of themselves with the book, and I love seeing their faces behind the poem. I’d love it if readers sent me an image of themselves with the book. It’s a great reminder that the reader is part of the text, and that it’s in his or her hands that the poems take shape.

Amaranth reads “P.S. A co-script posthaste postface”

More interviews:

Buzz Poole interviews Borsuk and Bouse for IMPRINT

Danielle Oliver interviews Borsuk and Bouse for THE DAILY BRINK!

David Shook interviews Borsuk and Bouse for “The Book 2.0″ on MOLOSSUS

JOE BRAINARD by JOHN ASHBERY

Joe Brainard was one of the nicest artists I have ever known. Nice as a person and nice as an artist.

This may present a problem. Think of how many artists, especially those whose work you admire, weren’t all that nice. Caravaggio. Degas. Gauguin. De Chirico. Picasso. Pollock. Their art isn’t exactly nice either, but the issue seldom arises. In Joe’s case, it does. He began around the same time that Pop Art did. With Lichtenstein or Warhol there is a subtext of provocation, though the Pop Artists generally were too cool, too “down” as we used to say, to let this possibility become anything more than unspoken. In Joe’s work, one of his pictures of pansies, for instance, there is confrontation without provocation. A pansy is a loaded subject. So is the effortless, seed-packet look of the painting. But there’s no apparent effort on the artist’s part to cause stress or wonderment in the viewer. With Joe, a certain gratitude mingles in the pleasure he offers us. One can sincerely admire the chic and the implicit nastiness of a Warhol Soup can without ever wanting to cozy up to it, and perhaps that is as it should be, art being, art, a rather distant thing. In the case of Joe one wants to embrace the pansy, so to speak. Make it feel better about being itself, all alone, a silly kind of expression on its face, forced to bear the brunt of its name eternally. They we suddenly realize that it’s “doing” for us, that everything will be okay if we just look at it, accept it and let it be itself. And something deeper and more serious than the result of provocation emerges. Joy. Sobriety. Nutty poetry.

Read the rest of the essay in the Siglio Library.

“Joe Brainard” by John Ashbery was originally published in the catalogue for Joe Brainard: Retrospective, Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York, 1997 and reprinted in Joe Brainard: A Retrospective, Granary Books, 2001. Copyright © 1997. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author.

More on Siglio’s publication The Nancy Book by Joe Brainard here.

Related posts on the Siglio blog: A truly dirty rotten book. A filthy weird book.

LOS ANGELES CELEBRATES JOE BRAINARD

Join Siglio to celebrate The Library of America’s publication of The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard at Skylight Books in Los Angeles on May 9.

Readings and visual presentations of Brainard’s inimitable writings and art by Bernard Cooper, Amy Gerstler, Lewis MacAdams, Lisa Pearson, Aram Saroyan, Ara Shirinyan, Michael Silverblatt and Benjamin Weissman.

Click here to download the invitation. General event info here.

Again George Perec (from “The Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books): “Like the librarians of Babel in Borges’s story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. . . . In the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.”

This is what came to mind when I was first told about The Reading Room at the Berkeley Art Museum. Envisioned by the poets Ramsay Bell Breslin and Lynn Hejinian, The Reading Room is a temporary library that opened January 15 (and will exist until June 17) as a collection of books of poetry, experimental fiction, books of essays about language and art (all published by three East Bay small presses, including Kelsey Street Press, Atelos Books, and Tuumba Press, and by independent presses represented by Small Press Distribution), free for the taking—though the space invites people to linger, look, read and listen. Its initial arrangement (described in more detail below by Breslin) was attentive to the visual and tactile (color, texture, size governing the order as well as constraints like the palindrome or an imitation of piano keys) in order to reorient the visitor the physicality of the book, its objectness, its beauty. (The image above and those below by Sibila Savage were taken early on.) It is a leap to imagine what the library will become: this is such an extraordinary experiment to see how human intervention (driven by generosity, curiosity, play, politics, self-interest, for example), whether with or without intention, will shape a new thing, create a different creature.

I hope to be able to post images of the library during its metamorphosis. While I’ll be going to Berkeley and will take pictures myself, if any readers of the Siglioblog want to send in photos they take, email me at publisher(at)sigliopress.com and I’ll post them (I’ll definitely want to know the date the photo was taken!). I’ll also look forward to hearing if and how the library revealed something unexpected to you.

—Lisa Pearson, publisher, Siglio

Ramsay Bell Breslin (co-publisher of Kelsey Street Press) says this about The Reading Room:

As one circumnavigates the space, The Reading Room itself can be “read” visually, beginning with the text-image art works by George Schneeman, in collaboration with poets Ron Padgett, Bill Berkson, and Lewis MacAdams and moving on to the books themselves. Because The Reading Room is in a museum, the books have been organized visually in ways that foreground the books-as-objects. Originally, the books were organized by scale (from short and narrow to tall and wide) and then by color to create a visual poem whose primary form is the palindrome. (A palindrome is a pattern that repeats in reverse.) For example, on the top shelf of the first bookcase, the books’ leaves face forward, displaying subtle variations on the theme of white and cream; on the second shelf you see the spines of these same books, which represent one copy each of the books that appear elsewhere in the exhibit as a whole. A few bookcases later, a pattern of color and scale emerges as multiple copies of each book repeats with variations that move forward as well as backwards, within and across the bookshelves, all the while growing in scale and depth until you reach a shelf in which the books are further arranged to resemble piano keys. The books-as-keys play with the depth of the shelves to create a sculptural composition. If scanned (as you would words in a poem), the rhythm established by the pattern of books-as-keys begins, at some point, to syncopate. One effect of these variations-on-a-palindrome is that the authors’ names appear at different locations throughout the room. In this way, no one book or author is privileged over another.

By displaying aspects of book production generally overlooked by libraries and bookstores, The Reading Room subtly challenges commercial and institutional conventions of book display, including museum display, by permitting the beauty and order of these books to gradually become unsettled over time as books are pulled from their rows and replaced. Both in its art and its use value, The Reading Room reminds us of what there is to enjoy about print books that can only ever be approximated by digital reading devices: books are material objects we finger and hold in our hands. The Reading Room also holds the potential for a rich and dynamic cultural exchange of art and ideas: by inviting visitors to take and replace older books of value to keep and/or share with family and friends, the project promotes human value (generosity) over commercial gain. It does this by encouraging the natural recycling by readers of books they love.

All photographs by Sibila Savage for the Berkeley Art Museum. Thanks to Larry Rinder, too.

On Molly Springfield’s Translation (excerpted in It Is Almost That)

Two years in the making, Translation is a set of twenty-eight drawings that render—or translate—the entire text of the first chapter of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time into drawings. For Translation Springfield pieced together the chapter with photocopies of pages from all of the existing English translations, shaping a sequence in which repetition and omission echo the transience of memory and point to the losses in translation. She then made photorealistic drawings in exacting detail and 1:1 correspondence of each photocopied book spread—including underlining, marginalia, and scribbles by previous owners, library patrons, and herself. This painstaking, laborious process calls attention to mechanical reproduction, the materiality of language, and the definition of originality. —LP

from Translation

Graphite on paper. Each 11 x 17.

Notes on Notes for the Translation

Notes for the Translation, my contribution to the It Is Almost That (Box) limited edition, is a compact incarnation of a site-specific work, A Brief Note on the Translation. Installed alongside Translation, it was intended to provide context and background for viewers, in the same way that an actual translator might provide an introduction to her readers. Selections from my Proust-related research and ephemera—which ranged from Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” to an article from The Onion, “Modern-Day Proust E-Mails Friend Six Times A Day,” to a madeleine cake recipe from the New York Times Magazine—were combined on a cork-line wall with drawings of the various drafts of an introduction I wrote for my translation.

Even if I’m only making drawings, I’m interested in the conceit of playing translator. Proust himself dedicated six years of his early career to translating John Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies into French, even though he didn’t know English well and saw the work as drudgery. Though my translation only took two years, I identify with Proust’s view of his time with Ruskin as a necessary and almost spiritual act of penance. In order to fully inhabit Ruskin he had to endure an arduous task. And, maybe that process aided him in accessing what Proust’s narrator calls the “true book”—the one that resides inside each one of us. —Molly Springfield

Notes for the Translation

Graphite on paper and photocopies. Finished booklet, photocopied and saddle-stitched, 8.5 x 5.5.

Installation Views

Cork, graphite on paper, graphite and colored pencil on paper, photocopies, push pins and other ephemera.

Installation views from the Thomas Robertello Gallery, September 11 – October 17, 2009 and the Baltimore Museum of Art for which Springfield’s piece was a finalist for the 2009 Janet and Walter Sondheim Prize.

You can find more information about Molly Springfield’s work on her website.
All images here are copyrighted by Molly Springfield and reproduced with permission of the artist.

Language is secreted away in the black and white square markers in Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse’s Between Page and Screen (Siglio, 2012). The squares are seemingly inscrutable until a webcam and special software unlocks them. Then, language is not only revealed but becomes animate in an unexpected, wondrous augmented reality. Certainly special, but not quite new. Squares of all kinds for centuries—millenia, even—have contained missives of all sorts, sometimes hidden, and often multi-layered. Siglio intern Alexis Chuck gathered a few of them here.

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

1. Log cabin quilt ca. 1880-1910. According to folk legend—repeated by generations of elementary school teachers—quilt patters were used by Underground Railroad to create coded maps. The log cabin pattern is said to have indicated safe houses. Featured in an online exhibition “Design Dynamics of Log Cabin Quilts: Selections from the Jonathan Holstein Collection” at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
2. Mayan glyph. Mayan scripts contained both phonetic signs and logograms. The two could be used on their own or together. One word could be written in many different ways. These appear in a museum in Palenque, Mexico. Public domain, Wikipedia.
3. Anonymous tantric painting from Rajasthan. “Having circled the sky of consciousness, the Goddess suddenly arrives at her source, her center, her sex. . . . A variant, more explicit: the tip of the arrow is replaced by a tiny golden triangle. Or perhaps this too: the great mask of the divinity with hollow eyes.” From Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme. Siglio Press, 2011.
4. Marker. “Spintospinpinintopinspinto…” From Between Page & Screen by Amaranth Borsuk & Brad Bouse, Siglio Press, 2012.
5. Persian magic square talisman. “To enable a woman to control her husband.” From The Patterns of Persian Henna by Catherine Cartwright-Jones, retrieved from blog Crush Evil.
6. Stamp from the poem “Sunny After Snow” by Wang Xizhi. From a work by the “Sage of Calligraphy” who lived in China during the Jin Dynasty (265–420). Public domain, Wikipedia.
7. Initial in “Portrait of the Author: Gaston Phoebus” ca. 1406. The beginning of a treatise on hunting. From Morgan Library & Museum Online Exhibition, Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands. Available online.
8. Z (Zulu). In addition to the letter “Z” this flag can signal “I require a tug” or “I am shooting nets” in the system of international maritime signal flags. When followed by numerals, it indicates time. In 1905, it was used by Adm. Heihachiro Togo to mean “The Empire’s fate depends on the result of this battle, let every man do his utmost duty.” Public domain, Wikipedia.
9. QR code. “Quick Response” codes were initially invented for use in vehicle manufacturing.
   Public domain, Wikipedia.

City Lights is a historical landmark, a living testament to the Beat Generation, and a destination for both tourists and the San Francisco literary community. How do these things influence how your curate the selection of books at the store?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti has always thought of City Lights as being part of a long tradition of resistance and dissent, a beacon of possibility and a place of refuge to consider the long horizon of potential futures. He has always felt it was imperative that City Lights be a place of lively stillness, where the browser/reader could peruse the shelves, select several books and read them at one’s own pace. Between these broad banks of resistance and possibility lie City Lights’ curatorial mission to include works that incite a dissenting imagination. This has been established over decades of thought, discussion, and practice among the entire staff of City Lights who, together, participate in the selection of titles that find a place on our shelves. This three-decades-old practice is an important part of City Lights’ continued relevance and long-term sustainability.

How much do the Beat origins of the store suffuse its current spirit? City Lights seems to have an enduring commitment to poetry. How does this manifest?

The “Beats” are an honored part of the City Lights heritage, but they are only one current in a broad stream of the “barbaric yawp.” Toussaint L’Ouverture, Rimbaud, Nedd Ludd, Soujourner Truth, Joe Hill, Charlie Parker, Fannie Lou Hamer and many others speak with that “barbaric yawp” that inspires us and helps shape our curatorial practice.

Tell us more about the relationship between City Lights and San Francisco, past and present. Does City Lights actively nurture that relationship?

Poet Gary Snyder said “City Lights was one of the suddenly, new great resources in my life. I discovered an array of books published by New Directions Press. They were bringing in European Modernism, Guillaume Appollinaire and all kinds of great stuff – Ezra Pound, (William) Carlos Williams, Robinson Jeffers, D.H. Lawrence, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre and Peter Kropotkin, the anarchist theorist. So there was a real strong intellectual connection …”

Fifty-nine years later, I believe City Lights plays a role that is very similar to what Gary Snyder described, as it is still both a resource and a source of inspiration for readers and writers. Shig Murao was Lawrence’s partner at City Lights for over twenty years and the individual who, along with Lawrence, is most responsible for the renown that City Lights enjoys. And the current staff, most notably Elaine Katzenberger, the director of City Lights, and Peter Maravelis, the events coordinator, continue this long tradition of introducing new and forgotten writers to a wider reading public.

Not many bookstores have a section devoted just to Dada and Surrealism, particularly in a prime location across from the front counter. What’s that about?

Dada and Surrealism are part of the broad river of dissent and resistance, and essential “barbaric yawp’. Nancy Peters, the director of City Lights for nearly 30 years and Philip Lamantia, the surrealist poet, created that section in the early 70s and that the staff has continued over many years. Sections like “Commodity Aesthetics” “Stolen Continents”, “Green Politics”, “Muckraking”,” Topographies & Somalogistics” are other examples of sections created and curated by members of City Lights. What we are attempting to do in these sections is to create a dialogue among the books themselves as well as with the potential reader.

5 QUICK QUESTIONS

What’s your favorite book from childhood?
“Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Graham. The Scribner Edition with illustrations by Ernest H. Shepard.

Do you write in your books? What do you use for a bookmark?
Never! I have a drawer full of bookmarks from other bookstores.

What’s the silliest question you’ve been asked at the front desk?
Where is City Lights?

What’s your favorite spot in the store?
Anywhere in the store after 3AM.

What do you do when you’re not reading or working at the bookstore?
Long walks.

And of course: What’s your favorite Siglio book (so far)?
Danielle Dutton’s S P R A W L  and Robert Seydel’s Book of Ruth.

This interview was the work of two Siglio interns, Delia Barnas and Jasmine Francis.

About the photos, Paul says: “The photo of the store dates from the early 60s. If I remember correctly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Shig Murao are in the mezzanine window. Under the awning are Kirby Ferlinghetti, Bob McBride and a person who I cannot identify. The photo of myself was taken by Stacey Lewis, the director of marketing for City Lights Publishing.” City Lights Bookstore is located in San Francisco, CA on 261 Columbus Avenue at Broadway (North Beach). Look for the next interview at the end of March (or subscribe to the blog to get an email when it posts).

*

I have noticed in the Tantric works how the simplicity of their conventional, geometric forms is complemented by the infinite complexity of their particular execution” water stains, flaws in the handmade paper . . . It’s not just a desire for the antique or a nostalgic patina that makes the incidental marks so important, it’s precisely that ideal forms—forms plumbed from the depths of the mid, of the soul—need to co-exist with randomness and the emptiness of chance. How is it that a symbol of god alone is so dull, but when juxtaposed with a smudge or a smear it comes alive?

—Lawrence Rinder, in his introduction to Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme

KALI

From Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme:

Imagine. Suddenly, after weeks, months, perhaps years of evoking the Goddess (for example), her arms, legs, her protruding tongue and frightful gaze, all suddenly resolved into a simple triangle pointing downwards.

To abstract. Abbreviate. To finally glimpse the whole.

*

Shakti in the manifestation of Kali, The Black One. According to an ancient treatise: “Just as all names and all forms disappear within Her, all colors disappear within black.” Night, once more, walks on night.

KALI & SHIVA

Kali haunts the cremation ground, and she is often pictured standing on the chest of the ashen white Shiva, who lies still as a corpse. In some images Shiva is ithyphallic and engages with Kali in a form of sexual intercourse called viparitarati or purushayita. In this position the female is on top, taking the active role. This inversion sends a message of the Mother Goddess’s supremacy. According to Shakta and Tantric cosmology, it is the feminine power that creates, sustains and dissolves the universe while the masculine principle is the static substratum. The sexual union of Shiva and Shakti graphically illustrates that ultimately the two are one, beyond all duality.

—David Nelson, The Many Faces of Kali

From Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme:

The eternal and frenetic race of the feminine principle towards its masculine counterpart. Shakti pursuing Shiva…. The triangle of the Goddess is not presented with point downward, as tradition normally dictates, but in full agitation. In time, the triangle should come to actually tremble, vibrate, hover about its lover, its magnet.

*

Indubitable scene of pure love. The Goddess, transfigured, has mounted Shiva. We might claim that the great Tantric mass is here intoned.

Tantra loves such reversals, such inversions. Shiva who had been dark as night has become as pink as a vulva, and she who was pink has reacquired her original color–Kali, The Black One.

VISHNU

From Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme:

The “illustrious fish,” the little blue form that some eccentrics call “the little blue tongue.” One of Vishnu’s ten incarnations descending into the night of our dark world, yet under the seal of energy (the multi-colored spiral, thus having the power to sport all aspects of manifestation, all taste, all color). As if this energy, slightly drunk on its own richness, and turning in reverse, agreed to be guided—in time without time of a painting, by a god become fish.

*

More about Tantra Song on the siglio website. (Use code TANTRA to get 25% off.) Bill Berkson’s interview with Jamme is excerpted here on the siglio blog.

This post was conceived by Siglio intern Casey Reck who researched and brought together of all the elements here. Please note that all excerpts reproduced here—text and images—from Tantra Song are copyrighted. We request that you credit any usage “from Tantra Song by Franck André Jamme, Siglio Press, 2011″ and link back to this blog or the siglio website.

The figurative images of Vishnu and Kali & Shiva can be found with full citations for their sources on Wikipedia. The single image of Kali was located on a blog discussing the origins of the Rolling Stones use of the tongue in their logo!

The audio was recorded on an iphone and begins with Mónica de la Torre speaking just after a short introduction which included Siglio publisher Lisa Pearson reading Seydel’s preface (text below) from the Book of Ruth. After the preface, you can find the images that were referenced during the evening. The audio just below may take a minute or so to download.

PREFACE TO BOOK OF RUTH by Robert Seydel

As my hair dries my mind goes.
—Ruth Greisman

The Book of Ruth is concerned with two main characters, my aunt and uncle, Ruth and Sol Greisman, who were siblings, born in Brooklyn, New York. Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp put in minor appearances as friends to both of them. A fifth character, mostly invisible, is “Robt,” or Robert Cornell, Joseph Cornell’s homebound brother, or myself, nephew, and the “half-wit” of the Book. Neither Ruth nor Sol married; they lived together for the better part of their adult lives in a small apartment in Queens, New York, not far from the Cornell house on Utopia Parkway.

Sol (sometimes Saul) was in real life a veteran of the First World War and suffered, as it was later said, from shell shock. After the War he became a plumber. Ruth was a Sunday painter who worked days in a bank and was active in Hadassah. In the Book the two of them meet Cornell and, through him, Marcel Duchamp. Ruth fell in love with the former, who was, in his own way, as impossible and sealed-off as her brother.

Ruth is the artist in the Book, her work taking the form of mailings to Joseph, various serial and other collages, such as Ten Tiny Collages for Teeny, and journal writings. Her work was first discovered among the boxes of miscellanea in the Joseph Cornell Study Center at The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Later research by family members turned up a treasure trove of material in a garage in suburban Fort Lee, New Jersey. Ruth’s emblem is the hare, Sol’s the worm, or sometimes a star-nosed mole.

IMAGES REFERENCED DURING THE CONVERSATION

Siglio Ephemera: from 5 HARES & 3 RUTHS

One View of Robert Seydel’s Library (photo: Richard Kraft)

Collaged Text

On left, “Moth” and on right, “R. ‘Our Bob’” from Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel

“Yeg” from Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel

Seydel + Duchamp

“Also a pharmacology, for marcel” from Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel and featured in BOMB, Winter 2011

“Pharmacy” by Marcel Duchamp

“Marcel Duchamp, Par-Fume” from Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel

On Hares & Stains

“Untitled [Hare, Dürer-type]” from Book of Ruth by Robert Seydel

Seydel’s Desk at Richard Kraft’s Playa del Rey studio

Untitled (Sun) by Robert Seydel

Printed Matter Event Info & Participant Bios

Book of Ruth is available directly from Siglio press. Use code AMHERST for a 15% discount or sign-up for the Siglio mailing list to get special offers and discounts throughout the year. All images and text by Robert Seydel and photographs by Richard Kraft are copyrighted. Please credit any online usage appropriately and link back to this post. Thank you.