collaborative processes pt 1

Forgive me but my road to collaboration in publishing was for the most part formed in my education and practice of architecture, i consider myself really fortunate to have been in architecture school in the 90s, a much headier time still rife with Eisenman's bastardized deconstruction, Lebbeus Woods' drawing, the opening of Gehrys Bilbao, Tschumi and Libeskind both thankfully not especially busy practitioners (both should have stopped immediately after their first public buildings), etc, and in line with that architectural education, at least at the institutions i attended, was far less focused on professional practice, more on the spirit of play that develops one's expectations of what is possible in design, and in my grad education, what it actually means to be an architect (which i have ported into what it actually means to be a writer, not just want it means to write), culturally and socioethically, my mind was abuzz with possibility, then i got a summer job in an office in LA, (my first in an office after working a couple of summers with a professor living in his farm in Central Griggs building a 3 story screen porch with a house floating inside it

, an intimate alive experience, embedded with practice, in the summer of 97 i remember listening to blut aus nord and summoning for the first time on a discman in my bunk bed in the old farm workers shack, walking in the forest with the dogs

, canoeing across the lake with the dogs swimming, only their heads visible, 5 of them, yelping with their mouths half underwater, ending up in the hospital multiple times, for myself and with others, the Chinese buffet in town in Perry, all of that was architecture to me), it was a small firm, the 2 principals and me (later that summer they hired a guy (email address i shit you not, on his fucking resume, was arcboy69@yahoo.com (feel free to drop him a line)) who came to the interview in a warehouse in santa monica wearing a 3 piece suit) in a little corner of a built out warehouse in Santa Monica near my beloved 18th coffeehouse (http://www.cafetableaux.com/18th-street-coffeehouse/) and by god were these two guys pricks, they were rude, unhappy, cynical, and very dogmatic, they did great work, but it was THEIR work and i was there to execute it precisely to their specifications, and although that is much more frequently the nature of architectural practice, it was not for me, i was nauseous at work every day (not to mention getting my black heart broken by Immortal releasing AT THE HEART OF WINTER), the following summer i spent back in Georgia on the farm and going to hellfest in Syracuse to see Starkweather, but i had kinda chosen a path there, whether i knew it or not, that i wanted to crack architecture open, and returning to LA that August i started my masters thesis which was focused on creating a new representational language for architectural representation that was primarily focused on the openness of text rather than the prescriptiveness of orthographic drawing, my first in a series of experimental exercises (in the scientific sense) was taking the text instructions from Robert Morris's BLIND TIME drawings and creating my own versions

, so basically plagiarism with a purpose, this was just to get my feet wet, secondly i took an essay by Peter eisenman about his Canneregio project in Venice and drew/built my own version by productively rereading his descriptions

, then, my final preparatory exercise was going from a finished piece of arch, not a text about arch, and creating an as-built document for the work, that could then have been utilized to create "infinite" variations on that seed, this was done for a motel room ar Arne's Royal Hawaiian (RIP)

in Baker, CA, i made 2 drawings, one was called an etymological furniture schedule and the other was a subjective spatial recipe (or something), this was an attempt at creating a language for communicating with other designers and fabricators in an open and subjective and productive manner

, finally, i used this language of representation or documentation to communicate with other thesis students to "design" elements of an installation based on baudelaire's "the double room", where one side of a wall in an old warehouse was the "sober" side

and the other was the "stoned" side

, anyway, this produced an outcome that fit some loose set of qualitative characteristics but was heterogenous in voice, not to belabor this, but i proceeded on with these thoughts in an architectural collaboration with a friend of mine under the guise of a small practice called the work.group for maybe 15 years after school, we engaged in what i would call obstructive collaboration, people might call aspects of it "photoshop tennis" in which we would share files of various sorts back and forth with the expectation of unearthing possibilities unexpected by each of us

, this is all pretty in keeping with my expectations of literature in general when one includes the reader into the equation, and without getting into the weeds with barthes and eco and such, all of my own writing has been with the goal of a reader being able to make their own work from mine, although i am very egotistical about what i am doing, my underlying agenda is quite the opposite, MASSIVE being the extreme example of this... 

thus we have a natural transition point to talking about ItC and collaborative processes.......

incastellated aesthetics

Total fucking necro, the faxed artwork of TRANSILVANIAN HUNGER, cold meat industry sigil bs, the BEGOTTENing of 90s dtv horror trash stills, everything on all the filters redlined, 90s websites like Dans Gallery of the Grotesque and blackmetal.com, Hellhammer, all come to mind for an underlying incastellated spirit, but we've made a conscious effort for our aesthetics to be distinct from our products, as elegant as something like Fitzcarraldo eds is it tips its hand about a perception of literature that is about acquisition and status, it is the suggestion (at first blush quite admirable) that all that matters is the text, sounds like something we'd love, but the more you think about it the less it is invested in the potential of the book as a thing and by extention the potential inhabitability of the text, it's suggestion is that the text could have been in any typeface, could have any cover, be any aspect ratio and only happens to have that particular blue cover, aspect ratio and set in Fitzcarraldo because they are the pub who acquired it, i guess you could say that all of our books look the way we do because we published them, however they never know what they will look like until we do, can you imagine BELFIE HELL with a tasteful blue cover, PERIPATET, HUNCHBACK 88? But one can easily imagine NOCILLA LAB with 1000 other covers, it is not the point though i don't think as to why all of our books avoid our "brand", is more that brand isn't or shouldn't be paratext, there are so many aspects of a book that can thicken its existence, i feel like there is probably a conception that with great literature you could read it off a phone and it would still be great, that you could listen to it on a podcast and it would still be great, but truly, if you're taking advantage of language (what other priority shutoff literature have) I don't think that is possible, Strickland (still not gonna spell his name) tweeted that he was listening to a FINNEGANS WAKE audio book while going to sleep, I think that's rad, but an audio book of the most linguistically complex prose ever written is missing the visual component of its punmanship, only seeing the text (and if you know like 50 languages) and its intentional misspellings etc is giving the full breadth of its possibility, it is a text meant to be read, why would all texts not aspire to be read, otherwise just record a podcast, so take FINNEGANS WAKE as the extreme of linguistic expectation for this, then there are other aspects of print to be explored and exploited, typesetting, i think of THE F TEXT for instance where each letter in the whole book was individually set to address Douglas's process of photoshop layer archeology, or PERIPATET where for whatever reason each page had a different font size so that despite different lengths of text components they still filled an entire spread, typeface, i think of NYMPHOLEPSY where we selected a font with as many ligatures as possible to express the interconnected nature of a highly sexual text written by two people, or BOUND, where we created a typeface based on Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum's logo to "write" a map of Dantes inferno, or aspect ratio where SEA-WITCH was already designed as a square, or the forthcoming AUTOBIOLOGY which uses a wider aspect ratio and a very narrow text block to accentuate the sense of scrolling through a long uninterrupted text... none of this is to even touch on cover art (we have multiple books that don't even have the title on the cover), title sequence (some books don't "start" for dozens of pages), etc, these things require the utmost freedom to truly bring a books potential to life as a book and not just something that has been written, and thus, as much as we strive to indulge in "our" aesthetic, our books will forever each have their very own, from scratch, bespoke, total fucking whatever identity. 

language lust pt 1

I've made the "joke" a couple of times on twitter that the Drain of Impurity song titles are the book of the year

,  i think it's something that at face value is a joke but i would much rather read that than most books, Tbh for the past few years, perhaps through some disillusionment with publishing or the gamesmanship of literature I've found much more textual inspiration and a refinement of my eye in the prose of slam (or brutal death metal or slamming brutal death metal or tags ad infinitum) track listings, other metal text creeps into the language life as well, Carcass (and their infinite progeny) song lyrics

, once derided in favor of the storytelling (lol) stylings of your Chris Barnes'ses and the like are crucial for their antiseptic encyclopedia entry distancing of the reader from the maker through use of jargon and utter lack of poetry, and some black metal song titles, just this past week Darkthrone released a record with a song called Beneath the Sea of Seas Beneath the Sea, or something, I'm not going to look it up, also reflecting back on a language life Kataklysms ridiculous TEMPLE OF KNOWLEDGE record was pretty pivotal as well, should I look up some excerpts, yeah here's a placeholder parenthesis (

), perhaps it's useful to be reflective on my attraction to these word employments, one key, i think, is that these all have the sensibilities of your lorem ipsum placeholder text, its hard to give the boys in Kraanium a lot more credit than that, sure there is an intentionality there based on tropic indulgence and tone which I'll get to, but it's the phrasing texture that is an initial entry point, what is at stake to make a text that is unlikely to be read, what is the appropriate methodology for its making AND what is the intent or expectation for its functionality, decisions about these are intertwined obviously, you can't make something without a methodology and you can't select or operate within a methodology if you don't have a presumption about how someone other than yourself can engage with the thing, i think that's one of the things i like about the Castle freak books and the project of them in general, the expectation i think is that you're not required to read the book in its entirety because it's not "written by a person", you can read it, but i don't think you have to, i don't think there is a methodology per se that Dragging Entrails uses to write their texts, and as with architecture i get much more personal enjoyment out of things that are made effectively (effective to me) without much intention behind them, for someone with an overburden of intentions it is perhaps inspiring, but i think what i like more is the ability to take ownership of it because it feels like nobody lays claim to it, if there is a text, a Maggot Colony song lyrics, the delivery of lyrics is irrelevant, one could argue that song titles are also irrelevant in the Era of streaming and colossal mp3 libraries (does anyone else still do this but me), if there is no one there to engage, no expectation of engagement, it feels like it is mine alone to appreciate. 

Endnotes: i won't get to tropics and tone here. Other topic for a further entry in this series is metal as world music and the benefits of ESL on the texture of slam texts...

Thanks to the greatest website on earth, the metal archives, you'd be better off reading that than lit hub.

unedited thoughts on shanejxsjc

 i believe or would like to believe i guess that shane edits extensively, i shared sex shops with my wife last night after she asked if i was reading about sex shops and could only say no, and failing to be able to say what i was reading i handed her the book, and thus i am not going to edit this, at first she said it was word salad and then after reading a few pages said oh i see, she started somewhere in the middle of the book as i believe all the books i really care about should be able to be done with, MOBILE, FINNEGANS WAKE, TOPOLOGY OF A PHANTOM CITY, or starting a movie in the middle, WITCHERY, INFERNO, as long as you go back all the way around to where you started as was obvs the functionality of FINNEGANS WAKE, if a book isnt like a painting in that way i will probably just read it as though it is, i am reading RING concurrently with SEX SHOPS and i like to think they are one book, everything on my nightstand is just a big stack of paper i can pull from, ATTIC AND BAROQUE PROSE STYLE, TRUTHLIKENESS, and SEX SHOPS is a very functional glue for the blending of books into one another, repetition,

repetition is what makes a texture, within a tonal establishment repeating is making a whole, somehow (in a critical take on Shane "somehow" will be repeated (not as in "somehow it works" but as in "somehow he wrote this" because it doesn't seem human, i would say it's not how the human mind works but it's exactly how the human mind works, what is striking is that it's not how the human mind exports information, someone says stream of consciousness in 2022 and you smother them with a pillow (or "strangle" in the lietmotif of SEX SHOPS) because who's stream is so pure, the stream of the 1920s is no more, but how do you write what the brain looks like and not what we want to tell our readers our elegantly composed and insightful brain looks like, i guess you have to not give a shit for one, Shane won't be for sale in an airport nor will be court a prize or award, you have not not give a shit about that, every single person who has won something has been on a road to success, you don't accidentally fall into that world inasmuch as you don't accidentally find yourself playing chess in an amphitheater, its not that you're good, you're just good in that way)), repetition implies repetitive, this is Penrose tiling, its isn't lulling it dependable, its infuriating, i think reading Shane almost killed Jacob Siefring, at the very least it angered him but imagine being able to do that, make people angry by giving them something that angers their expectations, most cultural reaction is either boredom or appreciation, very few people will appreciate Shane and that's good, i don't want to deeply love something that is loved by others, i love texture but it's nothing without content, it's ascii art, what is a book or prose without developing images and the somehow part of Shane's imagery is its bizarre fieldlike heterogeneity, it could not be much more heterogenous even with its repetition however its heterogeneity builds a critical mass that is unifying, local scrutiny of a series of phrases appears to exist as distinct nonsequiturs but the critical mass although it doesn't loop them back together (or if it does it is the frustrating "he strangled me in an alley" "he strangled me on a conference table" "he strangled me etc") it creates a mnemonic monolith, not in its momentum but in your memory of what you've passed through, like the mind, the consciousness, it cannot be stopped, it cannot be frozen for observation, it can only by looked back upon, and that is deceptive, cumbersome, the moment is chaos, the pages in your left hand make perfect sense, but if you flipped back to them you'd most certainly be lost again, you have been reading THE SEX SHOPS OF SHERMAN OAKS.

https://amphetaminesulphate.bigcartel.com/product/sex-shops-of-sherman-oaks

closing in on the end of 2022

Unlike larger publishers we work one book at a time. Excitingly this year we were able to get all of our covers done by the end of the summer, of course Kitchell, Corrao, and Kleine (the Hot Mikes) did their own. Excited for Corrao to take on some other books next year, notably Logan's, Sara & Johannes's, and Strickland's (not going to look up how many Rs and Ts are in his name). It feels wild to be publishing all these books and to have such brilliant assistance. We continue to plug away on AUTOBIOLOGY, although it's completely designed we are doing word counts on each page instead of page #s (take that Kim Palsat), and this seems to have to be done manually. If anyone knows how to automate it in Indesign I would be forever in your debt. Finally the slog continues laying out Grant's new tome which makes the design of PERIPATET and SMUTMAKER seem like dropping THE RAINMAKER into a pdf and going golfing. Hoping it'll be done by December 31 but growing increasingly doubtful. Each spread is designed 1 by 1 and although there's a rhythm to it there are half a dozen elements that are customized on each. 

Anyway, although we haven't seen any substantive changes to Twitter, Olivia Cronk graciously invited us to participate in another blog and, having had a blog in complete isolation in the 00s, it seemed nice to supplement ItC with this.