Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins, eds. Fantastic Architecture, 1970

Many of our best creative minds have been attracted by the relationship of living people to architectural works, to the possibility of living in, around or through these works. This is a collection of possible and impossible ideas, projects, fantasies, dreams, by artists, poets, musicians, philosophers and others working actively in the cultural fields.

(From Dick Higgins, The Arts of the New Mentality 1967-1968, Something Else Press, 1967)

The Aesthetics of Rock is the summation, summa cum laude, of “mere” (one of Meltzer’s key words) philosophical inquiry as applied to rock n’ roll. It is a maters piece of the academic language of category and definition; applied to the antithesis of that language, rock. It is not explanation. It is phenomenological. It is n-dimensional: rock as the only complete expression of body and soul and mind of our time - - - - rock slipping through the guises of art and non-art and anti art - - rock as the contemporary free and endlessly self-creating thing, resisting all attempts to identify it, plagiarizing itself and innovating with equal un-self-consciousness. 

(From jacket cover)

(Full title: The Mythological Travels of a Modern Sir John Mandeville, Being an Account of the Magic, Meatballs, and Other Monkey Business Peculiar to the Sojourn of Daniel Spoerri Upon the Isle of Symi, Together with Divers Speculations Therein)

"In these Mythological Travels Daniel Spoerri has traveled far afield, in the word and deed, from the eighty objects on top of the blue table in his Paris hotel room that served as points of departure for his classic autobiographical epic of accumulation, An Anecdoted Topography of Chance. This time the setting is the Greek island of Symi, a stone's throw form Turkey, where the artist lived, cooked and collaged under the roof of the unforgettable Kosta Theos, inventory, Son of God, and sworn foe of such 'monkey business' as the internal combustion engine, death, and the exploitation of man by man." - Emmett Williams (translator) Introduction

This gem of a book by Scotland’s well-loved poet consists of a miscellany of poems, But they sound so wonderful to the ear that it’s difficult to say whether they fall more properly into the tradition of sound poetry or into the visual, concrete vein for which the author is generally known. The drawings are by Gordon Huntley, hand silk-screened in color. The books comes bound in a three-ring binding designed by the author. 

(From Dick Higgins and Jan Herman, Catalogue Fall/Winter 1973-1974, Something Else Press, 1973)

Those who think are often relevant outside their so-called field of competence. This is true of Robson, who is one of the main popularizers of astronomy among semi-amateurs, who has worked as a chemist and invented rug shampoo, who has been a trapper, and who is presently a lecturer and writer on linguistics, structural aspects of poetry, orthography and the technology of using sound literature. Thomas Onetwo bears a relation to Robson’s works similar to that of The Hunting of the Snark to Lewis Carroll’s. The book is pleasantly illustrated by Ken Friedman.

(From Dick Higgins and Jan Herman, Catalogue Fall/Winter 1973-1974, Something Else Press, 1973)

Bern Porter, is, like Charles Ives (whom he resembles in inventiveness and originality of his work, which is produced in isolation but is thoroughly cosmopolitan), a one-man movement, Science and Art, Sciart. 

When one speaks of Porter, one has to ask which Porter one is speaking of: the atomic physicist, the poet, the surrealist, the first U.S. publisher of Henry Miller and of a number of the best poets of his generation, the sculptor, the early practitioner of “found poetry,” the graphic illustrator, etc. Most of what is most lively, technically, is the cultural environment today has been touched on by Power at some time over the last 30 years. He seems here to hold a position for the 1970’s analogues to that of Marcel Duchamp for the 1960’s. And, as with Duchamp, most of the work has appeared in minuscule editions, privately produced, if at all. A large part of his corpus is, in fact, produced in “an edition of one,” and is on deposit in the special collections of the library in the University of California at Los Angeles, waiting a more favorable time for its launching. 

But there is also the person behind the mask, the man who was born on Valentine’s Day, 1911 (which explains his many loves), and as with others of his generation such as John Cage and Kenneth L. Beaudoin, Porter has no difficulty with his role. He can be artist and scientist. It is as both that he wrote the Sciart manifesto, originally published in the 1950’s in Tasmania, Australia, and I’ve Left, originally published (with the manifesto included) in 1962. Porter has said that he wanted to summarize everything he knew in I’ve Left, and it’s in this spirit that the work should be taken. Epochal it is, and it should serve as a preface to Porter’s uncommonly terse and blank-filled works, whose meaning is provide primarily by the reader, but whose humor, style and general aesthetic quality are implicit in Porter’s constructions. As an example of these, we have included a small bouquet of Found Poems (1928-), deliberately undated, at the end of the present edition. 

Modern culture consists of many voices in lots of rooms. One of the larger of these, to which we hope this present volume provides the key, is that of Bern Porter. 

(From jacket cover)

Jackson Mac Low’s poems, plays, simultaneities and articles have been widely published since 1940. This volume is a collection of stanzaic-acrostic chance poems written for his wife in 1960. The separated stanzas, with words and phrases drawn from such widely different sources as newspapers and scientific treatises, have been used as text for simultaneous performance comprising musical sounds and nosies. 

(From jacket cover)

On this occasion the Press acted as co-publisher with another house, Second Aeon Publications, then located in Wales. The Press had co-published books before (e.g. the Emmett Williams books done with Hansjorg Mayer) but here the role of the Press seems to have been mostly a matter of support for a worthy cause. The anthology present a brief cross-section of a substratum in concrete/visual poetry, the poem rendered by the typewriter and dependent on the peculiarities of the machine for its character. The pouters are all British, and all apparently employ manual rather than electric machines. The poems originally appeared in British magazines and the book itself was printed in Cardiff…Higgins, who had not been informed that the anthology was entirely British and who was dissatisfied with it, suppressed the American run, even destroying most copies. 

(From Peter Frank, Something Else Press, McPherson & Company, 1983)

This first novel - by an expatriate American living in Canada - looks like previous surrealistic stories: but it feels like a hurricane. 

The nameless protagonist (unless “he” is the only name he has) is not merely faceless, he is defaced and raped. Violence, cruelty, and callousness are implicit in almost everyone of the episodes. The style is brutal in its cleanliness, a sort of ice-tract expressionism. 

Toby MacLennan is the first really tough novelist of her Vietnam-and-since generation: yet most of her work is purely visual. A Detroiter by birth, she holds an MFA in painting from the Art Institute in Chicago, and has taught painting and drawing in Mexico, the USA and Canada (Halifax), Presently she’s working on a photographic book under a Canada Council grant. But the writing keeps happening. It’s hard to stop writing when you think so much and do it so well. 

(From jacket cover)

Porter the ideologist (author of I’ve Left) and Porter the atomic scientist, Porter the social planning expert (whose 1969 plan for Knox County, Maine is a widely-acclaimed classic) and Porter the artist all come together in Porter the Poet. Porter’s Found Poems all have the same seminal position as Duchamp’s objets trouvés. Does this reflect Porter’s own 1930’s surrealist past? Only time can answer that

(From jacket cover)

This is the unmentionable book in the Stein canon. For one thing there seems to be some serious disagreement among the Stein experts as to whether or not it’s about her sexuality, and for another thing it’s written in her most beautiful but difficult “cubist” style. For both reasons it has baffled her (mostly male) critics. Nobody would call this an easy book, but it’s a heck of a human one. It needs reading more than talking about. 

(From Dick Higgins and Jan Herman, Catalogue Fall/Winter 1973-1974, Something Else Press, 1973)

Poets, writers, artists, composers - they all like to pretend that they knew all along what would happen when they began their newest work. Experiment is a dirty word, like avant-garde or even art. After all, in a sense, no art work can match the impact of the bullet that goes through your head, the poverty that ruined your childhood or the prejudices that made your life a hell for a time. 

Dick Higgins is a different kind of artist. In his essays (many of the theoretical ones collected in foew&ombwhnw, published by Something Else Press) he anticipated many reactions to the new arts and new art intermedia, and tried to place them in a realistic sociocultural context. But in his art work, he seems always to be testing new media, means of communication, and hoping through this somehow to find the right and unique voice for the motion that hasn’t been sounded. Experiment is implicit. 

A Book About Love & War & Death is one of the three major literals works he is responsible for, the others being the unpublished Legends and Fishnets and the unfinished 1000 Essays, irresponsible being the attitude he takes towards the details of subject matter, and his work being the defining of the matrix in which the details happen. He seems to feel if the matrix is right - and for that he takes full responsibility - the work will somehow feel right and encompass a tremendous expressional gamut. Plan the society right and within it people experience tremendous freedom of choice: structure the art work right, and the audience will find their minds extraordinarily exhilarated and joyful. To him that’s the real use of art. 

(From jacket cover)