siglio

Parable  |   When you order soup, make sure to ask the Waiter to hold the hair: Or, a parable about soup that’s really about printing and gaslighting and greed.

Statement  |   Hairy soup is Good! Most soups have hair in them!: Or, absurdity-driven litigation—how a small press publisher fights back in a Lithuanian court.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE IMPROBABLE: “The Improbable takes its inspiration from Dick Higgins’ Something Else Newsletter just as his Something Else Press (1963–1974) is a totemic spirit for Siglio.”

No. 3 Lingual Music — IN THIS ISSUE & INTRO: Guest edited by Alex Balgiu and Chloé Gourvennec, this issue is a catalyst, a manifesto, a conversation across time, language and musical propositions.

No. 1 Time Indefinite — MATVEI YANKELEVICH: In his reassement of the Something Else Press, he writes, “The value of the small press has long been centered in its marginality in relation to commercial culture.”

No. 1 Time Indefinite — Sally Alatalo: “… a journal doubles as travelogue and scrap book; a ship’s log takes turns as sea diary, atlas, illustrated catalog of fishes, a love letter longing for home.”

SEVERAL GRAVITIES — In his afterword, Robert Seydel writes about Waldrop’s collages: “Ghostings, hauntings, veilings, falling and ascending figures, drift are central terms for Waldrop, all concerning the in-between, in part the unbeheld.”

Remembrance  |  DOROTHY IANNONE, 1933–2022: A self-taught artist who made exuberantly sexual, joyfully transgressive, and often autobiographical image+text works, radical in their inversion of binaries, and often tender in the incorporation of her lovers and friends.

Remembrance  |  Bernadette Mayer, 1945–2022, “GIANT of AMERICAN POETRY.” We share our sorrow with her family, friends and readers—all who knew a truth-teller, a risk-taker, a shaman of daily life when they saw one.

ROCK OF EYE — Brent Hayes Edwards talks with Troy Montes-Michie: “I’ve come to think of [El Paso] as my first experience with the language of collage … two very separate cultures colliding on every level”

No. 2 Time Is Elastic — J. MAE BARIZO: “This mode of translation, one that is enacted in the colonizer’s language, is not enough; we need to think about the violation this blur of identity entails, how it can also ruin and obscure.”

No. 2 Time Is Elastic — IN THIS ISSUE & INTRO: A collection of summonings—our ghosts, ancestors, totems, touchstones, familiars. A collection of reckonings with—and embraces of—what cannot fully ascertained.

No. 1 Time Indefinite — Ann Lauterbach: “I want to ask our imaginations to allow for a generative leap across boundaries and borders, so that we begin to escape from the singularity of our identities…”

No. 1 Time Indefinite — TRACIE MORRIS: “There are intersecting communities of experimental artists … We are perpetually in conversation with each other across, time, space, beingness, perspective and geography”

No. 1 Time Indefinite — IN THIS ISSUE & INTRO: “Dear Readers … I suggested treatises, rants, manifestos, meditations, studies, lists, notes, but I also received a questionnaire, a novel excerpt, a film script …”

“It Is What It Is” — Introduction by author Richard Kraft: “One of the English tabloid newspapers summed it up with its Cockney-rhyming slang headline: ‘No, it wasn’t a dream folks … THE WORLD REALLY IS DONALD-DUCKED’.”

Print This!  |  “Subway Ghosts” by Chris Russell: Fellow subway riders are rendered in black ink on transparencies to be seen after they’re gone. A little booklet to make from a single sheet of paper.

MEMORy — by Bernadette Mayer: July 15, 1971: “what century & in what city do you see & do you see a faster way, find a faster way to get to the line that goes in all directions flame no continuing space a space to live in flame

MEMORY — A short history of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory in all of its incarnations, beginning in 1972 with an installation at Holly Solomon’s first art space

MEMORY — “My name is Bernadette Mayer, sometimes / I am at the head of my class,” —Mayer quoted in the biography written by daughter Marie Warsh

List  |  Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press Lives On: A bibliography of Something Else Press reprints, facsimiles, etc. that evinces the enduring love for SEP

Appreciation  |  JOSHUA BECKMAN AT POETs HOUSE: “My hope is to share some of the exuberance I have found … in the things Dick Higgins put in the world.”

CECILIA VICUñA — Lucy Lippard writes: “Her art is a naturally fused amalgam of word and act in which she not only translates, but becomes an archaeologist of language, excavating, dissecting, recreating meaning”

BECOMING IMPERCEPTIBLE — Andrea Andersson writes: “But Pendleton’s protest, like Bartleby’s, refuses a ‘common usage,’ even the ‘common sense,’ we anticipate from more conventional demonstration.”

Print this!  |  Richard Kraft invokes Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi to respond to the Trump Presidency: “And it’s your fault I’m stupid.”

List  |  Ray Johnson, Ray Johnson, Billy Ray Johnson: A google alert for “Ray Johnson” yields a multitude of Ray Johnsons doing many (often illicit) things

DOROTHY IANNONE — In her essay “Culminations,” Trinie Dalton writes: “Dorothy’s artwork … has obliterated practically every type of separation categorically, in both textual and material realms.”

DOROTHY IANNONE — From the editor: “The complexities of submission and dominance in the most sexually graphic aspects of her work have much … in common with medieval mystics.”

Dorothy Iannone — A short biography from the editor: “She is best known for her exuberantly transgressive, sexually explicit, mostly autobiographical image+text works exploring ‘ecstatic unity.’”

Constellation  |  FROM Robert Seydel’s “KNOTbooks”: Following his emblem the hare in his notations and collages … “The hare does in reality what man can only do mentally”

A PICTURE IS ALWAYS A BOOK — Editor Lisa Pearson writes: “I’ve been keenly aware of the kinds of contradictions Seydel lived within—the work as a means to get beyond the self and yet as also inextricable from self”

NOT NOTHING: SELECTED WRITINGS BY RAY JOHNSON — From editor Elizabeth Zuba’s introduction: “Multiplicity and distance or void wasn’t an affected practice on Johnson’s part; they were the very lenses of his reality.”

NOT NOTHING: SELECTED WRITINGS BY RAY JOHNSON — Kevin Killian writes: “I’m backing into Ray Johnson, gingerly, the way I might slide into a bumper car or the driver’s seat of a Lotus, ass first”

Constellation  |  RAY JOHNSON AND SNAKES — “Andy Warhol says my snakes aren’t snakes … My snakes are imaginary and inarticulate snakes, and what is life size about inarticulateness?”

A PICTURE IS ALWAYS A BOOK / BOOK OF RUTH — The last and only interview with Robert Seydel by Savina Velkova: “Art has always seemed to me a kind of exit out of the self, a way to get beyond the self.”

Appreciation  |  Lisa Pearson ON Robert Seydel: “A portrait of a woman for whom the distance between the ordinary and extraordinary, the ecstatic and the desolate, coherence and inscrutability … seems to collapse”

O! TRICKY CAD & OTHER JESSOTERICA — In his biography of Jess, editor Michael Duncan writes: “Jess filtered … far-flung references through a self-described Romantic sensibility.”

Biography  |  More about Charlotte Salomon and Life? Or Theater? A Song Play (Chapter 7 appears in the image+text collection It Is Almost That)

It Is almost that — From the afterword: “It is something, in other words, that can never be just that — fully one thing or another, wholly belonging here or there”

Biography  |  “The … eyes I encountered conveyed the same uncontrollable anguish spiders cause me … This is why I very soon divided myself into two halves” — Unica Zürn

List  |  Arranging One’s Books, No. 2: A glimpse into Robert Seydel’s personal library and a list of thirty-seven books he was reading in December, 2008

Missive  |  A Truly Dirty Rotten Book. A Filthy Weird Book. Not all of the mail is fan mail: “I can not understand how you … would publish such filth”

Tantra Song —  Bill Berkson interviews Franck André Jamme: “It took, let’s say, ten years to begin to know something, even if only a tiny something, about this amazing art.”

Tantra Song — Lawrence Rinder writes: “Ideal forms—forms plumbed from the depths of the mind, of the soul—need to co-exist with randomness and the emptiness of chance”

Torture of Women BY NANCY SPERO — Diana Nemiroff: “How to make the obscenity of torture visible without becoming obscene is the paradox Spero must address”

Disquisition  |  Catherine de Zegher writes: Nancy Spero “realized that, unlike any other state of consciousness, … physical pain resists verbal objectification in language”

Appreciation  |  John Ashbery: “Joe Brainard was one of the nicest artists I have ever known … This may present a problem.”