Jaded Ibis Productions, Inc.

Why This Now? Introduction by Debra Di Blasi

What do we talk about when we talk about conceptual writing?

Wait.

Do we talk about conceptual writing?

And who's we?

This website is dedicated to writing that's not easily categorized.  Writing that's too infrequently published.  Writing that's concerned with the concept behind the "product" — whether fiction, poetry, nonfiction or a multitude of cross-dressing genres. Writing that explores the how it's done and the why it's done, not just the It's done! 

Conceptual writing discloses the way we live now, our precarious existence illuminated in conscious choices made by writers hoping to push the act of writing beyond preconceived boundaries. 

Who built those stone walls, anyway, and why don't we shiver in their moldering shadows?   

A sense of risk-taking and fearless exploration exists in the visual arts that is sadly lacking in literature today.  American fiction, for example, is still closely allied with 19th Century naturalism and far less interested in the possibilities of form than are the visual arts.  Readers claim to crave "reality" but what they really want is some perverted notion of the real: tidy, facile and wholly comfortable. 

It’s increasingly difficult to get published if a writer's literary investigations occur far from the mainstream center, which has as much to do with the politics of our times as with America's craving for passive entertainment.  Well, they're entwined, aren't they? Apathy and politics:  Intoxicated lovers who think it's grass they're strolling upon, not corpses.

Conceptual writing is necessary if we are to keep from drowning in our own excreta.  As Goethe said: "The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation."

Read the Review feature of conceptual writers' art, interviews and dialogs now. (Download times will vary. Requires Acrobat Reader)

If Fiction Isn't Real: cover art by Jirí Cêch
Download review_cover.pdf

The Label-less-ists by Debra Di Blasi
Download labellessists_final.pdf

Ink by Maria and Steve Tomasula
Download tomasulas_final.pdf 

Literarchiture by Scott Helmes
Download scott_helmes.pdf

There Are No Rules: An Interview with  Eduardo Kac
Download kac_page.pdf

She Taking Her Space by Alexandra Grant & Michael Joyce
Download joyce_and_grant.pdf

Simple Math by Kass Fleisher and Joe Amato
Download amatofleisher_simplemath.pdf

We Have Nothing to Fear But August Highland Himself ...um...Herself?
Download highland_page.pdf

Ainsworth by Jen Maxted
Download maxted2005.pdf

Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
Download water.pdf

 

__________________
Grateful acknowledgement goes to Review and its publisher and editor, Mike Miller, and managing editor, Marcus Cain, for allowing me to guest edit a special feature on conceptual writing for the March 2005 issue.  The task connected me with great writers and their great writing.  And to them, too, I'm indebted, for having taken increasingly valuable time to create and discuss conceptual writing for Review and at the concurrent exhibition at Van Ackeren Gallery at Rockhurst University.  Of course, I'm thankful to Steve Tomasula at Notre Dame University who organized the first &NOW Festival of Writing as a Conceptual Art that introduced me to some of these writers and provided a physical space and real time to share ideas regarding the art form.  Long live the idea!  Long live the idea of the idea!

Jirí Cêch interviews Debra Di Blasi About Conceptual Writing
Download DebraInterviewweb.mov

Surgery #151 from The Collector, a multimedia novel
Download Surgery151web.mov

Click here for more audio, video, and visual art.

about Debra Di Blasi
Debra Di Blasi won the 2003 James C. McCormick Fellowship in Fiction from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, and her short story Sparrows was nominated for a 2004 Pushcart Prize.  Books include the novellas Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions), winner of the 1998 Thorpe Menn Book Award, and a short story collection Prayers of an Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press) that The New York Times Book Review praised for its "clear, resonant prose, laced with bittersweet humor."  Her short stories, essays, art reviews and articles have appeared in a variety of national and regional publications, including The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry Midwest, First Intensity, Chelsea, New Art Examiner, SOMA, New Letters, and Pitch where she served as art critic. Her fiction has been anthologized and adapted to film, radio, theatre, and audio CD in the U.S. and abroad.  Collaborations with visual and audio artists have been featured museum installations, and her drawings, digital art and videos exhibited in prominent galleries. Screenwriting credits include The Walking Wounded, finalist in the 1996 Austin Screenwriters Competition, and Drought, for which she won the 1999 Cinovation Screenwriting Award.  The short film Drought, directed by Lisa Moncure, went on to win a host of national and international awards, and was only one of six films selected for the Universe Elle section at 2000 Cannes International Film Festival. Debra is president of Jaded Ibis Productions, Inc., a transmedia corporation™ producing a mélange of audio interviews and music, videos, print and web fiction and visual art.

Fall Into The Gap: A 21st Century Primer

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Download FALLINTO.mov

If download fails, go to:  http://gertrudesbasket.blogspot.com

The video of my 2008 Associated Writing Programs (AWP) presentation on the marriage of text and image in fiction and other narrative forms.  Recommended reading for literary and art critics, creative writing and English professors, and writers who aspire toward approaching, Herein, I discuss Bardo, neurological synapses, amazon.com's Kindle, virtual reality, Second Life (and lives), typeface design and usage, advertising, brain computer interface, Oblomov, willful ignorance, and oh so bloody much more. (Originally presented on the AWP panel, "1000 Pictures," February 2, 2008, New York.) Thanks to all who expressed an interest in hearing it again.

READ & VIEW Conceptual Writing

Art, dialogs and interviews from Review special feature on conceptual writing are now viewable online here.  Click on "THE WRITING" in Recent Posts at left.

2006 &NOW FESTIVAL

Attention: Conceptual Writers!

&NOW / Lake Forest Literary Festival
April 5-7, 2006, Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, IL.
Proposal Deadline, October 15, 2005
http://www.lakeforest.edu/&now
andnow@lfc.edu
______________________________________________

The second iteration of &NOW: A Festival of Innovative Writing and Art, merged with the second annual Lake Forest Literary Festival (LFLF), will be held on April 5-7, 2006 at Lake Forest College, 30 miles north of Chicago.

This three-day festival will celebrate contemporary aesthetic practice in its most inventive forms: writing, visual, and multimedia art that is aware of its own institutional and extra-institutional history, that is as much about its form and materials-about language-as about subject matter.

&NOW/LFLF will bring together a range of writers and artists interested in exploring the possibilities of form and the limits of expression; writers and artists working to emphasize text as a medium and as an influence.

If traditional, mainstream art and literature are the equivalents of 19th Century still-life, innovative production might be the text scrawled on genetically engineered cells--works more interested in producing fantastic machines of art, rather than creating transparent windows to a world that no longer exists.

By bringing together innovative writers and artists, &NOW/LFLF will take stock of the "other" tradition-and perhaps offer a glimpse of where it is going.

Proposal Deadline: October 15, 2005
For more information, including guidelines for contributors and book fair exhibitors, see:
http://www.lakeforest.edu/&now

Send all correspondence to: andnow@lakeforest.edu
____________________________________________
The &NOW/LFLF organizing committee:
Davis Schneiderman
Tom Denlinger
Bob Archambeau
Steve Tomasula
Christina Milletti
Dimitri Anastasopoulos

JIRI TV INTRO

Download jiri_tv_intro.mov

Trevor Dodge

CLICK HERE to read Trevor Dodge's excellent blog.

Online LITERARY MAGAZINES

www.madhattersreview.com   

www.sleepingfish.net   Magazine exploring the interconnections between image and text.

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www.drunkenboat.com What online magagzine can and should be: prose, poetry, video, music, web art... 

more to come...

and if you want to suggest your innovative literary/art magazine, please do.

 

THE WRITING

Read the Review feature of conceptual writers' art, interviews and dialogs now. (Download times will vary. Requires Acrobat Reader)

If Fiction Isn't Real: cover art by Jirí Cêch
Download review_cover.pdf

The Label-less-ists by Debra Di Blasi
Download labellessists_final.pdf

Ink by Maria and Steve Tomasula
Download tomasulas_final.pdf 

Literarchiture by Scott Helmes
Download scott_helmes.pdf

There Are No Rules: An Interview with  Eduardo Kac
Download kac_page.pdf

She Taking Her Space by Alexandra Grant & Michael Joyce
Download joyce_and_grant.pdf

Simple Math by Kass Fleisher and Joe Amato
Download amatofleisher_simplemath.pdf

We Have Nothing to Fear But August Highland Himself ...um...Herself?
Download highland_page.pdf

Ainsworth by Jen Maxted
Download maxted2005.pdf

Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
Download water.pdf

Now What

Now What is a collective blog by alternative prose writers & publishers. Excellent source and resource of information, inspiration, consternation and amelioration. Hosed by Lance Olsen and Ted Pelton.
Go to Now What Blog now.  What?

Elizabeth Block

A Gesture In Time
by Elizabeth Block

While there are many talented experimental novelists working today, writers who are able
to transcend the traditional limitations of the novel in order to present rare states of experience
and consciousness, a rarer state of experience and consciousness occurs when an experimental
novel is actually fun to read. A Gesture Through Time, Elizabeth Block’s debut, is that rare
and sparkling find. Not only is Block’s novel more entertaining than most avant-garde writing,
but it gives more pleasure than many mainstream novels from large and small presses alike.
Spuyten Duyvil Press, which in recent years has been steadily improving its batting stats,
hitting doubles and triples and the occasional home run, has finally hit one clean out of the park.
...... Indeed, if Joyce and Eliot were alive today, celebrating literature by taking film cameras apart,
celebrating stream-of-consciousness by dictating their love of technology into digital recorders,
and celebrating sex by showing us what the lesbians are doing behind the steel plant, then Block’s
prose would be the prose that they would be required to write.  Robert Clark Young, The Brooklyn Rail

A  Gesture Through Time is a work of remarkable ingenuity. With the daring of a poet,
Elizabeth Block splices an unexpected montage of elements to tell a story that is as
intriguing and immediate as life itself. This meticulously written first novel by Block
demonstrates her sophisticated skills as a writer and a vision that expands the
possibilities for fiction.  Denise Newman (author of Human Forest, Apogee Press; Editor and Translator)

Elizabeth Block’s A Gesture Through Time is a novel for the new millennium. 
Deft and funny and wise, it examines authorship, narration, technology, love,
and memory, and asks most playfully what it means to tell a story.  Always
inventing and bravely trying out new strategies, she puts most writers and
their sorry pretenses of invention to shame.  In the spirit of Stern’s Tristram
Shandy, A Gesture Through Time captures the relation of muse and amuse, taking the
reader on a spirited, pleasure-filled journey.   Maxine Chernoff

Elizabeth Block’s debut novel, A Gesture through Time (written under fiscal sponsorship
of Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, selected as a 1997 Heekin Foundation first
novel fellowship finalist, short-listed with an honorable mention for the 2004 Starcherone
fiction prize, and the recipient of a Djerassi Resident Artists Program Tread of Angels
fellowship) is one of the most inventive narratives in contemporary literature.

At once erotic, whirling toward dying, philosophical, and comic, it explores an obsession
with bodies lost in love and in death, and the inability to distinguish between an absent lover
and an absent parent in memory. The tale’s abstract and meticulous language imagines
lost bodies in the wake of ruptured optics and indeterminate perceptions.

It begins in a Detroit steel factory, where a forbidden love affair ignites. Magnitude Hortense
Zappa, a worker, seduces the narrator, a teenage heir to the steel factory. When the steel
factory owner is killed by one of his workers, the love affair abruptly ends, leaving a wasteland
of unresolved emotion. The narrator’s own identity is only slowly revealed, as the lovers face
their affair 20 years later, when they cross paths at a San Francisco film festival.

Through innovative narrative structure, the story offers multiple points of view, ambiguous
sexual and romantic perspectives, cinematic scenarios, love letters, case history notes,
dramatic dialogues, unusual film history, textual flipbooks, and unreliable memories. The
story traces the lover’s shifting identities, and the psychological landscape where
conscious and unconscious associations of loss and love intermingle. Until their eventual
reunion, the lovers’ compulsions unravel through their constant inability to be in the same
place at the same time, whether in actual geographical space, the space of memory, or
in the space of their conflicting obsessions with sight and sound.

Oy Vey (and I'm not even jewish)!

Download oy_vey_excerpt.mov

Jirí Cêch interviewed by Steve Tomasula

Following are excerpts of an interview recorded live via phone. Writer and critic Steve Tomasula (pictured left) spoke from Notre Dame University. Poet and real estate developer Jirí Cêch spoke from a Delta Airlines 747 enroute from New York to London. The entire interview is available on Jirí's new top-selling CD:  Realer Than You. (Download times will vary according to your connection.)

Steve Tomasula is the author of the novels VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Station Hill / University of Chicago Press) and IN & OZ (Ministry of Whimsy Press). His short fiction has appeared widely and most recently in McSweeney's, The Iowa Review, and Fiction International.  Recent criticism and essays are included in Musing the Mosaic (SUNY Press); Data Made Flesh (Routledge); Leonardo (M.I.T. Press); the New Art Examiner,  and other magazines both here and in Europe.  He co-edited the Word & Image issues of the electronic book review.   He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is professor of literature at Notre Dame Unviersity.

Jirí Cêch has appeared as a primary or peripheral character in many short stories and articles, including “Czechoslovakian Rhapsody Sung To the Accompaniment of Piano” and “Glauke’s Gown,” published in The Iowa Review, (December 2000 and April 2002, respectively), “Oops. Sorry,” published in Notre Dame Review (Summer 2003), and “In Case You Haven’t Noticed I’m Not Wearing Any Clothes” presented at Notre Dame’s &NOW Festival of Writing as a Conceptual Art. His first book of poetry, Whither: Poems of Exile, won the Mennstrausse Poetry Award. Poems have been published in prominent literary journals like Pleiades, and The Melic Review where he later served as guest poetry editor.  Jirí recently completed a new poetry collection, Comes Life, with passages excavated from the Old Testament of the Bible and reshaped into a poetic sequence commenting, rather viciously at times, upon the events from September 11, 2001 forward, to the current dubious Iraq War. Jirí’s poetry has been adapted to video and music, and his art therapy drawings have become an explosive sensation in the art world.

excremental poetry
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ashcroft's sh*t list
Download ashcrofts_list.mov

the antichrist
Download antichristweb.mov

skating with jenna
Download skatingwithjenna.mov

kinder gentler apes (from The Salk Institute Lectures)
Download kindergentlerapes.mov

know more Jirí, better:
go to the real Jirí Cêch's website

Maria & Steve Tomasula's INK

Following are comments about "Ink," a collaboration between writer Steve Tomasula and painter Maria Tomasula.

Born and raised in Chicago, Maria Tomasula is an active part of the Chicago art scene. Maria Tomasula received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and then continued her education at Northwestern University, where she earned a Masters degree in Fine Arts.  She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame.  Recent solo exhibitions are at Forum Gallery in New York and at Forum Gallery in Los Angeles.  She is currently working on a solo show for Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago.

Steve Tomasula is the author of the novels VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Station Hill / University of Chicago Press) and IN & OZ (Ministry of Whimsy Press). His short fiction has appeared widely and most recently in McSweeney's, The Iowa Review, and Fiction International.  Recent criticism and essays are included in Musing the Mosaic (SUNY Press); Data Made Flesh (Routledge); Leonardo (M.I.T. Press); the New Art Examiner,  and other magazines both here and in Europe.  He co-edited the Word & Image issues of the electronic book review.   He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is professor of literature at Notre Dame Unviersity.

ARTIST STATEMENT
"As I started writing," says Steve, "the meaning of the words seemed like a page absorbing ink. A Rorschach inkblot, in part, represents an individual’s personality, perhaps the visible shadow of a person. In general, Maria’s work is about making an image enticing. She used a substractive process in this collaboration, carving away the darkness to reveal the shape of words, inkblot and, essentially, artist and writer.” 

Statement & Process: August Highland

Following is additional information regarding the work of August Highland, including links to his art and writing.

Before August Highland began producing text-based visual work, he developed a literary performance called "Metapoetics Theatre". (www.litob.com). Metapoetics Theatre is presented by 100 writers, all of whom are Highland's multiple persona. These 100 writers belong to one of three simulated literary movements called, "The Worldwide Literati Mobilization Network", "The International Belles Lettres Federation", and "The Superheroes of Humanities". Collectively, Highland's 100 persona have produced over 250,000 literary works (called "Literary Objects"), each of which are 1,000 pages in length and published unbound in a custom-designed wood cabinet with an inlaid glass frame in the lid which displays the cover artwork. This megalomanical output is called "Massive Media" and are presented under the aegis of "Culture Animal Productions". In all, Highlands's 100 persona have originated over 12 literary genres that explore loops, patterns, sequences and cycles.

Now August Highland works almost exclusively on his visual work which is called "Alphanumeric Painting", a description of which follows:

Compositional Elements
All of the compositional elements in my paintings are text. Sentences, phrases, words, parts of words, letters and parts of letters make up every stroke and gesture in my visual work. My background is in both the humanities and the arts, which in part explains why I arrived at this genre.

Art-Making Process
The art-making process that I use is one which I developed independently without the use of commercial graphic software. I began by creating the work to be viewed on the computer screen. I decided to apply the tools and technology to  visual work that could be displayed in a large-scale format in galleries and museums. I wanted to create a bridge between the online new media art world and the gallery art world.

SEMPRE
While, technically speaking, the works are printed, they are not "prints" in the conventional sense of the term. Each of my paintings are one-of-a-kind artworks which are never reproduced. The technical term I give this method of art-production is called SEMPRE which stands for "Single-Edition Media Printing."

I developed SEMPRE to create a standard that protects artists, dealers and collectors. SEMPRE requires that a Certificate of Authenticity is signed on the date of delivery by the collector, the dealer and the artist. The Certificate of Authenticity contains the catalogue number of the individual artwork, insuring that it will never appear in any other market for sale again.

Series
When I produce a series of work in a specific style, I am not producing a "series" in the traditional sense either. Each work in the series is also a one-of-a-kind. Although the style or format is the same, the text materials and the compositional arrangement of the text materials are unique for each piece in the series. Typically there are 10 works in a series. Once in a while, when I am lucky, I produce a work that is much better than I can give myself credit for. In these rare instances, I will create 20 works for the series.

Exhibitions and Publications
My literary and visual work is published and exhibited internationally.

Literary Work
Listed in no particular chronological order the online projects by Culture Animal Productions are:
Anti-Genre Elite Corps
InkBomb Disposal Unit
Encyclopoetica
Operation Nobel Prize
COW Gallery
Global Text Strategies
Club Bibliotech
The Hyper-Age
Afterhours Literati Cafe
Voice of the Village
Wired Paris Review
Guardian Del Sol
Web-Published Nation
Urban Text Kult
The S.C.A.R.E
Digital E-Motions
Academic Liberation Party
Atlantic Ploughshares
Amazon Salon
Pornalisa
The Book-Burning Department
New Literary Underground
The Brain Juice Press
Go Ego Go
Advanced Literary Sciences
Text-Modification Studio
Digital Media Generation
Post-Mortem Telepathic Society
Alphannumeric Labs

The upcoming projects are called: 
     "Collective Net-Text Industries"
     "Document Reassembly Plant"
     "Crash The Silence"
     "The Hermeneutic Fashion Poets"
     "The Subversive Intelligentsia Agency"
     "World War Web"
and others. These projects will be released beginning late 2006/early 2007.

Personal Note
My core ongoing work as a human being and an artist is to continue to develop along spiritual lines and be useful to others.

Please visit my online studio and contact me by email.

Thank you,
August Highland

Scott Helmes: Literarchiture

Scott Helmes is a poet, artist, photographer and architect who lives in St. Paul, MN. Starting in 1972, he began writing experimental poetry, pursuing mail art activities and producing artistic printmaking/drawings. His poetry has been published world wide and collected in numerous anthologies and museum archives. Recent exhibitions of his prints include the 4th Minnesota National Print Biennial, Minneapolis, MN; Art on the Plains #7-Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND; and Print National 2004-Lancaster Museum of Art. Through StampPad Press, he has published visual poetry and The June 30th Manifesto. He also performs with the avant garde Be Blank Consort, who recently performed at the Subtropics 17 Experimental Music Festival in Miami. His writing archive from 1972 to 1997 is collected in the Avant Writing Collection of The Ohio State Libraries.

Sound Haiku by Scott Helmes
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