Books

An important inspiration for this The Social Life of the Book series, Matthew Stadler is relentlessly challenging preconceived ideas of publishing and the book, in his own writing, lectures and publishing activities. In this new essay, he’s examining the political dimensions of the book, through an unexpected, yet fertile, comparison between today and the invention of the space of the page in the Middle Ages. His praise for the dynamics of the “marginal” introduces a compelling discussion on authorship, the market, and the reader’s agency – putting the emphasis on the democratic openness of the book.

An artist, a musician, and a publisher based in Brooklyn, NY, James Hoff tells here how books got him into art. He considers the complex and stimulating fabric of anecdotes, gossip, secrets, that are shared around artists’ publications, and, further, the role of printed matter in the building of an artist’s community. The essay pays homage to Edit DeAk through its title, and also comprises some pictures of book covers and LP sleeves from Hoff’s collection.

SALT.’s tenth issue is themed ‘Glossolalia’. Glossolalia means to speak in tongues, to speak in a language misunderstood, perhaps dead, perhaps not yet existent: a latent language waiting to be translated. It is in this almost-silence that we have found our submissions to reside, often emerging from a feeling of isolation or alienation where a will to speak reverberates but has not yet come to the fore.

Contributors: Sabeen Chaudhry, Gabriella Hirst, Anna Ilsley, Yessica Klein, Carlos Kong, Jessie Makinson, Harriet Middleton Baker, Jessa Mockridge, Penny Newell, Hannah Regel, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Thea Smith, Jala Wahid, Evie Ward, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Charlott Weise, Nicola Woodham.

The book includes Mendieta's first published comprehensive filmography resulting from three years of collaborative research conducted by the Estate of Ana Mendieta and the University of Minnesota as well as original essays by John Perreault, Michael Rush, Rachel Weiss, Lynn Lukkas, Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, and Laura Wertheim Joseph.

The first book-length treatment of Mendieta's moving-image practice, Covered in Time and History aims to locate her films centrally within her larger oeuvre and at the forefront of the multidisciplinary shifts that characterized visual arts practice during the 1970s.

A landmark work of lesbian literature, Lover was first published in 1972 by the now-defunct feminist press, Daughters, to tremendous critical acclaim. Emerging out of the women's and gay liberation movement alongside the early work of such writers as Rita Mae Brown and Jill Johnston, the novel features fictional and historical characters who run the gamut from saint to poor white trash, and who are by turn vulnerable and strong. One of the finest examples of early post-Stonewall lesbian fiction, Lover is poised to entice a new generation of readers.

Vale Ave, Latin for "Farewell, Hail", is a hymn to Eros that unfolds as a gorgeous palimpsest of eternal recurrence and reincarnation, charting the course of two lovers who each seek the other across cultures, myths, and centuries. Vale Ave is alchemical, "mystery and portent, yes, but at the same time," as H. D. writes, "there is Resurrection and the hope of Paradise."

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions is a beloved queer utopian text written by Larry Mitchell with lush illustrations by Ned Asta, published by Calamus Press in 1977. Part-fable, part-manifesto, the book takes place in Ramrod, an empire in decline, and introduces us to the communities of the faggots, the women, the queens, the queer men, and the women who love women who are surviving the ways and world of men.

This new edition will feature essays from performance artist Morgan Bassichis, who adapted the book to music with TM Davy in 2017 for a performance at the New Museum, and activist filmmaker Tourmaline.

In this edited collection of work spanning more than 20 years, Silvia Federici provides a detailed history and critique of the politics of the commons from a feminist perspective. In her clear and combative voice, Federici provides readers with an analysis of some of the key issues in contemporary thinking on this subject. Drawing on rich historical research, she maps the connections between the previous forms of enclosure that occurred with the birth of capitalism and the destruction of the commons and the "new enclosures" at the heart of the present phase of global capitalist accumulation.

Considering the commons from a feminist perspective, this collection argues that women and reproductive work are crucial to both our economic survival and the construction of a world free from the capitalist hierarchies. Federici is clear that the commons should not be understood as happy islands in a sea of exploitative relations—but rather autonomous spaces from which to challenge the existing organization of life and labor.

Bringing together both known and previously unseen works of film and video, installations, works on paper, and material from her archive, this volume addresses critical themes that appear throughout Hammer's work, including sensation and intimacy, lesbian representation, and the maintenance of illness, in addition to exploring the artist's relationship to experimental queer cinema, feminist history, and environmental activism. Featuring a wide range of responses, from personal anecdotes to academic analysis and poetic interpretation, this volume highlights the resonating impact of Hammer's artistic narrative across cinema studies, art history, queer theory, and feminist thought.

In Sonic Agency, Brandon LaBelle sets out to engage contemporary social and political crises by way of sonic thought and imagination. He divides sound's functions into four figures of resistance—the invisible, the overheard, the itinerant, and the weak—and argues for their role in creating alternative "unlikely publics" in which to foster mutuality and dissent. He highlights existing sonic cultures and social initiatives that utilize or deploy sound and listening to address conflict, and points to their work as models for a wider movement. He considers issues of disappearance and hidden culture, nonviolence and noise, creole poetics, and networked life, aiming to unsettle traditional notions of the "space of appearance" as the condition for political action and survival.

QUICKSAND was written to be an opera libretto. But it was written in the form of a novel....I am devoted to "mystery" stories. I read them one after another, mostly two or three times. Some of the best writers today are writing in this form. So, I thought that I would try to make an opera libretto from a mystery story, told verbatim. That is, the libretto and the novel would be the same: no scenes moved around or actions adapted to the proportions of a libretto, just tell the story the way it's told in the novel. But first I needed a novel....So that meant I had to write a mystery novel. Where do you start? The answer is: I always need a 'location' to be inspired to tell a story. Everything in the novel is true, except for a lot of the facts.

Recyclopedia shows the extraordinary development of Harryette Mullen's career, in her books Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge, all originally published in the 1990s and now available again to new readers. These prose poems and lyrics bring us into collision with the language of fashion and femininity, advertising and the supermarket, the blues and traditional lyric poetry. Recyclopedia is a major gathering of work by one of the most exciting and innovative poets writing in America today.

"I get this pinwheel relationship to wisdom & history when I read Simone White. I'm in her dream, but it's a remarkable solidly packed one informed by the quotidian rarity of for instance a prose disquisition on lotion and skin and haircare especially in winter. Like Dana Ward's, her work sends me searching. Like what part of speech is here.

As I'm wondering Simone sometimes exits first, and I even feel that a real piece of her poem is adamantly not here and that is her privacy, her power & her skill so what kind of quest is it, this beautiful complex & alive work. Here's my best guess.

OF BEING DISPERSED is an ur text of the fourth wave of feminism which we come to realize is ocean and women are now standing on it and amidst this clatter of voices Simone White walks."—Eileen Myles

Deep Listening is a practice created by composer Pauline Oliveros in order to enhance her own as well as other's listening skills. She teaches this practice worldwide in workshops, retreats and in her ground breaking Deep Listening classes at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Mills College. Deep Listening practice is accessible to anyone with an interest in listening. Undergraduates with no musical training benefit from the practices and successfully engage in creative sound projects. Many report life changing effects from participating in the Deep Listening classes and retreats.

Same old (new book), featuring some cut up drawings because sometimes you just gotta. ~6x9cm ~400p , Glued by hand with shiny cover.

This Container is an open host for texts and documents that come through and alongside choreographic thinking. It’s a recipe, but not for eating; a sequel to everything up until now; horizontal tourism; many feminists’ elegy; opinions weakened with time; an inaudible lesbian opera; a future ballet manifesto; dances and desires; cheating discipline; purposely misplaced; only poems; statements and speculations; a diagram for artistic research; and an incomplete encyclopaedia of random knowledge and dear dances. This Container takes shape according to its content, without organising through prominent narratives or figures, this container wants to weave, leaving holes and threads between the forms of writing.

More info at http://www.thiscontainer.com

The Poeticians is a publication of the performance of the collection of clothes and poetry called Writing Wounds To Heal by Swedish choreographer Pontus Pettersson. Made in velvet silk with the poetry burned out in the fabric exposing the texts, the poetry exposes both itself and the skin of the performer. Throughout the durational piece the performers are doing Pontus Petterssons cat practice and is one of the main ingredients of the project as well as the clothes/poems. The Poeticans is also a choreo-curational event that hosts different choreographic proposals inside of it. It is seen as module or installation where pieces, objects, performers can be inserted rather than a performance that executes and performs the same over and over. It was created as an extension of Pontus interest in poetry and choreography where hospitality and proximity is seen as key concepts in the development and execution of the event.

The Wind Escorts The Sky (Weld 2017) is the second part of Pontus Pettersson’s project Poetic Procedures. The project and performance looks into the relation between dance and poetry and how these practices can unfold in the situation of a dance class and with the case of The wind Escorts The Sky; a stage performance. This is the publication that came out of that practice.

Writing Wounds to Heal (2015) is a project that uses clothes and photography to express poetry in between the field of clothes, choreography, photography, performance and documentation led by Pontus Pettersson.

This delectable book collects the rococo prose of Lisa Robertson. There are essays - many originally published as catalogue texts by art galleries - on the syntax of the suburban home, Vancouver fountains, Value Village, the joy of synthetics, scaffolding and the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. It makes for one of the most intriguing books you'll ever read.

Lisa Robertson writes poems that mine the past, its ideas, its personages, its syntax, to construct a lexicon of the future. Her poems both court and cuckold subjectivity by unmasking its fundament of sex and hesitancy, the coil of doubt in its certitude. Reading her laments and utopias, we realize that language, whiplike, casts ahead of itself a fortuitous form. The form brims here pleasurably with dogs, movie stars, broths, painting's detritus, Latin and pillage.

Erudite and startling, the poems in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.

Unsorcery composes and explores ways of sorcery that can eventually surpass or undo some of the contemporary realities and subjectivities. It is an Artworld involved in a productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thought. Unsorcery is an environment in which Alina Popa and Florin Flueras were working together, each following their own path, doing their own practices, texts and performances around the concepts: Life Programing, Artworlds, Black Hyperbox, Second Body, Dead Thinking, End Dream.

I I C / The Contract / Ellipsis / Delbaram / Booos / U OK?

A series of choreopoems by Eric Peter. Published at the occasion of 'Assemblages of Intimacy' a group exhibition in a Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam in 2018.