Tenement Press, a house for homeless ideas, is an independent
publications project dedicated to the championship and promotion
of experimental literary works—in English and first-time English language
translation—wherein which the poetic and the political intersect.
editors@tenementpress.com
Editor & Publisher
Dominic J. Jaeckle
dominicjaeckle.com
Design
Traven T. Croves
traven-t-croves.co.uk
info@traven-t-croves.co.uk
Contributing Editor(s)
Jon Auman
Gareth Evans
Benjamin Pickford
Stephen Watts
No University Press
Benjamin Pickford
Alexandra Dias Fortes
Giovanbattista Tusa
Radio, Audio, & Production
Dominic J. Jaeckle
& Milo Thesiger-Meacham
Guest Readers
Lucy Mercer
Open Call, May ‘22 / Poetry
Vanessa Onwuemezi
Open Call, May ‘22 / Poetry
DONATE TO TENEMENT PRESS
Water-tanks are tramp directories.
Not all in idle wantonness do tramps
carve their monicas, dates and courses.
Jack London, The Road (1907)
Tenement’s insignia is borrowed from the ‘signal code’—a pictograph languange popularised during the great depression as a means of communicating vital information between itinerant workers as they traversed North America. Although there is some dispute as to the veracity and extent of the code’s usage (with some scholars claiming the code a fiction conjured up to portray unity and solidarity between vagrants), it’s place in folklore as a subterranean means of communication underwrites the aims of a Tenement spine.
Left—An artist’s re-rendering of a ‘signal,’ meaning
‘a safe place to rest,’ ‘to take the night.’ See John E. Fawcett
and Elizabeth D. Rambeau, ‘A Hobo Memoir, 1936,’
Indiana Magazine of History, 90.4 (1994).
Right—John Divola, from the ‘Zuma’ series, circa 1977.
Distribution
Asterism (asterismbooks.com)
Tenement’s catalogue is represented by Asterism Books,
an online bookstore and wholesale portal designed, built, and run
by independent publishers.
SEE HERE FOR TENEMENT’S CATALOGUE ON ASTERISM
For any press queries or trade enquiries,
please contact the editors here.
Stephen Watts, ‘I AM A FILM,’ as shot
by filmmaker Huw Wahl, circa 2022.
The Yellowjackets
A sideways resuscitation of Penguin’s abandoned, yellow-topped miscellany series, an effort to win the colour back from cowardice, Tenement’s “Yellowjackets” are a thread of angular, interdisciplinary and experimental works in English and first-time English language translation in which the political, poetic, and philosophical intersect.
In order of appearance ...
I. Joan Brossa
El saltamartí / The Tumbler
Translated from the Catalan
by Cameron Griffiths
978-1-8380200-1-9
See here
Joan Brossa creates distilled excitement. He is both wise and wild. His poems are surreal and matter-of-fact, playful and minimalist and utterly original. In his ability to make it new, Brossa is an essential modern poet.
Colm Tóibín
II. Stanley Schtinter, et al
The Liberated Film Club
An anthology publication of ‘introductions’ to the unknown.
978-1-8380200-3-3
See here
Schtinter runs with wolves. His Liberated Film Club was, throughout its brief, perfect existence, the antidote to contemporary cinephilia. It was impious and sexy, mysterious and unsober, a ululatory free zone for refuseniks, a place of magic and mayonnaise. If you never made it to one of its mad, baffling nights, this book is guaranteed to make your loss all the more deliciously unbearable.
Sukhdev Sandhu
III. Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger
Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi
978-1-8380200-4-0
See here
A White Review ‘Book of the Year’ 2022
Antiphonal, intimate and virtuoso, these variations respond to the sense that the interpretation of desires can be endless—it can dance this way and that, and then turn and turn again. The exchange of voices, singing lines that meet and part, pick up on the presence of the lover and the beloved in the poems; as Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger pass each newly wrought phrase back and forth between them, the distance between Seale in Istanbul and Moger in Cape Town is bridged, and so are the centuries that separate us from Ibn Arabi, his motifs, his mystical ascents and descents, and his anguished yearning. This is translation as intrepid and inspired re-visioning, a form of poetry of its own, as forged by Edward FitzGerald, Ezra Pound and Anne Carson.
Marina Warner
IV. SJ Fowler, MUEUM A novella (I/III)
A novella
978-1-8380200-6-4
See here
Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2022/23
Deeply, beautifully unsettling, and somehow so complete that I have screwed up and rewritten this endorsement seventeen times. As a text, MUEUM seems to eat any potential response to it. Sometimes I called it a mesmerising, bravura meditation on work, power, and subjugation; sometimes I called it the psychopathology of the institution; sometimes I just made sub-animal noises. Initially I just felt awe at how compelling Fowler can make the sheer tedium of labour, in an environment terrifyingly regimented, curious (and intimate, like being let backstage behind existence itself), but this was gradually replaced by an increasing suspense and horror which got its claws into me for the whole last half of the novella. Anyway. It makes me very happy—and also insanely jealous—that works like this are being written.
Luke Kennard
V. Jeffrey Vallance
A Voyage to Extremes
A bible-long collation of the artist’s
selected spiritual writings.
978-1-8380200-5-7
See here
Vallance’s Voyage to Extremes seems to me to be the most successful literary embodiment of the human cognitive structures that have evolved with the internet—not from imitation, but from pre-existing structural resonance. A playful, weightless curiosity may seem like a fey and inconsequential thing, but when it drifts across a border as if the border wasn’t there, watch out!
Artillery Magazine
VI. Kyra Simone
Palace of Rubble
978-1-8380200-7-1
See here
Like traditional methods of salting, pickling, drying, and smoking, Palace of Rubble saves transitory substance from expiration. From the stuff we unfold in the morning and throw in the recycling bin at night, Simone coaxes the rhythms of cyclical life, the patterns and variations on patterns that define the sphere of the daily, that baseline on which extraordinary events and crises exert their pressure. The world she constructs is recognizable, textured, gently humorous—but also luminously, piercingly exact—possessed of the strangeness of seeing something for the first or the last time.
Alexandra Kleeman
VII. Pier Paolo Pasolini
La rabbia / Anger
Translated from the Italian
by Cristina Viti
978-1-8380200-8-8
See here
Pasolini’s poems thrive with passion and outrage. A 20th century Dante, he grieves at inequity, feels disgusted by corruption, and wails against the evil that people do. Pasolini doesn’t render a coming paradise, but contests hate with love, meanness with generosity, and through the reality of his beautiful poems, suggests the possibility of creating a better world.
Lynne Tillman
VIII. Reza Baraheni, Lilith
A novella
978-1-8380200-9-5
See here
Baraheni’s vision was not confined to Iran. He was instrumental in having the wording of charter of PEN International changed to make it more universal. Its first words used to be: “Literature, national though it may be in origin, knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals.” He proposed deleting the words, “national though it be in origin.” That simple yet profound change was approved at the 2003 PEN Congress in Mexico City, the first change to the document since it was agreed to in 1948. The revised Charter now reads: “Literature knows no frontiers...”
Haroon Siddiqui
IX. Dolors Miquel
El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove
978-1-7393851-0-1
See here
The Pink Plastic Glove is language fighting for its life, or more appropriately, for its death. It points to what lies beyond language in a way that opens onto the archaic, and in a way that makes you gasp. Dolors Miquel is the grand disappearer of words, with a style so lucid, and savage, that it makes tangible the invisible behind words and the long blank at the end of meaning without ever losing faith in the power of language to do exactly that. I’m struggling to say exactly what the experience of reading this book feels like, which is exactly the effect of this supremely discomfiting book, to be in the un-worded presence, through words themselves, of the sacred. The Pink Plastic Glove is a supreme act of faith and despair.
David Keenan
X. Stanley Schtinter, Last Movies
A book of endings.
978-1-7393851-1-8
See here
All films are haunted, both by the immortal light of the sooner-or-later dead that they curate, and by the filaments of meaning they extrude into unscripted human lives. Last Movies is an unexpectedly revealing catalogue of final interchanges between imminent ghosts and counterpart electric spectres on the screen’s far side. Profound and riveting, Schtinter’s graveyard perspective offers up a rich and startlingly novel view of cinema, angled through cemetery gates before the closing credits. A remarkable accomplishment.
Alan Moore
XI. Mario Benedetti
El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel / Juan Angel’s Birthday
Translated from the Spanish
by Adam Feinstein
978-1-7393851-2-5
See here
It’s extremely difficult to find a poem which fulfils the condition of a novel and a lyrical text without betraying both. El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel achieves this feat through experimental verse. It’s an extraordinary river-poem in which, without abandoning the nucleus of poetic art, Benedetti takes the genre of militancy and the pamphlet a step further. As if a true Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the protagonist passes through different stages as revolutionary as they are imbued with a biblical, epic quality. It is so fortunate for all those discerning English-speaking readers that this book is now published.
Agustín Fernández Mallo
XII. Edwina Attlee
a great shaking
978-1-7393851-8-7
See here
In mediaeval manuscripts, engravings of the steps of life from birth to death often omitted women completely. In this fascinating collection, Attlee talks to them directly, making them entirely visible as she explores the legacies of indentured labour, the toils of women and the mythologies of motherhood, all in real time: the crows eat up the corn / the baby is back / and the women open their legs to the stove / pushing soft porridge into his mouth / like companionable silence. This empathy and companionship are the backdrop to her own negotiations of work, family and political activity, and expose how impossibly intermingled these are. She weighs the magical thinking of folktale and childhood against the real world to expose the gap between there and here, while continuing the ancient task of trying to find a way to make it all work. Her language is present and exact, and razor sharp: my mother is here / laughing like a broken plate. Throughout, there is love and wry humour: You are the word I will use to call the cows home at night (‘Old English love song, Traditional’). This is a deeply affecting collection; these poems come from a very genuine sense of communion with all those semi-visible individuals who labour and have always laboured for love, family and fairness. Forgive us this standing. Forgive us in strength. / Unforgive if forgiving undoes sorrow. Do not unstep your step.
Lesley Harrison
XIII. Giovanbattista Tusa
Terra Cosmica / Traces of Georealism
978-1-7393851-9-4
See here
Giovanbattista Tusa finds the words that won’t fill the disquiet and the terror of the illegible revolt of the elements against our way of production. The fury of climate deregulation and the ecological crisis have a history and a foreseeable future that we now must become acquainted with. This book is a magnificent tool to help us begin to accomplish the most urgent task of contemporary humankind: the only one that can save us.
Claire Fontaine
XIV. Chris McCabe
Terra Cosmica / Traces of Georealism
978-1-7393851-9-4
See here
[Chris McCabe] is a man to be respected and enjoyed.
Ivor Cutler
XV. Lucy Sante
Six Sermons for Bob Dylan
978-1-7393851-9-4
See here
Inspired by sermons recorded in Black churches in the 1920s and 1930s,
Sante’s are soul poems for 21st-century uncertainty.
Randy Kennedy, Ursula (Hauser & Wirth)
Sante’s are soul poems for 21st-century uncertainty.
Randy Kennedy, Ursula (Hauser & Wirth)
XVI. Wadih Saadeh
A Horse at the Door / A chronological survey of poems
Translated from the Arabic
by Robin Moger
978-1-917304-02-3
See here
In a 2014 AlMayadeen TV interview with the Lebanese poet-host Zahi Wehbe, Wadih Saadeh called his work ‘an autobiography of other people’s lives.’ At this point in the conversation he had already explained that people are essentially alike, so the deeper you plunge into yourself the more you find out about others. Speaking casually, the then sixty-six year old—very arguably the greatest living Arabic poet—did not seem to realise how startling is the idea. Donald M. Murray’s All Writing Is Autobiography is one thing, but to say that poetry is a way to be someone else, and so let someone else be you—that feels like a coup de foudre. A poem, Saadeh told Wahbe, is ‘a momentary, illusory cure’ from the horrors of the world, wounds actually dressed by working, having a family, emigrating. He called the third person, which in Arabic translates to ‘the absent one,’ ‘a shadow self, the self that cannot be present.’ Summoning that inner absence, switching on the reader’s presence, is what the Lebanese master manages, every time.
Youssef Rakha, from his Afterword,
‘The Australian’
Reading Wadih Saadeh, in this inspiring translation by Robin Moger, one finds oneself entering the aftershocks of an imagination devastated by war and the deep internal and external exiles that follow such destruction. His poetry, loose and open—attentive and philosophical—lives in the remnants of what is left, of what survives to tell its tales, in both short-form, slightly surreal parables, and longer autobiographic tracings. It speaks of dust, of being dust, of stones talking to stones, of separated limbs and shadows walking their own way, clinging to shapes, of being water, of being rubble, new languages learnt, friendships, and tobacco at the source of a breath. Of travelling without arrival. Of moving without settling. As though one is forever seeking to settle but one doesn’t know how, or into what form. In the end, the poet settles on passing, and finds aliveness in its slightest movements. Like passing one’s hand through one’s hair, as he does it in the closing sequence of his ground-breaking poem from the Lebanese civil war. An extraordinary and painfully timely collection.
Caroline Bergvall
XVII. Milo Thesiger-Meacham
Audible Heat
978-1-917304-08-5
See here
A work shortlisted for the inaugural
Prototype Prize, 2024.
Almost Borgesian in the levity by which it seems effortlessly to embody encyclopaedic multitudes, Audible Heat deploys multiple perspectives to explore its themes. Of course it does: its agent provocateur—the cicada—not only has compound eyes, it also has five optical units. So, while scalar and focus shift are central to Thesiger-Meacham’s project, the author never loses sight of, nor respect for, his galvanising subject.
As the temperature rises on his investigation, moving from Sergio Leone’s Spanish Westerns to Socrates and beyond, we understand—and appreciate—the intricate assembly of fragments, quotations and images that factor in distance, as much as intimacy, as an engine to the work. Founded on an attentive silence, a patient accretion of time spent in both actual and meditative spaces (strategies we should surely also apply in our encounter here) Audible Heat balances both the warmth of genuine passion for its material with a controlled and “cool” gaze that makes for a singular outcome.
It's time to listen to the page; really listen.
Go closer. Closer, still.
Gareth Evans
‘Each mortal thing,’ writes Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘does one thing and the same’ ...
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
But in Audible Heat, Milo Thesiger-Meacham elegantly and categorically refutes this idea and, in a text both singular and pluralistic, uncovers for us a creature which seems to speak of everything but itself. This mind-boggling encyclopaedic essay ranges across continents and cultural histories to offer us quietly radical termite art of a kind that Manny Farber would approve, nibbling omnidirectionally at the edges of philosophy, entomology, anthropology, poetry, music, film and diverse technologies.
In this synthesis of electric intellectual impulses and nimbly novel insights, sound looms large: like a latterday Langland the author “wente wide in this world wondres to here” only to find in a sound at once familiar and uncanny, eternal and pregnant with anticipation and dread, a hall of mirrors for the restless human soul. Like the sun, the cicada looms like likeness itself and we are led down garden paths that form a maze of amazing information, suggestion and nuance.
Armchair amateurs, we expect a traveller’s tales to feature monsters or larger than life extensions of their own id (giant sloths, Blemmyes, overwhelming flocks of wild geese) but this is a more modest affair, pitched at a scale where the human is not just always discernible but gently and incisively illuminated. It also speaks of the limits of species entrainment, of our faltering efforts at empathic behaviour, and tells us a lot about how we act in relation to other creatures, how culture sits with nature. Perhaps more important is how it subtly suggests how we should or might act.
Ed Baxter
XVIII. Steve Zultanski
Help
978-1-917304-04-7
See here
Steven Zultanski doesn’t so much risk the obvious as aspire to it, as the Latin poets did.
Robert Glück
Brilliant, willfully obtuse, indeterminate, and excruciatingly voyeuristic, Help re-orchestates and dissects the everydayness of our feelings, restaging them around spatulas, a glass of water, a group of friends eating breakfast and talking. Zultanski's proscriptive, quasi-improvised script deregulates our offhand affects and turns them into what they were all along: stage props in the mise en scenery of our lived lives.
Tan Lin
Help is a completely unique and compellingly brilliant work. I was riveted by the strange theatre of discussion, the sociality of speech and the hilarious, macabre themes it naturally leads to. I wish there were more writers like Zultanski, writers playful and secure enough to so simply nudge existence into new terrain. Alas there are very few, so we have to grab rare works like this when they come around.
Holly Pester
XIX. Batool Abu Akleen
48kg. / ٤٨ كغم
Translated from the Arabic by the poet,
with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami,
Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher
978-1-917304-03-0
See here
mpT / Modern Poetry in Translation’s
Poet in Residence, 2024.
One of the most viscerally affecting collections of poems I have ever read. Devastatingly precise and unforgettable images emerge from every line. The Arabic and the English sit side by side on the pages of this book but the effect is deeper than language, it meets the reader in the heart. I wept reading this brilliant, natural, gifted young poet and wished her subject was something other than this atrocity visited upon her and her people.
What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it and the result is truly astonishing.
Max Porter
What is happening in Gaza is a genocide not a war, but not since Akhmatova have I read poetry that so potently reckons with the relationship between war and the body. They create a new category of literary grace out of the cataclysm. These are poems of fire and agony, bombing and starvation, but they are also poems of grace, cleverness, tenderness and yearning. A great international poet arrives with this collection, but it is also a landmark work of resistance. No human should have to write their poetry from inside death's dominion, but Batool Abu Akleen has done it and the result is truly astonishing.
Max Porter
Forthcoming
XX. Alix Chauvet
Cyclamen / Poems After Baudelaire
978-1-917304-09-2
See here
XXI. Friedrich Hölderlin
Der Tod des Empedocles / The Death of Empedocles
Translated from the German
by Rebecca Wright / R. Martz
Recorded and arranged
by Seth Tillett
978-1-917304-10-8
See here
This powerful poem, part bardic chant and part street-corner rant, is delivered by Rebecca Wright with such sustained force, pedal to the metal, that it sounds as if she were practicing circular breathing techniques, like a saxophone player, even on the page. Wright’s mistranslation (term of art) of Hölderlin gets to the heart of the matter: a human who wants to be like the gods but is brutally repressed by them. She sets her action today—meaning Summer 1984, forty-one years ago—when the ongoing dehumanisation of the city was only just beginning.
There is something asleep there.
Don’t think that it is dead.
Lucy Sante
XXII. Sharon Kivland
Envois / The Complete Correspondence :
Love Letters from Jacques Lacan to Sharon Kivland,
MCMLIII-MCMLXXI
978-1-917304-06-1
See here
Kivland utilises the practices of fiction to create space for speculation, as a way of revealing certain psychic tensions. Her heretical invention is produced by acts of antipatriarchal subversion: screwing around inside the library, cutting parts out of the canon of psychoanalysis, sticking them elsewhere, getting all the details wrong on purpose, causing mischief in a way that makes self-important men very cross. Mockery as style becomes a way of loving men by loving women more, a practice that undermines patriarchal seriousness and undoes the need for vengeance. Kivland’s practice laughs at the father, which is a kind of love too.
Ed Luker,
The Los Angeles Review of Books
XXIII. SJ Fowler
BARABUS A novella (II / III)
What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job.
I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg.
Luke 16:3
I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg.
Luke 16:3
Occasional Collaborations
I. Seven Rooms
(Tenement Press & Prototype Publishing, 2023)
(eds.) Dominic J. Jaeckle & Jess Chandler
An anthology publication, an assembly of works from
a magazine series called Hotel.
978-1-913513-46-7
See here
Once a magazine, now an anthology, a selection, a condensing, a celebration, a feast, call it what you will, for this volume takes on different forms in the eyes of each reader. Each generation should build their own edifices, whether hotels, factories or pleasure domes, places in which they gather their interests and ideas so that they can hand them forward.
Each editor must have a burning desire to research and draw from precursors and move with contemporaries, find a dialogue, or ideally a community and make it public, a way to share, to offer as a gift the work that one finds valuable and that one would like others to consider. I want to be made aware of that ongoing dialogue. I want something personal from its editor, an intimacy you might call it.
This hotel started as a series of dialogues in seven issues of a magazine. Now it is re-edited to found a new dialogue, drawing from theseries to make a fresh whole. Today technology allows us to use itto work with art, illustrations and markings to bind with the texts, helping the volume to gain its own rhythm. For me, there’s added interest in this volume with its global reach, with foreign works to thread through the weave. And further, many of the texts are shaped with referencing other writings, and thus further weaves. And yet, though the fabric shows such diversity and span in its contributions, there is a sense of intimacy overall. This anthology has acquired its own presence. And like any anthology of worth it makes me want to read more, to follow up various writers, people new, people who I’ve known about but who have slipped my net, too many to name, many in fact. This anthology does that, with panache. I love it. And as I re-read, seeking what I intend to follow through, I am listening to John Cale in concert making ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ his own.
Paul Buck
Literary diversity was always on show in Hotel.
Michael Caines, The Times Literary Supplement
II. Stanley Schtinter, Last Movies
(Tenement Press & purge.xxx, 2023)
(eds.) Dominic J. Jaeckle & Stanley Schtinter
A limited run “glow-in-the-dark” big and black hardback
edition of Schtinter’s debut authored work.
978-1-7393851-6-3
See here
Here is the endgame of endgames. A commendably perverse demonstration of how it is possible for something to be assimilated, by way of rumour and manipulated history, without being experienced.
Iain Sinclair, Sight and Sound
In Last Movies, artist-curator Stanley Schtinter turns the idea, that film captures the dead and turns them into ghosts, on its head. Rather than focus on deceased people onscreen, he finds out (or, occasionally, makes an informed guess at) what was the last film that various important twentieth-century political and cultural figures had watched, bringing together a potted history of the medium itself.
Juliet Jacques, ArtReview
No University Press
No University Press (NoUP) publishes argumentative work of any field, so long as it is also work that strives beyond its field; work possessing a presentist enthusiasm that works beyond the policies of enclosure that define and underwrite the mission of academic publishing. An imprint from Tenement Press, NoUP exists as both an open, digital library and print publisher. Concentrating on collaboration and cooperation in lieu of peer review, the press will advocate a fair remuneration for its authors, and consider the pace (and place) of publication as an (unerringly) collaborative process.
I. Radical Translation Workshop,
An Anarchist Playbook
A crowd-sourced set of workshop translations
of texts from the French Revolution.
978-1-7393851-3-2
See here
An Anarchist Playbook is an essential collection of works that were the roots from which all later revolutionary ideas grew. Skillfully translated and beautifully designed, it belongs in every radical’s library.
Mitch Abidor
An Anarchist Playbook is an excavation of future thinking. In its radical mode of communal translation, it recovers equally radical political energies.
Adam Thirlwell
I. Maria Sledmere,
Midsummer Song / Hypercritique
Sledmere’s Song is an interrogative appendix of
essayistic motifs and citational montage. A raised bed of
a book, a syncopated study of mutualism, commonality,
interdependence, and resilience.
978-1-7393851-7-0
See here
Midsummer Song intermingles a lodestar of potent poetic sources into a lyric architecture which refuses to be singular in form or bound by convention. This book is plural—at once an elegy for our world—and also—seance and party you won't want to miss. Your tools, dear reader, include countless luminary texts, summer light while it lasts, meadows, cinders, glass, and clairvoyance. Can the poet be everywhere? If nuance is purple and writing is light, this book may convince us that dream space is the necessary elixir to take with us into impermanence, bursting with everything in the world, an ecstatic catalogue and a devastated delirium. Like Christensen's alphabet, this book at once beams and cautions—like a horn of plenty spiraling out from the ear of Athena, a cornucopia of Sledmere's poetic powers. No other poet can make me feel giddy at the end of the world, gorgeous with intimate tears and flight. Descendants of Bernadette Mayer rejoice—now at long last we can dream not only the winter's dark but also in summers blindingly bright. Like when we climb into the red- / threaded spiderweb / of another plague year / and we activate the starlight / stimulus package / in thermotaxis.
Laynie Browne
John Cassavetes
An occasional publication series, the ‘Cassavetes’ titles are a set of books in a sequenced train of thought (named not for the filmmaker’s body of work but for his “kitchen sink” forms of low and no budget production). An occasional assembly of collaborations and experiments by Dominic J. Jaeckle.
I. Dominic J. Jaeckle
& Hoagy Houghton
36 Exposures / A bastardised roll of film
978-1-7393851-4-9
See here
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
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.
Chris McCabe
II. Dominic J. Jaeckle
Magnolia or Redbud / Flowers for Laura Lee Burroughs
978-1-7393851-5-6
See here
My mother returning to me is one of the primal images of my life. Added to all this, I could not help marvelling, is what booksellers call a sort of brogue. These are all part and parcel of this precious book, which go to make up the sum of its treasure to me ...
David Keenan
Dominic Jaeckle’s strange homage—is it really?—to William S. Burroughs’s mother Laura Lee takes the form of poetic assemblages that are invariably funnier and more subversive than the language of their anodyne source material would suggest. But this beautifully composed volume also goes beyond the more familiar uses of the cut-up, fashioning an unpredictable array of gifts through its trance-like modalities: These perishable arrangements / are the needle that holds our colder climates together.
David Grubbs
Harry Caul
Named for the protagonist of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 motion picture, The Conversation—Harry Caul, the film’s precarious listener—works in this series will pair makers and thinkers, sit them in dialogue at a paper table, and run as a set of feature-length ‘conversation pieces.’
I. Stanley Schtinter & Gareth Evans
Snow, Always Snow /
A conversation between Stanley Schtinter
& Gareth Evans on the implications & associations
relative to a film, Schneewittchen
(S. Schtinter, 70m / 35mm, MMXXV)
978-1-7393851-5-6
See here
Schtinter’s newest moving-image work is Schneewittchen, 2025, a feature-length, palimpsestic retelling of Snow White. The film features almost no footage and is instead centred on an English-language audio recording of the Swiss writer Robert Walser's titular German play (published in 1901), itself a reworking of the Brother’s Grimm fairy tale (published in 1812). Schtinter’s film, with its minimal visual content composed largely of a black screen, interspersed with seemingly unrelated shots of passing clouds, is formally also a remake of the Portuguese director João César Monteiro’s feature film, Branca de Neve / Snow White (2000), which performed the same feat with a Portuguese-language version of Walser’s play. A remake of a remake of a remake, then. While on the surface another puckish engagement with cultural production, Schtinter’s film nevertheless functions as both a challenge to the culture industry’s amnesiac thirst for endless remakes of commercial dross and as a kind of Brechtian confrontation with the spectacular expectations imposed on a patronised viewing public (the two are intimately bound up with each other). The project further frustrates the conventions of easy access required of moving image works, which must now be available for dissemination in a myriad of digital forms, many of which make it at least feasible for the viewing public to watch works as isolated individuals in their own homes. Schtinter's film will, according to the artist, ‘only ever show in analogue format, so it will always be an event to travel to and never streaming or screening digitally.’ For Schtinter, the political power of collective viewing is something worth fighting for.
Talk of Brechtian distanciation, critiquing the culture industry, anti-capitalist stances, anti-spectacular image making and so on connects Schtinter to a critical tradition that may, in some ways, seem classically modernist. That is to say, there is an intention behind all of the work and a belief in something better for audiences and artists alike.
[...]
The ultimate agenda across Schtinter’s work, it seems, is an attempt to create a form of critical awareness regarding the destruction of certain intellectual and volitional faculties that humanity has fought to preserve over centuries—namely, the autonomy of thought and action.
Morgan Quaintance, Art Monthly
(No.483, February 2025)
Hotel Cordel
Hotel Cordel takes its cue from traditional Spanish “Cordel” literatures. A nineteenth century pamphlet culture that owes to the Portuguese ‘literatura de cordel’ (translating as a “string” or “thread” literature), ‘Pliegos de cordel’ (cordel sheets) are a cousin to the ‘bibliothèque bleue’ (blue library) in French publishing tradition; a brother to the German ‘Volksbuch’ (people’s book): an inexpensively printed pamphlet containing folk novelettes, poems, political statements and songs. So named because they were hung from strings in marketplaces to display these texts to theirpotential readers, Cordel sheets would conform to the traditional chapbook format; printed on a single sheet and then folded into a paper concertina of either 8, 12, 16 or 24 pages. Re-versioning this convention, Hotel Cordel will run as a series of collaborative pamphlets that’ll see Hotel partner with poets, authors, other small press projects, publishers, artists and curators to produce a series of pocket literatures in the Cordel tradition.
Forthcoming /
Keep an ear to the ground.
