Margaret MacArthur
1960
Showing posts with label Once in Vermont Films. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Once in Vermont Films. Show all posts
Monday, May 25, 2020
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Sunday, February 7, 2016
Saturday, November 28, 2015
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Friday, November 23, 2012
Saturday, November 3, 2012
BOOK LOVE ~
To be clear about these little book films I make from time to time — no part of the films are meant as a promotion or marketing tool for our bookshop at Longhouse.
In fact, the better majority of the books shown aren't even available in our bookshop. You are looking at my own personal library and I garner my personal library not from any professional status, but as a 100% devoted reader. It just happens to be what is being read at the moment by either my own hunts and findings, or someone has sent a book as a gift through the mail, or it may be a booklet or small book we have published and I'm setting it on the stack as I'm gathering a stack of books for a film.
Donna Fleischer's red covered booklet we reprinted over last week before Hurricane Sandy blew in — so there's Donna at the top of the stack. Same with the Helen Nearing book we published. Last night I wrapped up a half dozen for Greg Joly to have since Greg was instrumental at getting the manuscript into our hands. I took an extra copy and slipped it into the stack.
I seem to be always reading Popa; like what Kent Johnson devised in an all-together possible O'Hara-Koch world; Nate Kluge came from out of the blue via a yet one more little wonder from Pressed Wafer; and the Ed Baker was one of those moments finding a stray envelope while researching something else and asking myself, "What is this?" and having one of the tiniest books I own slip out into my bigger palm.
If you're not in wonder about books, you better pinch yourself.
A book's existence is up there with mountains, rivers, and seas. Try to convince yourself ebooks are the next wonder of the world and you're just kidding yourself while trying to sell your ebooks — may it happen since it is one more avenue of readership — but it isn't a book. . .where some of the most massive and exquisite buildings ever built were built around them.
To be clear about these little book films I make from time to time — no part of the films are meant as a promotion or marketing tool for our bookshop at Longhouse.
In fact, the better majority of the books shown aren't even available in our bookshop. You are looking at my own personal library and I garner my personal library not from any professional status, but as a 100% devoted reader. It just happens to be what is being read at the moment by either my own hunts and findings, or someone has sent a book as a gift through the mail, or it may be a booklet or small book we have published and I'm setting it on the stack as I'm gathering a stack of books for a film.
Donna Fleischer's red covered booklet we reprinted over last week before Hurricane Sandy blew in — so there's Donna at the top of the stack. Same with the Helen Nearing book we published. Last night I wrapped up a half dozen for Greg Joly to have since Greg was instrumental at getting the manuscript into our hands. I took an extra copy and slipped it into the stack.
I seem to be always reading Popa; like what Kent Johnson devised in an all-together possible O'Hara-Koch world; Nate Kluge came from out of the blue via a yet one more little wonder from Pressed Wafer; and the Ed Baker was one of those moments finding a stray envelope while researching something else and asking myself, "What is this?" and having one of the tiniest books I own slip out into my bigger palm.
If you're not in wonder about books, you better pinch yourself.
A book's existence is up there with mountains, rivers, and seas. Try to convince yourself ebooks are the next wonder of the world and you're just kidding yourself while trying to sell your ebooks — may it happen since it is one more avenue of readership — but it isn't a book. . .where some of the most massive and exquisite buildings ever built were built around them.
Once In Vermont films © bob arnold
Sunday, September 23, 2012
NORTHERN ~
there's an exhilaration going on here — a combined landscape love and two people love in a new rental car, borrowed for four days, let loose and sweeping a landscape these passengers have returned to after an absence of decades. little has changed, unlike where they have come from and will return to. the territory is too far away from the mainstream and too extreme in its properties to be easily changed — see how the highway, built for and by farmers and woodsmen and large families and isolation, sweeps with the lay of the land, each building needed and cared for or else long gone. this is a no-fooling place, and we are self-guiding through, passing through, having been here before, exactly the same way: of love for one another and for the earth but hurdling at large speed through large landscape. for days and weeks and months and years before this moment we have been on-foot, traveling. now this. tense changes in the text will be unavoidable. someone watching this knows exactly where we are, but I'm calling it earth since we are caught in a matter of time
the film began on the far northern reaches between two states, finally stopping for gas, traveling since the middle of the night, climbing climbing to this spot, where like I say we've been here before. a corner market and not much else, still a pay phone, big old fashioned coca-cola sign white and red lettered, a much older sign rusting and saying even more of what this place once was. a beatup car pulls in next to us, solo driver, a pit-stop with a cd or tape left going, window cracked, the driver grunts getting out and will grunt when he stoops to get back in behind the wheel, pearl jam is playing. he's local — you can tell from his clothes, his walk, his familiarity, and the car has been diminished to short runs. we have pearl jam somewhere with us and so from this driver and stranger we take up his music as we continue our journey, over a landscape that will be slowly but surely disappearing, although it hasn't that much in the four decades since we've been away
no one is about where we are, some of these buildings we pass may be abandoned, though someone has run up that flag, and someone is caring to mow that cemetery, it's saturday and people are home, good size trucks are parked in dooryards and we're still early birds. where's this highway going? it's wilderness and expansive tracts of water, lakes, ponds, bogs, swamps, the famous pointed fir trees of another author's book title. and what will keep it all sustained? the landscape will do quite fine without us, thank you, but what of this highway and where it is all headed to? there is an exhilaration in the love and to the land, the music brought along but inspired by its use from another and taken from his car into this car, the camera is running
there's an exhilaration going on here — a combined landscape love and two people love in a new rental car, borrowed for four days, let loose and sweeping a landscape these passengers have returned to after an absence of decades. little has changed, unlike where they have come from and will return to. the territory is too far away from the mainstream and too extreme in its properties to be easily changed — see how the highway, built for and by farmers and woodsmen and large families and isolation, sweeps with the lay of the land, each building needed and cared for or else long gone. this is a no-fooling place, and we are self-guiding through, passing through, having been here before, exactly the same way: of love for one another and for the earth but hurdling at large speed through large landscape. for days and weeks and months and years before this moment we have been on-foot, traveling. now this. tense changes in the text will be unavoidable. someone watching this knows exactly where we are, but I'm calling it earth since we are caught in a matter of time
the film began on the far northern reaches between two states, finally stopping for gas, traveling since the middle of the night, climbing climbing to this spot, where like I say we've been here before. a corner market and not much else, still a pay phone, big old fashioned coca-cola sign white and red lettered, a much older sign rusting and saying even more of what this place once was. a beatup car pulls in next to us, solo driver, a pit-stop with a cd or tape left going, window cracked, the driver grunts getting out and will grunt when he stoops to get back in behind the wheel, pearl jam is playing. he's local — you can tell from his clothes, his walk, his familiarity, and the car has been diminished to short runs. we have pearl jam somewhere with us and so from this driver and stranger we take up his music as we continue our journey, over a landscape that will be slowly but surely disappearing, although it hasn't that much in the four decades since we've been away
no one is about where we are, some of these buildings we pass may be abandoned, though someone has run up that flag, and someone is caring to mow that cemetery, it's saturday and people are home, good size trucks are parked in dooryards and we're still early birds. where's this highway going? it's wilderness and expansive tracts of water, lakes, ponds, bogs, swamps, the famous pointed fir trees of another author's book title. and what will keep it all sustained? the landscape will do quite fine without us, thank you, but what of this highway and where it is all headed to? there is an exhilaration in the love and to the land, the music brought along but inspired by its use from another and taken from his car into this car, the camera is running
film © bob arnold
once in vermont films
once in vermont films
Monday, August 13, 2012
THANK YOU, FRIEND ~
Once In Vermont films © bob & susan arnold
Bob & Susan say thanks (out of the rain)
The complete Susan edited Birthday tribute anthology is here
The complete Susan edited Birthday tribute anthology is here
Once In Vermont films © bob & susan arnold
Friday, August 10, 2012
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Monday, April 2, 2012
HOMEMADE POEMS ~
"In 1963, Lorine Niedecker married Al Millen, a house painter. The marriage surprised several of her friends, but it gave Niedecker steady companionship from day to day and allowed her to leave her cleaning job at the hospital and devote herself more fully to writing. In October of 1964, having no book prospects on the horizon for the poems she'd written during the first year of her marriage, Niedecker took action and assembled her own—a book of thirty poems inscribed into the pages of a dime-store sketch pad, whose front and back she had covered in wrapping paper. She carefully handwrote the small poems in blue-inked cursive, placing each one on its own unnumbered sheet of paper. She then sent the book, with the wry title Homemade Poems and her name inscribed on the cover, to her friend (Cid) Corman, who was living in Japan at the time. A few months later, she constructed two more renditions of the book, which she sent to poet Louis Zukofsky in New York and Jonathan Williams, founder of the seminal Jargon Press. The titles of these latter two books were transformed from Homemade Poems to Handmade Poems.
By turns, the small poems in this three-edition self-publication move through a sprawling array of modes. Niedecker makes room here for — to name only the several categories that spring to mind — deft, vivid details from daily life; excerpts of intimate colloquial speech; sober evocations of global violence; abstracted sound-mosaics; spare "portraits" of historical figures; and found poems pulled from friends' letters (Ian Hamilton Finlay and Louis Zukofsky, "LZ")."
. . .
"My zeal for textual knowledge in this case drove me to seek out Homemade Poems in the New York Public Library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature, where the book is held as part of Cid Corman's papers. Encountering the book that day — spending time reading its poems in just the form Niedecker had so deliberately inscribed and arranged then — immediately stirred in me a conviction that the textural production itself, in some form or version, deserved a much wider readership, a life outside of the archive."
. . .
"As editor for this project, my central objective has been to create an accurate, commensurate reading edition of Homemade Poems that allows the work to be experienced roughly as Niedecker first gave to it. However well poetry is designed and printed, anthologies of all kinds necessarily have a way of superseding or drowning out the sort of reading experience described above. The very job of any massive, unified anthology is to subsume the smaller, heterogeneous works that are fed into it. In a case like Homemade Poems, this effect is even more pronounced: its singular materiality and text-deployment set it utterly apart from any sort of printed, standardized, mass-produced version."
film © susan & bob arnold
LORINE NIEDECKER
"In 1963, Lorine Niedecker married Al Millen, a house painter. The marriage surprised several of her friends, but it gave Niedecker steady companionship from day to day and allowed her to leave her cleaning job at the hospital and devote herself more fully to writing. In October of 1964, having no book prospects on the horizon for the poems she'd written during the first year of her marriage, Niedecker took action and assembled her own—a book of thirty poems inscribed into the pages of a dime-store sketch pad, whose front and back she had covered in wrapping paper. She carefully handwrote the small poems in blue-inked cursive, placing each one on its own unnumbered sheet of paper. She then sent the book, with the wry title Homemade Poems and her name inscribed on the cover, to her friend (Cid) Corman, who was living in Japan at the time. A few months later, she constructed two more renditions of the book, which she sent to poet Louis Zukofsky in New York and Jonathan Williams, founder of the seminal Jargon Press. The titles of these latter two books were transformed from Homemade Poems to Handmade Poems.
By turns, the small poems in this three-edition self-publication move through a sprawling array of modes. Niedecker makes room here for — to name only the several categories that spring to mind — deft, vivid details from daily life; excerpts of intimate colloquial speech; sober evocations of global violence; abstracted sound-mosaics; spare "portraits" of historical figures; and found poems pulled from friends' letters (Ian Hamilton Finlay and Louis Zukofsky, "LZ")."
. . .
"My zeal for textual knowledge in this case drove me to seek out Homemade Poems in the New York Public Library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature, where the book is held as part of Cid Corman's papers. Encountering the book that day — spending time reading its poems in just the form Niedecker had so deliberately inscribed and arranged then — immediately stirred in me a conviction that the textural production itself, in some form or version, deserved a much wider readership, a life outside of the archive."
. . .
"As editor for this project, my central objective has been to create an accurate, commensurate reading edition of Homemade Poems that allows the work to be experienced roughly as Niedecker first gave to it. However well poetry is designed and printed, anthologies of all kinds necessarily have a way of superseding or drowning out the sort of reading experience described above. The very job of any massive, unified anthology is to subsume the smaller, heterogeneous works that are fed into it. In a case like Homemade Poems, this effect is even more pronounced: its singular materiality and text-deployment set it utterly apart from any sort of printed, standardized, mass-produced version."
sharing excerpts from the editor John Harkey's "Usable Dimensions: An Afterword", a pamphlet insert to Homemade Poems.
Some time soon Homemade Poems will be available from
"The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative"
The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10016-4309.
And from us here at Longhouse
Longhouse has also published: Lorine Niedecker, A Cooking Book
another of Lorine Niedecker's rare handmade books
coordinated and prepared by Cid Corman & Bob Arnold ~
"The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative"
The Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10016-4309.
And from us here at Longhouse
Longhouse has also published: Lorine Niedecker, A Cooking Book
another of Lorine Niedecker's rare handmade books
coordinated and prepared by Cid Corman & Bob Arnold ~
link to our Lorine Niedecker publications here
film © susan & bob arnold
Thursday, February 9, 2012
WOODBURNERS WE RECOMMEND ~
It's been presented in many venues, stages, full-flowered, and happenstance. It's all about supporting books and many size publications — not burning, as a few have humorously thought.
A 'woodburner', like rock maple or very dry oak, is something you keep, covet, keep warm by, same with these varied publications. Some offerings may be many-storied volumes, others may be a slip of paper, poem on birch bark, a label, a bumper-sticker. A chalkboard! All reading.
I started the Woodburners We Recommend reviews within mimeograph publications, then photocopy journals and folds, into desk-top, now to the electronic age of words, and film.
The Woodburners have gone by different headlines, sometimes no headline. It's all about books and readings that come my way, often through the care and generosity of a gifting hand.
Thanks to those.
film © susan & bob arnold
A Once In Vermont Film
This is the 40th year for Woodburners We Recommend.
It's been presented in many venues, stages, full-flowered, and happenstance. It's all about supporting books and many size publications — not burning, as a few have humorously thought.
A 'woodburner', like rock maple or very dry oak, is something you keep, covet, keep warm by, same with these varied publications. Some offerings may be many-storied volumes, others may be a slip of paper, poem on birch bark, a label, a bumper-sticker. A chalkboard! All reading.
I started the Woodburners We Recommend reviews within mimeograph publications, then photocopy journals and folds, into desk-top, now to the electronic age of words, and film.
The Woodburners have gone by different headlines, sometimes no headline. It's all about books and readings that come my way, often through the care and generosity of a gifting hand.
Thanks to those.
film © susan & bob arnold
A Once In Vermont Film
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
