Alcheringa times 4

Thirteen issues of Alcheringa, the journal for ethnopoetics, appeared between 1971 and 1980. They are all online. But that is not enough for me: I want to have them! There are copies around but not almost within my budget and/or paypal-sphere. Last year I found one, last week I found three from two different sellers. Two separate issues I purchased on ebay as first/only bid. Like often with reputedly highly collectable material (less obvious William Burroughs for instance): they are not really that sought after at all. While searching for the other issues I can read these and be pleasurably annoyed.

Beatscene magazine[s]

Beatscene press is run from Coventry by the Ring's. They publish not one, not two but three long running series of beat generation publications. There is the pocket book series, limited edition booklets with unique material (interviews, memoires) relating to the more recognizable Beat names, for instance Iain Sinclair's reminiscences on his encounters with William Burroughs with a so-far unpublished cut-up by WSB. There is Transit, a little magazine that mainly brings original poetry but my issue is devoted to a long essay on Gary Snyder. But their flagship publication is the Beatscene magzine, a quarterly down to it's 70th issue within a few months. It brings reviews, essays, interviews, scholarly articles, fan writing and original material. In the US especially there is still tons of books being published about anything related to the beats. There is previously unpublishable material like letters and notebooks but there is also a steady stream of biographies, academic works and memories. Some of the original beats are still alive and publishing and Beatscene goes out of their way to speak to them, others are dead and lionized and incorporated into Hollywood and Beatscene will keep up for you. Which is to say that there is still enough happening to keep a magazine filled. The definition for being called a beat is pretty democratic so Beatscene will write with as much zeal for Jack Kerouac as it will for some guy who used to work at City Lights bookstore and published limited edition chapbooks al his life and is probably a complete unknown. The sheer volume of stuff covered is fantastic and, if nothing else, it shows how collectable beat generation material is. 

The urban forage fashion police

"foraged plants and flowers can be kept in a basket"

In the Netherlands the great forage revival keeps attracting more high-profile coverage. This time I nearly fell from my seat as I recognized the face of Edwin Flores in the pages of the Margriet, a woman's weekly I associate with the reading pleasure of countless of grandmothers. I don't know Flores but earlier I reported on a forage tour he guided and I have to repeat what I said earlier: if foraging had a fashion police he would be the chief super intendant! He is "well groomed in Bear Grylls chic" and the picture above confirms it.

Mockery aside, it's great to see 'wild picking' promoted in such a magazine (ook al moet het vertrut worden om acceptabel te zijn) and perhaps, given that its readership comprises of older woman, it could perhaps, via via, release a lot of dormant plant knowledge. I mean: it would have been great if my own grandmother who was a avid reader of the Magriet (she passed away 5 years ago) on reading this article would suddenly remember forgotten uses of plants from her own youth and tell us about it. 

The obvious thing to say about the recipes is that the foraged greens, presented as a way to 'eat from nature', are almost symbolic additions to ingredients you can buy in every supermarket. The wild plants provide parts of the flavour, the rest, calories especially come from elsewhere. When looking at foraging as a political activity this is significant. There is a good post by Ian M. on foraging for Burdock that addresses some of these issues.

Pasta with smoked chicken and ground elder pesto

Bread with cheese, ham and nettle tops.

Reviewing TheState, Volume 1

The State is a website and magazine based in Dubai. The State's first volume 'voicings/articulations/utterances' appeared about a month ago, it's in A4, black and white with a few pages in full colour, to be read not from left to right but from top to bottom with the binding held horizontal. The writing is of a consistent good quality and all writers aspire to write about what is happening in the world now in a language that is journalistic-academic, serious but without jargon. My favourite pieces are the personal reflections on identity, politics and the prospects of life to come. There is one awful piece which is by myself and deals with some of the finer points of cryptoforestry in a globalized world. From my perspective the best thing about The State is that it offers a collection of voices I would never have come in touch with otherwise: the main connection seems to be between India, the Gulf states and the United States, with people coming from one of those places and living in one of the others. I think that the overall mood of The State is one of insecurity. Most writers are of the student age or just beyond that, and you sense that the economical and political storms (the 2008 financial crash and its consequences, the Arab spring and Occupy) have created an atmosphere in which few people know what to expect other than the conviction that the future might not be as bright as was promised. And that this feeling is felt even stronger by younger people. I hope that the editors will live up to the aim expressed in the foreword and find a way to speak about the present in terms of daily life and easily observable phenomena.  

Amidst austerity measures today, we find ourselves increasingly precarious and pixelated; atomized, alienated, and irreparably glitched. Yet rather than attempt to definitively theorise, analyse, and explicate this contemporary situation, we found ourselves returning to these few questions: How do you speak a place? How do you speak from a place, or non-place? What might the reader expect to see from a certain region, and why? Who speaks, and in whose vernacular?   

Psychogeographical publications from the future: Six

The date given for the publication #4 of 'Transgressions, a journal of urban exploration' is spring 1998 and this probably means that I purchased it a year later at Camden's Compendium bookstore when I was in London for the 10 Days in Space festival organized by the Association of Autonomous Astronauts. This magazine ticks all the boxes of that time: magico-marxism (!, where has it gone), primitivism, the AAA, Luther Blissett, Stewart Home when he could still be taken serious, The LPA's Fabian Tompsett, Angry Brigade's John Barker reviewing Tom Vague's book on the AB, psychogeo field reports, Asger Jorn and rock art. What more could you possible want? This was psychogeography as it was before 2000: exclusively used and understood in activist/anarchist/left-wing Marxist terms. This is not by definition a good thing because the overall tone is one of sectarian self-righteousness gift wrapped in academically sanctified forms. 

Sometimes I check ebay to see if any of the other 4 issues are for sale, but nobody wants to flog them. 

Post part of a series of psycho-nostalgix

Fight the Google-Jugend!

We are miserable creatures.

We are stunted in our growth.

We are mostly naked.

Our faces are hideous, bedaubed with paint.

Our skins are filthy, green tobacco slime drips down from our chins.

Our voices are discordant.

Our gesticulation is violent, without any dignity.

Our language is like the clearing of a throat.

Our language is hoarse, guttural, clicking.

We are savages.

We do not need search.

We know everything we need to know.

Please do hide that look of total and utter surprise, but yes, I do, to my own surprise as well as yours, very occasionally publish essays in things that get printed. Today arrived my latest enterprise in print: Tresholds 38, themed Future, edited by the great Orkan Telhan and published by the MIT's department of Architecture. My piece is called 'Fight the Google Jugend' and it is a kind of Amazonian enthnopoetic compendium of local voices kept together by a fat sauce of anarcho-sentimentality. The footnotes are about 30% of the text in the version published here, the ratio in the manuscript was closer to 60% and it apparently looked so daunting that the text managed to pass peer-review. It was illustrated by the wonderful Lucy Cheung. Proper publications are, to a certain extent, the justification for my, to a certain extent, marginalization and I was pretty chuffed about this piece when I submitted it, after months of waiting for the final result a certain emptiness has come over me. I take this to be the universal hangover that is part of writing. Am looking forward to read the rest of the magazine.

Our ancestors could never have believed that our world was being watched keenly and closely by intellects cool, dogmatic and unsympathetic (Yeah!), who regarded our world with envious eyes, and who slowly and surely drew their plans against us (Yeah!). Early in the sixteenth century came our great disillusionment, we were all counted amongst the dead when the pananakiri came. We are the feral children of the forest (Yeah!). The collateral damage of the search for that mystery land of liquid Inca gold (Yeah!). Doomed orphans of El Dorado (Yeah!). We have survived the euro-germs, for now, but as long as anyone of us dies from the common cold, the measles or the flu, the discovery of America is not yet over...

(Yeah!)

(Go on!)

(Yeah!)

Earth scraped bare (Yeah!) ! Plunder and deforestation (Yeah!) ! Rubber Rubber Rubber (Yeah!) ! Death Death Death (Yeah!) ! Sold into slavery (Yeah!) ! The state will eat us all (Yeah!) ! The centre cannot hold (Yeah!) ! Anarchy unleashed, chaos and turmoil (Yeah!) ! Fire and pain, disease and suffering (Yeah!) ! The shabono teargassed, the maloka nuked ! (Yeah!) Thousand corpses, grinning missionaries (Yeah!) ! Deluded anthropologists (Yeah!) ! Post-crash Tupi-Surrealism (Yeah!) ! Myth verified as history (Yeah!) ! The blotted-out forgotten past announces our second coming (Yeah!) ! The raised mounds of Marajo Island (Yeah!) ! The garden cities of Xingu (Yeah!) ! The lost cities of Z (Yeah!) ! The forest islands of the Beni (Yeah!) ! The geogplyphs of the upper Purus (Yeah!) ! They are all coming to the surface like badly healed broken bones scarring the skin from underneath (Yeah!) ! Red and blistering (Yeah!) ! Infected and rotting (Yeah!) ! It all started with the wrath of Viti-Vití (Oh Yeah!)!