THE ODD MAGAZINE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Márton Koppány

to Bill, Jim

 

I was excited about your new book, “Stories & Puzzles”, that Jim sent me a few weeks ago:

 

https://ia801500.us.archive.org/0/items/JimLeftwichBillyBobBeamerSTORIESPUZZLES/JimLeftwichBillyBobBeamerSTORIESPUZZLES.pdf

 

This was my first reaction then (easier to repeat than to recompose):

 

It is a rare balance of randomness and exactitude beyond it, but that beyond is playful again, and belongs to nowhere – in a happy way. (Each nowhere still has a mood.) Plus the whole is more,  really more in this case than its units. I appreciate the restrain, too, in the case of two writers as productive as Jim and Bill (in that sense, perhaps, as Robert Filliou used the word “creation”): it works.

Ps 1: I know that meaning is a tricky word, “but”...

PS 2: "happy" is not necessarily better than “bitter”, but my impression is that you both enjoyed the collab, and that feeling comes through.

 

I would like to add (and I’m searching for the right words with my limited English and not only because of that) that I especially enjoyed the music-like repetitions and variations. How conscious are they? Did you select the pages from a larger whole? Did you arrange them? Or is it totally random? In ANY case, I see progression, I see a story of cut-ups generating texts, texts generating cut-ups, and the connection is lose, but it does exist. Anyway, what is (seems to be) a title becomes a pictural element, what seems to go on and on becomes totally new in a new context. And it is logical (dream-logical), but only retrospectively. I like that “the eyes of asemia” don’t take too seriously calligraphy either, they are completely free. What does “my bird” opposes? Numbers, stamps, dates? To be numbered? To be cut up for a purpose or be torn by chanche? Titles get free from their meanings in your “vacuum cleaner” and come back somehow clean and fresh (and not only nonsensical) thanks to (the memory of) the process. You apparently don’t discriminate image from text, and indeed, who could tell the difference. Every scribble in this “garage” is in the “middle”, but that middle is only a “square” again. It goes on and on. I am very curious to know how you collaborated on this book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jim Leftwich

to Bill

 

i think we should use this email to go back and forth in response to Marton’s questions. i will begin by saying that i made the visual poems we used for the book as a part of my “ongoing research in and around asemic writing” project. the “eyes of asemia” poem is perhaps the clearest evidence of that. my thoughts about that piece have to do with the fact of my reading the quasi-calligraphic marks in order to give the piece a title. as with seeing faces in the clouds, i see eyes in the marks. the phrase “the eyes of asemia” suggests for me the eye of Fatima, both the image of the hand with the eye in it, and the Camper van Beethoven song with that title from the 1980s post-punk scene. in other words, i find quite a lot of semantic content in what might at first glance be taken as an example of asemic writing. while some participants in the asemic writing movement seem to equate asemic writing with polysemy, or with an extension of the open text, i actually think this possibility, the possibility of this definition, is good evidence to support my deliberately provocative assertion that “there is no such thing as asemic writing.”

I’ll be back late tonight.

 

 

Jim Leftwich

to Bill

 

My Bird Oppose opposes reading. it is a writing-against-itself. (perhaps all visual poetry, all writing wherein the visuality is foregrounded, is a writing-against-itself.) what happens when we attempt to read My Bird Oppose? the language of the birds is opposed to the language of newspapers, of advertising, of propaganda. some writing is more obviously, more necessarily, about language than other writing. visual poetry is always about reading. about making the reader aware of the effort of reading. the duration of the effort. time. reading more slowly than normal. re-reading. re-routing a reading. returning. remembering. we remember necessarily at some point during this reading that the title of the book in question here is STORIES & PUZZLES. a visual poem is not a puzzle. we are telling ourselves a story about reading. “puzzles are worse than stories 032” is the tile placed beneath the parking lot ticket for the Center in the Square Garage, the last poem in the book. (3 + 2 = 5, the number of the quincunx, 3 x 2 = 6, the number of the mysterium conjunctionis, the geometrical representation of which can be found inside the square of the quincunx, in the form of two triangles – as above, so below – which meet at the center point.) the title My Bird Oppose reminds us that another poem in the book is entitled My Bird Foot Foot. we remember The Shaggs because they couldn't play their instruments. Frank Zappa liked that. a couple of decades later Kurt Cobain also liked it. we really don’t like it all that much, don't like to listen to it all that much. but we do like the kind of opposition it inserts into the culture. it is the opposite of an oppositional punk “fuck you”. it has wandered into the party and is standing in the kitchen, leaning uncomfortably against the kitchen table. it makes everyone uncomfortable. uncombfortable. uncomforktable. uncombforktable. it is combing its hair with a fork. that's why we call it the vacuum-cleaner of the Dadas.

 

 

Billy Bob Beamer

to Jim

 

not as a direct response to his question, but taking yr last assertion as example... to make an eventual point... bear with me

 

# i fell down the rabbit hole [no hole, no rabbit, no joke] thru coast to coast in 2003, after retirement from social services and music. then met you in 2009, and you introduced to this incredibly profound group....[ after c2c came my attention to asemic writing in 2004 –, then i meet you 2009...& the rest is...]... i am on the fringe of the margins of what i suppose most agreed to refer to as marginal arts.

 

i will keep it simple. here’s some stuff :

the works do have a musical form – as you once wrote, a call response, something quite familiar to me and other jazz musicians... and that process [tho usually reversed] has been the pansemic playhouse for me [at least until recently, when i have been given space for my long solos].

in the playhouse and in puzzles, specifically, our dialogue – a dialogue i would describe as “interdimensional” but this leads the response to the question way astray – has been, as beth shumate pointed out , “a conversation of a different order”. in one way, because we didn't discuss your semantic associations, nor did we need to... my response was mostly a visual one based on a reading of each image – one without too much thought but a load of inspiration... clearly asemic writing, visual poetry '”thinking'” were at the forefront of my mind... as you recall, i did all fairly quickly... i would add, i completed them without much analysis. generally, for the playhouse, my titles, beyond a personally symbolic number series, come to me immediately upon finishing the work, and for me are an extension of my visual image – this, in re: a point he made. in puzzles, i rearranged your titles, again without much analysis. i usually make small edits, and most of those occur in the titles.

 

i like his point about being dream-logical, but only on retrospect

all this sounds a bit like the early days of surrealism, when breton wanted everyone to BE a surrealist and talent was not the ticket, nor was meaning… then[now] it becomes about the excess of meaning

 

 

Jim Leftwich

to Bill

 

some specifics:

i selected the pages from a much larger collection.

Bill worked on them and returned both his collaborative versions and my originals in a single email.

i decided to use both his versions and my originals.

the sequence was decided by the interaction of our computers.

the collaborative process happened very quickly.

Bill and i have done a lot of work together. i think we agree that our interaction is very musical, with lots of repetitions, themes and variations, call and response, all in a context of (not always entirely free) improvisation.

we are both very playful and at times painfully serious. it is the world and the time we live in.

the poems are generative, or should be, and the components (cut-ups, calligraphies, texts, images, textimagepoems... numbers words letters spaces...) are also generative. the road of excess leads to the palace of excess. meaning makes meanings.

more than enough can be a goal in the poem, because any of it is always more than enough, but once we've had even the tiniest taste, nothing will ever be nearly enough.

i think we should send all of this to Marton and see what he says in response.

 

 

Billy Bob Beamer

to Jim

 

yes – i like/am a solid practitioner of “writing against itself'”…

for me yr details below are painted as i read them, which is one way to operationally define what i mean about “visual reading.” but yr description covers a multitude, beautifully...

everything you say resonates on some level... certainly by the time of the art/anti art show at tanglewood mall, performance

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UMzihZPUnU]

sponsored no less than by the rescue mission’s art on a mission... by that time i was moving into a great interest in fluxus and asemic writing, seeing my messages and word dust as just that.

reactions to kitchen fork combing were observable there... and later at the old MAF, at the school.

 

 

Jim Leftwich

to Bill

 

i sent it, and Marton has already responded. he would like an edited version, as i think both of us expected. I’ll edit it tomorrow, probably late-night. for now i should get some sleep.

 

 

Jim Leftwich

to Bill

 

i heard from Marton again and he has decided that the flow and spontaneity of our email conversations is something he wants to keep, so he is recommending that it not be edited very much. i actually appreciate that quite a bit. that’s one of the reasons i wanted us to answer in an email exchange. so, with this new perspective in mind, i will go through what we have later tonight and see where any changes might be made.

let me know if you want to add or remove anything.

 

 

Billy Bob Beamer

to Jim

 

I’m glad he has decided to keep yr draft flow and spontaneity is real good so, revisions?

1. it’s an if... if u want to mention pansemic playhouse, okw/me

2. and “computer drawn” images is ok, shld you elaborate on medium/ia, etc.

btw, if marton wants to know, my responses to yr calls in PUZZLES were created by ms paint and pixlr photo editor.

 

 

Jim Leftwich

to Bill

 

this is good, from your other email:

i use multiple backgrounds upon which to build... 1. those may be existing photos, altered beyond recognition, usually – or used as “paint color”, for blending, usually

2. – or they may come from original drawings from paint or from photos of my pencil works, oft altered beyond recognition.

and i use pixler brushes & functions in ways i'm certain were never intended... i have crashed and had to reload many times.

in the book PUZZLES the response as you noted was immediate, and not too many far out, let’s say, techniques were used... I’ll lv it at that.

there shld be a little mystery.

I’ll be back with a revised version of the whole thing in a bit.

 

 

Marton Koppany

to Bill, Jim

 

Sometimes I feel that in some cases, what people call asemic writing is not too different form what Harold Rosenberg called apocalyptic wallpaper a generation ago. And I get bored quickly, exactly the same way as with not so good visual poetry, textual poetry etc. (Who reads poetry anymore etc.) On the other hand, I get excited easily when I see work like your book and feel delighted and want to understand why it is different – and I have no real answer. I don’t understand my – changing – taste. I mean I’m not interested in categories and even less in categorization. That is why I wanted to talk with you and the other recipients about specific works which have touched me a lot, and I’m grateful for your responses. Rosenberg referred to the lack of inner tension. I can experience similar lack of external, “allegorical” tension in, say, conceptual writing in some cases. What does tension mean, by the way? A shift of perspective – like in your book, where text changes into image and vice versa, and the series memorizes itself step by step, becomes a story, and moves me toward more inner space? Called “intermedia” today, used to be called “alienation effect” a few decades ago? (But what could be more dramatic than an old haiku or sonnet with their shifts – we certainly can’t surpass them.) To be able to look at “it” from a distance as well: to be an outsider? But how full that shift might be? If I were a Martian I still would be a Martian Jew, I guess. Ok, “shift” is dropped.

 

Or am I painfully old-fashioned with my preferences, with having preferences at all? I was very active in mail art in the 80’s, and learned a lot from it, and it was the only way to be in touch with – what? Sometimes with true and justified “Peace!” postcards. I got in touch with a lot of amazing artists as well. If anything goes, then we’re either traveling toward a new world, the Republic of Poets, where Anonymous is not a monk anymore, but a layperson, any of us (animals, plants, stones, etc. included!), immersed in the world, in our community, in nature, or it is just another power game: “When a tube of paint is squeezed by the Absolute, the result can only be but success”.

 

I don’t trust visual poetry more than textual writing. We should learn to read between images the same way as we must learn to read between the lines of a text in a newspaper or a poem. Bill and Jim, yes, please go on nurturing readers on what is difficult to read, but watch out: your book finds its readers who read it as a pop song. We probably can’t do without “plain” information like objects, dreams, words, letters, scribbles, telepathy. Your book contains plenty of information about your world and how it is reflected in your mind. When information is removed, what we call “aesthetics” replaces it quickly and becomes ordinary information. Then aesthetics might reappear on the border of itself (as a small but somehow consistent error (let’s call it beauty) in the machinery (of the day), because it is visible only for the peripherical sight. Yes, I agree with Jim that anything can be and is worth being read, especially clouds. Could you both please talk a bit about new projects?

 

 

Jim Leftwich

to Marton, Bill

 

“Abulafia looks for something capable of acquiring the highest importance, without having much particular, or if possible any, importance of its own. An object which fulfills all these conditions he believes himself to have found in the Hebrew alphabet, in the letters which make up the written language.” – Gershom Scholem

this is where the idea of asemic writing comes from. (cf., the phrase for letter permutations or recombinations transliterated as Tzeruf ha-Otiyyot, zerufe otiot, tzeruf otiyot, tzeruf otiot...). the idea of asemic writing could not have developed without Patricia Cox Miller's essay, In Praise of Nonsense (“Magical writing takes the form of ordinary writing by using its letters and so is faithful to it, but it betrays that writing by its nonsensical use of those letters and is thus faithful to the writing that is an invisible inscription on the soul. Yet it betrays the invisible inscription as well.” – Patricia Cox Miller) for me personally, the practice of quasi-calligraphic writing began early one afternoon as i was attempting to process the experience of a “heroic dose” of psilocybin mushrooms the night before. i started writing unreadable quasi-calligraphic lines almost as if i was being instructed to do so. i sent some of the results to John Bennett for his LAFT magazine and he called them “spirit writings”. a little later Tim Gaze published some of them in a small chapbook with Spirit Writings as the title. that little book was the first publication representing what eventually became the asemic movement.

 

on April 22, 2011 at 3:26pm, De Villo Sloan wrote, as one of the first posts concerning The Martha Stuart School of Asemic Wallpaper, a discussion group hosted by the IUOMA website as a subcategory of the Asemic Writing for Mail-Artists Discussions:

I added this discussion because for some reason it made me think about Jackson Pollock. When his paintings were all the rage, he was approached by a wallpaper company that wanted to produce Jackson Pollock Wallpaper. He ultimately declined. But it certainly made me think. Why should it be limited to a gallery or museum? Or is the work completely debased when it’s mass-produced? It would be easy to turn asemics into pure, repetitive design. Fake Jackson Pollock wallpaper.

 

in the late 90s i thought of asemic writing as a small part of a kind of training manual. it was intended to be an extension of the practices i had developed from reading Moshe Idel’s books on Abulafia, and Patricia Cox Miller’s essay on nonsense. my writings at the time combined an experimental textual poetry and a kind of textimagepoetry, which was a variety of visual poetry.

i still think of asemic writing as a small part of this training manual.

most of what i see these days under the heading of asemic writing is actually a kind of quasi-calligraphic drawing, and a lot of it looks decidedly decorative. when asemic writing stops being a kind of writing-against-itself it becomes a form of decorative visual art, and i have no interest in it.

 

my primary current project is a series of books entitled Six Months Aint No Sentence. i have been working on this series, writing at least a little every day, since Easter Sunday of 2011. i am currently working on book 141. each book is approximately 100 pages long. i think of Six Months Aint No Sentence as a long poem with a lot of history.

 

 

 

Billy Bob Beamer

to Marton, Jim

 

hi, marton, jim...

to address your question about new projects...

i am preparing works [graphite and pigment on paper] to send to the nevica project gallery in chicago. and i will continue sending images to jim's pansemic playhouse. marton , i don’t trust aesthetics. and most art bores me silly. i just do what i do. and try not to “define it”... my usually small drawings, my ”word dust'” pieces, could be seen to thwart contemporary concepts of art and the ”1%” art world... that is, my drawings are small, subtle, and require looking, not just a glance... & they hover between [my thinking of] art vs. visual poetry... so i have called my drawings, ”dritings” [drawing +writing ]... actually, all this was important to me several years ago. now i don't think about aesthetics and what i do much. & like you, marton, i do not like catagories, even if or though we all seem to have a need to create them or live within them. jim once wrote: “write or be written!” a profound sentiment. let's all create ourselves afresh!

 

one thing that i have not mentioned anywhere in our email exchange, is my use of drawing, both on paper and on the computer, as a method of biofeedback and distraction from chronic pain. i also have taught classes in this technique... and plan to continue doing so. [ i have a longer essay on this topic that i can send, if interested]

 

that’s the short answer... jim's comments will probably inspire more comments from me!

best wishes,

bill [billy bob] beamer

 

ps the ”billy bob'” nickname got started via my weekend music career. one night i was getting ready to play a trumpet solo, and the lead singer of our [great] band, the EQUALIZERS, shouted out, “mr. billy bob beamer”... short for William Robert, and said by some as an irritant ...i just decided to “own” the name for all my creative projects..but i go by bill..jim uses bill... I’ll stay with bill here – if it is even important. probably not.

 

 

Billy Bob Beamer

to Jim, Márton

 

re decorative... your dislike... i am there with you

decorative also describes most art that i run across

 

i mean, i hope the artist enjoyed doing the painting, and i hope they are happy if it sells. etc

but i won’t go there.

 

and the thwarting issue... from my perspective, to change consciousness one must change perception, turning blake’s famous phrase around. cause and effect. correlation. synchronicity.  of course, I’m not saying you go in this direction with the concept of “thwart.”  thought and sentiment can take one anywhere.

but , as always, jim, great information.

 

 

Jim Leftwich

to Bill

 

only a couple of thoughts here, and i think for my part this can be considered finished:

first, i should say that the statement “write or be written” is by Phillipe Sollers. I’ve quoted it a few times, but it isn't mine.

also, i should probably address briefly the word “pansemic”. i started using it in the early 00s to describe my ongoing explorations of quasi-legible and entirely illegible writings, the same kinds of writings i have at times categorized as asemic. i had come to the conclusion that the asemic writing was best understood as an aspirational practice, a striving towards something humanly unattainable. at the same time i had recognized that particular struggle as a special kind of  training for the mind, for consciousness, for pattern-recognition and pattern-creation, possibly even a part of the process of training the dendrites to a new trellis.

the pansemic playhouse came into being to fill the void left by the end of the collab fests. between the summer of 2008 and the summer of 2011 i helped organize 86 collab fests. when they ended i wanted to continue with something either performative or collaborative or both. what has developed is a 4-year-long image-based conversation between Bill and myself.

and Bill, knowing your longstanding interest in Antonin Artaud i think it is safe to expect that you are not pursuing your creative practices with an eye on decorative results. quite the opposite in fact.

 

ok. i think that's enough from me. thanks for inviting us to do this, Marton. your questions are fantastic. they set the tone for all the rest of this.

 

 

Billy Bob Beamer

to Jim

 

i sort of think of pansemia as everything being potentially readable – nature as well as human constructions

like the lines on an orange peel, the twigs intertwined, etc.

this goes well with the [physics] concept that all is energy, carrying data, meaning information...

pansemia as i see it can be used to define multidimensional models...

 

 

Jim Leftwich

to Bill

 

that’s how i think of pansemia too

 

 

Márton Koppány

to Bill, Jim

 

Dear Bill and Jim, thank you, I enjoyed our dialogue a lot. It is a shame that it has come to an end, at least for this project. I think that your comments, Jim, on an “aspirational practice”, are very interesting, and could be the perfect beginning for another discussion, also on different traditions “behind” asemic practices, like the Abulafia-school (isolated for a long time within Kabbalah as well), via Gershom Scholem, via Jackson Mac Low and others. And what Kabbalah might mean apart from the daily practice of Torah. Or oriental calligraphy apart from the daily practice of, for instance, Zen and the Buddhist precepts. I don’t think they are meaningless. But they represent “something” new, and there are many paths again. So let’s read and appreciate original works like your Stories & Puzzles.