Shep Campbell's Eyebrows

Alright, I've been thinking about this for a while. It's time I lay it on you... Everybody knows the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words." Richard Yates, in his masterpiece Revolutionary Road, dedicates paragraph upon paragraph to describing Shep Campbell's secret love for April Wheeler. His envy of her husband, his contempt for his own wife... In the movie however, it's more or less summed up in the eyebrows...

There are cinematic tricks to compensate for the lack of narration. Camera angles, music options... implications... but what if there weren't? What if it was just the actor - like in a play? Or just a still frame of Shep Campbell and his jealous, anguished eyebrows? What is the feeling in there? If we had 1,000 empirically accurate words to sum up every frame of film from our own memories of our own lives then this would be a very different world, but of course that is not the way it is. As it stands our lives are confusing messes full of misunderstandings and contradictions. We don't have Richard Yates whispering at 5,000 words per second precisely what is going on and why.

Here's what we're gonna do. We will pick a photograph, or a painting or something -- anything contained, complete and 2D. Then everybody independently sums it up in 1,000 words. Maybe we could compile the results and make a compilation. Does this sound fun?

1975

hey, i was looking for you
chalky black weeds
tangle of ankle
shadows of apple blonde hair
on redondo beach
with sand in the elastic
of my underwear
my arms asleep beneath your bones

the sun is coming
spinning as a chandelier
it still isn't scary
your obituary

my arms are none of this business
my arms, so full of hearts

sun -- bleeding like a blade
hey, i was looking for you

Different Directions

There were two Indian women on the subway. Each of them wearing a colorful sari and holding an enormous blue cart at their feet. Like a grocery cart but twice as big. The carts were filled with large cloth sacks, which were filled with I don’t know what. The older one had a small stud in her nose. We were sitting directly across from each other and I wondered if they had just arrived from India or maybe Bangladesh. I looked closely at their mouths and tried to see if they were the kind of mouths that form English words.

A man with a gray goatee and a Puerto Rico baseball cap sat down next to the older one and accidentally brushed her elbow. They smiled at each other in the way people on the subway do when unintentional contact has been made. She then turned away from him and back towards me. She put her head on her daughter’s shoulder and giggled uncontrollably. Her eyes had fireworks in them. I imagined he was the first American she had exchanged idle pleasantries with. Between bouts of laughter she would whisper a strange language in her daughters ear. My heart nearly exploded, I diverted my eyes and concentrated on those mysterious cloth sacks. I wanted to know their secrets.

In Berlin I met a Russian man at 4 o’clock in the morning. We were the only people around and we both wanted company. I spoke zero Russian and he spoke zero English. We drank two beers together, throwing non-sequitors back and forth to keep the silence at bay. His countenance was sort of frightening but I decided it was just a cultural thing. I imagine our conversation may have gone something like this.

“I am going to Prague in two hours. Sad to leave Berlin. Beautiful people here.”

“I don’t understand a word you just said. What a shitty night it‘s been!”

“Oh, that's interesting. Have you ever been there? I want to see the Charles Bridge.”

“You’re a strange person, aren’t you? Thank god for beer. Why on Earth haven‘t you gone home yet?”

“…My sister broke her leg once taking out the garbage…”

One morning in Amsterdam I awoke to find a ladybug had made a home for herself in my belly button. I had been dreaming about flowers. Beautiful flowers of all different colors and impossible compositions. They were everywhere and for some reason I lacked coordination and kept stepping in their beds. Every time I stepped on a different flower it made me feel terrible. I really didn’t want to step on them, but my muscles were not in my control. So to awake from this dream and find a ladybug had made a home out of my belly button -- well, I stayed in bed extra long so as not to disturb it.

When I finally got up I scooped my little tenant onto my finger and she walked around a little bit. She was disoriented with sleep but at least I hadn’t squashed her. I hopped down from my bunk bed and took her to the porch. This woke up my Italian roommates. I told them all about it but I’m not sure it really came across. I do not speak Italian.

It was the first time I’d been out of The United States in over fifteen years. I was traveling alone and I only got back a week ago. Ever since returning home people have been talking to me more on the streets. They ask me for directions, they comment about how nice the weather is, one little kid even asked me to pet his dog. Nobody spoke to me before the trip. I had been closed off somehow without knowing it. Furthermore, certain elements of the tourist still compel me; the landscape will not be lost on my lens. This is New York City, after all.

The Indian women, they understood this. It was an enthusiasm we shared. They got off the train at 104th St., deep in Queens. Their gargantuan carts thumping as they jostled from the train to the platform. They pushed their carts westward, the mother walking ahead of the daughter. I continued on until 121st St. in Kew Gardens. I don’t live here. I am cat sitting here for a friend of a friend while she is in Seoul negotiating fabrics. That was a long train ride. I was on my way back from downtown Manhattan. You can sit on the steps of Federal Hall with it’s bricks and winding sidewalks and forget for a moment that this is where you live.

Guerrero and 15th

sitting here

across the street

from the house

that I grew up in

they say this neighborhood

has changed a lot

but I don’t think it has

the pigeons may have

gained some weight though

YO DOO @ Cakeshop

So we participated in the March YO DOO at Cakeshop. It's essentially a flea market for hand made crafts. It was a great opportunity to sell a couple books, pick up some hand stapled literature, and get schooled on how likeminded publishers are getting the wordz out.

For starters, check out kaboompress.com ...the site itself appears to be under construction but the video is reason alone to check it out. They put out little quarter page books. TONS OF THEM. They also have really nice versions of some of Dustin Jenkin's books, (he has books on ILOAN too). It's run by Steve and Inju, really nice people who live uptown and print the books in their apartment.

Then there's the Dapper Chap Quarterly. INCREDIBLE. I picked this up from Mike Freiheit, one of the featured artists / illustrators. I have never considered myself a comic book junkie but these guys are crossing boundaries, genres. It's art, plain and simple.I also got a zine called Ditmas 2 which is a fantastic compilation of comics by Wafflebutt Press. I purchased it from the bass player for The Shaydes, who also gave me a couple copies of his mini-comic which documents the adventures of his band.

Finally, I learned about Fractious Press. You can go to their website and see what they've got going on. They've got bookstores carrying their stuff all over the country. One of their books was reviewed in The Village Voice. So yea, they are really working it.

I'm inspired...

TR

Our Dogs Are Restless

It is fitting that I belly up to the blog slightly intoxicated. It's a time for celebration. ILOANBooks is getting ready to release a beautiful compilation written by lifelong buds Andrew Macy (poet / musician) and illustrated by Jake Page (artist / arteest). Dammit, we just couldn't be prouder.

Our Dogs Are Restless is a collection of bloody, lovelorn, whiskey drenched, ocean sprayed poems. They tenderly address the illusions that make our lives meaningful and the way they're so often sucked beneath the undertow, rendering us wobbly, naked and sun burnt. As Macy writes, "We're only as beautiful as the light that bounces off of us." Dogs are invoked upon this dependency. The wandering curiosity of man's best friend; the naive optimist, the shoulder, the witness... there is a sense of suns rising and suns setting... helplessness and finding purpose through purposelessness.

eyes parted by blistered thumbs
i was looking for you
you were right
i'll never remember anything
until the view from your window
reminds me i'll never
remember anything

Macy's voice is spontaneous, readily imperfect but streaming consistently with honesty and good humor. Freedom is in the fabric of the text -- it hovers between the pages like flies on an empty bag of sandwich meat. The pursuit of freedom, the taking of it, the loss of it. Jake Page's illustrations, which uniformly capture dogs engaged in human leisure activities, play on freedom as well.

I'm enticed to pontificate on the significance of dogs on rope swings, dogs playing accordions, and dogs flying kites... but they speak for themselves. Here is one of my favorites.


Marinate on that for a second.

Click here to read sample pages.

<333
GI/TR

Four Years of Publishing

When ILOANBooks first started up, I was binding a 200 page manuscript at the Cotati Copy Shop on Old Redwood Highway. They came out looking like college course readers and the cost of manufacture was a little over $20 each. The anticipation waiting for Kate (copy shop homegirl) to finish printing them was excruciating, (it took a while for the glue to dry). I'd sit at home, staring at the decomposing fooseball table and listening to my neighbors marching up and down the steps. I took so much pride in those books. They were eating up my student loan checks but it was worth it. It was 2005 and I was published. People were reading my stories. That was the bottom line.

A year after moving to New York I had written another manuscript and a friend told me about self-publishing online with lulu.com. It was about $10 per book. They were professionally bound, they could be ordered by 3rd parties online, and best of all: THEY LOOKED OFFICIAL. I continued to give these books away but at least I wasn't going broke at the same pace. In some rare instances I was actually making money. It was the right time for lulu because I felt like I had something to prove. Packing up for New York is a big deal and I wanted to show my friends and family that I wasn't just sitting on my ass all day. For one book I even bought a distribution package, earning me an ISBN number in the library of congress and a few scattered sales through amazon.com. That was cool for a while but not worth the $100+ I spent on it. It also meant I couldn't revise the text, which is something I often need to do. Another problem with the ISBN is that Google Books was suddenly offering browsers a full PDF of the book -- which makes it harder to sell. In other words, I was simultaneously publishing my own work AND losing the rights to it.

Over time other people came to me with their manuscripts. They had written things and they wanted to share them with the world. Some of them had experienced a million formal rejections from Da Publishing World while others had zero interest in making themselves vulnerable to that kind of rejection in the first place. That's where ILOANBooks comes from -- the desire to share language. It's a platform to stand on. We did Kevin Estrada's books, then Vahn Kuhl's and Mara Vasquez. There were cookbooks, young adult fiction, even a little masterpiece about how to take the perfect bath. Many of these books are illustrated, and all of them were formatted for lulu with an overheard of roughly $10 a copy.

The books, (although most of them are currently out of stock) were only available through ILOANBooks.com and we had the prices marked up $5 -- basically enough to cover shipping. We were breaking even, IF that, but the system was up and running and the gears clamored into rhythm.

In recent months we've moved away from online publishing and towards doing everything ourselves. Printing books on folded 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper and stapling them down the middle with a long neck stapler. It's personal to the final fold. Each book has been assembled by the loving hands of a person who feels strongly about the material. No computer necessary. Another benefit of DIY printing is that the product qualifies as a "craft" which opens markets that were previously off limits. Etsy and flea markets are both prime places to sell. And the cost of producing a 40 page book, (if you shop around for the right copy shop) is $2 or $3. At that price you can leave books on the subway, on coffee counters, sandwiched between a couple Dan Brown Bestsellers at Barnes and Nobles... there are also radical / anarchy shops in NYC where you can sell a stack of your books to the store and they will sell them for you. St. Marks Bookstore and Blue Stockings both spring to mind. The production costs are 80% lower and the books don't smell like baseball cards ...they smell like xerox heat! Everything about the process is poetic.



The first hand made ILOANBook was The Square Root of Advice -- over a year ago. But in recent months we've got Snub Pollard's Autobiography, Zippy Stalkings and Even Oscillating Fans Have Elevators In Them -- all Gus' books. They will be available on the website soon but are currently only on Etsy. We are also finishing up a new book by Andrew Macy and Jake Page.

Theirs is a collection of illustrated poems entitled, "Our Dogs Are Restless" but more on that in the next post.

I hope this compressed review of 4 years as an independent publisher has been helpful to someone out there. If you, (whoever you are...) have questions about publishing please e-mail me at iloanbooks@gmail.com. I love talking about it. Also, if you are an artist / writer and you have something you'd like people to read, let's get it out there.

T.R. & G.I.

Snub Pollard: An Autobiography

I found an old tobacco "Movie Star" card in a Brooklyn Flea Market with Snub Pollard on it. What a face! What a mustache! I started carrying it around in my wallet, behind my ID.



I didn't know anything about Snub at the time and he became a bit of an obsession; where did he come from? Did he curse a lot? Did he hop trains or toss pennies to the beggars? Did he ever walk down 42nd St? This preoccupation turned into an art project when I started putting words in his mouth. In a couple weeks I'd written Snub Pollard's Autobiography, which is essentially a picture book.

The book explores the psyche of a man from the inside out and in the loosest possible terms -- mostly images and non-sequitors. The result is what I consider a quilt of frozen moments, some life-defining and others completely unremarkable, woven together in an effort to resurrect the memory of one of hollywood's most successful silent comics. Someone who, to me, epitomizes the idea that a famous life disappears from memory twenty or thirty seconds later than an obscure one.



Inevitably I did pick up some concrete information about Snub in the course of the project and I incorporated those things into the work. If you've ever seen Singing In The Rain, when the title song ends, Gene Kelly hands his umbrella to an aged Snub Pollard - Snub didn't have a single line and was uncredited in the film but his strut is unmistakable.



The book is $4.00 on Etsy but I'll send you a free copy if you ask graciously. Here is a passage from it and an illustration:



Nightclubbing controversy designed to an altar cloth. Following his move and developing an anthology of annual cash. Colloquially hunted for her fur, males being larger than females, the digits developed in the red label bourbon but mother nature syndicates her calendars. I don't want to see any flies into the sink below the law. Open along the edge of the isthmus. A sealer can enhance colors taking the show precast selection reclaiming handsome in her effervescence.

Such is a mother's wig print hours infused with primer and electric wood burning paternity.