I’ve been playing around with Lulu.com, a print-on-demand publisher, for the past several months, making little books, experimenting with cover designs, having them printed and sent to me, etc. Kind of testing the waters to see if I want to be a print publisher with Arras again, since I’ve been enjoying print design much more than web work lately.

It’s been fun if a bit solipsistic considering I’ve been using early and “uncollected” poems of mine. Yes, vanity indeed. But I’m done now, just “finalized” this collection which I guess is available for purchase at Lulu. I’ve tried to keep the shite out.

Don’t tell Charlotte Rampling–I know she’s on your Facebook account somewhere–that I’m using her face for the back cover. It’s a promotional still for the science fiction big budget B-bonanza starring Sean Connery and a number of British extras called “Zardoz,” which is probably a better name for an anti-anxiety medication than “Xanax” IMHO.

 

I’m updating this post just to mention how much I love this typeface. It’s called A.D. Mono and it’s available for free here:

http://www.getfreefonts.info/free_font.admono.html

Click the poster below to enlarge if you can’t read it well:

 

Here are some brief descriptions of ideas for courses at Richard Stockton College, should I take a position there as a full time professor:

New Media for Children and Education

This will be a workshop course in how to design web sites and Flash applications for preschool children and for the classroom. What sort of interfaces appeal to children? How can new media augment a traditional education? Students will spend a month learning Macromedia Fireworks (an imaging program) and Flash (an interactive graphics program). We will also read and discuss children and creative educational literature and websites. For the second half of the semester, students will work on a final project that has either an educational function or is geared toward children.

Hypertext Fiction, Poetry and Non-fiction

This will be a workshop course for which the first half will be entirely devoted to writing in the various genres above with traditional “workshopping” critique sessions, and reading the classics of hypertext literature and holding up to the same values we expect of print literature. During this time, rudimentary skills in Fireworks and Dreamweaver will be acquired along with basic typesetting skills. For the second half of the semester, students will work on a final project that will encompass issues of writing, design and interactivity that characterize a successful hypertext work while keeping an eye on its print manifestation.

Writing for Video Games

In this class, we will read and play several of the “classic” video games that involve textual experiences by the users with a mind to treating the text like one would a screenplay — as a literary genre primarily associated with a visual (and highly lucrative) medium. We will consider these games in relation to the traditional genres of literature, such as drama and fiction, and read several interactive fiction texts. Students will also acquire a working knowledge of a software program or programming language (not sure which one yet), and work on crafting textual, interactive experiences in these programs.

Electronic Editing and Publishing

This is a workshop in print design (in Photoshop and Illustrator), typesetting (in Quark if they have it in the Mac lab, in Word if not) and print-on-demand services such as Lulu.com. Students will have produced a professional looking perfect bound publication by the end of the class. The content will be a collection of writing of some nature – poetry, essays, etc. – which can be either collected online or via submissions from peers. By the end of the class, each student will have conceptualized, edited, designed, typeset, and finally “published” a paperbound book through Lulu.com.

[I’ve been invited to be a part of this… come on out! I’m in the “Beer and Pretzels” part of the day.]

Now that Adam’s Books has been open awhile, and opening wider each day, the time has come to celebrate. For example, this Sunday, November 12: THE ADAM’S BOOKS GRAND OPENING CELEBRATION PARTY.

If you haven’t visited the store recently, you might be surprised at how grand it has become. The shelves are full. The books are sorted and alphabetized. There are soft, comfortable chairs. There are more and better and grander books than ever before.

So: SUNDAY NOVEMBER 12: all afternoon and evening, from 12 to 10 pm, the GRAND OPENING party to celebrate ADAM’S BOOKS. There will be balloons.

Also: short readings by several of the neighborhood’s finest writers. (See below for schedule.)

You can dance if you want to. This will be a party.

ADAM’S BOOKS is located at 456 Bergen St., between 5th Avenue and Flatbush.
That’s north Park Slope, Brooklyn, just around the corner from the Atlantic Yards landgrab.
Steps from the 2,3 Bergen St. subway; a short walk from the MNQBRW2345 Atlantic Ave subway hub.

12 pm – 3 pm:  COFFEE & MUFFINS

12:00 – 1:00 : Rick Pernod, Andrea Baker, Bronwen Tate
1:00 – 2:00 : Jenn Guitart, Tisa Bryant, Lynn Xu
2:00 – 3:00 : Christopher Myers, Erika Howsare, Jackie Delamatre, Juliette Lee

3 pm – 6 pm:  BEER & PRETZELS

3:00 – 4:00 : Will Hubbard, Jess DeCourcy Hinds, Amber West
4:00 – 5:00 : Eve Packer, Holly Tavel, Fred Schmalz, Brian Kim Stefans
5:00 – 6:00 :  Mac Wellman, Erin Courtney, Jonathan Ceniceroz  

6 pm – 10 pm: WINE & CHEESE

6:00 – 7:00 : Anika Haynes, Gareth Lee, Brenda Iijima
7:00 – 8:00 : Luisa Guigliano, Jennifer Hayashida, Christopher Stackhouse
8:00 – 9:00 : Bonnie Emerick, Amy King, Adam Tobin

Adam’s Books
456 Bergen St. 11217
(between 5th Ave. & Flatbush)
Brooklyn NY adamsbooks@earthlink.net
718 789 1534

Yay… (I ripped this off of Amazon).

Stefans’s multigenre Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics (2003) has already emerged as a major text on its subject, and his digital poems would make most cognoscenti’s top 10 lists. Published simultaneously with Stefans’s essay collection Before Starting Over (Salt Books), this set of five chapbooklike sections of poems reads like a “real playstation/ or organic whist” that treats history as a kind of textual joke; every line signals a deep, playful, Frank O’Hara–like imbrication in the 20th-century’s pains and pleasures: “Pound’s flopping of oars… crises that approach with the grace/ of guttural, 32-bit Nazis, or with jodi.org’s antique ‘pro-situ’ strains.” The section “The Window Ordered to be Made” contains “They’re Putting a New Door In” (which made The Best American Poetry 2004) and “Poem Formerly Known as ‘Terrorism’ ” (“I’m hurt like Rocky,” notes its speaker). There’s a set of 15-line poems documenting the travels and travails of a figure named Pasha Noise, who also appears in a concluding comic strip (with illustrations by Gary Sullivan). These new poems broaden the range of Stefans’s wonderfully supersaturated sensibility. (Nov.)

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