THE BLUE HOUR COLLECTIVE

A Reunion Delayed--

2008-10-16T11:08:00.000-07:00

I miss you my collective brother!

"The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.”
-Iris Murdoch

Song for Lorca

2008-10-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

The line of her headband
into the night of her ears
the fountain of hair between those lips
drink it before it's not pure anymore
drink it before it's not pure anymore
Gypsy won't have anything with her
she said the line in her hand is too new
and he'll come from across the water

Well his victory comes slow but true
victory comes slow
victory comes slow but true
victory comes slow

Death in Seville
The moon's coming in for the kill
Death in Seville
The moon's coming in for the kill

Sunrise attacking a finger
she writes a word in the sand
so green
so fast
so good
poetry came true this time
poetry came true
poetry came true this time
poetry came true

We're blind...Death in Seville...

From the album Folkloric Feel by Apostle of Hustle

The Ohio Love Sculpture

2008-09-18T07:52:00.000-07:00

Alexis Duque, The Gift

First, a huge apology from our members for not posting lately…real life in all its entanglements has intervened of late. But we are back, and will be updating regularly from now on!

Here is a gift to you in penance- a short and very creepy story that I’ve finally tracked down after obsessively searching for decades…much like the search of this story’s protagonist.

I originally found this story in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stories to Stay Awake By. If Alfred Hitchcock Presents had still been on TV in the 1970’s, this tale could have been adapted quite nicely into a half-hour sting-in-the-tail episode (and would have showcased Hitch’s interest in increasingly graphic nudity and sexual violence as reflected in Frenzy and his uncompleted film Kaleidescope). The author ‘Adobe James’ is the horror nom de plume of late author and Sherlockian playwright James Moss Cardwell; he also wrote horror stories as ‘James McArdwell’. Little beyond that is known of him.

Ladies and gentlemen…

may I present The Ohio Love Sculpture

Cover Art

2008-07-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

Dear Collective: Here are some sketches for possible cover art. Feedback and suggestions posted here would be appreciated, and I think our readers would enjoy the public discussion.

Blue Hour Reunion!

2008-07-23T09:24:00.000-07:00

Our collective members will reunite this weekend.

"Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection."
-Arthur Schopenhauer

Lorca's Odes and Wagner

2008-07-21T04:00:00.000-07:00

Lorca wrote a number of long poems that he called 'Odes', although the connection between the forms that these poems exhibit and Greco-Latin verbal structures of the same name is remote. One of them, the 'Ode to Walt Whitman', is famous, often translated and much anthologized. On the one hand, it seems a hymn to yet another avatar of the dying and rising god. On the other hand, it is a didactic poem, encouraging a proper way of being homosexual and denouncing other modes of homosexual being, particularly those that are parasitical on heterosexual styles. In any case, precisely because it has been done many times and frequently done very well, we, at the Collective, are steering clear of this wonderful poem. Instead, as mentioned in an earlier post, we are translating two other Lorca's odes, the 'Ode to Salvador Dali' and the 'Ode to the Most Blessed Sacrament.' Neither is as immediately accessible as 'Walt Whitman', but both are thick with the rich Surrealistic imagery that characterized Lorca's poetry in the late 20's and early 30's. While, initially, there seemed little to connect the three odes, the translation work itself began to reveal some common imagery (e.g., rivers, the dying and rising god), and slowly a conception of these three works forming a coherent triology began to take hold.

Schopenhauer is known to fans to Wagnerian opera but is otherwisealmost forgotten today outside of university philosophy courses and even there remembered primarily as Nietzsche's precursor. This state of cultural ignorance is unfortunate, not so much because of Schopenhauer's philosophical achievements (although he probably deserves more credit here than he gets,) but because of a) his world historical role in propagating knowledge of Vedantic and Buddhist texts to the West (in however a distorted a form - although the Collective thinks that the amount of distortion has been overstated) and b) the incredibly broad influence of own philosophical system on the 'cultured middle class', particularly in Germany and the Spanish speaking worlds. Now Brian Magee, in his brilliant study, Wagner and Philosophy (called The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy in the USA), makes a compelling case that whilst The Ring of Nibelung is fundamentally a Schopenhauerian cosmology/cosmogony, his other three 'late' operas - 'Tristan and Isolde', 'The Mastersingers', and 'Parsifal' represent explorations of the central three solutions proposed by Schopenhauer to the negations he saw lying at the heart of being: respectively Love, Art, and Religion. (btw, Collectivistas sometimes argue that Verdi's 'Don Carlo' and then 'Otello', 'Falstaff', and the Requiem Mass are a parallel project but that may be pushing it.) Now, mindful of Schopenhauer's pull on the spirits of the Spanish speaking intelligentsia (as well as Wagner's for that matter), we are increasingly coming to believe that the three Odes are, in fact, Lorca's attempt to present the three Schopenhauerian solutions to a Schopenauerian cosmology/cosmogony, articulated in his case by 'Yerma.' As the translation work continues (and, yes, these Odes are making the Collective sweat!), we will elaborate on this interpretation (and link it to some of our Summer reading.)

On The Silver Globe: Transendental Sci-Fi

2008-07-02T09:53:00.000-07:00

Images courtesy of http://www.andrzej-zulawski.com

Polart has just released On The Silver Globe (Na srebrnym globie), a brilliant and frightening Polish science-fiction film whose fractured plot of a society displaced and degraded ironically reflects the film's aborted place in cinema history. When the film's backers floundered and the Polish Ministry of Culture closed production in 1978, it was not until the fall of Communism in 1986 that director Andrzej Zulawski completed his film. He bridged unfinished scenes with narration and utterly mismatched footage that does not jar the story- amazingly, it succeeds in connecting the film's themes to the present as well as the future.

Although On The Silver Globe is one of Zulawski's first films as director, its style and themes have echoed through his career: wildly-pitched performances, thrashing physical confrontations and crazed close-ups alternating with wide-angle depths of action can also be seen in his best known film, 1981's Possession. Possession won Isabelle Adjani a best actress award at Cannes but also allegedly pushed the actress to attempt suicide, due in part to her role's intensity.

Opening with a spaceship from Earth crashing on a planet's surface, the film's themes of death and displacement echo until its final frames. As the ship's three survivors begin to populate the desolate landscape, their descendants devolve into ragtag, brutal tribes. Generations later, the arrival of an emmisary from Earth is hailed as the return of a long-awaited messiah...but we all know what happens to messiahs.

This movie is not for the faint hearted. Some viewers may find it the cinematic equivalent of having a cheese grater rubbed against your face for two and a half hours. If you can bear its extremes of beauty and brutality, you'll see a futuristic, funhouse mirror of the everyday brutality that exists all around us.

A Poet to the Rescue!

2008-06-26T12:41:00.000-07:00

He looks like he means business...ouch.

Our Summer Reading List favorite Gerard Malanga has risen to the defense of Andy Warhol's estate in a fascinating tale of true vs. faux Warhol silkscreens- read here.

Some Linkages...

2008-06-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

Our reading list is, by the way, a bit less random than the casual observer might guess. How, one might wonder, does Category Theory relate to a Tibetan commentary on Nagarjuna?

Well, it works like this: Nagarjuna's metaphysics is all about working out the implications of the Buddha's notion that all beings are, to their very core, 'dependently arisen' - conditioned by their relations to other beings. He comes, famously, to conclusion that being is, at its heart, emptiness. Now, Category Theory is a way of looking at mathematical objects which seeks to describe them entirely in terms of their relationships to other mathematical objects, emptying them out - so to speak - of any internal content. Put another way, Category Theory is a very Mahayana Buddhist way of looking at mathematics and maybe more. (There is another interesting connection here with the work of French philosopher, Alain Badiou, who argues that the void that generates Set Theory is the central truth of ontology. Someone must have already drawn the parallel between Badiou and Nagarjuna but I have not been able to track a reference down. In any case, a new volume by Badiou will soon be published in English extending his thoughts from Set Theory to Category Theory but that is more properly a candidate for next summer's reading list.)

Summer Reading List!

2008-06-12T12:16:00.000-07:00

Ah, summer...die brandung ist oben!
Time for all those pasty, housebound academics to dust themselves off and shamble into the sun! Here's ten selections our Collective will be reading on the beach in the next few months. If anyone tries to kick sand in your face, that four volume set of Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers will come in quite handy (metaphorically speaking of course...)

The John Woods translation of Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers

Thomas Beddoes- Death's Jest Book

Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi- Zone 5: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 3

Steve Awodey- Category Theory

Robert Brandom- Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment

Richard Kieckhefer- Magic in the Middle Ages

Gerard Malanga- No Respect: Poems 1964-2000

Tsong khapa- Ocean of Reasoning:A Great Commentary on Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, translated by Ngawang Samten and Jay L. Garfield

Lynd Ward- God's Man: a Novel in Woodcuts

Charles Williams- All Hallows' Eve

Lorca and Cornell...

2008-06-09T13:55:00.000-07:00

Between 1958-1965 collage artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell directed (with Larry Jordan) A Legend for Fountains, which took its title from Lorca's poem Your Childhood in Merton.

Since the poem will be included in our chapbook-- and our illustrations will be in the surrealist collage style of Cornell and Max Ernst--I thought I'd post a link to see the film, which tells the story of a little boy's wanderings in Manhattan.

According to legend, at Cornell's premiere screening of his first film Rose Hobart Salvador Dali was in the audience. As the film began, Dali was enraged- knocking over the projector, he cried that Cornell had "stolen his dreams!"

You can read about Voyager Foundation's DVD set The Magical Worlds of Joseph Cornell here.

Lorca Lecture

2008-06-06T09:34:00.000-07:00

At The Great American Pinup blog you can read an overview by Christopher Maurer on Lorca's 1933 lecture "Play and the Spirit of Duende" exerpted from the New Directions book IN SEARCH OF DUENDE.

Parvenu's Dark Love...

2008-06-05T08:46:00.000-07:00

UK's Parvenu Press has a beautiful wood-cut printing of Lorca's Sonnets of Dark Love reviewed here.

In the Running...

2008-06-05T08:29:00.000-07:00

Letterpress finalists...
I'm finally making some headway on presses that could print our chapbook cover. Although I've not discussed this with our members yet, I'd imagine a run of about 100 copies plus artist's proofs. These are the vendors I'll be contacting-- can other members have a look at these sites, then give me some feedback?

Running the Goat Press
A beautiful handmade look. Love the binding!

Chester Creek Press
Lovely, well-designed books and broadsides. Nice open space!

Interrobang Letterpress
Work is very nice, lots of rock poster and CD design

Bieler Press
Around since 1975, beautiful typography! Love that Weiss font...

What is 'The Blue Hour'?

2008-06-04T10:00:00.000-07:00

'The Blue Hour' is best described as the hour before dawn- about 4AM. It is a passionate and spiritual time of day with echoes of death and rebirth, and a time for deep reflection. It a perfume by Guerlain, it's mentioned in a Lorca poem and is a very sentimental time for our members. These lyrics by Roy Orbison sum it up best. They're from his song "When the Blue Hour Comes"...

The good times are all gone
The night keeps coming on so strong
You can't hold on, no matter what you do
Will there be someone who cares for you
When the blue hour comes?

And when your restless heart
Tears your world apart
And everywhere you turn, it's falling down on you
Will there be a light that shines for you?

When the blue hour comes for you
If there's anything that you would have me do
Just call on me and I'll be coming through
I will always be there for you
When the blue hour comes

Good times don't last forever
Sometimes it's now or never
Darling, reach out for me, you know where I'll be
I will always be there for you
When the blue hour comes

I will always be there
When the blue hour comes...

Ainadamar

2008-06-03T10:46:00.000-07:00

Could my collective brother write a bit about the Lorca opera Ainadamar by Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang?

Letterpress Love Letter

2008-06-03T09:18:00.000-07:00

Ampersand Duck has a lovely piece on the physical act of setting type here.
What a tactile act typesetting is! I'm in the middle of researching possible vendors for our letterpress cover, so any suggestions on printers in the NY area would be very helpful.

Lorca and Italy

2008-06-03T06:51:00.000-07:00

Lorca is amazingly popular in Italy, particularly in the South. He translates easily, of course, but, perhaps his popularity in cities like Palermo, Bari, and Naples is also the result of affinities stemming from the long term Spanish presence in Southern Italy (I remember the curious experience of reading what I thought was some odd dialect of Italian inscriptions carved into old walls in Sorento and Naples, only to realize, after a few seconds, that I was reading some pretty bog standard Spanish), a similarity of history (a Latin Catholic overlay of infrastructure laid down by what had been a reasonbly longlived Islamic conquest), and even a similarity of climate and landscape. Of course, Lorca's anti-fascist credentials are impeccable and that helps too in a country where, despite Berlusconi's recent return to power and the presence of genuine fascists (suitably modernized) in the government, you can't be a true intellectual if you are not a Marxist.

On a completely unrelated note, while exploring the many bookstores of Como this past week (the bookstore density in Como is similar to the coffee shop density in London), I discovered a facing page translation of Finnegans Wake into Italian. Very wild indeed.

'Road' Movie...

2008-05-28T08:05:00.000-07:00

Read about the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road here.

Greetings, Traveller!

2008-05-27T07:33:00.000-07:00

For a collective member at Lake Como --

"The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object, and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity."
-Shelley, from To Divide is Not to Take Away

New Rimbaud!

2008-05-23T08:56:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, Le Figaro reported the discovery of a hitherto unknown poem by Arthur Rimbaud. Written when he was 16, it is called 'The Dream of Bismarck (Fantasy).' For our readers, here is what may be the first rendition of that poem into English.

It’s evening. In a tent filled with silence and dream, Bismarck, his finger on the map of France, meditates. A thin line of smoke escapes from his immense pipe.

Bismarck meditates. His small, hooked index finger walks on velum. From the Rhine to the Moselle; from the Moselle to the Seine. Its nail lightly scratches the paper around Strasbourg. It moves on.

Saarbrucken, Wissembourg, Woerth, Sedan, the little, hooked finger quivers with delight. It caresses Nancy, scratches Bitche and Phalsbourg, Metz, a scratch. It traces the small, broken border lines and stops...

Triumphant, Bismarck covers Alasce and Lorraine with his index. Oh! What a miser’s delirium under his yellow skull cap. What delicious smoke clouds spread from the happy pipe!

Bismarck meditates. Wait! A large black spot seems to stop the fidgeting index finger. Paris! The little nasty nail scratching, scratching the paper, here, there, with rage, finally stopping. The finger remains there, bent, motionless.

Paris, Paris! Then, sleepiness seizes our day-dreaming villain, his face leans towards the map. Unconscious now, the pipe escapes from his lips. Its furnace of burning ash covers the nasty black spot.

Ay, Povero! He has lost his poor head and plunged his nose, the nose of Otto Von Bismarck, into the burning furnace. Ay, Povero! Go, Povero, into the incandescent furnace of the pipe...Ay, Povero, his index finger was on Paris! The glorious dream, it is finished.

It was so fine, so spiritual, so joyous, that nose of the old first diplomat.

Hide that nose, hide it!

Ah well, my dear, when you return to the palace to apportion the royal sauerkraut (...) with crimes of...lady (...) in history, you will carry your carbonized nose between your stupid eyes eternally.

There you have it. You should not have day dreamed.

Reader of the Day...

2008-05-22T08:07:00.000-07:00

...and what else would

an anonymous collective member

read but Black Mask?

House Press Shout-Out...and a Good Word from Kingdom Books

2008-05-21T07:56:00.000-07:00

House Press is a small indie-press whose striking cover designs stand out.

We like them. Also, Beth from Kingdom Books paid us a lovely complement here. Thank you.

Favorite Bookshops in London, Part 1

2008-05-20T08:21:00.000-07:00

If Lorca had visited London instead of New York in 1930, we can only wonder whether or not he would have been drawn into the circle of Aleister Crowley, bi-sexual, hated by the fascists (the Italians, in Crowley's case), and, importantly for resolutely mono-lingual Lorca, Spanish-speaking. While occult/theosophical elements are subdued in Lorca's work, they are there (arguably, of course, it was just part of the zeitgeist - if you were modernist of any stripe in the 20's, you either had Marxist or Fascist leanings - remembering that, for a long time, one could hold to one those political theologies and still admire the other - ; you believed in the need to reduce form to its purest elements; and you thought there was something compelling about theosophy.) It is likely, in any case, particularly given Lorca's meditations on El Duende, that he would have found the company of Crowley congenial.

There is an absolutely wonderful bookshop - just off of Charing Cross Road called Watkins (http://www.watkinsbooks.com/) which has been around (in one form or another) since the late 19th century and was frequented by Crowley and his friends. Not surprisingly it contains just about anything to satisfy your needs for esoterica but also stocks what is, by far, the best collection of scholarly books on eastern religions in London. If any of our readers visit and venture downstairs, he or she may very well find some members of the collective thumbing through a Sanskrit grammar or a Tibetan commentary on Nagarjuna (we may discuss either or both of these topics in future posts.)

DIY Chapbooks...

2008-05-19T08:13:00.001-07:00

http://diypublishing.blogspot.com/ has oodles of small press/micropublishing/ self-publishing links and resources.

Duende and Loa

2008-05-19T04:01:00.000-07:00

A question for our friends: is there any connection whatsoever between Maya Deren and Lorca? She arrived in New York long after he departed but the hagiography of Lorca as an anti-fascist martyr had already begun to be written and the Trotskyite mileu from which Deren sprung was intoxicated with the romance of the Spanish Civil War. More fundamentally, there are some among us who find the atmosphere of 'Meshes of the Afternoon' to be similar to the atmosphere of many of Lorca's plays and poems. Even more striking is the similarity between Lorca's notion of El Duende and the way in which Deren understood the Loa of Voodoo. (Imagine Deren filming Lorca's Yerma!)

Reader of the Day- Charles Williams

2008-05-16T07:51:00.001-07:00

A collective member has interested me in the fascinating work and amazing life of Charles Williams- he never attended college, yet rose from a lower middle-class background to become a lecturer at Oxford's Divinity School. A member of The Inklings, the "dearest friend" of C.S. Lewis and a Rosicrucian who practiced 'natural magick', Williams had friendships with Eliot, Robert Graves and the Sitwells. He wrote poetry, prose and philosophy yet he is almost forgotten. I think he's my new favorite writer. Here is a blog that prints daily devotionals of William's theological writings-- http://tomwills.typepad.com/thenewchristianyear

And to reward the friend who has introduced me to Charles Williams-- I'll be sending you a very special book...

Lorca in Vermont

2008-05-15T10:40:00.000-07:00

Yes, Lorca fled New York City for the relative peace of Eden Mills, Vermont where he recuperated enough to return to Manhattan and issue a sequence of great Jeremiah-like denunciations (New York, Jewish Cemetery, Crucifixtion, Cry to Rome, and the impossibly beautiful Ode to Walt Whitman.)

On his way to and from Vermont, he traveled through upstate New York along the path of the Taconic Parkway, stopping in Newburgh and, probably, some other towns well known to our friends. Strangely, Newburgh blended with Granada in his mind and, on his return we believe, he had the terrible vision of the little girl drowned in the well, the translation of which we will share in our volume.

Lorca in New York as a film or a play - there have been some plays - none memorable. Hmmm, perhaps a future opportunity for all of us.

And, yes, the cover is beautiful. Perfect in fact.

Lorca in Vermont...and cover ideas

2008-05-15T08:24:00.000-07:00

Beth from Kingdom Books in VT (see bookstore links) sent us a very kind letter and mentioned that Lorca had spent some time in Vermont. Can anyone out there provide more info on this? Lorca's adventures in NYC and VT would make an amazing film...

I had a free hour from a design job so I mocked up cover art for the chapbook. I want it symetrical, elegant...this is a very rough idea, mind you! I'd like the cover done by letterpress, so I'm at the mercy of the available fonts the pressperson will have. A simple, open, airy font is best.

Feedback from collective members (or our friends) is encouraged. Click on the cover for a larger view.

Readers of the Day- Paolo and Francesca

2008-05-14T07:55:00.000-07:00

One day, to pass the time away, we read of Lancelot, how love had overcome him. We were alone, and we suspected nothing.

And time and time again that reading led our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale, and yet one point alone defeated us.

When we had read how the desired smile was kissed by one who was so true a lover,this one, who never shall be parted from me, while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth.

-Dante, Inferno V.82-142

Art by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Paolo and Francesca (1855)

The Tate Gallery, London

The Cycle

2008-05-13T11:48:00.000-07:00

Our selection for the chap book is partly driven by our desire to pass on the poems that delight us most and partly driven by our desire to tell a story. In the end, we don't know which desire has proven the strongest or whether both desires amount to the same thing.

The 10 poems most likely to make up the cycle of translations are: Surprise, Blue Hour, The Rider's Song, Ode to Salvador Dali, Ode to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, Your Childhood in Menton, Little Girl Drowned in the Well, Ghazal of the Dark Death, Qasida of the Woman Prone, and Sonnent of the Sweet Complaint.

Lorca and Sonnets

2008-05-12T11:11:00.000-07:00

Lorca wrote sonnets throughout his life but his exploration of this structure intensified towards the end of his life. Spanish language poets were collectively rediscovering the expressive potential of traditional forms in the late 20's and early 30's and it is probably not coincidental that this trend was contemporary with Modernism's Neoclassical turn. In any case, we hope to feature one or two Lorca's late sonnets in our collection. Among our favorites is the Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint. Here's a tentative version of the first quatrain:

Don't let me lose the marvel
Of your statue eyes, nor the accent
That, by night, places on my cheek
The solitary rose of your breath.

a personal history of private publishing

2008-05-12T10:39:00.000-07:00

Bronzino- Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time (1545)

Do any two words pique a reader's purient interest more than Privately Published ?

Prominent authors have published their own works for centuries- Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, William Blake...unfortunately, modern readers tend to group privately published works into three categories: 1. Smut, 2. The badly written (unfortunately, these two categories are not mutually exclusive of each other) or 3. Works whose scope is so narrow as to be of little interest to the general public. Dredging up visions of dull family histories or soppy poetry by your maiden aunt, those who yearn to print their own works have a rough go of it. An article in The New York Times titled "The Passing of Privately Printed Books" stated:

"To any one familiar with English history as told in letters, memoirs, and family papers, present-day publishers' announcements bring home the fact that in recent times a great change has taken place in the mode of publishing these books. The era of privately printed books, so far as this department of literature is concerned, is apparently at an end."

That was written in 1899. Opinions have not gotten better since. The general view today is that self-publishing, like self-pleasure, seeks to please only its author.

My entrance to the privately published book was a copy of Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, stumbled across in a jumble shop as a teenager. Its lurid lilac cover beckoned alluringly. Its numbered, limited edition status made me feel like oh-so-special...ah, one of the select few! The indulgent, full-page etchings of slim, nude sylphs reclining into the furry embrace of obliging bears, lions and tigers didn't exactly jibe with the text (after all, Wanda wore those furs, she didn't loll around with their original owners), but it was a book that begged to be furtively bought, snuck quickly home and hidden deep in one's closet for midnight reading.

I quickly discovered that not all "for subcribers only" books were transgressive- some were quick-and-dirty efforts designed to trample an author's copyright for a quick buck. But the best books were designed and distributed with true affection-- slim volumes with indulgent embossing, delicate end-papers and elegant fonts-- numbered by hand and created to keep one's favorite writings alive. They were labours of love. A book treasured by our collective is a 1940's copy of Mademoiselle du Maupin, customized by yours truly with a gold-and-black rendering of the Gautier's crossdressing heroine as a bodice-bearing swashbuckler. It was my pleasure to add yet another layer of reverence to a volume that someone invested such time, love and art into sixty years ago.

With the advent of the artist's book, a humble chapbook could become a viable and collectible aesthetic object. The surrealist's cryptic texts tumbled down broadside pages, and Anais Nin posed beside her own hand-cranked printing press. San Francisco Beats made silkscreened books on butcher paper. In the 60's the Fluxus movement created boxed collections of books, cards and objects printed with antic directions and Zenlike declarations. Now, with desktop publishing within everyone's reach anyone can be an author- for better or worse!

Although the printer's chore can be skipped in favor of a .pdf document sent straight to your website, please remember- there is nothing like a book. A book has length, depth, breadth and life. It crackles in your hands. It can be slipcased, tucked in a pocket or inscribed to a loved one. It can become an old friend who, in old age, is taped, glued and handled with reverence. Books mark dates and places in our lives- who we read them with, who we gave them to, the people we loved.

We wish to present our subscribers with a lovely little polished gem they can add their personal luster to- so the memory of your first "privately published" book can be as precious as mine.

2008-05-09T09:23:00.001-07:00

Lorca writes in three more or less distinct registers. The first, and most widely appreciated, is romantic, peopled with gypsies and other almost stereotypical Andalucian characters. The second is urban and modernist. It might be Lorca's most influential register, at least in Spanish language literature, shaping much of what is memorable in writers like Borges and Paz. The third is high surrealist. This last register is his least accessible (Neruda spent his entire career trying to craft a more accesible version of this register) but also, we feel, his most interesting and will be the source of most of the translations to appear in our first volume.

our first chapbook!

2008-05-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

A first step! Our first book will be ten poems by Frederico Garcia Lorca with new translations, an introduction and illustrations by our members. Copies will be distributed free of charge upon request (to the US and UK only) via our US and UK email addresses. We'll post our addresses as the project comes together...we hope this will not just be a book, but a limited edition work of art that will be treasured by our subscribers.

The number of copies will be limited- the number of books and our time~frame for all of this is still being hashed out. But a start, no matter how humble, is still a start :)!

the blue hour collective

2008-04-26T08:18:00.001-07:00

CHAPBOOKS FREE OF CHARGE
A new publication on poetry, philosophy or critique each year, distributed free of charge-- this is the goal of the blue hour collective. More news to come...