News — Tenement Press

^{22.04.24

El cumpleaños de Juan Ángel / Juan Ángel’s Birthday

Mario Benedetti

Translated from the Spanish

by Adam Feinstein

The eleventh title in Tenement’s “Yellowjacket” series, out now.

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

The work of Mario Benedetti, my friend and brother, is surprising in all its aspects, whether the varied extent of genres it touches, the density of its poetic expression or the extreme conceptual freedom it employs.

José Saramago

This forgotten novel in verse follows the Montevidean bourgeois life of Juan Ángel's successive birthdays and his transformation into a Guevarist revolutionary in a style that fuses slang and rage, tango rhythms and avantgarde word-play, agilely and vividly translated by Adam Feinstein, so that we understand Benedetti's class values and his transformation into a fearless underground guerrilla revolutionary, which today maybe reads nostalgically for a lost youth, but at the time in 1970 was a brave call to arms before the guerrilla dream soured.}_{Jason Wilson}

^{Order a copy direct from Tenement here.}

^{18.04.24

On Seven Rooms ...

Jess Chandler & Dominic Jaeckle

in conversation with Micaela Brinsley & Eponine Howarth

℅ La Piccioletta Barca}
^{SEE HERE}
_{For a further word on Seven Rooms, see here.

Order a copy of Seven Rooms direct from Tenement here.}

^{15.04.24

On Agitated Air ...

‘A Wider Circle—Skimming Ibn Arabi’ Nasim Luczaj, Nothing Personal (Issue № III)}_{‘Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi is the fruit of a back and forth exchange between two Arabic-English translators, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger, who are distinguished by their initials, YS and RM, both in the text and this review. The project grew organically: the authors sent each other a few of their own translations from Tarjuman al-Ashwaq / The Interpreter of Desires or The Translator of Desires, a 13th century 61-poem cycle by the Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi, and then replied to each poem with a new “response” translation. This process was repeated a few times for each piece, pushing the translators to convey the poems in new ways not only in relation to one another, but to their own previous attempts. Agitated Air is a compilation of fifteen exchanges, providing the reader with the original text and up to seven translations with alternating authors. The book, then, is not a translation of the text per se. In a frolic of splinters, the poems reincarnate from email to email, refracting as they hit another shore. We, readers, float with. Like a sea, the opportunity to reiterate allows us to let go.’}

^{SEE HERE}
_{For a further word on Seale & Moger’s Agitated Air, see here.

Order a copy of the collection direct from Tenement here.}

^{15.03.24

Translating the French Revolution

An Anarchist Playbook

℅ The History Workshop

Following the publication of An Anarchist Playbook, an anthology of translations pertaining to the ongoing work of the Radical Translations group—a collective that looks to the French Revolution to recover the vitality of Europe’s shared radical past via an ongoing experiment in collaborative translation and collectivity—the History Workshop podcast series hosted a publication with the group.

Chaired by Marybeth Hamilton, History Workshop invited Laura Mason, author of The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals, Dominic Jaeckle of Tenement Press, and Sanja Perovic and Cristina Viti of the Radical Translations Workshop, ‘whose new book An Anarchist Playbook (published by Tenement) compiles vibrant and politically engaged translations of long-forgotten documents from the final years of the French Revolution, marked by virulent schisms over the meaning of private property, social justice, and the practice of radical equality.’}

^{(See historyworkshop.org.uk)}

^{03.03.24

Railroad Flat Radio

A Suite for Seven Rooms / Seven Hundred Horses

14:30 (GMT), Resonance Extra

Hannah Regel
Nicolette Polek
Iain Sinclair
David Grubbs
Lucy Sante
Imogen Cassels
Jess Cotton
Joan Brossa
Stanley Schtinter
Edwina Attlee
& Wayne Koestenbaum

A new entry in the occasional broadcast series from Tenement Press and Prototype Publishing, Railroad Flat Radio, Seven Hundred Horses is a suite of readings by eleven poets and makers to mark the publication of Seven Rooms, an anthology of works from across the Hotel series, 2016 to 2023, co-published by Tenement and Prototype, and edited by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Jess Chandler.

Seven Hundred Horses assembles a select thread of live recordings and materials from the London launch of Seven Rooms at Presse Books / FormaHQ (Regel, Sante, Cassels, Cotton, Attlee and Koestenbaum) alongside choice cuts from the Hotel Archive (Polek, Sinclair, Grubbs, Brossa, and Schtinter).

“A hotel is defined by its inhabitants,” runs Hotel’s tagline. If Hotel itself were a concrete edifice, it would be more like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’s Circus-Circus than the Grand Budapest, despite its tasteful, clean exterior. Its commitment to “new approaches to fiction, non-fiction and poetry” promises all manner of havoc. It is not the only journal committed to literary innovation, but it is among the best.

Camille Ralphs, The Times Literary Supplement

& in which ...

Hannah Regel reads Mahmoud Darwish’s ‘Eleven Stars Over Andalusia,’ Nicolette Polek reads a short story called ‘The Rope Barrier,’ Iain Sinclair reads ‘Animal Drums,’ a cut-up impromptu to SJ Fowler’s motion-picture-poem of the same name (at the Whitechapel Gallery, 2019), David Grubbs reads a slice of his feature-length poem, ‘Good night the pleasure was ours,’ Lucy Sante reads a poem called ‘Call My Baby,’ Imogen Cassels reads a poem called ‘Two Types of the Same Return’ and ‘Moss’ (as in Kate), Jess Cotton reads a poem called ‘States of Bewilderment’ and a poem called ‘Aloof,’ Stanley Schtinter reads Joan Brossa’s ‘Astral Summary’ (Parts I and II of III), Edwina Attlee reads a poem called ‘Refrigeration’ and a poem called ‘Australia Day,’ and Wayne Koestenbaum reads a poem called ‘Stigma Pudding.’

SEE HERE}

^{Order a copy of Seven Rooms here.

Read editors Jaeckle & Chandler’s introduction

to the collection, ‘Forethoughts,’ here.}

^{01.03.24

An Anarchist Playbook

Radical Translation Workshop

The first title in Tenement’s new imprint, No University Press, out now.}

^{SEE HERE

An Anarchist Playbook is an excavation of future thinking. In its radical mode of communal translation, it recovers equally radical political energies.

Adam Thirlwell

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

Launching at London’s MayDay Rooms}

^{19:00 / 01.03.24

Readings, songs, & a roundtable on revolution.

MayDay Rooms

88 Fleet Street
London EC4Y 1DH
United Kingdom}

^{Roundtable—

Héléne Parent

Stéphanie Roza
Rosa Mucignat

& Sanja Perovic
Readings—

Stephen Watts
Cristina Viti

Songs—
Mikey Kirkpatrick

(Free tickets available here)}

^{29.02.24

Last Movies in Screen Slate

Stanley Schtinter & Chris Petit

in conversation, after the show,

at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London

(A transcript, 12.12.23)

SEE HERE

Rainer Werner Fassbinder (d.1982)
20,000 Years in Sing Sing (Michael Curtiz, 1932)

John Dillinger (d.1934)

Manhattan Melodrama (Van Dyke & Cukor, 1934)}

^{19.02.24

Railroad Flat Radio

Derek Jarman, Through the Billboard Promised Land

Without Ever Stopping

First Ears
19.02.24 12:00 Resonance Extra
19.02.24 20:00    Resonance 104.4FM

Repeats
20.02.24    10:00 Resonance 104.4FM
21.02.24 10:00 Resonance Extra
23.02.24    18:00    Resonance Extra
25.02.24    22:00 Resonance Extra}
^{An unabridged, archival recording—as read by the author—to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Jarman’s death, and following the 2022 Prototype / House Sparrow Press publication of Jarman’s sole work of narrative fiction.}

^{(With thanks to Gareth Evans, Declan Wiffen, So Mayer and the London Review Bookshop.)

SEE HERE}

^{14.02.24

Last Movies on Resonance Extra

Stanley Schtinter & Gareth Evans in Conversation

Resonance Extra, 10am (GMT)

Resonance 104.4FM, 10am (GMT)

SEE HERE}

^{01.02.24

‘Cultured Wars’

Michael Caines’ NB column,

the Times Literary Supplement

‘Trouble at the Royal Society of Literature, experiments at the Hotel’

(On Seven Rooms)}
^{SEE HERE}

^{29.01.24

‘According to Stanley Schtinter, we get the films we deserve’

Schtinter in conversation with Agnès Houghton-Boyle
Fetch Magazine

SEE HERE}

^{27.01.24

Schtinter reads Schtinter:

Last Movies

Montez Press Radio, 13:00 (EST)}
^{SEE HERE}

^18.12.23
^{(Excerpt.)

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies on LitHub

John F. Kennedy / From Russia with Love

‘Kennedy proclaimed his love for Bond wherever he could.’}
^{SEE HERE}

^{16.12.23

(Excerpt.)

Cristina Viti’s translation

of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger

in Critical Muslim

The ‘Algeria’ Poems

Issue 48

(ed.) Ziauddin Sardar}^{SEE HERE}

^09.12.23

^{Clive Martin on Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies
in Plaster Magazine

‘A highbrow Wikipedia hole full of fascinating coincidences.’

SEE HERE}

^{06.12.23

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies

on the Film Comment Podcast

Following the recent Tenement publication of Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies, Film Comment hosted a conversation between Schtinter, Erika Balsom, and editors, Clinton Krute and Devika Girish on and around the project’s authorship and Schtinter’s roving parallel screening programme.}

^{28.11.23

Ryan Gilbey on Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies
in The Guardian

‘Last Movies shakes up the orthodoxy in its own way. “I think it’s important to abandon the criteria by which we organise history,” Schtinter says. “As it stands, it’s not working. What we end up with is this biased history leaning heavily toward James Bond: chauvinism, expensive food, the killing of foreigners. It’s kind of how JFK got to power in a weird way. He wanted to position himself as a serious literary guy but he also needed this strongman element on the side.”

The likelihood is that Kennedy’s last movie was From Russia With Love, but he isn’t the only Bond fan in the book. Elvis Presley hired out a Memphis cinema to screen The Spy Who Loved Me in the weeks before the end credits rolled in his own life. From this starting point, the Presley chapter spirals off into a survey of the King’s eating habits, from the squirrels he devoured as a youth to the hamburgers, Pepsi-soaked Sweet Tarts and deep-fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches that hastened his exit. That leads on to a playlist of food-related songs in the singer’s discography, including It’s Carnival Time, taken from Presley’s 1964 film Roustabout, which featured a small role for Richard Kiel, who went on to play the metal-toothed baddie in… yes, The Spy Who Loved Me. Wade more than a dozen pages into Last Movies and these connections start to reveal themselves like constellations on a cloudless night.’}

^{SEE HERE}

^27.11.23

^{Michael Eaude on Dolors Miquel’s

El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove
in Catalonia Today

‘The 36 intense, fierce poems about death, grief, and beauty are connected. In her prologue, a prose-poem in itself, Miquel tells how the death of others close to her left her "a flower without roots" (p.17). She dwelt in "the belly of death" herself. Then she started to cry. "Weeping rents the air. To weep is to come out of the bier" (p. 17). Death and decay, and the fight for life, pervade the book. […] Death dominates with humour (the Psychiatrist for the Dead; a collection service for corpses), enquiry (poems on rubbing and scrubbing and kissing the dead), lyricism (a crow with a worm in its mouth), but most of all with rage. Miquel moves out from her own fight to survive to a poem listing animals made extinct or another recalling the massacres of Cathars and at Nagasaki. […] Miquel loves distorting language, finding double meanings. This makes translation a tough task, but Peter Bush succeeds by translating loosely where necessary, prioritising rhythm and word-play over literal meaning.It's a challenging book, but worth the effort.’}

^{23.11.23

Juliet Jacques on Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies
in ArtReview

“Went to the cinema. Wept. Matchless entertainment.”

‘Cinema, the quintessential twentieth-century artform, which became integral to the era’s politics and culture soon after its first demonstration in 1895, has an inherently haunting quality. The obvious reason for this—surely apparent to the Lumière brothers as they captured workers leaving the factory—is its ability to preserve not just the features but also movements and eventually the voices of people for posterity, with more accuracy and less sense of separation from the subject than the earlier method of photography or portrait painting. (Nearly a 100 years since the advent of ‘talkies,' silent film has this eerie property in extremis: long-since deceased actors express and gesticulate in antiquated fashions; different frame-per-minute rates sometimes render their movement strange; and the decay of its stock produces a ghostly effect, making it of interest to contemporary archive-filmmakers such as Karel Doing and Bill Morrison.)

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.’}

^{SEE HERE}

^EVENT(S)^{Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies
at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London

The Mall,

St. James’s, London

SW1Y 5AH

‘Last Movies remaps the first century of cinema according to what a selection of its key cultural icons saw just before dying. Conceived and created by Stanley Schtinter to enable an audience “to see what those who see no longer saw last,” the ICA hosts a five-month programme to coincide with the publication of his book of the same title, described by Alan Moore as “Profound and riveting ... a remarkable achievement,” and by Laura Mulvey as “deeply thought-provoking.”’

SEE HERE

12.03.24
Last Movies
Mozart Brothers (Suzanne Osten, 1986)
& Alamut: A Journey into Iran (1986)
with CM von Hausswolf

(See here.)

14.02.24
Last Movies
The Piano (Jane Campion, 1994)
with Elena Gorfinkel

(See here.)

30.01.24
Last Movies
Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh, 1996)
& Carlito’s Way [Excerpt] (Brian de Palma, 1994)
with Adrian Dannatt

(See here.)

12.12.23
Last Movies
20,000 Years in Sing Sing (Michael Curtiz, 1934)
& Manhattan Melodrama (W.S. Van Dyke & George Cukor, 1934)
with Chris Petit

(See here.)

22.11.23
Last Movies / Programme & Book Launch
War is Hell [Excerpt] (Burt Topper, 1961)
& From Russia With Love (Terrence Young, 1963)
with Erika Balsom}^{(See here.)}

^EVENT

^{15.11.23

A Launch for Seven Rooms

Presse Books & Forma HQ
140 Great Dover Street
London, SE1 4GW

16:00 (Onwards) / 18.11.23

SEE HERE

16:30-17:15
Paul Buck
Sophie Seita
Hannah Regel

17:45-18:15
Stanley Schtinter,
‘Seven Rooms at the Hotel Bardo’
A screening, ℅ the artist

19:00-20:00
Imogen Cassels
Jess Cotton
Edwina Attlee
Will Eaves

20:20-20:40
Helen Cammock, ‘They Call it Idlewild’
A screening, courtesy of the artist
& Kate Mcgarry Gallery, London

21:00
Cristina Viti
Wayne Koestenbaum
Pre-recorded
Nicolette Polek
Pre-recorded
Lucy Sante
Pre-recorded
Stephen Watts, ‘I AM A FILM’ (Huw Wahl, 2022)
A screening, courtesy of the poet

& the filmmaker

Hosted by Gareth Evans

Exit Music, ℅ Will René
(Plastic Language, NTS)}

^{05.11.23

Out now with
Tenement Press

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

Very strange, and deeply thought-provoking.

Laura Mulvey

A publication, durational artwork, and moving-image experience, Schtinter’s debut collection, Last Movies, is an alternative account of the first century of cinema according to the films watched by a constellation of its most notable stars shortly before (or at the time of) their deaths.

An extensive and exhaustive research project—a holy book of celluloid spiritualism and old canards—Schtinter questions and reconfigures common knowledge to recast the historic column inches of cinema’s mythological hearsay into a thousand-yard stare.

Via a series of interlinked vignettes, here we’ve a book in which Manhattan Melodrama, directed by W.S. Van Dyke and George Cukor, is seen by American gangster John Dillinger, only for him to be gunned down by federal agents upon leaving the cinema. In which George Cukor watches The Graduate and dies thereafter. In which Bette Davis—given her break by Cukor—watches herself in Waterloo Bridge (the 1940 remake Cukor had been meant to direct), before travelling to France and failing to make it back to Hollywood. In which Rainer Werner Fassbinder watches Bette Davis in Michael Curtiz’s 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, and suffers the stroke that kills him. In which John F. Kennedy watches From Russia with Love at a private ‘casa-blanca’ screening prior to the presidential motorcade reaching Dealey Plaza; in which Burt Topper’s War is Hell exists only in a fifteen-minute cut, considering this is as much as Lee Harvey Oswald would have seen at the Texas Theatre in the wake of JFK’s killing.

Including a foreword from Erika Balsom—an ‘intermission’ by Bill Drummond—and an afterword by Nicole Brenez, Last Movies is a love letter to those that’ve lived (and died) amidst the patina and glow of cinema’s counterpoint to life. Like Hermione Lee ‘at the movies,’ and redolent of the works of Kenneth Anger, Schtinter’s collection antagonises the possibility of survival in an age of extremity and extinction only to underline the degree of accident involved in a culture’s relationship with posterity.

A “glow-in-the-dark” hardback,
co-published in a limited edition of 101
by Tenement Press and purge.xxx
is available here.}

^EVENT

^{05.11.23

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies

A multi-venue day & night screening,

New York City, NY

‘Light Industry, Nitehawk Cinema, and Spectacle Theater are co-hosting a day-long suite of screenings, films bound together by a single, shared characteristic: they are Last Movies. The phrase is evocative, rhyming with those familiar designations so often pinned to auteurs and their work (first films, late style), but here we refer to something else entirely. From morning to midnight, we will be presenting the last movies of Franz Kafka, John Dillinger, Charlie Parker, Boris Vian, Lee Harvey Oswald, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Sergio Leone, Bette Davis, and Stanley Kubrick—that is, the last film they saw before they died.’

SEE HERE

Spectacle

124 South 3rd Street, Brooklyn

+ Nitehawk (Williamsburg)

136 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn

+ Light Industry

361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

20,000 Years in Sing Sing (Michael Curtiz, 1932)
Waterloo Bridge (James Whale, 1931)
The Kid (Charlie Chapin, 1931)
with live score by Dan Arnés & Erik Gundel
Stage Show (Dorsey Brothers, 1955)
I Spit On Your Grave (Michel Gast, 1959)
I Want to Live! (Robert Wise, 1958)
Eyes Wide Shut, Trailer (Stanley Kubrick, 1999)
War is Hell [Excerpt] (Burt Topper, 1961)
Manhattan Melodrama (W.S. Van Dyke & George Cukor, 1934)
Oedipus Rex (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)}

^{01.11.23

Iain Sinclair on Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies
in Sight and Sound

‘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.’

SEE HERE}

^{19.10.23

Out now with

Tenement Press

& Prototype Publishing

Seven Rooms

(eds.) Dominic J. Jaeckle & Jess Chandler

978-1-913513-46-7

SEE HERE

[Hotel] is a part of the renaissance of UK literary journals.

Nicholas Royle, The Guardian

Once a magazine, now an anthology, a selection, a condensing, a celebration, a feast, call it what you will, for this volume takes ondifferent forms in the eyes of each reader. Each generation shouldbuild 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 onewould 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 anyanthology 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

Hotel was a shortlived magazine and multiform publication project for new approaches to fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Seven years following the publication of Hotel #1 (2016), and in tribute to the cessation of the ‘Paper hotel’ with the publication of Hotel #7 (2021), Seven Rooms—a collaborative publication from Tenement Press and Prototype Publishing—is a document of the project’s unerring commitment to pioneering creativity, literature’s idiosyncrasies, and shared space.

An anthology publication,
featuring contributions from
Mario Dondero;
Erica Baum;
Jess Cotton;
Rebecca Tamás;
Stephen Watts;
Helen Cammock;
Salvador Espriu;
Lucy Mercer;
Lucy Sante;
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa;
Ryan Choi;
John Yau;
Nicolette Polek;
Chris Petit;
Sascha Macht;
Amanda DeMarco;
Mark Lanegan;
Vala Thorodds;
Richard Scott;
Joshua Cohen;
Hannah Regel;
Nick Cave;
Daisy Lafarge;
Holly Pester;
Matthew Gregory;
Olivier Castel;
Emmanuel Iduma;
Joan Brossa;
Cameron Griffiths;
Imogen Cassels;
Hisham Bustani;
Maia Tabet;
Raúl Guerrero;
Velimir Khlebnikov;
Natasha Randall;
Edwina Attlee;
Matthew Shaw;
Aidan Moffat;
Lesley Harrison;
Oliver Bancroft;
Lauren de Sá Naylor;
Will Eaves;
Sandro Miller;
Jim Hugunin;
Levina van Winden;
Aram Saroyan;
Glykeria Patramani;
Will Oldham;
Antonio Tabucchi;
Yasmine Seale;
Elizabeth Harris;
Nina Mingya Powles;
Isabel Galleymore;
Jason Shulman;
Jeffrey Vallance;
Preti Taneja;
Stanley Schtinter;
Wayne Koestenbaum;
Sophie Seita;
Ralf Webb;
Jonathan Chandler;
Iain Sinclair;
SJ Fowler;
Cass McCombs;
David Grubbs;
Agustín Fernández Mallo;
Pere Joan;
Thomas Bunstead;
Adrian Bridget;
John Divola;
& Gareth Evans.}

^EVENT
^{A Voyage to West Sunset Boulevard

Readings on (and conversations around) the “bible-long” Tenement Press publication of Jeffrey Vallance’s selected spiritual writings, A Voyage to Extremes, featuring contributions from Jeffrey Vallance, Doug Harvey, David Shulman, and Daniel Rolnik.

Stories Books & Café

1716 W Sunset Blvd.

Los Angeles, CA

19:00 / 11.10.23}

^{SEE HERE}

^{04.10.23

Stanley Schtinter’s Last Movies

in Prospect Magazine

‘The Last Sights’

‘The more details Schtinter’s Last Movies uncovers the more mysterious his project becomes. What are we meant to understand from learning that Franz Kafka’s last movie was The Kid (1921) by Charlie Chaplin? Or that Chaplin started casting it just one week after the death of his son Norman? Or that Norman’s tombstone read only ‘The Little Mouse’? Or that, after Chaplin himself died in 1977 (his last movie was Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon), his coffin was dug up from a Lausanne cemetery by two refugees and held to ransom? Perhaps it’s the freedom to speculate, the unanswerability of those questions, that is its own reward. Boldface names, lurid details, strange connection. Schtinter, always eager to deflate pomposity, likens his project to an “occult version of OK! magazine.” I myself can’t help wondering: what if we were to watch every movie as if it were our last?’

SEE HERE}

^{21.09.23

Railroad Flat Radio / Montez Press Radio
London / New York City, NY

A Pink Plastic Glove Arrives
18:00 (EST) / 23:00 (BST) / 27.09.23

A bilingual assembly of poems from the Tenement publication of Dolors Miquel’s El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove (translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush), featuring readings from Miquel, Bush, and Nadia de Vries.}

^{SEE HERE}

^{21.07.23

Out now with
Tenement Press

Dolors Miquel,
El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove

Translated from the Catalan

by Peter Bush

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

Erotic, caustic, uncompromising, alive...

Dolors Miquel's poems are a pulsating delight.

Nadia de Vries

Dolors Miquel is a blast of fresh water irrigating the stony terrain of Catalan poetry.

Francesc Gelonch}

^{Life asked Death why he needed her to live

And Death asked Life why she needed him to die …

So begins Miquel’s El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove, a lyrical, acute, and metaphysical sequence of poems some fifteen years in the making. At the heart of Miquel’s collection, we’ve a central image. An unnamed man in a state of constant decomposition, rotting away in the kitchen sink. Piece by piece, his slow unbinding underpins a train of images wrought in sensuous, playful, and dynamic language. Stark vignettes spun from everyday colloquy—run through with the aura of Catalonian Renaissance writings—and gilded with a patina of light, a glut of shadow, and a blur of sensory experiences.

El guant de plàstic rosa houses 36 studies of the dynamics of decay. The purr and buzz of bees humming, off-stage asides, slaughtered cows, mountains made of olive stones, the hum of a permanently empty refrigerator, and edible dreams littered with dahlias and roses, with carnations and colourful chrysanthemums.

Here, sex rattles the bones; Miquel’s pages percolate with love, with life—the subjectivist and social connotations of disease and decay—and on the prospect of mass destruction in a world itself on the brink of a self-inflicted extinction. In Bush’s visceral new translation, this chaos of signifiers sing-speaks its way through the undying days of a century beyond its “sell-by,” and cogitates on life—so furnished with all its illusions and ironies—in an age consistently defined by its constant decline.

Bush’s translation is punctuated by photographs by Barcelona based artist and photographer, Helena Gomà.}

^{12.07.23

Temporary Palaces / Plastic Language

NTS Radio}

^{Excerpts from Kyra Simone’s Temporary Palaces—an unabridged serialisation of Simone’s Tenement title, Palace of Rubble—were featured on Will René’s monthly radio programme, Plastic Language (NTS), alongside works by Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum, Tod Barton, Ursula K. Le Guin, Eugene B. Redmond, Mike Ratelage, and a myriad more.}

^{SEE HERE}

^08.07.23

^{Alistair Findlay on Cristina Viti’s

translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger
in The Morning Star

‘Pasolini's comments on the montage of setbacks suffered by Western imperialism during the height of the 1950s to early ’60s cold war reflect both the extent and diversity of its defeats in Korea, Suez, Algeria, Cuba, Congo and Africa as well as in Vietnam and Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement which brought civil war to the streets and campuses of the US itself, and death to its citizens—King, Malcolm X and the Kennedy brothers—all viewed by capitalist US elites as “enemies within.” [...] He described La rabbia as “an act of indignation against the unreality of the bourgeois world and its consequent historical irresponsibility—a record of the presence of a world that, unlike the bourgeois world, has a deep grasp of reality.” La rabbia, Pasolini’s anger, penetrates the untruths still beating in Western capitalism’s dark imperial neoliberal heart.’}

^{SEE HERE}

^04.07.23

^{Dolors Miquel’s El guant de plàstic rosa
in Granta

The title poem from the forthcoming Tenement Press publication of Dolors Miquel’s El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove has been published online by Granta, alongside works by Marta Orriols, Irene Solà, and Montserrat Roig as a part of a Catalan special issue.}

^{SEE HERE}

^{19.06.23

Railroad Flat Radio / Resonance Extra

London

Helen Palmer, Pleasure Beach (Cochlearical)

A book as mind-bending as Blackpool itself.
Jeremy Deller

Pleasure Beach does for neon lycra cycling shorts, Nik Naks, and acid trips what Ulysses did for lemon soap: it kaleidoscopes the everyday in a way that remakes the world by recording the bits of it that all too often slip out of view of the literary. 1999 is right before your eyes reading this novel, and Helen Palmer is Blackpool’s incomparable archivist. A social history of fun’s commodification and excess, an intellectual ride, a real queer pleasure.
H. Gareth Gavin

An unabridged, four-part serialisation of Helen Palmer’s

debut novel, Pleasure Beach, to mark its publication with

Prototype Publishing, as read by the author.

Palmer’s Pleasure Beach is a queer love story from the North West’s saucy seaside paradise, Blackpool, on one day: 16 June 1999. Written in multiple voices and styles, Pleasure Beach follows the interconnecting journeys and thoughts of three young women over the course of 24 hours and over 18 chapters which are structured and themed in the same way as James Joyce’s Ulysses.}

^{Palmer, photographed during the Pleasure Beach sessions

in Resonance’s Bermondset ‘Chapel’ studio, London

Hedonist and wannabe playwright Olga Adessi, 19, is struggling along the prom to get to her morning shift at the chippy with a monstrous hangover, trying to remember exactly what happened with Rachel Watkins, 19, a strange and fragile girl she had an encounter with the night before. Former gymnast and teenage mum Treesa Reynolds, 19, is off to the Sandcastle Waterpark with her mum Lou and daughter Lulu, looking forward to a sausage and egg McMuffin on the way.
Pleasure Beach breathes and exhales the unique sea air, fish and chips, donuts and candyfloss scents of Blackpool, bringing to life everything the town is famous for, portraying the gritty magic and sheer unadulterated fun of the city and its people across a spectrum of sensory experiences and emotions.
Pleasure Beach (Cochlearical) was produced by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Milo Thesiger-Meacham for broadcast on Resonance Extra, and recorded on location in Resonance’s Bermondsey ‘chapel’ studios, London, accross four days in late April, 2023.

21:00 (BST) / 13.06.23

Chapters I through III

21:00 (BST) / 14.06.23

Chapters IV through VIII

22:30 (BST) / 15.06.23

Chapters IX through XI

21:00 (BST) / 16.06.23

Chapters XII through XVIII

ORDER A COPY OF THE NOVEL DIRECT FROM PROTOTYPE HERE}

^{18.06.23

Edward Young on Vallance’s Voyage

in the Fortean Times

︎︎︎︎

‘Fortean Times first featured the work of Jeffrey Vallance back in 1989, when it reported the story of “Blinky the Friendly Hen,” a supermarket chicken that he had buried in the Los Angeles pet cemetery back in 1978 [see FT53:23]—“dedicated to the billions of hens sacrificed each year forour consumption.” Blinky’s remains had bled onto a paper towel, creating the Shroud of Blinky. (The funeral service landed Vallance on Letterman and MTV.) This fat yellow tome is a treasure-packed bran pie that will delight those who have been diverted by the many pieces Vallance has contributed to FT over the last three decades, exhibiting his characteristic wit and erudition.’}

^{13.06.23

On Constraint / Romance / & Dissolving Worlds

A conversation between Kyra Simone

& Maggie Millner, ℅ BOMB Magazine

‘Epics are generally in sections or cantos, but there’s also a narrative coherency that supersedes the modular nature of the individual poems. Palace of Rubble is that way, too; there's no single dominant narrative that asserts itself across every story, but there are narrative currents and recurring characters and preoccupations. The sections flow into each other in a way that also feels reminiscent of a certain kind of deconstructed epic. If the linebreak is a technology that creates “units” or slows the pace of the reader’s eye on the page, I would argue that part of the power of the prose in Palace of Rubble has to do with the lack of separation, the lack of breath or space between ideas, and how that density operates on our attention. Each chunk of prose becomes its own edifice.’

M.M.

SEE HERE}

^{09.06.23

Out now with
Tenement Press

Reza Baraheni,
Lilith

With an afterwork by Reza Baraheni, ‘Daf’

translated by Baraheni & Stephen Watts

978-1-8380200-9-5}

^{SEE HERE}

^{Iran’s finest poet.

Harper’s Magazine

[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, former president of PEN Canada,

in tribute to Baraheni on his death in 2022, PEN International}

^{‘I think therefore I am other…’

In Reza Baraheni’s Lilith, the mythological demon of the night gives a youthfully irreverent, viscerally wise voice to the lucidity of the rebel. Rather than renouncing freedom, Lilith is outcast for her outspokenness and sensuality—sequestered to a place wherein freedom is crucially situated in the power and beauty of language, and where that language is seated in stark opposition with the oppressive forms of authority that seek to make it mute. Lilith can be seen as an allegorical take on the condition of the poet in exile. Like the banned and persecuted author, the demon refuses to yield to force and is, resultantly, a pariah. Her body becomes the dumping ground of all power-driven fantasies, and the figure of the exile is invested with the projected fears and compulsions of the dominant society. But it is the creative drive of language that permeates these pages.

A deeply lyrical and irreducibly subversive work, over a little less than a hundred pages Lilith investigates the limits of a linguistic freedom via encounters between Lilith and a cast of fabled figures, and the vulnerable courage of the poet is set against avatars of patriarchal oppression and authoritarian rule alike via the demon’s dance with language. In Lilith, it is language that disrupts ordinary chronology; language that allows for the shade of a dream life to dint the light of day; harking back to an envisaging of poetry as music, as ritual. This is not language as an evocation of some distant golden age, but as celebration. An experiment in word alchemy; a dance of grace and danger on the faultline of prose and song; Lilith explores the reality-making function of language to pinpoint the antagonistic faculty and political felicities of poetry itself.

In 2006, Lilith was adapted for the theatre and produced in France and Geneva by Thierry Bedard (under the title Exilith). Bedard has also previously presented Reza Baraheni’s play Enfer to great acclaim at the Avignon International Festival in 2004. This Tenement text is a translation of Clément Marzieh’s brilliant French version (Fayard, 2007). No edition of Lilith, as far as is known, seems ever to have been published in Persian and, indeed, the original manuscript appears to have been lost.

The English translators of Lilith have chosen to remain anonymous. This edition is accompanied by a series of works by London-based artist Oliver Bancfoft, and carries an ‘afterwork’ as afterword, Reza Bareheni’s poem ‘Daf’ (translated by Baraheni and Stephen Watts).}

^{EVENT

On Craquelure: Publication as Philosophical Project
Dominic J. Jaeckle

IFILNOVA / CULTURELAB

Universidade NOVA de Lisboa

Lisbon, Portugal

16:00 / 25.05.23

SEE HERE

Amazon appropriated our books. We will appropriate Amazon’s logic.

Jorge Carrión

“Craquelure” is a term for the network of fine cracks that appear in the varnish of an oil painting over time. The morphology of these cracks displays the dynamics of history on the surface of a canvas, effecting an image with a new set of desire lines, with distortions—a kind of pictorial “crow’s feet” that delineate a painting’s age and antiquity—and these fissures or fault lines explicitly show (to quote novelist Chloe Aridjis) how every surface “gives way to tension”, in end. To fixate on this equation—an image or idea over time—provides a perfect metaphor with which to think through a publisher’s impulses and the mechanics of publication as a form of production or creative expression. Factoring in the work of Jules Verne, Jorge Carrión, and Ingeborg Bachman—the varied currents of a contemporary literary mainstream and the deep rivers of a “minor” literature (by way of the anti-institutionalism of Adorno’s ‘Valéry Proust Museum’)—Jaeckle’s presentation will explore “craquelure” as a means of discussing the work of the small press publisher today via a fragmentary set of notes excerpted from a forthcoming anthology project, Seven Rooms (Tenement Press and Prototype Publishing, 2023).

The presentation will conclude with a short showcase of works from Tenement’s catalogue (featuring translations of works by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Joan Brossa, Reza Baraheni, and Dolors Miquel, amongst others).

Chaired by Ana Falcato}

^{EVENT

On Pasolini’s Anger / The Friulian Works
Cristina Viti & Rosa Mucignat

The Italian Bookshop

123 Gloucester Road
London, SW7 4TE

18:30 / 23.05.23}

_{RSVP

italian@esb.co.uk
italianbookshop.co.uk/events}

_{05.05.23

Masters and Slaves:

Mark Glanville on Cristina Viti’s translation

of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger

in the Times Literary Supplement}

_{‘La rabbia is a sequence of poems and commentary by Pier Paolo Pasolini from 1963, made to accompany a documentary of the same name—a departure from the fictionalised studies of Roman poverty that defined his earlier work. Trawling through some 90,000 metres of archive footage, the director gathered a collection of images and footage portraying recent events, including the Hungarian Revolution, the Algerian War, the Korean War and the Suez Crisis. Much of the text of La rabbia / Anger didn’t make the final cut; even so, with music and narration overlaid on frenetic and disturbing scenes, the film sometimes tips into overload. The words are better appreciated on their own and Cristina Viti’s fresh translation captures their grim vitality.’}
^{SEE HERE}

^{27.04.23

Dolors Miquel’s
El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove
Sant Jordi USA

Online Programme

14:00 / 17:00 EST; 13:00 / 16:00 CDT; 19:00 / 23:00 BST

This year’s Sant Jordi—a rich, hybrid programme of Catalan literatures to mark and commemorate the Barcelona bookfair and festival—will feature a pre-recorded reading of works from the forthcoming Tenement Press publication of Dolors Miquel’s El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove in a new translation from Peter Bush (with contributions from Dolors Miquel and Amsterdam based poet, Nadia de Vries).}

^{EVENT

Dolors Miquel’s
El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove
Bristol Poetry Institute / University of Bristol

SEE HERE

18:00 / 27.04.23

Bristol University

Wills Memorial Building / Old Council Chambers

Queens Rd, Bristol

‘The Bristol Poetry Institute, in collaboration with the Institut Ramon Llull and the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies, are pleased to invite you to a showcase of recent Catalan poetry. This one-hour event will feature bilingual readings with English translations, of four Catalan poets, with the special collaboration of Dominic Jaeckle, writer and editor of Tenement Press.’

Eduard Escoffet

Míriam Cano

Jaume C. Pons Alorda

Xavier Mas Craviotto

Dominic J. Jaeckle

& Peter Bush}

^{22.04.23

Railroad Flat Radio / Resonance Extra
London

Tenement Press presents
Kyra Simone’s Temporary Palaces

A three-part serialisation of Simone’s collection that presents a rehanging of the author’s debut, Palace of Rubble, as in a tidal pool of drones and appropriated noises. Temporary Palaces was produced by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Milo Thesiger–Meacham, and recorded on location in Resonance’s South London “chapel” studios.}

_{Tarzan the Apeman
13:00 BST / 22.04.23

Resonance Extra}

_{In which the author reads ...
‘Palace of Rubble’
‘When Language is Gone from Bodies’
‘The Boys of Summer’
‘The View from the Tower’
‘World Business’
‘County Fair’
‘Still Life with Parrot’
‘Museum’
‘Today, Clouds’
‘Foreign Affairs’
‘The Empty Lot’
‘Dear Pauline’
‘Cadets No More’
‘The Wedding Exit’
‘The Nomad’
‘Blue Moon’
‘The Diver’s Song’
‘Pawns Talk of Scars’
‘Den of Millionaires’

The Wild One
13:00 BST / 27.05.23

Resonance Extra}_{In which the author reads...

‘The Great Escape’
‘The Revolving Door’
‘The Tunnel’
‘May’s End’
‘A Certain Music’
‘The Era is Over’
‘Obituary for Mrs. H’
‘Empty Chairs’

‘Somewhere Else’
‘The Prairie is on Fire’
‘The Lonely Pioneer’
‘The Last Days of Winter’
‘Rooms That Aren’t There’
‘The American Falls from Below’
‘You Promised me a Kingdom’

The Stranger
13:00 BST / 01.07.23

Resonance Extra

In which the author reads...} _{‘Au Black’
‘Away on Business’
‘The Clouds that Pass’
‘The Avalanche’
‘Swept Up in the Wave’
‘The Bag Lady & La Fleurs du Mal’
‘The Winged’
‘The Oneironaut & La Novillera’
‘The Thing in the Road’
‘The Land is Dark’
‘The Last Man to Qualify’
‘Thank You, Bye’
‘A Walk By the River’
‘The People in the Hotel’
‘The Palace at Midnight’}

^{17.03.23

SJ Fowler’s MUEUM shortlisted
for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses

Daniel Davis Wood & Dominic J. Jaeckle

in conversation for 3AM Magazine

3:AM: Look at the opening lines of MUEUM and it seems like something familiar enough, with its gestures towards a post-apocalyptic dystopia. But very quickly it turns into something less familiar, more difficult to pin down: abstract, often theoretical, an intellectual exercise, but not a cold one—an exercise in morbid self-deprecation and deadpan humour, as much as anything else. How did you encounter MUEUM as something you felt compelled to publish?

DJ: From the editorship of Hotel on through to the advent of Tenement’s activities back in 2021, I was drawn to the spike of SJ Fowler’s anarchic wit, and I’ve been fortunate enough to count on Fowler as a friend and frequent collaborator. With either the page or stage in mind, our collaborations have always leaned on conversation, and the candour of our exchanges always proved coloured by a free circulation of ideas. Be it a consideration of creativity, fresh enthusiasms, works-in-progress, or projects-in-percolation—all was ever fair game—and (in the best sense of the word) it seemed inevitable that, once the Press had found its feet, we’d begin thinking on the prospect of our working on a publication together.

The idea of publishing MUEUM emerged organically from the critical palette of such a kinship, from such a free market of mind. Fowler sent on MUEUM as a fully formed manuscript, and I was struck by the ways in which his first draft compounded an array of entrapments via his acute, curt prose. In MUEUM, we’ve the biographical; the bibliographical; the philosophical; the personal; the institutional; the intellectual; and a dedication to the psychic ironies and chemical truths that compete for attention in any circumnavigation of the notion of hourly pay. Of the value of time. All heady nodes in a constellation of concerns that butt heads over a short distance, like livestock suddenly all too aware of the farm’s fence line, in sum—and as a manuscript—MUEUM seemed to write itself down as a prism of prisons.}

^{SEE HERE}

^{17.03.23

SJ Fowler’s MUEUM shortlisted

for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses

The 2022/2023 edition of the prize was judged

by Isabel Waidner, Vanessa Onwuemezi, and Lamorna Ash.

SEE HERE

2022/2023 Shortlist:

Missouri Williams, The Doloriad (Dead Ink);

SJ Fowler, MUEUM (Tenement Press);

Nate Lippens, My Dead Book (Pilot Press);

Sheena Patel, I’m a Fan (Rough Trade Books);

Thuân, translated by Nguyėn An Lý, Chinatown (Tilted Axis Press)}

^{15.01.23

Reem Abbas on Seale & Moger’s Agitated Air

in PN Review

‘Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger translate from classical Arabic the mystical love poems of philosopher-poet Ibn Arabi’s Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, or ‘Interpreter of Desires.’ These nasibs—a pre-Islamic form of erotic poetry that commemorates the beloved—were written by the twelfth-century polymath following his pilgrimage to Mecca. During his time there two major things happened: he began writing one of his major works, Al-Futûhât al-Makkiyya (‘The Meccan Openings’), and met one Lady Nizam, whose epithet was notably the ‘Eye of the Sun and Beauty’. The writing of the spiritual and erotic nasibs of Tarjuman al-Ashwaq shortly followed. These poems grapple with the dizzying experience of divine love through a corporeal beloved; an experience which turns out to be as delicate as it is complex and asymptotic. Hopelessly grasping as the interpretation of one’s own desires may sound, Seale and Moger to manage to translate Ibn Arabi’s own spiritual translations into English in language that is equally sheer with desire and torment (شوق). Each poet, having produced their own translation of the same poem, would exchange it with the other, after which each would attempt a second translation inspired by or through the other’s translation. The translator-poets then repeat the process until ‘exhaustion’, resulting in first, second and third iterations of a single poem. This back-and-forth process reveals interpretation’s foundational place in translation: the poems can be read like palimpsests in which voices interweave and entangle.’}

^{SEE HERE}

^{Two evenings at The Italian Cultural Institute

The Italian Cultural Institute
39 Belgrave Square
London, SW1X 8NX

Pasolini / Pedriali

09.12.22 / 18.01.23

The launch of the Tenement publication of Pasolini’s La rabbia will conclude a special exhibition at the Institute of works by photographer Dino Pedriali (1950-2021), curated by writer and critic Marco Belpoliti. The exhibition at the institute includes twenty-nine portraits of Pasolini; the photographs—taken shortly before his death in ‘75—portray the poet at his two homes, Sabaudia and Torre di Chia, reveal an intimacy between artist and subject in striking stills that constitute one of the last traces of one of the most significant writers and intellectuals of the Novecento.

A launch for La rabbia

18:30 / 16.01.23

A bilingual reading at the Italian Cultural Institute
to mark the publication of the Tenement edition of
Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger, with translator Cristina Viti,
editor Dominic J. Jaeckle, and Gareth Evans.

TICKETS}

^{15.01.23

Janani Ambikapathy on Seale & Moger’s Agitated Air
in mPT: Modern Poetry in Translation

‘A Known Gazelle’

‘In the year 1214, Mohieddin Ibn Arabi, a revered Islamic poet and philosopher, compiled an extraordinary cycle of 61 poems called Tarjumān al-Ashwāq (The interpreter of Desires), a complex meditation on the nature of love. In Agitated Air / Poems After Ibn Arabi, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger each translate the same poem from the cycle, send it to the other, and write another version in response to the poem received. This process continues until they are exhausted, and they begin to circle a new poem.

In the first iteration of the ninth poem by Seale, a gazelle ‘masked in red’ beckons with ‘finger raised and moving lids’, and ‘her pastureland the zone from collarbone to gut.’ In the second iteration by Moger, the gazelle grows wild, acquires a fevered pitch: ‘wild gazelle | Whose face is all a blaze and gesturing, | grape-red fingertip flicking, flickering lids, at pasture | between the breastbone and the meat.’ In the third iteration by Seale, the gazelle disappears. What remains is a memory of the gazelle trying to materialise around words that can contain her form: a lonely ‘eye’ in the middle of a stanza, followed by a meadow a few lines later. In the fourth iteration by Moger, the gazelle returns as a deer, feverish still, but with a muted fervour ‘in its crooking fingertip/lids shuttering/ (it is amazing/between breastbone and gut grazes’…). The book lays out a coded garden of spectacles at the limits of translation: Ibn Arabi emerges from a John Donne erasure surrounded by greyed out lines that mark the unsayable, to say ‘How little… is.’ Inasmuch as you can pin a fleeing gazelle to the page, the poems change as quickly as you change your mind about them.

The perils of translating ancient poetry from the East into English (say Arabic, Persian or Tamil) are many: the rich images and archaic language often trigger a fawning orientalism that dilutes the complexity of the material. The text risks slipping into the abyss of easily accessible platitudes. As the poems flip back and forth between Seale and Moger, they accrue a kind of poetic difficulty that is hard to reduce to cliches. The translations are approximations of a source poem—in some instances there is a flash of clarity, in others a profusion of ambiguity. They defy the expectation that a translation must decipher or explicate—the poems flicker in the margin between the known and unknowable.

For all that the book conceals, the process reveals itself fully—the translator’s hand is plainly visible, their calibrations conspicuous. Nearly half a decade earlier, AK Ramanujan published translations of four Kannada poet-saints, contemporaries (c. 10th/12th centuries) of Ibn Arabi, in a collection titled ‘Speaking of Siva.’ He notes in the introduction that he has allowed the source poems to ‘speak to his biases’ and that translation is a ‘betrayal of what answers to one’s needs, one’s envies.’ If Seale and Moger were any less self-aware, the book could have turned into a gimmick. But their attention to the intricacies of the source, and a loyalty towards their own proclivities, brings us a book that is a wonder to behold.’

SEE HERE}

^16.12.22

_{Two Poems / Cristina Viti’s translation
of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger

on LitHub}

^{SEE HERE}

_{‘Anticommunist Youth Marches in Rome’

& ‘Series of Atomic Explosions’}

^15.12.22

^{Vallance’s Voyage in Artillery Magazine}

^{‘Art historically, this ginormous yellow tome is a gold mine, providing off-the-cuff anecdotal accounts of Vallance’s legendary curatorial interventions in various off-beat thematic museums in Vegas, while elsewhere detailing extensive cross-cultural research into the religious, anthropological and philosophical significance of clowns. As promised by the subtitle, much of the work addresses spirituality, religion, shamanism and paranormal phenomenology. Richard Nixon, Thomas Kinkade, Martin Luther, Charlie Manson, Ronald McDonald, the Loch Ness Monster and other spiritual teachers all make appearances. It’s not a fluke that Vallance’s curiosity-driven ideational flow is so reminiscent of an extended Wikipedia surf.

[...]

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! That’s when Luther’s excrement hits the Devil’s fan!’}
^{SEE HERE}

^14.12.22

^{Out now with
Tenement Press

Pier Paolo Pasolini,

La rabbia / Anger
Translated from the Italian

by Cristina Viti

With a foreword from Roberto Chiesi,

& an afterword from John Berger

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

Pasolini saw what was coming, and saw the poet’s mission as an excoriation of this world to come, that has now arrived. His tremendous energy was not negative. It came from an abounding love of the world. Picturing himself like a hero from ancient days, he struggled mightily, in and against the powers arrayed against life. What he called neocapitalism already came with its own brands of neofascism. Good comrade that he was, he knew the mark of our enemies, and where to direct his rage. Here we find him in a moment when he thought the good fight might still be won. A book to give us courage.

McKenzie Wark

La rabbia remains one of Pasolini’s most singular achievements, an all-consuming expression of the restless and relentless fury that defined his work and his thinking. In an age of increasingly one-dimensional political art, this most welcome volume is an urgent reminder of its dizzying possibilities.

Dennis Lim

Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti’s request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini’s lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John XXIII; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we’ve a panoply of photorealist intimations of Pasolini’s ‘poetic sense.’ The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, as the poet’s line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints.}

^{In Viti’s translation, the weave of prose and poetry that forms La rabbia portrays the vitality of Pasolini’s work in its capacity to speak to both the specifics of his contexts, the character of our own present tense, and the ironic fact of a life lived against the gulf of discontent in its myriad forms. Here, we’ve a startling confrontation of a revolutionary struggle in stasis set in lines that crystallise a rallying call against blindness. ‘I’ll not have peace, not ever,’ he writes. A lucid acceptance of the poet’s restlessness, and a marker for Pasolini’s commitment to a solidarity with the oppressed that we find reaffirmed on every page, in La rabbia the poet charts how ‘the powerful world of capital takes an abstract painting as its brash banner’ in this unravelling of ‘crisis in the world.’}

^{01.12.22

Seale & Moger’s Agitated Air,

A White Review Book of the Year, 2022

‘The most beautiful poems, rewriting each other and the world.’

Charlotte Geater}

^{SEE HERE}

^{28.10.22

Tenement Press at the Small Publisher’s Fair (London):

Three Readers / SJ Fowler, Kyra Simone, & Cristina Viti}

^{A record of a reading in the Green Room at Conway Hall on 28.10.22, with SJ Fowler reading from MUEUM; Kyra Simone, from Palace of Rubble; and Cristina Viti, reading from her translation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La rabbia / Anger.

The readings were recorded by Vilde Valerie Bjerke Torset.}

^24.10.22

^{Out now with
Tenement Press

Jeffrey Vallance, A Voyage to Extremes

Selected Spiritual Writings

978-1-8380200-5-7}
^{SEE HERE}

^{Jeffrey Vallance is our Philip Marlowe, quite literally our private eye, with a private vision of pied beauty and sacred banality that extends to the horizon.

Dave Hickey

Jeffrey Vallance is one of the world's most original, thought-provoking and entertaining writers on visual culture—his essays are works of art in themselves.

Ralph Rugoff

A “bible-long” anthologisation of Vallance’s life-long commitment to esoterica; a collection of insights, asides and revelations; an assembly of ruminations on ghosts and other paranormal phenomena; Richard Nixon’s dog Checkers; (fabulous) vegas casinos; the pedagogical value of Lapland; Charlie Manson’s father; (the glory of) Ronald McDonald; Martin Luther; Blinky (the friendly hen); Thomas Kinkade; dream sequences; Jägermeister; a raunchy affair (at an ice hotel); hot tubs; shamans; Dürer; Biblical etymology; base gratification; enlightened asides; a wedding ceremony; his Majesty, King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV of Tonga; the summoned ghosts of Vincent Van Gogh, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and Frida Kahlo; the living ghost of David Byrne; Liberace (in space); Big Foot (in Texas); Arctic glamour; Judas; St. Luke; a reliable recipe for a rump roast; ravens; crows; clowns; the Ozone layer; demilitarised zones; duty free zones; the weeping virgin of Las Vegas; a bar called fale kava; a restaurant called Matsuhisa; Houdini artifacts; Santa Claus; Charles Fort; Mikhail Gorbachev (carved out of Ice Cream); Mike Kelley; artificial insemination (cow) and more.}

^04.10.22

^{Out now with
Tenement Press

Kyra Simone, Palace of Rubble
Stories, with accompanying

photographs by John Divola

978-1-8380200-6-4}

^{SEE HERE}

^{Simone, reading at McNally Jackson (New York City, NY), 29.09.22.}

^{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—a lamp store in Chinatown is “a gallery of lights all blinking in dissonant rays of color,” the disassembling of a famous church that will be put together a few miles up the road is rendered via “the villagers holding pieces of it in their hands as they head over the hill in a great procession into the distance.” As the author herself puts it, these texts retain “a distant ember of the world from which they were first generated,” an effect that can feel for the reader like peering into a place that is both familiar and unknown, gazing at this place through the blur and distance implied by the passage of large swathes of time, physical displacement or shifts in ontological perspective.

Alexandra Kleeman

Kyra Simone’s Palace of Rubble is a collection of stories composed primarily of single words culled each day from the New York Times, among other news sources. Written under constraint in the tradition of Oulipo, these hybrid works of prose are reconstructions that no longer resemble the original texts, yet draw from the same reservoir of vocabulary, conveying new images and ideas, while preserving some distant ember of the universe from which they were first generated.}

^{Initially inspired by a photograph of one of Saddam Hussein’s demolished palaces printed on the cover of a newspaper Simone found discarded on a café table during the fall of Baghdad in 2003, Palace of Rubble has since evolved into an accumulation of texts invoked by a historical moment spanning the eras of Bush, Obama, Trump, and into the present day. Offering surreal glimpses of what might be identified as echoes of a post-Republic America, an imagined Middle East, and some other unnamed and unreachable world, it chronicles a vivid landscape of crumbling towers and heart-broken animals, eclipses, comets, and lovers in abandoned rooms, still searching for beauty amidst the ruins of the catastrophe bequeathed to them.}

^{01.10.22

Railroad Flat Radio / Resonance Extra
London

Tenement Press presents

SJ Fowler’s MUEUM

A mesmerising, bravura meditation on work, power, and subjugation.

Luke Kennard

A four-part serialisation of Fowler’s novella, as read by the author, and recorded on location in Resonance’s South London “chapel” studios. Fowler’s MUEUM was produced by Dominic J. Jaeckle and Milo Thesiger–Meacham.
The four instalments in this series were first broadcast on Resonance Extra on the following dates:

1 October 1st 2022

Chapters I through IV

2 November 5th 2022

Chapters V through VII

3 December 3rd 2022

Chapters VIII through XI

4 January 7th 2023

Chapters XII through to the (bitter) End.}

^{Fowler recording in the Resonance ‘chapel’ studios, Spring 2022}

^{A conversation between Fowler on (and around) MUEUM with Gareth Evans;

recorded in the Resonance studios by Therese Henningsen.}

^16.09.22
^{Railroad Flat Radio / Montez Press Radio

London / New York City, NY

Big Doom Above Me

45 Minutes in SJ Fowler’s MUEUM
13:55 / 22.09.22

An unabridged iteration of Fowler’s conversation with Eley Williams.} ^{SEE HERE}

^28.06.22

^{Out now with
Tenement Press

SJ Fowler, MUEUM

978-1-8380200-6-4}

^{SEE HERE}
^{With the apocalyptic vision of Ballard and the acerbic attitude of Céline, MUEUM scatters human detritus over the shiny Perspex of our most dearly loved vitrines. Rimbaud's visits to the British Museum reading room come to mind: scratching himself down for lice as he flicked through the latest encyclopaedias. And Bataille, assembling curios so strange the Surrealists wouldn't touch them wearing gloves. MUEUM is a novel of watchers and the watched, a testament to the fact that people are always more interesting—and far stranger—than things. And nothing is stranger than people's obsession with touching objects from the questionable past.

Chris McCabe}

_{A novella of ludic menace, a puzzle without pieces, SJ Fowler’s MUEUM pictures the amassing and dismantling of a public edifice, brick by brick, in prose that refracts and breaks the light emitted by history’s ornaments and history’s omissions.

Suspended in unknowable time there is a city; in the city, an event, a conflict. Amid the ash, fog and cloud, there is the manufacturing of a space—a many-winged museum on the make. On the plinths, exquisite remnants of life present and past—adorning the walls, portraits of gentle torture sit hand in hand with brutal and statuesque portrayals of camaraderie—and the gift-shop is littered with plastic curios and gilt revulsion. Goya, as atmosphere rather than artwork, hovers amid iron age ghosts, bronzed ideas, and antiqued anxiety.

Pacing the hall, atrium and corridor, there are those who keep the museum—the various midwives to the building’s demands—and those, like the reader, who merely visit; those who pass through the vacant galleries adrift with questions. What can I touch? What is next to Egypt? What is hidden in Mesopotamia? Where do we eat? Drink? Where is the entrance? The exit? Following the tradition of the Nestbeschmutzer authors (“one who dirties their own nest,” vis-à-vis Bernhard and Gombrowicz, et al), in Fowler’s curt, spiralling, and acute work, the museum’s keepers will answer.}

^16.03.22

^{M Lynx Qualey on Seale & Moger’s Agitated Air
in ARABLIT Quarterly

A translation is sometimes called a mirror of its original, although critics will often salt on a disclaimer, such as fun-house or magic, strange or distorted. Some dislike the mirror metaphor for its passivity, saying it fails to acknowledge the agency of the translator. A mirror, after all, is a flat unthinking thing: hung on a wall, or sitting quietly at the bottom of a purse.

And yet the mirror metaphor persists, and not only among those outside translation. In an interview with Dima Ayoub, maia tabet said of translation, “you’re transforming something which was in one state into something that is sort of parallel or a mirror image,” while author Rabai al-Madhoun told me, “When I read the final manuscript (of The Lady of Tel Aviv) in English, I felt as though I were watching a new look of mine in the neighbor’s mirror.” In 2019, Hend Saeed asked the poet Dunya Mikhail why she didn’t publish her Arabic and English poems in a single collection. The poet said that “having only one side of the mirror is poetical, like those half heart necklaces in search of the other half.” And the late Humphrey Davies said, in a video interview with AUC Press, “I like the idea of mirrors and reflecting. But you see, a mirror [image] is not identical. It’s subtly changed.”

For me, it is not mirroring’s lack of agency that nettles. But there is something about the singularity of a mirror image that doesn’t fit. It is as though, when standing a text in front of the glass, there is one possible output, one ideal reflection.
In their new collection of Ibn Arabi translations, Agitated Air, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger give us, instead, multiple reflected/refracted iterations of Ibn Arabi. They borrow fifteen of the sixty-one works from Ibn Arabi’s The Interpreter of Desires, a much-beloved work of nasib poetry by the philosopher-poet who was born in Murcia in 1165 and died in Damascus in 1240. The poems, they write in their introduction, are works of “distance and approach, of communion and the impossibility of union, of completion and the impossibility of completion”—a bit like the act of translation itself.}

^{SEE HERE}

^28.02.22

^{Out now with
Tenement Press

Yasmine Seale & Robin Moger
Agitated Air: Poems After Ibn Arabi

978-1-8380200-4-0

SEE HERE

In this heavenly and heartbreaking collection, the nasibs, preludes or love-songs of Mohieddin Ibn Arabi are translated to vividly retell the human erotics of divine love. The dialogic method of the translator-poets means that each poem is a collaborative attempt to retrieve a passion that is elusive and ‘steady;’ set to ‘sliding scales,’ the lyric like a ‘waterski’ on the distance between them. The imagery is touching and evocative, sweet and spiritual. The reader is reminded of a love that is active and ongoing, told in a linguistic tense that subtly, tragically, holds the sought for moment away from us. We may never find anything that gets as close to the deferring grammar of love as the phrase, ‘when held.’

Through these translations of ancient poems, we remember that love produces a relationship with time. The lover of a love poem is looking forward to it, already in its wake, mourning and restarting to yearn. It’s like a spiritual lesson in how to love God, where the erotics of times’ surfaces react to each other, causing a space like grace, and a situated feeling ‘Regardless of where you are’. In nuanced and humble syntax, Seale and Moger recreate in English the event of fresh longing in every word, as accurate as it is provisional. They do this with tender and careful poetry, finding in the original a fleeting but piercing voice, as if from underneath another voice, fragmented and reaching for its reply. Small elliptic lines, ‘no fun being locked here,’ create all the more agitated air for intimacy.

Holly Pester}

^{Born in Murcia in 1165, Ibn Arabi was a prolific Muslim philosopher and poet. He travelled extensively before settling in Damascus, where he died in 1240. Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, or The Interpreter of Desires, is a cycle of sixty-one Arabic poems. They speak of loss and bewilderment, a spiritual and sensual yearning for the divine, and a hunger for communion in which near and far collapse.

Agitated Air is a correspondence in poems between Istanbul and Cape Town, following the wake of The Interpreter of Desires. Collaborating at a distance, Yasmine Seale and Robin Moger work in close counterpoint, making separate translations of each poem, exchanging them, then writing new poems in response to what they receive. The process continues until they are exhausted, and then a new chain begins.

Translated and retranslated, these poems fray and eddy and, their themes of intimacy across distance made various, sing back and forth, circling and never landing. Absence and approach, knowing and unknowing, failure and repetition: Ibn Arabi’s cycle of ecstatic love shimmers with turbulence. Seale and Moger move into and against these contending drifts, finding in the play of dissatisfaction and endurance a prompt for new poetry.}

^{EVENT

On Joan Brossa’s El saltamartí

Centre for Catalan Studies

Queen Mary, University of London

19:00 / 24.11.21

TICKETS

An evening celebrating Tenement’s 2021 publication of El saltamartí (translated from the Catalan by Cameron Griffiths). Featuring readings, reminiscences, and a reading of a new, commissioned work from Stephen Watts in response to Brossa’s writings and contexts. This event is free, but advance booking is essential.}

^23.10.21

^{Out now with

Tenement Press}

^{Stanley Schtinter, et al
The Liberated Film Club

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

The Liberated Film Club—running from its birth to its death, 2016 to 2020—would guarantee a wide wing-span for critical conversation. Screening “Liberated film” (a loose category designed to scaffold the show), a guest would be invited to introduce a film; an audience seated to watch it through; but there’d be an interruption to that typical format. Neither the audience nor the guest would have any idea what film would be shown, and this anonymised format would invite broad and antagonistic perambulation on the what, the why and the how of film.

An interrogation of what we do when we sit in a cinema; a reckoning with the kind of posture we should assume when we frame a film for further talk. Playing with the various ways we should consider and reproach the institutions built around all of our cultures of making and the manners and methods of all of our cultures of consumption, the Liberated Film Club was a rare reflection on the act of reflection itself.

Starting out as a pirate DVD/USB company, issuing irregular mail-order catalogues of films otherwise unobtainable (an activity which it maintains), the club ran as a regular event series at the Close-Up Film Centre, London, curated by Schtinter. This anthology is a complete and unabridged collation of these introductions.

An anthology publication of ‘introductions’

to the unknown, featuring contributions from

Shezad Dawood;

Chris Petit;

Andrea Luka Zimmerman;

William Fowler;

John Rogers;

Ben Rivers;

Gideon Koppel;

Gareth Evans;

Adam Roberts;

John Akomfrah;

Shama Khanna;

Tony Grisoni;

Damien Sanville;

Mania Akbari;

Xiaolu Guo;

Sean Price Williams;

Chloe Aridjis;

Athina Tsangari;

Juliet Jacques;

Anna Thew;

Adam Christensen;

Laura Mulvey;

Astra Taylor;

Dennis Cooper;

Stewart Home;

Stephen Watts;

Dan Fox;

Miranda Pennell;

Elena Gorfinkel;

& Tai Shani.}

^{Launch, 23.10.21

In the afternoon...
at LUX, London

(See here.

In the evening...
at Close-Up Film Centre, London

(See here.)}

^{13.10.21

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Stanley Schtinter’s edited collection,
The Liberated Film Club, in Screen Slate

‘I’m a sucker for genre-defying “What is it?” books, and this one is further enhanced as well as complicated by chronicling a London film club that’s no less eccentric and transgressive in its refusal to stand still and behave reasonably or even (on occasion) coherently. This is plainly an anarchist book designed for insiders, and I’m an outsider—or maybe one could say that this is an anarchist book designed for outsiders, and we’re all outsiders interested in redefining what an alleged inside might consist of.’

SEE HERE}

^01.07.21

^{Matilda Munro on Stanley Schtinter’s edited collection,
The Liberated Film Club, in Sight and Sound}

^15.04.21

^{Out now with

Tenement Press

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

Playful, sharp, unbelievably fresh, ironic and free, Brossa’s poetry

translates wonderfully into English as an ode to irreverence, a work of

art and a magician’s trick. As the curtain rises the words appear, the

wordsmith is here, the wizard is here. Hold tight. Abracadabra.

Irene Solá}

^{This first-time English translation of El saltamartí / The Tumbler—a collection of poems written by Joan Brossa in 1963 (and first published in Catalan in 1969)—presents a convergence of Brossa’s critical and cultural concerns. With his growing sense of social commitment and support of Catalan independence, freedom stands as both Brossa’s primary subject and conceptual framework in this collection. The Tumbler is an anti-clerical and anti-authoritarian work that brings together verse vignettes and visual poems to revivify the proverbial, often with comic and subversive effect. Brossa plays with image, iconography and intimation as both verbal and visual elements vie for our attentions throughout these pages.

In The Tumbler, traditional poetic stanzas sit side-by-side with a more liberated poetic form—one Brossa referred to as a synthetic poetry—in which he employs a straightforward, everyday language (it is the language of the working classes with which he identifies). Always the innovator, Brossa reinvigorates this language so as to evince an accessible and archly political poetry that demands our critical and creative participation. Challenging the very notion of an author’s hold over these texts, Brossa invites us to approach these works with a critical autonomy all of our own, and The Tumbler stands a critical study of freedom. The poet places himself as a critic of established power systems, accepted meanings and held conceptualizations of liberty. His movement towards an aesthetic autonomy (a journey we can charter from his early books on) arrived at its final destination in a complete break with language—his visual poetry—and in this collection we encounter this mixture of verse and visual poems for the first time. An examination of poetic license that proves as pertinent today as it did upon its first publication.}