In(ter)ventionists posing at Banff

By jso | Published: 1 March 2010
3 of 3 posts in 1-​Minute Movies

On the second day at Banff, 20 Feb 2010, the In(ter)ventionists took a moment out of their delib­er­a­tions to stand in the sunlight. This one-​minute movie is sharper than the others on this blog, so maybe I’m getting it!

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Launch your own blog

By jso | Published: 20 February 2010

Launch day: Banff Centre.
The first entry in this blog, which goes public today, during the lunch break at the in(ter)ventions confer­ence (paren­the­ses supplied by the Banff Centre), was writ­ten on the 24th of Janu­ary; several entries have been added since then during a month of tweak­ing and trying to under­stand the process of writ­ing back­wards, which seems to be what the blog form requires, as new posts can be seen to displace exist­ing posts rather than adding to them—an illu­sion of course, but quite convinc­ing; the result­ing uneasi­ness is what you feel when you send an email apol­o­giz­ing for remarks in the email you sent moments earlier and shouldn’t have; now the apol­ogy will arrive before the insult.

So this post, which appears at the top of the stack (for the time being) is the last in a sequence of posts writ­ten before the blog goes public, in only a few more minutes.

Shortly before lunch inter­vened at in(ter)ventions, Charles Bern­stein read a poem with Saska­toon in it; Steve Toma­sula demon­strated the work­ings of TOC: A New Media Novel, and Erin Moure spoke eloquently about the neces­sity and the impos­si­b­lity of bring­ing voices from else­where into “the context we call Canada” — ques­tions that inform her new book, O Resp­lan­dor, just published by Anansi.

I must arise and go now, and go to luncheon amongst, between, the silent, the impon­der­able, the ponder­ous, the impos­si­bly Rocky, the falli­bly pathetic, the totally adver­bial, the scene, the scenery, the scene, the scenery, the prepon­der­ous virtues of the natural.
Welcome to this blog.

Adden­dum: Every­one remem­bers Saska­toon from the movie Atlantic City, but how many remem­ber Woody Herman singing out “Don’t be a goon from Saska­toon,” as he and the Swingin’ Herd wail their way into “Get Your Boots Laced, Papa?”

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Ten thousand, a million copies in America

By jso | Published: 14 February 2010
Paulo Coehlo, whose books had sold in excess of 65 million copies before one of them fell into my hands in a used book store in the spring of 2009, is described in the biograph­i­cal note as having suffered torture at the hands of the para­mil­i­tary in Brazil in the late nineteen-​sixties, an expe­ri­ence that “affected him profoundly,” and caused him to exchange the life of an activist for the life of “an exec­u­tive in the music indus­try.” Later in his life, accord­ing to the same biograph­i­cal note, Sr. Coehlo met a man in Amster­dam whom he had seen in a dream. In his intro­duc­tion to the book that fell into my hands, Sr. Coehlo advises his read­ers to pursue their dreams as he has pursued his. One of his dreams, perhaps his main dream, ceased prop­erly to be a dream when he discov­ered that it “little by little, was becom­ing real­ity” as one of his books sold “ten, a thou­sand, a million copies in America.”

Some 65 million copies of the works of Paulo Coehlo were already circu­lat­ing in 150 coun­tries and 60 languages when a pre-​owned copy of The Alchemist announc­ing these facts in the cover appeared last summer in one of the few great 2nd-​hand book­store left in Vancou­ver (Biblio­phile on Commer­cial Drive), which is where I came to know of its cele­brated author — a man, accord­ing to the note in the back of the book, whose suffer­ing at the hands of para­mil­i­tary goons in Brazil in the nineteen-​sixties had “affected him profoundly,” and led him to take up the life of an “exec­u­tive in the music indus­try.” He became a writer, the note-​writer goes on to say, after meet­ing a man in a cafe in Amster­dam whom he had seen months earlier “in a vision.”

In his intro­duc­tion to The Alchemist, Sr. Coehlo commands his read­ers to pursue their dreams as he has pursued his own. One might suggest that at least one of his dreams, the only one alluded to in his intro­duc­tion to The Alchemist, ceased prop­erly to be a dream when, as he writes, “little by little, my dream was becom­ing real­ity,” and his books began to sell “ten, a thou­sand, a million copies in America.”

Is such not always the destiny of dreams? — to be erased by reality.

The “essence” of Coehlo’s work rendered in a few sentences can be found in an arti­cle in the Busi­ness Stan­dard by Nilan­jana S Roy of New Delhi.

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Know when it's over

By jso | Published: 10 February 2010
4 of 4 posts in 1972

After seven and a half years, and 117 issues, we put the 3-​cent maga­zine to rest with a final monster edition of 24 pages, a page length intended to satisfy outstand­ing subsrip­tion balances of two years and more. It was dated 20 Janu­ary 1980, Sunday of the same week that smug­glers were discov­ered conceal­ing Mercedes Benzes in the desert sands of Arabia and that “Why Should the Father Bother” hit number 18 on the Born Again Hit Parade; the week the Cana­dian Civil Defense Comman­der told the nation there was noth­ing to fear from a nuclear attack “as long as they don’t attack at night, or by surprise.” We put these inter­est­ing facts into the farewell essay because they had come to our atten­tion while it was being composed: 3-​Cent Pulp was noth­ing if not aleatory: the pure prod­uct of chance oper­a­tions. “We are getting old,” I wrote, in 1980, when I had achieved the advanced age of 33, “and lack­ing a bureau­cracy with its feck­less capac­ity for regen­er­a­tion, we want to have a rest and dry out for a while.”

The seven­ties had ended.

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Do the math

By jso | Published: 10 February 2010
3 of 4 posts in 1972

By our own calcu­la­tions we had in the course of seven years spent $65,000 in the Marble Arch beer parlour, the equiv­a­lent of 130,000 glasses of beer. We had printed a total of 117,000 copies of the maga­zine, half a million pages of liter­ary writ­ing, we had perfected the finan­cial manage­ment tech­nique that we named 100% Loss Financ­ing. And we had launched the 3-​Day Novel Contest, which is still thriv­ing today, in its pages.

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The Extensible Moment

By jso | Published: 4 February 2010
2 of 3 posts in 1-​Minute Movies

The digi­tal camera offers the photog­ra­pher a new dimen­sion in image-making–we might call it the exten­si­ble moment. Photographs made using film tech­nol­ogy can be said (as John Berger does) to cut across time. The minute-​long photographs that result from hold­ing a digi­tal camera in one posi­tion in movie mode embrace or include time as motion while retain­ing the lure of the photo­graphic glimpse. Now explic­itly, for the first time, narra­tive begins to intrude in the photograph, to emerge from the frame, and, with repeated view­ing, elements of “plot” can be discov­ered in the “instan­ta­neous,” along with impu­dent traces of upstart alle­gory and fable.

My first 1-​minute movie was filmed near Studio C103 at the inter­sec­tion of Commer­cial Drive, Commer­cial Street, 18th Avenue, Find­lay Street and Victo­ria Diver­sion (a compli­cated corner in Vancou­ver). I held the camera on a mono­pod, and watched the timer count down in the corner of the viewfinder. I let the “shot” continue for 2 minutes or so, and later trimmed out the minute presented here. The image is brighter and sharper in the orig­i­nal: it has soft­ened up in the tran­si­tion to Youtube. This is no doubt reme­di­a­ble, once I learn more about what I’m trying to do here.

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Make a one-minute movie

By jso | Published: 26 January 2010
1 of 3 posts in 1-​Minute Movies

If you hold a digi­tal camera steady for a minute or so (in Movie mode), you get a still photo­graph that regis­ters move­ment. Photog­ra­phers have been regis­ter­ing move­ment for the last hundred years by exploit­ing blurs and streaks. Now they can get the detail and the move­ment at the same time, or during the same time–and time itself becomes a dimen­sion of the photograph.

The images displayed below are part of the Geist One-​Minute Movie Mapping Project (soon to be launched) at geist​.com.

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Use the technology

By jso | Published: 24 January 2010
2 of 4 posts in 1972

We used a big rubber stamp and a pad of red ink to print the logo by hand on each copy of 3-​Cent Pulp, and even­tu­ally employed an machine that used silk-​screen sten­cils (prepared on a type­writer and then stacked in a hopper) to address copies of the maga­zine to subscribers. By 1980, we had published 107 issues and had been banned twice from the Vancou­ver Public Library and we were two and half years behind in the publish­ing schedule.


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Launch a 3-cent magazine

By jso | Published: 24 January 2010
1 of 4 posts in 1972

The idea for a four-​page maga­zine emerged on an other­wise idle after­noon in 1972, in a 3rd floor walkup on Pender Street in Vancou­ver across the alley from the Marble Arch beer parlour, where Pulp Press Book Publish­ers had been in oper­a­tion for about two months. One of us had discov­ered that you could get 5,000 words onto an 8.5 by 11 inch piece of paper in 5 point type if you weren’t too picky about margins. The trick was in fold­ing the sheet over to make leaves, and then we hit on the idea of charg­ing three cents a copy and consign­ing the whole price to book­stores that would agree to carry it on their front counter.

We chose three cents as the cover price because there was a tax on books at that time so anyone making a purchase in a book­store always had a few pennies in their change, and we announced a biweekly publish­ing sched­ule because we were too young to know better, and a subscrip­tion price of $10 a year, which repre­sented to us, as we put it in our subscrip­tion offers, a consid­er­able saving over the cover price of three cents a copy.

Within a year we had 250 subscribers and a corre­spond­ing budget of $2500; editors and contrib­u­tors were never paid and neither was the rent or the phone or the bill for the telex rolls we used for corre­spon­dence, all of which came from other sources.

We printed 1000 copies and shipped them out in bundles to book­stores across the coun­try and engaged the post office on the ques­tion of 2nd class mail priv­i­leges, which at that time extended only to news­pa­pers; for six months the most eloquent writer among us, a poet and a song­writer of some renown, typed out a series of letters on one of the telex rolls–the telex roll came with carbon paper built in, so copies of all corre­spon­dence from that period has been preserved in bull­dog clips that we hung on the wall in an ever-​lengthening row.

In the end the eloquent poet won the argu­ment with the post office by prov­ing beyond doubt that our three-​cent maga­zine was indeed a news­pa­per, with the result that 3-​Cent Pulp was the first liter­ary maga­zine in the coun­try to qual­ify for the postal subsidy.

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