#uxudo

[litmuspress]

Collaboration

Uxudo was published as a joint project by Berkeley-based Tuumba Press and Oakland-based O Books. 

From 1976 to 1984, Lyn Hejinian produced 50 handset letterpress chapbooks at Tuumba press. In 1999, Tuumba was revived to realize Anne Tardos’ Uxudo in collaboration with Leslie Scalapino’s O Books. Since the mid 1980s, O Books has been publishing innovative works in poetry, drama, and essay; today, O Books is managed by Litmus Press. 

That a precise attention to detail is shared by both Tuumba and O Books is evident in the relationship of image to text in Uxudo. The images in the book, stills from a videotape of the author’s family and friends, work in conjunction with the text to create a document of love and closeness articulated in various languages. 

In “Love,” Tardos writes, 

Il y’a longtemps que je t’aime, Jamais je ne t’oublierai.

No translation is offered for this particular passage. Instead, the opposing page features a girl’s face with the same text situated above her head in a different typeface from that on the preceding page. In a repeated, if negated, future, the text insists on love’s potency. The speaker reminds the reader that memory is rendered superfluous as long as we continue dwelling with those we love. 

I love that the collaboratively-published text is an embodiment of the relationships not only between author and publisher, but also between publishers. In this increasingly-globalized world, the codex reminds us of some of the functions of location and physical proximity. It reminds us of the incalculable value of friendship. 

[litmuspress]

Uxudo / Cyborg Exit

“I found the word ‘uxudo’ on a page of output errors of my printer. It could have been a random occurrence of letters appearing next to each other, or maybe it is part of an intramachine command not meant for human eyes. I have a collection of such mono prints, mostly of graphics, that printed out in a very special way and that I could never reproduce. ‘Uxudo,’ then, is a gift from the technology I use.”

Uxudo spit out from the printer. Uxudo—which my 2010s computer keeps autocorrecting to oxide, refusing the chance that could spit out a neologism—whose prefix calls to mind an exodus or “out of” like the cousin which which it makes a minimal pair, -ex.

And then I look in the dictionary and find that uxorial means “of or relating to a wife.” So I wonder what the technology was trying to say about belonging. And relationships. And property.

From “ArbeitsAmeisen”:

Word of a petite pleaser’s
 slippery secret of sensational sex. 

The light of a single galaxy.

A pair of lungs.

From the consciousness which is liminal, Tardos extricates this light of a not necessarily smooth transition between languages. ArbeitsAmeisen, which translates to WorkAnts, embodies the “ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit” that Donna Haraway writes about in her Cyborg Manifesto. In the glide across the two panels from one facet to another facilitated by translation, the slippery sex is not necessarily about a particular relationship. Or a specific pair of lungs. And yet that the sex and the lungs are both personal is shown in the image beneath the poems — an image Tardos added from, like the rest of the images in the book (except for a clip-art dog on page 74), one videotape taken of friends and family in Vienna in June 1997, after the ultimate exit of the author’s mother. Is it too far out to say that Uxudo is communicating between worlds? 

[litmuspress]

On musicality and listening in the polyphonic text

On PennSound, a recording of songs from Uxudo in flute, violin, and soprano highlights the attention to sound in the text in Three Cycles. Polylingual, polyphonic. Does the flute resonate like a long a? Does the violin draw attention to the lax attitude of certain short i’s? Textures play off of each other in a melange of vowels and consonants, traversing from lexicon to melody to an internarrative space between media.

“Soft stimulation Thursday, sanctuary birthday, rationalize—”

Rationalize, recognize. The timing of the piece—for the pieces act together as one piece; out loud, the songs blend together as the languages do on the page—is mediated by the space between sounds the way meaning is controlled by grammatical nuts and bolts. Sonic repetition creates a type of security one goes to meaning for, consciously or not.

Language is always a collective space. In this linguistic object, all hope is not lost. Tardos’ wordplay, especially in conjunction with the leaps of tones and pitch from the musicians, creates a sense of optimism. Language is a fun place. It is also tenacious. I am noticing what effect the instruments and language have together on my body. I feel a release.