Things afoot

I'm spending 10 days tooling around the Midwest, during which a number of plans continue to move forward. In brief:

• I'll be beginning the process of making everything available for purchase on the website via paypal.

• I'm hoping to print everything that was not printed during the last attempt (see previous post), including some good copies of Synapse.

• Recording audio-commentary tracks by everyone involved with making the full-length Ubu Roi film and possibly some early PNA video pieces (the Squibbles films and/or those available thru mOnocle-Lash as Poorly Made Films, Vol. I). This means that we can look for some new deluxe editions of these films by the end of A.Da. 94/2010 by either mOnocle-Lash or [Pro]-[Anti].

• Making & collecting more material from Surrealist games played by various Post-Neo and Post-Neo allied groups for the upcoming Exquisite Crypt 2 anthology, booked for January or early February publication.

• Interviews with Robert Inhuman and John M. Bennett are underway for the book on DIY/subcultural organising, and more should be undertaken as we move into January.

• A book of collaborative collage with bela b. Grimm, Warren Fry, and myself.

• I'll be working with Imogene Engine on another poetic collaboration; we're still considering where to move next on another yet-to-be-titled text.

• I am currently assembling texts and research materials for what will probably be the first installment of the series of translations of work by the Bouzingos group, poems by Philothée O'Neddy. I'm having difficulty finding texts--only 5 so far! So we may have to begin with somebody with more texts available online (probably Borel or Bertrand) while I try to track down more texts from archives and harder-to-locate printed material; an arduous process. (I can only imagine how hard it will be finding work by Augustus MacKeat or Deveria...) Once I've got enough material to translate, I'll send it all out to our team of willing translators and get this ball rolling!

SYNAPSE vs THE BLIZZARD!

This past weekend I loaded up all of the master copies for the new publications, a zip drive, glue sticks, and a quarter ream of A4 paper and took the bus out to Kinkos to actually PRINT the first contributors' copies. All went well for awhile, as I whipped through the usual last-minute changes, numeration, and other chores that for reason's I shan't go into unless someone actually wants to know, are most easily done there. Time to print up the first batch of Synapse 4.

First photocopier: big gash across the glass.
Second machine: different, but similarly disfiguring scar across the flatbed.
Third machine: small specks tossed across the glass.
Fourth machine: beauti-no, no, it wrinkles every piece of 11x17 that it touches.

And that's it. Machine #3 it is.

The final master prints off pretty well; so far so good.

Then I discover that I'm being stranded in a blizzard.

It is announced that Kinkos, the 24-hour place, is closing in less than an hour. Fuck. So, rather than my usual laborious procedure of separately scanning and checking each sheet before I print the full batch, I scan all 14 double-sided sheets in at once, and hit PRINT, as I scramble for another control card to start printing the TLPs on machine #4, which can handle letter-size paper. It's then announced that they'll be closing even earlier and will shove me out into the snow when the employees' rides arrive.

The key thing to remember here is that if I am caught out in the snow for 45 minutes waiting for the bus, more than $100 worth of paper is likely to be ruined. Also my feet might fall off, as my shoes are full of holes.

So, Warren with his hearty little car heroically ventures out into the increasingly snowy New Jersey roadway system (Midwest drivers could have handled this snow, but this is Jersey, so everything's fucked from the get-go, it's an ontological principle). Meanwhile I have discovered that Machine #3 is mis-registered, and is shifting everything 1/8 inch up, so that I'm losing text at the top of the page. I frantically re-print the worst offenders whilst packing up the materials for the publications I no longer have time to print and verbally sparring with the anxious employees in order to prevent myself getting tossed out.

Then Warren gets a flat tire.

I throw the still-warm pages of Synapse into a box, finagle a plastic bag from the employees to buy the copies some time, and lunge out the door into the cold, plunging through the virgin snow, up and down the footbridge over Route 18, through some parking lots gaping like white deserts, over the islands of corporate gardens studding whitely from them, to the hotel lot where Warren is propping the perennially half-attached trunk open. The spare tire is literally frozen to the floor of the trunk. It will not budge. Like a fat rubber Excalibur.

So we drop the unassembled Synapses inside and trudge back to catch the bus back to New Brunswick after all.

The next day Warren retrieves his car and the box of Synapses returns. The following day I open it and begin to assemble it:

IT'S SHIT.

In addition to the mis-registration, good old Machine #3 printed everything at an inexplicably dark range, meaning that the images are flattened and obscured, the traces of the opposite side of each page are printed on the front, and columns of text close together have shadows added to them. It looks like a bad bootleg.

The moral of the story? Fuck Kinkos.
......aaaand, fuck snowstorms.
and even more their unholy progeny.

THE REASON YOU PAY $$ AT KINKOS IS BECAUSE THEY TAKE CARE OF THEIR MACHINES.
They ought to take care of their machines.

So now the first 15 copies/$80 of Synapse are down the drain. Good ones, and everything else, soon! I hope to be sending out around five packets of contributors' copies out a week starting after Christmas (and a number will be distributed in person before then, as I do a quick string of meetings-up with people in Ohio). Other things are simmering--more soon!

To Synapse 4 contributors (and everyone else)

To all of you 60 Synapse contributors: I will begin mailing out contributors' copies in December. It will be a long process since I have literally no capital to print them at all once (or to pay all of my bills next month), so I'll be sending them out in small batches every two weeks. This staggered printing schedule is a part of the larger strategy that I outline on the website. My apologies for the wait, but don't pay for them unless you're in a damned hurry (and actually, even then just let me know and I'll try to send it out with the next batch).

This issue has taken 2 years to put together. In the interim there has been a three-month run of bi-weekly events, an international Post-NeoAbsurdist Festival, two festivals in Roanoke, VA, the production of a Jarry play, and a year (or more) of nearly utter stagnation. Some of you probably don't even remember giving me this work! Others gave me work just weeks ago. So it's an even more heterogenous issue than usual. At the same time, it covers a fuller range than ever before and begins to reflect the expansion of Post-Neo activity into various networks, communities, traditions, and fields of action; a development that will be much more fully at play in the next issue.

It is also the last issue to be hand-collaged. I love this intensely laborious process, I love the multifaceted and intimate relationship that it forces me to develop with each text and image in the journal; but it is simply not sustainable, and for Synapse 5 I will be switching to a digital process to lay it out. The advantages, however, will be many. The next issue ought not to take two years to put out; the reproductions for images will be clearer, formatting prose digitally should free up a bit more space for additional material; and the positioning and juxtaposition of contributions can be more pointed and refined.

Amid so many preparations--the website, Synapse, the new books, and all of the other invisible infrastructure being put into place, it just wasn't possible to prepare a CD Sound Supplement with this issue. Synapse 5 will see the return of the Supplement, with the cover that Aaron Andrews had originally designed for this issue (a year and a half ago).

...and there's a blog, too...

I smash a Gargantua-n bottle filled with marmalade and meat chili against the hull of this maiden blog.

I view this blog as an extension of the mOnocle-Lash website, insofar as whatever discussion and communication ends up occurring here (if anything) will play an integral role in how mOnocle-Lash continues to develop and operate. What form that takes remains to be seen.

In addition to responding to individual releases or making observations about our general strategy and catalog, this is a venue to let us know what you would like to see published, or (better yet) would like to help us make a reality; or to arrange collaborative projects; or to fill in or add to the context of a publication, or follow up its effects; or to ask questions or provoke discussion with those involved with the press; or anything else you (and we) decide to do with it.

In this spirit, we'll be making charming use of the otherwise-often-annoying 'poll' widgets such as the one to the right.links will be added within a few weeks; until then, there's the links page on the website proper.

Somebody start this off...