Thanks Martha, Joel, others. I should say that I'll follow up with part
2 of unprintability, a dialogue with Alan Sondheim on the topic.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Charles Baldwin" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2011 11:13 AM
Subject: [WDL] unprintability (part 1)


Do not print this book
Sandy Baldwin

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what
good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction? -
Julio Cortazar

Geoffrey Gatza, fearless director of BlazeVox, that "publisher of
weird
little books," took the final proofs of Lurid Numbers to his printer
on
July 27, 2011. Lurid Numbers is a collection of more or less
"codeworked" text - much like _i did the weird motor drive_, my 2007
book with BlazeVox - written through simple computer scripts and word
processings, and through my own impulse, inquiry, and idiocy. The next
day he came back with some odd news in the form of an email from the
publisher:

------ Forwarded Message
From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:02:16 -0700 (PDT)
To: Geoffrey Gatza <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Files for Lurid Numbers, 978-1609640705 require your
attention

The interior and cover files for Lurid Numbers, 978-1609640705 have
been reviewed.The cover file meets our submission requirements; it is
not necessary for you to make any revisions to this file or upload it
again.The interior file does not meet our submission requirements for
the reason(s) listed below. Please make any necessary adjustments to
your interior file and upload it again by logging in to
createspace.com.The interior file contains pages with unreadable text
or
"jibberish" which we are unable to move forward with as it may appear
as
a file error in manufacturing. Please submit a revised interior file
for
further review.

Best regards,
The CreateSpace Team

As we like to say in academia, the email was "interesting," that is,
it
could be read as linked to a number of other cultural domains and
protocols. The relation of the "interior" to the "cover" repeats and
takes part in the history of the "book," where the cover is the limit
of
the work of writing; the cover is the enclosure or partition, the 
event
and inscription of multiple institutions: of authorship (if the work
is
under a pseudonym or in some way unsigned, the copyright page still
must
contain an author's name, even if it is "anonymous"), commerce (the
name
of the publisher, legal descriptions of rights and regulations, and so
on), and archiving (library of congress number, date of publication,
etc.). Along with this, the fact that the interior of the book was
somehow rotten or broken seemed both a judgment and a simple fact of
this book. It was even better that this was expressed iconographically
in the cover, which did meet "submission requirements." I saw the
cover
as a submission of the contents to a single image. The cover shows a
butchered and already old, slightly rotted fish. The image is
photoshopped, neon and definitely lurid. Geoffrey directed me to this
image, and I loved the combination of the repulsive and slimy, the
mundane and organic, with the software transformation that keeps it
real
but artificial as well. It did indeed seem to submit and capture the
interior.

And then: "the interior file contains pages with unreadable text"
seems
to me an almost ontological statement, one that rubs against the
proximity between the written work and the human. We may submit, we
may
submit a cover - ourselves - that meets requirements (of culture, of
others), but our interiors are often quite different, unreadable. I
also
appreciated the misspelling of gibberish, suggesting a virality of the
unreadable text into the printer's email. Finally: "we are unable to
move forward [...] as it may appear as a file error in manufacturing"
suggested to me an event or force of the work beyond the interior
file,
a hidden explosion breaking the apparatus that machined it, and
seeping
or flooding past the cover.

In short, I was pleased to become more than just another job for the
printer, to become a new process and something beyond the routine. At
the same time, I was concerned, wondering what would happen with my
interior file, as it were. I found out five days later, on August 1,
2011, when Geoffrey informed me in an email that "they cannot print
this
book and there is nothing I can do about it. [...] this is something
completely new and I have to say I am perplexed by the mechanizations
of
modern times. The printers are not opposed to you or your work, this
is
a situation of a printing process that is highly automated and this
registers exactly like a printers error to their machine. It is not a
human that we must cajole into agreeing that this is art, which was my
first take on this, as with the printer who cannot spell. This is a
matter of a quality control camera that will reject books that look
like
this. I talked with a lot of people in the company and even had my
lawyer call them to see if great weight would move the immovable. But
no, their system will literally stop when it would try to produce your
work."

A writing that stops the computer system, the very system designed to
print out writing: what more could I ask for? What more frustrating
thing, as well, so close to the print out of the book, that fetish
object that makes authors out of writers? I was judged by the computer
to have written something, i.e. it did not deny that there was an
input
that it could judge, but it evaluated my writing as unprintable, as a
writing that can only remain in the space of the computer, within the
possibilities of software. My interior file was bummed out but also
filled or luridly lit up with a deep pleasure.

"The act of writing is related to the absence of the work, but is
invested in the Work as book. The madness of writing - this insane
game
- is the relation of writing; a relation established not between the
writing and production of the book but through the books production,
between the act of writing and the absence of the work.[...] To write
is
to produce the absence of the work (worklessness, unworking,
[désoeuvrement]). Or again: writing is the absence of the work as it
produces itself through the work, traversing it throughout. Writing as
unworking (in the active sense of the word) is the insane game, the
indeterminacy that lies between reason and unreason." - Maurice
Blanchot

BTW, the book is here:
http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/Poetry/lurid-numbers-by-sandy-baldwin-244/


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