Brick & mortar bookshops
/
order via asterism.
(Praise for
36 Exposures.)
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
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’
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.
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(A bastardised roll of film)
2. Magnolia or Redbud (Flowers for Laura Lee Burroughs)