May 17th 2010

Words In Progress

Yesterday I spoke at Words In Progress, an event convened by Hannah Gregory, of Vertigo of the Modern, and Monster Emporium Press. There was much goodness there, from such fine folk as Ambit, CB Editions, antepress, Strange Attractor and Zero Books—the latter represented by Nina Power of Infinite Thought, whose book One Dimensional Woman is worth your time.

Stories

My favourite work, however, was by David Rule from or-bits, whose obsessional diarising over six months produced a five volume, barely edited memoir, and who turns his and…

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May 14th 2010

Blog All Dog-Eared Pages: A Universal History of the Destruction of Books

Fernando Báez is the director of Venezuela’s National Library and the author of, among other things, a history of the lost library of Alexandria. In 2003 he was sent to Baghdad as part of a cultural commission to evaluate the damage down to Iraq’s—and the world’s—cultural heritage, having previously performed a similar, and similarly devastating, task in the former Yugoslavia.

cover

The result of 13 years labour, A Universal History of the Destruction of Books (trans. Alfred MacAdam, Atlas & Co., 2008) is a compendium of bibliocausts, a necessary reckoning of not only what we have lost, but of the…

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May 13th 2010

Long Snake City

Long Snake City

It was the second Gamecamp on Saturday, and by all accounts it was a huge success. I couldn’t attend, but I was asked to contribute something to the one-off newspaper produced for the day. The result is above, with the text below.

During the proceedings of the Fourth Situationist International Conference in London in December 1960 Tomas Coteblanc found a playing card in the gutter outside a bar in King’s Cross. As a result, he proposed the game of Long Poker.

Players were to collect cards as they went about their daily lives, but all cards were to

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