commodities update

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So I received in the mail last Friday two copies of Timoleon from Lulu (previously described here). They are not lovely. Here is what went wrong with them. First, problems with Lulu:

  • The spine. Predictably for such a thin book, some of the spine text bleeds onto the front cover. I did follow the Lulu directions precisely and added some room for bleed, but maybe not enough; one odd thing is that the author name & title, which are at the top of the spine, are correctly placed, while the press name, at the bottom, seems to be slightly on the front cover. Maybe the covers were slightly tilted? A bit odd.
  • The covers. These are glossy, not matte. Glossy covers look cheap and make the design look like garbage. In addition, there seem to be some bubbles in the gloss; one copy’s slightly worse than the others. The color looks fine, despite being four-color; the separations are okay.
  • The binding. This isn’t great, in no small part because it’s a 64-page book. But: the glue’s rather uneven, and there are noticeable extra dollops of glue between the covers and the first and last page. 
  • Interior paper stock. The covers (and the inside front & back covers, covers 2 & 3) are on bright white stock. This is good. The interiors are distinctly off-white: maybe they’re parchment colored? So the first and the last spread (where you see the inside front cover and the title page, for example) look abysmal. Why would they do this? I don’t know.

Second, design issues that were entirely my fault:

  • The copyright page. Why on earth is this in such large type? I don’t know.
  • The table of contents. This is also too large, though this isn’t quite as grievous an issue.
  • Two-page poems. An aesthetic improvement: when possible, I’ve pulled down the text on the second page so its start position is parallel with the text of the first page.
  • Typos. At least one prominent one. Still haven’t effectively proof-read this.
  • Messed-up grids. For some reason, everything had been snapping to 0p6 grids when the text was all set to a 1p0 grid. This probably made things more difficult than they needed to be.

So: a second printing has been published on Lulu. Unfortunately: you don’t seem to be able to change the glossy covers or the creme-colored papers, though maybe I’ve missed something?

In addition: new and improved electronic version (PDF, 308kb) with above improvements and exciting new PDF table of contents & hyperlinks etc., which should have been there in the first edition but weren’t for whatever reason.

Also: an electronic version (PDF, 288kb) of Tender Buttons, which for some reason I never got around to putting up.

stein/duchamp

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“I was always perfectly able to understand the enthusiasm that Marcel Duchamp aroused in New York when he went there in the early years of the war. His brother had just died from the effect of his wounds, his other brother was still at the front and he himself was inapt for military service. He was very depressed and he went to America. Everybody loved him. So much so that it was a joke in Paris that when any american arrived in Paris the first thing he said was, and how is Marcel. Once Gertrude Stein went to see Braque, just after the war, and going into the studio in which there happened just then to be three young americans, she said to Braque, and how is Marcelle. The three young americans came up to her breathlessly and said, have you seen Marcel. She laughed, and having become accustomed to the inevitableness of the american belief that there was only one Marcel, she explained that Braque’s wife was named Marcelle and it was Marcelle Braque about whom she was enquiring.”

(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 795)

duchamp/stein

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“CABANNE: So it’s your moral position, more than your work, which was irritating?

DUCHAMP: There again, I had no position. I’ve been a little like Gertrude Stein. To a certain group, she was considered an interesting writer, with very original things . . .

CABANNE It’s a form of comparison between people of that period. By that, I mean that there are people in every period who aren’t ‘in.’ No one’s bothered by it. Whether I had been in or not, it would have been all the same. It’s only now, forty years later, that we discover things had happened forty years before that might have bothered some people – but they couldn’t have cared less then!”

(Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett, p. 17)

dali, not sounding like dali

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“In Paris, in the early days, there were 17 people who understood the “readymades” – the very rare readymades by Marcel Duchamp. Nowadays there are 17 million who understand them, and that one day, when all objects that exist are considered readymades, there will be no readymades at all. Then Originality will become the artistic Work, produced convulsively by the artist by hand.”

(Salvador Dali, “L’Échecs, c’est moi”, preface to Pierre Cabanne’s Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett.)

locus solus industries 006

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My Tender Buttons:

my tender buttons

There’s a perfectly good edition of Tender Buttons from Green Integer, and it’s collected several other places, including the first volume of the dreadful Library of America compilation. But I wanted one of my own. And you can have one of your very own, courtesy of Lulu. N.b. I still haven’t seen the first one of these, and this one only took me half-an-hour to put together, so no guarantees.

Suggestions for further volumes (preferably 64-page volumes like these) are welcome.

the disinherited

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I move in darkness—widowed—beyond solace,
The Prince of Aquitaine in a ruined tower.
My one star is dead; the black sun of sadness
Eclipses the constellation of my guitar.

O you who brought me light in the night of the tomb,
Bring back Posillipo and the Italian sea;
Bring back the flower that made my sad heart glad,
The grove where the rose and vine twined joyously.

Am I Eros or Apollo, Lusignan or Biron?
My brow still burns red from my Queen’s kisses.
I dreamed such dreams in the cave of a swimming siren,

And I’ve crossed Acheron in glory, twice
To play on the lyre of Orpheus and intone
The sighs of the saint and the fairy’s clear cries.

(Gérard de Nerval, originally published 1854, trans. Daniel Mark Epstein, at, hold your nose, The New Criterion in 2000.)

The French original (from here):

     El Desdichado

Je suis le ténébreux, – le veuf, – l’inconsolé,
Le prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie :
Ma seule étoile est morte, – et mon luth constellé
Porte le soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

Dans la nuit du tombeau, toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé
Et la treille où le pampre à la rose s’allie.

Suis-je Amour ou Phébus ? . . . Lusignan ou Biron ?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine ;
J’ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la sirène . . .

Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron :
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée.

On consideration: I think, not knowing any French that the above translation is a bad one. Did Epstein lose the italics of the French for stylistic reasons, or did they just get lost in the transition to the web? Not sure. Also odd: that Epstein takes the title (Spanish in the original French, in draft the French “Le Destin”) and turns it into plain English (“The Disinherited”). Some background and analysis of the poem here, though note they manage to lose the italics in the French.