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22 August 2011. Add responses by Ted Byfield and A. Unprintability
Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2011 14:39:34 -0400 Do not print this book Sandy Baldwin What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction? - Julio Cortazar Geoffrey Gatza, fearless director of BlazeVox, that "publisher of weird little books," took the final proofs of Lurid Numbers to his printer on July 27, 2011. Lurid Numbers is a collection of more or less "codeworked" text - much like i did the weird motor drive, my 2007 book with BlazeVox - written through simple computer scripts and word processings, and through my own impulse, inquiry, and idiocy. The next day he came back with some odd news in the form of an email from the publisher: ------ Forwarded Message As we like to say in academia, the email was "interesting," that is, it could be read as linked to a number of other cultural domains and protocols. The relation of the "interior" to the "cover" repeats and takes part in the history of the "book," where the cover is the limit of the work of writing; the cover is the enclosure or partition, the event and inscription of multiple institutions: of authorship (if the work is under a pseudonym or in some way unsigned, the copyright page still must contain an author's name, even if it is "anonymous"), commerce (the name of the publisher, legal descriptions of rights and regulations, and so on), and archiving (library of congress number, date of publication, etc.). Along with this, the fact that the interior of the book was somehow rotten or broken seemed both a judgment and a simple fact of this book. It was even better that this was expressed iconographically in the cover, which did meet "submission requirements." I saw the cover as a submission of the contents to a single image. The cover shows a butchered and already old, slightly rotted fish. The image is photoshopped, neon and definitely lurid. Geoffrey directed me to this image, and I loved the combination of the repulsive and slimy, the mundane and organic, with the software transformation that keeps it real but artificial as well. It did indeed seem to submit and capture the interior. And then: "the interior file contains pages with unreadable text" seems to me an almost ontological statement, one that rubs against the proximity between the written work and the human. We may submit, we may submit a cover - ourselves - that meets requirements (of culture, of others), but our interiors are often quite different, unreadable. I also appreciated the misspelling of gibberish, suggesting a virality of the unreadable text into the printer's email. Finally: "we are unable to move forward [...] as it may appear as a file error in manufacturing" suggested to me an event or force of the work beyond the interior file, a hidden explosion breaking the apparatus that machined it, and seeping or flooding past the cover. In short, I was pleased to become more than just another job for the printer, to become a new process and something beyond the routine. At the same time, I was concerned, wondering what would happen with my interior file, as it were. I found out five days later, on August 1, 2011, when Geoffrey informed me in an email that "they cannot print this book and there is nothing I can do about it. [...] this is something completely new and I have to say I am perplexed by the mechanizations of modern times. The printers are not opposed to you or your work, this is a situation of a printing process that is highly automated and this registers exactly like a printers error to their machine. It is not a human that we must cajole into agreeing that this is art, which was my first take on this, as with the printer who cannot spell. This is a matter of a quality control camera that will reject books that look like this. I talked with a lot of people in the company and even had my lawyer call them to see if great weight would move the immovable. But no, their system will literally stop when it would try to produce your work." A writing that stops the computer system, the very system designed to print out writing: what more could I ask for? What more frustrating thing, as well, so close to the print out of the book, that fetish object that makes authors out of writers? I was judged by the computer to have written something, i.e. it did not deny that there was an input that it could judge, but it evaluated my writing as unprintable, as a writing that can only remain in the space of the computer, within the possibilities of software. My interior file was bummed out but also filled or luridly lit up with a deep pleasure. BTW, the book is here: http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/lurid-numbers-by-sandy-baldwin-244/
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Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2011 17:25:44 -0400 Charles.Baldwin[at]mail.wvu.edu (Sun 08/21/11 at 02:39 PM -0400): > Do not print this book I had a similar experience with them when they refused to print the book _Cablegate: The Complete Wikileaks Datadump_, Volume 1, which consisted of 200 pages of apparently random 2-bit snow. http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1102/msg00058.html They argued, variously, that "the interior content...contains blank black and white pages," "your title is entirely comprised of black and white static," "you are displaying encrypted text and...it is a gag book," and "the book is a gag [and] illegible." It was clear from the way their argument unfolded, and the way they clung to particular phrases, that they knew their position was incoherent. But it was also clear that I was dealing with a customer-service structure (including a few 'escalations') and that epistemology wasn't really their racket. Eight months later, their Kindle conversion system says of the 'book': Converting book file to Kindle format... Meanwhile, on Amazon, you can still "look inside" to see what their machines couldn't see, or could see that they couldn't see: http://www.amazon.com/Cablegate-Complete-Wikileaks-Datadump-1/dp/1456438824/ I was tempted to experiment with subsequent books of encrypted gags, gag encryptions, a history of snow, stegoed images, images rendered in snow, etc, in order to build a sort of matrix of their policies, but that kind of game gets a bit dull. The larger issue is that, by disintermediating publishing, they've internalized several roles that used to be adversarial -- and, not coincidentally, were filled by different actors. As a result, they end up establishing internally contradictory policies then announcing them on an ad-hoc basis. If anything, this is the defining characteristic of organizations whose business involves 'user-generated content' (as opposed to 'common carriage,' say); it's also a defining trait of conglomeratization. So that kind of experiment is pretty much a waste of time for anyone but a zealot (and I use that term positively -- I'm happy there are zealots willing to do that kind of stuff). It's worth noting that these changes seem to have restored the book's potential as a way to probe some of the internal operations of power structures. It's been a while. Funny that its 'death' should mirror its 'birth' in this respect -- as though it has a certain 'disruptive' (ugh) capacity not in itself but, rather, when it's teetering on the edge of legitimacy. But to pursue that kind of argument, I think we'd need to -- as we should anyway -- distinguish between different kinds of books, rather than throwing it around like it's some metaphysical category, because it isn't one. Papyri, codices, broadsides, pamphlets, pocket bibles, newspapers, paperbacks, samizdat, photocopies, faxes -- the list goes on and on -- have all had their day. Cheers, T
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Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2011 16:38:20 -0500 RE: http://cryptome.org/0005/unprintability.htm This reminded me of the publication history of Ulysses. Because Ulysses was considered obscene, no English-language publisher would touch it. So Joyce had it printed in France. The original French typesetters thought they'd do Joyce a favor and fix a bunch of his spelling errors, which turned out to be puns in the Shakespearean tradition... Joyce re-edited the text for a second edition, found some of his own errors, fixed those, revised some passages, added some new errors, etc. Things continued like this for several years. Today, academics spend their lives studying this book, but can't at all agree on precisely what ordered collection for sentences constitutes the actual printed text. Cheers!
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