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Author Archives: jso
Launch your own blog
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 [...]
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Ten thousand, a million copies in America
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 [...]
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Know when it's over
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 [...]
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Do the math
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% [...]
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The Extensible Moment
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 [...]
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Make a one-minute movie
If you hold a digital camera steady for a minute or so (in Movie mode), you get a still photograph with movement in it. Photographers have been "simulating" movement for a hundred years by registering blurs of more or less distinctness. 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.
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Use the technology
By our own calculations we had 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 had named 100% Loss Financing. And we had launched the 3-Day Novel Contest, which is still thriving today, in its pages.
Launch a 3-cent magazine
The idea for a four-page magazine emerged on an otherwise idle afternoon when we 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.
In(ter)ventionists posing at Banff