In(ter)ventionists posing at Banff

By jso | Published: 1 March 2010
3 of 3 posts in 1-​Minute Movies

On the second day at Banff, 20 Feb 2010, the In(ter)ventionists took a moment out of their delib­er­a­tions to stand in the sunlight. This one-​minute movie is sharper than the others on this blog, so maybe I’m getting it!

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Launch your own blog

By jso | Published: 20 February 2010

Launch day: Banff Centre.
The first entry in this blog, which goes public today, during the lunch break at the in(ter)ventions confer­ence (paren­the­ses supplied by the Banff Centre), was writ­ten on the 24th of Janu­ary; several entries have been added since then during a month of tweak­ing and trying to under­stand the process of writ­ing back­wards, which seems to be what the blog form requires, as new posts can be seen to displace exist­ing posts rather than adding to them—an illu­sion of course, but quite convinc­ing; the result­ing uneasi­ness is what you feel when you send an email apol­o­giz­ing for remarks in the email you sent moments earlier and shouldn’t have; now the apol­ogy will arrive before the insult.

So this post, which appears at the top of the stack (for the time being) is the last in a sequence of posts writ­ten before the blog goes public, in only a few more minutes.

Shortly before lunch inter­vened at in(ter)ventions, Charles Bern­stein read a poem with Saska­toon in it; Steve Toma­sula demon­strated the work­ings of TOC: A New Media Novel, and Erin Moure spoke eloquently about the neces­sity and the impos­si­b­lity of bring­ing voices from else­where into “the context we call Canada” — ques­tions that inform her new book, O Resp­lan­dor, just published by Anansi.

I arise now and go, and go to luncheon amongst, between, the silent, the impon­der­able, the ponder­ous, the impos­si­bly Rocky, the falli­bly pathetic, the totally adver­bial, the scene, the scenery, the scene, the scenery, the prepon­der­ous virtues of the natural.

Adden­dum: Every­one remem­bers Saska­toon from the movie Atlantic City, but how many remem­ber Woody Herman singing out “Don’t be a goon from Saska­toon,” as he and the Swingin’ Herd wail their way into “Get Your Boots Laced, Papa?”

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Ten thousand, a million copies in America

By jso | Published: 14 February 2010
Paulo Coehlo, whose books had sold in excess of 65 million copies before one of them fell into my hands in a used book store in the spring of 2009, is described in the biograph­i­cal note as having suffered torture at the hands of the para­mil­i­tary in Brazil in the late nineteen-​sixties, an expe­ri­ence that “affected him profoundly,” and caused him to exchange the life of an activist for the life of “an exec­u­tive in the music indus­try.” Later in his life, accord­ing to the same biograph­i­cal note, Sr. Coehlo met a man in Amster­dam whom he had seen in a dream. In his intro­duc­tion to the book that fell into my hands, Sr. Coehlo advises his read­ers to pursue their dreams as he has pursued his. One of his dreams, perhaps his main dream, ceased prop­erly to be a dream when he discov­ered that it “little by little, was becom­ing real­ity” as one of his books sold “ten, a thou­sand, a million copies in America.”

Some 65 million copies of the works of Paulo Coehlo were already circu­lat­ing in 150 coun­tries and 60 languages when a pre-​owned copy of The Alchemist announc­ing these facts in the cover appeared last summer in one of the few great 2nd-​hand book­store left in Vancou­ver (Biblio­phile on Commer­cial Drive), which is where I came to know of its cele­brated author — a man, accord­ing to the blurb at the back of the book, whose suffer­ing at the hands of para­mil­i­tary goons in Brazil in the nineteen-​sixties had “affected him profoundly,” and led him to take up the life of an “exec­u­tive in the music indus­try.” Paul Coehlo became a writer, the blurb-​writer goes on to say, after meet­ing a man in a cafe in Amster­dam whom he had seen months earlier “in a vision.”

In his intro­duc­tion to The Alchemist, Paulo Coehlo commends his read­ers to pursue their dreams as he has pursued his own dreams. One might suggest that at least one of the dreams of Paulo Coehlo, the only dream alluded to in his intro­duc­tion to The Alchemist, ceased prop­erly to be a dream when, as he writes, “little by little, my dream was becom­ing real­ity,” and his books began to sell “ten, a thou­sand, a million copies in America.”

Too often such is the destiny of dreams — to be erased by reality!

The “essence” of Coehlo’s work rendered in a few sentences can be found in an arti­cle in the Busi­ness Stan­dard by Nilan­jana S Roy of New Delhi.

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Know when it's over

By jso | Published: 10 February 2010

After seven and a half years, and 117 issues, we put the 3-​cent maga­zine to rest with a final monster edition of 24 pages, a length intended to satisfy outstand­ing subsrip­tion balances of two years and more. It was dated 20 Janu­ary 1980, Sunday of the same week that smug­glers were discov­ered conceal­ing Mercedes Benzes in the desert sands of Arabia and that “Why Should the Father Bother” hit number 18 on the Born Again Hit Parade; the week the Cana­dian Civil Defense Comman­der told the nation there was noth­ing to fear from a nuclear attack “as long as they don’t attack at night, or by surprise.” We put these inter­est­ing facts into the farewell essay because they had come to our atten­tion while it was being composed: 3-​Cent Pulp was noth­ing if not aleatory: the pure prod­uct of chance oper­a­tions. “We are getting old,” I wrote, in 1980, when I had achieved the advanced age of 33, “and lack­ing a bureau­cracy with its feck­less capac­ity for regen­er­a­tion, we want to have a rest and dry out for a while.”

The seven­ties had ended.

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Do the math

By jso | Published: 10 February 2010
2 of 2 posts in 1972

By our own calcu­la­tions we had in the course of seven years spent $65,000 in the Marble Arch beer parlour, the equiv­a­lent of 130,000 glasses of beer. We had printed a total of 117,000 copies of the maga­zine, half a million pages of liter­ary writ­ing, we had perfected the finan­cial manage­ment tech­nique that we named 100% Loss Financ­ing. And we had launched the 3-​Day Novel Contest, which is still thriv­ing today, in its pages.

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The Extensible Moment

By jso | Published: 4 February 2010
2 of 3 posts in 1-​Minute Movies

The digi­tal camera offers the photog­ra­pher a new dimen­sion in image-making–we might call it the exten­si­ble moment. Photographs made using film tech­nol­ogy can be said (as John Berger does) to cut across time. The minute-​long photographs that result from hold­ing a digi­tal camera in one posi­tion in movie mode embrace or include time as motion while retain­ing the lure of the photo­graphic glimpse. Now explic­itly, for the first time, narra­tive begins to intrude in the photograph, to emerge from the frame, and, with repeated view­ing, elements of “plot” can be discov­ered in the “instan­ta­neous,” along with impu­dent traces of upstart alle­gory and fable.

My first 1-​minute movie was filmed near Studio C103 at the inter­sec­tion of Commer­cial Drive, Commer­cial Street, 18th Avenue, Find­lay Street and Victo­ria Diver­sion (a compli­cated corner in Vancou­ver). I held the camera on a mono­pod, and watched the timer count down in the corner of the viewfinder. I let the “shot” continue for 2 minutes or so, and later trimmed out the minute presented here. The image is brighter and sharper in the orig­i­nal: it has soft­ened up in the tran­si­tion to Youtube. This is no doubt reme­di­a­ble, once I learn more about what I’m trying to do here.

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Make a one-minute movie

By jso | Published: 26 January 2010
1 of 3 posts in 1-​Minute Movies

If you hold a digi­tal camera steady for a minute or so (in Movie mode), you get a still photo­graph that regis­ters move­ment. Photog­ra­phers have been regis­ter­ing move­ment for the last hundred years by exploit­ing blurs and streaks. Now they can get the detail and the move­ment at the same time, or during the same time–and time itself becomes a dimen­sion of the photograph.

The images displayed below are part of the Geist One-​Minute Movie Mapping Project (soon to be launched) at geist​.com.

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Use the technology

By jso | Published: 24 January 2010
1 of 2 posts in 1972

We used a big rubber stamp and a pad of red ink to print the logo by hand on each copy of 3-​Cent Pulp, and even­tu­ally employed an machine that used silk-​screen sten­cils (prepared on a type­writer and then stacked in a hopper) to address copies of the maga­zine to subscribers. By 1980, we had published 107 issues and had been banned twice from the Vancou­ver Public Library and we were two and half years behind in the publish­ing schedule.


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Launch a 3-cent magazine

By jso | Published: 24 January 2010

The idea for a four-​page maga­zine emerged on an other­wise idle after­noon in 1972, in a 3rd floor walkup on Pender Street in Vancou­ver across the alley from the Marble Arch beer parlour, where Pulp Press Book Publish­ers had been in oper­a­tion for about two months. One of us had discov­ered that you could get 5,000 words onto an 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper in 5 point type if you weren’t too picky about margins. The trick was fold­ing the sheet over to make leaves, and then we hit on the idea of charg­ing three cents a copy and sign­ing over the whole price to book­stores that would agree to carry it on their front counter.

We chose three cents as the cover price because there was a tax on books at that time so anyone making a purchase in a book­store always had a few pennies in their change, and we announced a biweekly publish­ing sched­ule because we were too young to know better, and a subscrip­tion price of $10 a year, which repre­sented to us, as we put it in our subscrip­tion offers, a consid­er­able saving over the cover price of three cents a copy.

Within a year we had 250 subscribers and a corre­spond­ing budget of $2500; editors and contrib­u­tors were never paid and neither was the rent or the phone or the bill for the telex rolls we used for corre­spon­dence, all of which came from other sources.

We printed 1000 copies and shipped them out in bundles to book­stores across the coun­try and engaged the post office on the ques­tion of 2nd class mail priv­i­leges, which at that time extended only to news­pa­pers; for six months the most eloquent writer among us, a poet and a song­writer of some renown, typed out a series of letters on one of the telex rolls–the telex roll came with carbon paper built in, so copies of all corre­spon­dence from that period has been preserved in bull­dog clips that we hung on the wall in an ever-​lengthening row.

In the end the eloquent poet won the argu­ment with the post office by prov­ing beyond doubt that our three-​cent maga­zine was indeed a news­pa­per, with the result that 3-​Cent Pulp was the first liter­ary maga­zine in the coun­try to qual­ify for the postal subsidy.

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