Pacts

Listening Looks

These are the covers for some music CDRs I've made over the years. I've created a separate page to house sample songs and some information about the projects. To get an earful, visit the "Homespun Music" tab at the top of the page.

Monoscopic

Monoscopic.2012. This booklet is a meditation (just barely) on the pros and cons of having only a single point of view. It was included in Eyelevel Gallery's Reshelving Initiative 5.

B&W laser print, 6 pp., 8.5 x 5.25"

Download a PDF of Monoscopic

The dice never land

Carpe Libris

Like a lot of people who buy used books, I’ve managed to accumulate quite a few that feature the former owners' names.  Most often, people write their names on the endpapers. Sometimes a name will be stamped, printed on an address-style label, or will be featured on a decorative bookplate.  Below is a list of titles with the names of people who, at one time, owned a book that I now possess. (I'll update this list with new acquisitions as needed.) 

 This post is kind of a public announcement and acknowledgement to the former owners (or their ghosts). Obviously this is not as serious as the obligatory adoption notices you'll find in the classified section of a newspaper, but that practice keeps coming to mind. Anyway, I’m grateful that these works are part of my collection, and I’m happy I have some common interests with a slew of specific strangers, however remote.

John Ashbery, Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Albert Tsugawa

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Robert W. Paisley

Bergson/Merdith, Comedy, Caroline Trapp

Yves Bonnefoy, Early Poems, Pour Elisa from Gareth

Yves Bonnefoy, Poems 1959 to 1975, Harry M. Sartain (?)

Henri Bosco, Farm Theotime, To Violet from Elizabeth

Dino Buzzati, Tartar Steppe, The Smiths

Bernard Cache, Earth Moves, Marc

Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, Graham Shearing 89

Robert Creeley, Selected Poems, To Debbie from Steven

e.e. cummings, Collected Poems, Rosemary F. Levehter

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Cruso, Allen C. Kaetzky

William Faulkner, The Hamlet, Suzanne

Gustav Flaubert, Temptation of S. Anthony, James D. O’brien

James, G. Frazer, Golden Bough, George W. Waters

Hamlin Garland, Main Traveled Roads, Peter S. Marlee (?)

J. W. Goethe, Elective Affinities, Max Jones

William Golding, The Spire, Amy Simons

Julian Green, The Dark Journey, Sadie Katz New York City

Martin Heidegger, Language, Thought, and Poetry, Elmore J. De Grange

Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, Juania Lee Davis

Franz Kafka, Amerika, Richard B. Vowels Vice Council of the United States

Franz Kafka, The Trial,  Phelps/a. Rehner/T. Bozik/M. Carlsen

D. H. Lawrence, Pansies, Clint Harvic

D. H. Lawrence, Selected Poems, R.K.

D. H. Lawrence, Viking Portable, Jim McDowell

Jakov Lind, Soul of Wood, G. Marloy Gaspar (?)

Stephane Mallarme, Poems of Mallarme, I. Cearrs 1955 (?)

Herman Melville, Confidence Man, Danny C. Gunnels

Herman Melville, Israel Potter, Edwin T. Moul

Herman Melville, Mardi, Eva Felicite Middlebury

Herman Melville, Selected Writings, Robert W. Sauder

W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology, Christine Versor (?)

Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, Brian C. Riley

Benjamin Peret, From the Hidden Storehouse, Jim Tnivgham (?)

St. John Perse, Eclogues, Robert Strew (?)

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, Mary E. Schawrtz

Ezra Pound, Selected Cantos, di Piro 775 5125

Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, Mike Timmins

Ranier Maria Rilke, Stories of God, Manny Theiner

Jules Supervielle, Selected Writings, To Tim from Robert

Nathanial West, Miss Lonely Hearts and Day of the Locust, Amy Slavin

School of Medicine

School of Medicine (Bridge), 2012, Ink on paper, 8 x 10."

I make up a lot of songs. I like some of them enough that I record them in my basement (electric guitar and yelling) and put them on CDRs.  When I'm not too self conscious about the whole enterprise, I'll give them to friends to listen to.

I often make drawings for (of?, in response to?, in spite of?) these songs. Here is one from a group of songs I've been working on. If asked what the song's about (who would ask such a thing?), I'd say team sports and ineffectual shamans.

I'll try (I don't know how hard) to post some recordings down the road.

lip to rest on

A Lip To Rest On. 2009.  Drawings and daydreams unfold (and close up, and unfold again, and again) in this homage to an architectural oddity I discovered in the closet of an apartment I used to live in.
B&W photocopy, 7 pp., stapled ,6 x 4.5”

This booklet can be found at Printed Matter.

...up a storm

I go through some periodic bursts of activity where I make a lot of scribbled drawings.  More or less provisional picture-making marks swirl together with verbal fragments.What's happening here is I'm daydreaming with a pen in my hand trying to "work out" some jumpy thoughts around a given observation or memory. These source observations or memories usually haven't gelled into anything too unified so the drawings that arise are a record of what's available to me (what's present?) before any highly unified contour or syntax can set in--pretty much standard early 20th-century automatism.

Making Way

I've posted three projects that are very old. In Charm's Way, Likewise, and Dislikewise. This isn't to establish a chronology, really. You see, I need to clear my decks and these have some qualities that I'm still excited about, despite their age. Unlike other older work, when I pull these out of their storage boxes, I'm not overcome by embarrassment. I get contemplative and giggle.That's a pair of sensations that I wish would team up more often.

In Charm's Way

Likewise

Dislikewise

Dislikewise, 2004, photocopy booklet

One has to start somewhere, nowhere.