#v. vale

[postpunkindustrial]

Re/Search

Here is a (nearly) complete collection of Re/Search books mostly on PDF.

Enjoy the Ballard. Learn about early Industrial culture. Be baffled by their attempt to cash in on the Swing trend of the early 2,000's. Be annoyed that they were partially responsible for extending Boyd Rice's career by decades. Marvel at once was and might possibly still be transgressive.

You can get it all from my Google Drive HERE

[cyborgsmanifest]

[gotankgo]

[sdpubliclibrary]

Search & Destroy

Issue no.10

[publiccollectors]

This is just about the only kind of celebrity endorsement Public Collectors would want for its work. Here's V. Vale from the legendary RE/Search Publications with a copy of the latest issue of Library Excavations. I had the great pleasure of visiting Vale and his wife Marian in San Francisco last week. Always a huge pleasure to talk to this great thinker, whose books have been so important to the creative development of so many people for so long.

[angehaufte-mutationen]

[rustbeltjessie]

Some things I’ve read recently--

Book of Mutter, by Kate Zambreno A collage-like, hybrid work (part memoir, part art criticism, part family history, part fracturing), detailing the aftermath of her mother’s death. Absolutely devastating. “I find out my grandmother Mary’s daughter too, an Aunt Anna, was institutionalized for most of her life. The black-and-white photograph hanging up in the upstairs hallway of my parents’ house. My paternal great-grandparents standing sternly. Little boys, my grandfather and great-uncle, hold a large American flag over their laps. The baby is your Aunt Anna, my father tells me. It wasn’t a secret. None of this was secret. My father insists. Beginning in the 1940s Anna moved around from private to public institutions and spent the last years of her life in the infamous state institution at Elgin. It really isn’t something the family is happy talking about. My aunt writes me in an email. (My grandmother is still alive.) She still however is, like my father, reticent yet forthcoming, still fulfilling the role of the family historians. My father tells me, warily, that as far as he knew she was difficult. She couldn’t concentrate, he was told. She couldn’t learn. She was always running away. One always had to watch her. You will always be spinning your wheels. The rebellious daughter hidden in the cellar. The fast daughter or slow one. Her history exiled into silence.”

Hip Hop Don’t Stop #9, by Tyler Debelak Nice little text-heavy perzine. Thoughts on thoughts, the meaning(lessness) of life, and difficulty communicating.

The Lonely Hearts Hotel, by Heather O’Neill A sweet and whimsical, dark and brutal and strange novel about love and crime and everything else. I honestly don’t even quite know how to describe it, but I highly recommend it. (I have seen reviews where it is compared to The Night Circus. Do not be fooled--it is much better than The Night Circus.) “The Mother Superior was of the opinion that happiness always led to tragedy. She had no idea why people valued the emotion and pursued it. It was nothing more than a temporary state of inebriation that led a person to make the worst decisions. There wasn’t a person who had experienced life on this planet who wouldn’t admit that sin and happiness were bedmates, were inextricably linked. Were there ever any two states of being that were so attracted to each other, were always seeking out each other’s company? They were a match made not in heaven but in hell.”

Object Lessons, by Eavan Boland Another sort of hybrid text, combining thoughts about the craft of poetry with memoir, and the history of poetry in Ireland. It gave me a lot to mull over, and the prose is lush and chock-full of imagery (you can tell that a poet wrote it.) “Now it begins. The first of these powerful, distracting voices comes to her. For argument’s sake, I will call it the Romantic Heresy. It comes to her as a whisper, an insinuation. What she wants to do is write about the laburnum, the heat of the child, common human love—the mesh of these things. But where, says the voice in her ear, is the interest in all this? How are you going to write a poem out of these plain Janes, these snips and threads of an ordinary day? Now, the voice continues, listen to me, and I will show you how to make all this poetic. A shade here, a nuance there, a degree of distance, a lilt of complaint, and all will be well. The woman hesitates. Suddenly the moment that seemed to her potent and emblematic and true appears commonplace, beyond the pale of art. She is shaken. And there I will leave her, with her doubts and fears, so as to look more closely at what it is that has come between her and the courage of that moment. *** The Romantic Heresy, as I have chosen to call it, is not romanticism proper, although it is related to it. “Before Wordsworth,” writes Lionel Trilling, “poetry had a subject. After Wordsworth its prevalent subject was the poet’s own subjectivity.” This shift in perception was responsible for much that was fresh and revitalizing in nineteenth-century poetry. But it was also responsible for the declension of poetry into self-consciousness, self-invention. This type of debased romanticism is rooted in a powerful, subliminal suggestion that poets are distinctive not so much because they write poetry as because in order to do so, they have poetic feelings about poetic experiences. That there is a category of experience and expression which is poetic and all the rest is ordinary and therefore inadmissible. In this way a damaging division is made between the perception of what is poetic on the one hand and, on the other, what is merely human. Out of this emerges the aesthetic which suggests that in order to convert the second into the first, you must romanticize it.”

Siren School, by Isabella Rotman Hilarious and spot-on comic full of mermaids and misandry.

Terminal Punk: Punk Philosophy, by V. Vale Occasionally I get tired of punk and think I’m over it, and then I read something like this and get all fired up about it again, and realize that I’ll never be able to give it up fully. In this zine, V. Vale discusses the origins of punk, the philosophy behind it, and the ways in which it is still relevant. I didn’t agree 100% with every single thing, perhaps because I am from a different generation of punx, but the cool thing is, V. Vale encourages discussion and dissent. This is definitely not one of those “I am the absolute Authority on punk and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong” things. “Rules To Live By - by V. Vale 1) Develop all your Talents (Potentials, including the ones you don’t yet know you have). Create in all the media you can! 2) Silence, Solitude, Skepticism. Keep a Diary! Record Ideas! 3) Work is everything (but, No Separation Between Work & Play. Note That Silent Leisure Time is the Mother of Ideas) 4) Humor Uber Alles (maybe that should be Number One) 5) Be Diligent & Perfectionist (but Finish Projects) 6) Search for Weird; Search for Strange (Be a “Seeker”) 7) Stay Curious and Driven (& Persevere for the Long Haul) 8) Your Desires Magnetize the Universe 9) Be open to chance (& Be a Flaneur once in a while) 10) The machinery for dreaming and the imagination was not implanted in your brain for nothing. (Keep a dream diary!) 11) Minimize Your Addictions (You’ll Get More Done) 12) See everyone before they see you!”

[sdpubliclibrary]

Search & Destroy

Issue no.4