Do you like paper? A lot? Do you fetishize it, stroke its fine grain, sniff its woodsy bouquet? Do you like going to your earthbound mailbox and finding something inside other than a bill from a company that hates everything about you except for your debt? Were you recently without electricity and thought, dang, maybe there remains a place for the printed word after all? Do you know that you are a real writer because you have boxes upon boxes of postcards and news clippings and a Xeroxed copy of the “Rules for use of the Game Room” at a Natural Bridge, VA, campground, and other scraps of paper that you have collected over the years, a collection that looks and smells remarkably like your idea of a “soul,” whereas your 3TB portable hard-drive is super handy but, as an object, somewhere between meh and ugh?
Do you know about Rabble, from Insert Blanc Press?
Well, then, allow us to paraphrase and lift whole swaths of language without deploying quotation marks:
Rabble, co-edited by Holly Myers and Mathew Timmons, prints single-author issues of critical essays of about 1500 words on artwork (or series of artworks) broadly defined: visual art, literature, music, architecture, film, design, whether contemporary or historical. The essays are printed in pamphlet form, with room for a couple full color images, and distributed at a reasonable price.
Allow us also to quote directly:
Rabble was conceived as a venue through which to interrogate the nature of criticism, a laboratory for prodding at the boundaries of criticism as a form. The idea is to begin with a framework that reduces criticism down to its two fundamental components—the thing that’s been made and the person who responds to the thing that’s been made (i.e., the art work and the critic)—and invite each writer to take it from there. We’re not looking for the average book or exhibition review, but something that tests out a new direction, whatever that means to the individual author.
We have great confidence in the potential of Rabble to make a lasting contribution to the cultural discourse on the West Coast and beyond. It is our hope that, in charting a path between the two prevailing poles of the genre—the ever-narrowing shutters of print journalism on the one hand and the ponderous obscurity of the academy on the other—Rabble will go some way in restoring the sheer excitement of criticism.
Current Rabble(s) feature essays by derek beaulieu, Steve Roden, and Tyler Stallings. You can also subscribe to all issues of Rabble for 1 year (“at least” 12 issues, Myers and Timmons assure).
Tarpaulin Sky was positively stoked to find beaulieu’s essay, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” delivered free to our earthly mailbox just the other week. (For you, it might cost $5, which is more than generous, wethinks, considering the time and resources involved in creating an object with tangible vibe.) Not only did the pamphlet look good and feel good and occasion a certain TSky editor’s trip to the theater–literally the same synchronous day–to see The Shining on the big screen for the first time in the 30+ years since he first saw the movie on TV, sitting on the floor of his cool older sister’s first single-wide home–but the essay, clocking in at approx. 1500 words spanning 6.5 panels of a 4-panel-x2 pamphlet, was actually interesting to boot.
For starters, did you know there is a second half of the oft-quoted “All work and no play…”, which “first appear[s] in James Howell’s Proverbs in English, Italian, French, and Spanish”? Indeed there is:
All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy.
Did you know that the production of Jack Torrance’s “manuscript” (which was not in King’s book but is Kubrick’s invention) was re-tooled by Kubrick depending upon the country in which his film was to be shown?
Seriously. Kubrick used different traditional proverbs/adages local to that country, and he had his production crew type out new manuscripts. For the Spanish version of the film, beaulieu informs us in a footnote, Kubrick used what is now this blogger’s favorite phrase: No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano; “Rising early will not make dawn sooner.”
The meat of the essay, however, if it can be separated from this fab trivia, is a brief but fascinating, theory-driven survey of writers who have deconstructed and recreated or re-envisioned Torrance’s manuscript: Phil Beuhler, Jean Keller, and “the anonymous author published by Gengotti Editore.” (Another footnote informs us, “Rumor has it that both Michael Ondaatje’s and Michael Redhill’s archives contain similar attempts.”)
The essay ends by posing some difficult question about what it means to have “the gall to call oneself a writer,” and asks, “Can not writing be a literary act?”
(If you’re a writer-publisher, the answer is clear. The writer-publisher’s curse/blessing (same root word in the Hebrew) is that when s/he hasn’t written a damn thing in the last 24 hours, or week, or month–still they get to point to a bookshelf full of other writers’ work and think: I made that happen. Which is why you should go check out Rabble and Insert Blanc Press and throw them a few dollars. They take both digital and paper money, just as they make digital books as well as killer pamphlets.)
In closing, we’ll post a scan, below, of four of the essay’s panels. We’ll redact some of it, not because we Myers or Timmons would be anything but glad that we reproduced their paper in pixels, but because things that are redacted look cool.
