Studio C103

In(ter)ventionists posing at Banff

jso — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 01:18:26 +0000

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!

Launch your own blog

jso — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 03:30:48 +0000

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?”

Ten thousand, a million copies in America

jso — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 10:57:48 +0000

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.

Know when it's over

jso — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:07:54 +0000

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.

Do the math

jso — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 10:04:47 +0000

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.

The Extensible Moment

jso — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:22:12 +0000

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.

Make a one-minute movie

jso — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:23:10 +0000

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.

Use the technology

jso — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:16:54 +0000

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.

Launch a 3-cent magazine

jso — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 06:08:06 +0000

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.