36 Exposures — Tenement Press

_{36 Exposures

A bastardised roll of film

Dominic J. Jaeckle

Hoagy Houghton

Designed & typeset

by Ana Baliza

Tenement Press / John Cassavetes I
978-1-7393851-4-9
390pp

£20.00

ORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE

Published July 31st 2024

With an afterword by Chris McCabe}

_{A new edition, following the 2021 release

via Dostoyevsky Wannabe.

A utility amongst the swallows is their music;

they use it to avoid collision.

John Cage, ‘36 Mesostics’

The methodology was as follows. Over the course of a single year, 2018, Houghton would send Jaeckle three photographs a month from his archive; Jaeckle would respond with an accompanying prose-work for each image.

At the year’s end, the resulting collection would cover twelve months, comprising 36 images and 36 reactions, and express itself as a roll of film in the abstract. A contact sheet spoilt by written interventions; an index of distractions and elaborations; an array of materials that pictures a false or disrupted communication as ideas are exchanged and images developed over the course of a calendar year.

From the onset of the project to its end, Jaeckle and Houghton never met in person—this exchange of materials was their only means of communication—and thus, this collaboration is a form of conversation twelve-months wide and three-hundred-and-sixty-five days long. The texts number fragments, at turns essayistic and anecdotal; short stories, prose-poems, and assimilated citations. The images are largely personal: snapshots; familiar faces; passing objects of interest and attention.

The Exposures project is a near-novel, a broken love song, an experiment in a direct and indirect address of ideas in both high and low resolution, at high and low tide, when the moon is up, and when the sun is near.

For the attention of ‘brick & mortar’ bookshops,
order copies of Jaeckle’s 36 Exposures

via our distributor, Asterism Books.}

_{^{Diamanda LaBerge Dramm,

reads ‘March 2nd (Nina Simone)’}}

_{^{Mark Lanegan,

reads ‘March 1st (Mercè Rodoreda)’}}

_{^{Diamanda LaBerge Dramm,

reads ‘February 3rd (Alberto Pimenta)’}}

_{^{Polly Barton,

reads ‘June 3rd (The Louvin Brothers)’}}

_{^{Mark Lanegan,

reads ‘June 2nd (Veronica Lake, Walden Pond, & River Phoenix)’}}

_{Read an excerpt,
‘January 1st (Ruben A)’

via Fence

Read an excerpt,
‘June 2nd (Veronica Lake, Walden Pond & River Phoenix),’

via The London Magazine}

_{Verse & Chorus

A Patchwork Quilt for the Radio

Dominic J. Jaeckle

& Nadia de Vries

Cast (in order of appearance)—
Nadia de Vries
Matthew Shaw
Cíntia Gil
Diamanda La Berge Dramm

Mark Lanegan

Stanley Schtinter

Duke Garwood

Vilde Valerie Bjerke Torset

Becket Flannery

Spotify

Soundcloud

Railroad Flat Radio

An inheritor of various of this book’s pages, Verse & Chorus is an exquisite corpse of an “I” played out in a multiplicity of voices, Verse & Chorus is an experimental act of collaborative reworking that quilts and collages cuts from two manuscripts into an imagined third object, pooling poetry from the Exposures project and de Vries’ second collection, I Failed to Swoon following their publication via Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021.

Verse & Chorus was first broadcast on Montez Press Radio (New York) 29.01.21, and—thereafter—was included in the online programme for the 2021 edition of the Rewire Festival (The Hague, The Netherlands). Verse & Chorus is archived via radia.fm; an international, informal network of community radio stations that have a common interest in producing and sharing art works for the radio. In 2024, the network gathers 22 radio stations from 21 cities across 15 countries, speaking 9 different languages.}

_{I’M LOOKING FOR A MODEL

FOR A NOVEL CALLED PUBLIC DOMAIN

Dominic J. Jaeckle
& Jon Auman

Resonance 104.4FM

The University of Copenhagen

The Louisiana Museum

An excerpt from the Exposures project—appearing therein under the entry, ‘April 3rd (The Paris Review)’—that was also produced as a play-for-the-radio under the titled ‘I’m Looking for a Model for a Novel called Public Domain.’ A one-act monologue in which an imagined writer thinks on their processes, thinks on an imagined work for the current century composed out of the detritus of the previous.

A look-book of twenty-first-century interpretations of twentieth-century experiments—a chorus of conflicting opinions looking for a little harmony—the writer’s voice essays a plagiarism. A ghost composed of multiple conversations, the text is a combinatory “cut-up” assembled entirely out of sentences, clauses and sub-clauses lifted verbatim from interviews with authors and makers published by magazines without paywall (featuring at least two hundred interviews in all).

‘I’m Looking for a Model for a Novel called Public Domain’ was first broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM (January 2019), and the rough-edged “lyric video” above was produced for Carol Mavor and Rune Gade’s summer school programme, The Afterlife of the Object, 2019, hosted at the University of Copenhagen and the Louisiana Museum. The writer’s part is played by Jon Auman.}

_{Shipping Forecast / A Table of Contents

Dominic J. Jaeckle

Milo Thesiger-Meacham

Matthew Shaw

Mason Lindahl

Diamanda LaBerge Dramm

Polly Barton

Resonance Extra

I salt my breakfast eggs.
All day long I feel created.

Anne Dillard, Holy the Firm (1977)

Two feature-length for-radio specials, collating and scoring readings from the Exposures project; (i.) ‘Shipping Forecast’ features readings by Diamanda La Berge Dramm, against a soundtrack of drones and nocturnal noises from Matthew Shaw; (ii.) ‘A Table of Contents’ features readings by Polly Barton, set against found sounds and ambient melodies from Matthew Shaw (again) and Mason Lindahl on guitar. First broadcast on Resonance Extra (‘Shipping Forecast’ was aired on Monday 22nd February 2021, 18:00-20:40 GMT; ‘A Table of Contents,’ Tuesday 5th October 2021, 14:00-15:30 BST).

Shipping Forecast

Dominic J. Jaeckle

Diamanda La Berge Dramm

Matthew Shaw

A Table of Contents

Dominic J. Jaeckle

Polly Barton

Mason Lindahl

Matthew Shaw}_{_{36 Exposures is a manuscript owing to an ongoing project called
Veronica Lake, Walden Pond, & River Phoenix—a cumulative train of thought, a series of spines, a ‘Legend of Duluoz’ in which the author argues with varied objects of attention in a borderless field of enquiry.

1. 36 Exposures

2. Magnolia or Redbud (Flowers for Laura Lee Burroughs)}}

_{According to the Midrash, the light created by God on the first day of creation shone for exactly 36 hours. What lasting images were developed in that moment?

[...]

Exposures of lived moments. Writing as an organising principle. Writing as complete commitment. Writing as life.

[...]

Jaeckle shows us the difference between watching and looking. Between staring and focussing. Between thought-making and thinking.

[...]

36 Exposures is a source book containing enough ejector seats for Jaeckle to get high as a writer for the rest of his life.

[...]

Camera exposure relies on light to make a picture darker or lighter. The more light, the brighter the photograph.

Chris McCabe, from his Afterword,

‘36 Expositions’

Does language need to be reinvented in order to talk? Or even, to see? Dominic Jaeckle thinks so, and provides a compelling, propulsive essay poetry to accompany a year-long suite of pictures by Hoagy Houghton. This twitterverse feed takes philosophy personally, mixmasters it up with best friends and late-night movie simulations. While there are encounters by the galore, and biographical instants dropped like crumbs on a forest walk, the focus here is not on the story, but the lighting, the staging, the choreography of digression. Talk about talking. In these mirrors are reflections of a lost brother, an almost date, an almost self, on the times we used to have, the blood rites we shared until we couldn’t. Black and white photos offer starting points to think about colour. What colour is the memory of brother? The photographs offer shadowy basement creatures caught in the half light, as if the camera wasn’t even there, vacuuming up every decisive moment. Pensive, coiled, we are dropped in the midst of a drama that will need to bury a few Russian philosophers before life can begin again. And coursing through it all this essential belief: that the right painted apple, the right sentence, the right thought: would change the world. The revolution is in the waiting room.

Mike Hoolboom

Sheets to the wind,

a suite of songs to accompany

these pages.

_{Dominic J. Jaeckle

51.4545° N, 2.5879° W

Jaeckle is a writer, editor, and publisher. Jaeckle curated and collated the irregular magazine series Hotel and its adjacent projects, and publishes works of experimental and esoteric literature in English and in first-time English language translation via Tenement Press.

Hoagy Houghton

51.5072° N, 0.1276° W
Houghton is an artist based in London.

Chris McCabe

53.4084° N, 2.9916° W

McCabe’s work spans artforms and genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, drama and visual art. His work has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the Republic of Consciousness Prize. His latest poetry collection The Triumph of Cancer (Penned in the Margins, 2018) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and he is the editor of several anthologies, including Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages (Chambers, 2019) and, with Victoria Bean, The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2015). His novels are Dedalus (Henningham Family Press, 2018) and Mud (Henningham Family Press, 2019). McCabe is presently working on an epic series of psychogeographical books documenting the lost poets buried in London’s Victorian cemeteries, the latest of which is Buried Garden: Lockdown with the Lost Poets of Abney Park Cemetery (Penned in the Margins, 2021) which was chosen as a White Review Book of the Year in 2022. McCabe is National Poetry Librarian at Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library, London.

Ana Baliza

38.7223° N, 9.1393° W

Baliza is an artist based in Lisbon.}}