Vispo/Print: Promise

RTomens, 2025

Well that was a struggle...an afternoon of failed attempts to get anything right, in keeping with Chelsea's performance against Arsenal, which I was half-watching whilst trying various prints. Yes, some days are like that. I nearly gave up (Chelsea had). The foundational collage of pieces from an old sci-fi magazine seemed to stubbornly resist all attempts at adding to it. Try print texts - nope. Images - nope. Then there was a breakthrough, altering a version of the original and printing that, then deciding to create a circular image. At last!

Poetry Student magazine no.1, 1975. The Bob Cobbing selection

 

A good find at the book fair on Sunday, which I only went to because Typewriter Jim found a gem there when he last attended. This copy of Poetry Student magazine was buried in piles of old poetry mags. It features Bob Cobbing as guest editor of their Centrepiece section. I did find a couple more, one with Bob Cobbing material in, which I might scan. I've got a cold though at the moment and already the effort feels to much like hard work - oh you're so lucky - really - but I made the effort! Adding titles to the pieces is too much effort though - sorry - but if you follow the guide in the Centrepiece box below you'll find out who did what since I scanned them in the correct order. Visual/Concrete Poetry might have been on its last legs by 1975. I don't know. That's just a feeling. Before the gap in which nobody did anything (ha-ha) then the revival in, um, er, 2000-and-something.

The revolution will be stencilled! Mimeography and Small Press at UCL

Typewriter Jim asked me to contribute to his demonstration at the UCL event. It was the kind of college demonstration I could get behind, you know, not the political kind, but a demonstration of the spirit duplicator machine and Gestetner mimmeo printing. So I created about a dozen pieces using the required carbon paper, then he rolled them out on the day as part of pages made by others to be collated as a magazine.

Here's the machine in action...

The UCL has a large collection of underground press, some of which was laid out on a table for visitors to look through.

This is Jeff Nuttall's My Own Mag. 

The college also took my latest production, Mind Games, for their collection.

Print/Vispo: Famous Writers School

RTomens, 2025

From around the age of ten I wanted to be an artist so I applied for a correspondence course but didn't meet the minimum age requirement. A year or two later I could officially enrol and having taken the tests they sent me the info but more importantly, the price, which my dad didn't want to pay. That was that.

Apart from drawing, writing was my other passion. I'd write sci-fi stories in a lined pad in the living-room, with my family watching the telly. What powers of concentration I must have had in those days! No correspondence school attempt in that regard though.

I wonder how I'd have fared with the Famous Writers School. The only member who's name I recognise is Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone.  I don't think they were open to concrete poetry.

The ad was on the back of this magazine. 

Book: Tomorrow Inc - S.F. Stories about Big Business (1977) / Tomorrow's World

 

'We all have basic needs like food, sex, clothing and shelter.  Almost everything else (including the book you are now reading) is wants, often artificially created by the culture in which we live.' - From the introduction to Ballard's The Subliminal Man

True, true - of course I didn't need another book! I bought it anyway, not because it was forced onto me through subliminal advertising but because I was already aware of it and whilst searching the online Oxfam shop's sci-fi section it appeared at an irresistibly reduced price of £6. 

I like the theme and what a great cover (no credit given for the designer). Love that 'futuristic' font too, a variation on the one used by the BBC's Tomorrow's World  (first transmitted on 7 July 1965)

Tomorrow's World looked at developments in science and technology. By the 70s it was attracting 10 million viewers per week, including my family. Science for the masses! You may find it hard to believe but trust me when I tell you that the programme's popularity did not reflect a sudden awakening to the wonders of science on behalf of the proletariat. No. It was essential escapism from the reality of industrial Britain, heavy Industrial Britain, you know, when we still had an industry, we made things, important things like steel...and we dug up tons of coal, which came in handy too...and men were men who did the dirty, dangerous work, not the wimps of today sat tapping keys in offices all day because what Tomorrow's World predicted came true in the form of computers in every home, office and hand!

Yes, real men, 70s men, such as the miners, willing to strike at the drop of a fag butt and stay on strike until they got what they wanted even when it meant the government deciding to ration the use of electricity therefore probably preventing everyone from being able to watch Tomorrow's World. The television broadcasting restrictions were introduced on 17 December 1973, suspended for the Christmas and New Year period, and lifted on 8 February 1974. I remember those candle-lit nights but I can't remember what we did as a family. It must have been hard. I'm guessing playing cards were useful. Board games? Long conversations? Not likely...

'This terminal is linked to a giant brain' says the narrator - ha-ha! I love it - very sci-fi. The warning signs were there. In the next century, giant Silicon Valley 'brains' would be manipulating information, tracking our every move online and censoring material not deemed politically acceptable (laptop? What laptop?). And there's little Nicholas, aged four, an early adopter and innocent forerunner of today's young addicts who, at a slightly later stage, laugh at their parents' attempts to monitor their online activity whilst they peruse porn, follow lifestyle influencers and watch Drill videos under the duvet.

When it comes to book-buying, as helpless consumers we addicts may as well live in an area where giant signs advertising must-have reads loom large over roads and houses (as in Ballard's story). Unlike the fictitious one though, the scenario would have to be a purely personal one. The signs would not say 'BUY NOW NEW CAR NOW' as they do in the story but 'BUY ----- (desired book) NOW BUY NEW ------ NOW'. 

Now we 'drive' along the highways and byways of the internet, the not-so-subliminal signage taking the form of shopping baskets on various sites, filled with thumbnail images of what we want and so, ironically, it isn't size that counts; it doesn't need to be a massive billboard, just a small representation of our desires. No great effort required. No visits to a showroom. Just the click of a mouse! Tomorrow's world today and all the books we desire, instantly! 

England Swings SF (ed Judith Merrill) - The Nova (Scotia) Science-fiction connection

 

Nova being the feminine form of novus, meaning "new", it's appropriate that this, my favourite science-fiction anthology, travelled all the way from Nova Scotia to finally come to rest in my London home. It is, after all, very much a New Wave SF collection. The idea of such a 'new' thing (in 1968) even being in Nova Scotia seems incredulous, but then, we can't imagine how far artifacts from Swinging England travelled when they were still fresh. It could, of course, have ended up there at any time since, assuming they have a secondhand section. 

Nova Publications was formed in 1949 in order to keep New Worlds magazine going and so, with Michael Moorcock transforming it into the New Wave SF mag, the nova connection, my book and it's origin in Canada is complete.

Vispo: Speed of Thought

RTomens, 2025

 

Type/Print: Ad Infinitum and it's evolution / the lure of the skull

 

RTomens, 2025

Above is the finished Ad Infinitum. The title's taken from the sampled Paul Valery texts used. 

It began with this...

...which I typed on, thinking that would be the end of it...

...you guessed, it wasn't. Below is one several versions used to make up the final printed image.

I have to resist the urge to create too many 'skull pieces' because, like a Goth, I'm attracted to them. That is my only Goth inclination, I swear. Here's my favourite skull album cover...

TTN

Collage: Private Lives / The Gas - Charles Platt

RTomens, 2024

I made Private Lives late last year and a few weeks later found myself reading The Gas by Charles Platt. One reflects on privacy and what goes on behind closed doors, the other depicts a country (England) driven sex mad by gas leaked from a military lab.  'Why don't we do it it in the road?' indeed.

If sex circa 1970 in relation to the 60s 'revolution' was supposedly about liberation, Platt drives that idea to an horrific extreme in which no-one can control their desires and sex is not a choice but a compulsion. The results are repulsive and Platt doesn't hesitate to describe them in graphic detail. It's an extraordinary piece of fiction, a grotesque twist on disaster sci-fi...pulpy, conceptual, pornographic and possibly profound, if you like to read it that way. Not for the faint-hearted.

 

Happy New Year From Japan's Propaganda Dept (1939)

New Year's postcards sold in Japan. From Life magazine, Feb, 1939