100 Hybrids by Jefferson Hansen Book Release Reading, at Boneshaker Books in Minneapolis, on September 22nd from 6pm - 7pm

Please join us for an evening of poetry and asemic writing. Jeff will be reading from his new book 100 Hybrids. His book plus other Post-Asemic Press titles will be available for purchase. A few other local poets will also read.

Click here for more info: https://www.facebook.com/events/1810818072339339/?notif_t=plan_user_joined&notif_id=1534938110935778

Boneshaker Books 2002 23rd Ave S, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404

Saturday, September 22 at 6 PM - 7 PM

PEN America | Writers Resist!

Today hundreds of newspapers across the United States, led by The Boston Globe, published editorials challenging attacks on press freedom. These stressed the essential role of journalism and news outlets in undergirding American communities, our politics and policymaking, and the nation as a whole. They issued a powerful call to action for citizens to rise in defense of a free press.

For the last 22 months PEN America has been at the forefront of mobilizing writers and readers across the country as a force in defense of press freedom, truth, and open discourse as they have come under new threats here at home. Today I am proud to announce the formal launch of PEN Across America, a national initiative that has already engaged PEN America Members and allies in 22 American cities—including Detroit, MI; Birmingham, AL; Dallas, TX; Pittsburgh, PA; New Orleans, LA, and elsewhere—in programs, events, campaigns, and advocacy on press freedom and free expression, working with support from staff in our offices in NYC, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Piloted beginning in September 2017 as the PEN America Press Freedom Incentive Fund, this effort has included more than 30 separate events and initiatives, with plans for dozens more in the coming months. The details on our activities can all be found here.

In order for journalists and editors to remain focused on their critical role as dispassionate and dogged searchers for truth, it falls to the rest of us to fend off attacks and threats that are making their work so much more difficult and even dangerous. We have had the luxury in this country to take for granted an intrepid and robust press corps. No more. If the news media is to survive intact serving communities and holding the powerful accountable, it will be because we as citizens took a stand and recognized in time that journalism is worth fighting for.

Our work, including particularly through PEN Across America, would not be possible without the dedicated support of members and allies like you. If you'd like to be involved in a robust defense of press freedom in your community, please contact us. If you haven't yet done so, I urge you to subscribe to PEN America's Daily Alert on Rights and Expression, a must-read update on developments threatening our right to speak, listen, access information, and carry out the obligations of an informed public. 

Yours in solitude,

Suzanne Nossel

FALSE FICTION FRACTURED FACT ALTERED by Marilyn R. Rosenberg is coming out in Fall 2018! Post-Asemic Press #008

Sample page

Post-Asemic Press is pleased to announce the release of FALSE FICTION FRACTURED FACT ALTERED by Marilyn R. Rosenberg this October of 2018. The book is a great work of asemic abstract calligraphy. It was originally created as a one-of-a-kind artists' book. Marilyn explains here:

About this work-.

   The False Fiction Fractured Fact series started in 2001 with a diary/journal of 219 pages. Worked on throughout the blank bound purchased book pages in and out of order, MRR often returned to pages and to work on them again, as she still does in other new bookworks/artists' books. Related, are False Fiction Fractured Fact- THE OTHER SIDE, in 2008, a visual/asemic poem published 2009, on Michael Jacobson's’ web/ blog http://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.com/  .

There is False Fiction Fractured Fact: take it with you, 2008 at https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/search?q=False+Fiction+Fractured+Fact%3A+take+it+with+youl 

And other works, including an asemic computer collage, False Fiction Fractured Fact: THE OTHER SIDE in 2008, on http://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.com/  

   Concept started here with a new irritation, a bite of memory, and a triggered reference as a glimpse, with a ghost of an old idea. FICTION FRACTURED FACT ALTERED  can be read, continuing in both directions, and so has two beginnings and possibly no end, spiraling around, as do most of MRR’s bookworks, and can be read in more than one direction. So seeing is both forward and backward, up, down and around. 

     Broken unity, and hesitations in continuity, are so often concretely expressed by the fragmented circle. But, the complete circle does convey the absence of interruption, and many circles, whole and part circles are here. There are fish in various places, which for decades are the metaphors for groups, family or specific personalities. The name of a fish, the type of fish, gives the clue to its reason for being in the space it occupies. 

     Calligraphic marks can recount one side of abstract conversations. Sometimes the open folio is one thought, but most often the facing pages are in dialogue, sometimes in heated contrast and possibly interacting or playing with the pages before and those pages ahead. Calligraphic drawing marks, indecipherable language, Ideogrammatic language, asemic poetry, is the language without known language, before written language, the language beyond any language. Varieties of Ideogram languages/ asemic narratives, tell abstract stories, of course. Interacting within themselves and with the viewer/reader, the pages do ask- are we filled with drawings or poems? Altered and added marks, layered, have hints of depth, space, and sometimes of darkness. Images of objects, and new marks together with those from this earlier series, develop new  groups of visual and asemic poems/drawings. 2018 computer collages are 90, or so, pages in this edition artists'  book -

FALSE FICTION FRACTURED FACT ALTERED by Marilyn R. Rosenberg

FALSE FICTION FRACTURED FACT ALTERED is available at Amazon. 

BRIEF BIO -  Marilyn R. Rosenberg

Born in Philadelphia Pa, MRR is second generation in the USA and all of her family came from the Ukraine while it was under Russian rule. She and Bob have two daughters, 5 grand sons and one grand daughter. Through the years MRR has had a varied education, then in 1978, a Bachelor of Professional Studies in Studio Arts at Empire State College, State U of NY.  In 1993 MRR graduated with a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from the Graduate School of Arts and Science, New York University, NY, NY. 

Marilyn R. Rosenberg, as usual, with actual and virtual collage, with pen and brush, stencils, ink, and gouache is making unique and edition images often in bookworks or artists' books. And using the mouse, the Mac, and scanner MRR makes marks, images and words. Since 1977 MRR has been in some one person exhibitions and very many international group exhibits. MRR’s works are part of early mail art, and in current interactions. Ongoing MRR makes artists’ stamps, bookmarks, artists’ books, visual and asemic poetry. A small percentage are created with collaborators. Many unique sculptural bookworks, and published edition works, and works in catalogs, zines and anthologies can be found in university, college and museum library collections.

Everyone Is Reading Asemic Writing Down Under! Zinc Zanc Zunc: An Asemic Conjugation by Rosaire Appel | Post-Asemic Press #003

Photo by Anneke Baeten

Click here for Zinc Zanc Zunc: An Asemic Conjugation by Rosaire Appel.

A review of Michael Jacobson's Works & Interviews by Federico Federici

"Works and interviews" by Michael Jacobson is a collection of both asemic scripts ("The Giant's Fence", "Action Figures", "A Headhunter's Tale"), interviews and other textual installations ("THAT: A Planet", "The Paranoia Machine", "MK JCBSN").
The first three sections challenge the reader to enter a net of finely entangled patterns and explore the residual signs of plots, which the paranoid characters, once inhabiting there, left deliberately behind.
Page after page, a carousel of abandoned or accidental symbols, of dreams cropped from a broader vision is delivered to the brain, which is supposed to edit and reassemble them into full narrative frameworks. Readers turn into spies collecting evidences of the impenetrable shelter of meaning. They may even find themselves connected to peripheral cameras, recording the relentless brain activities on the verge of dreaming.
Under a different perspective, the storytelling approach of this book convincingly relies on a cornerstone of asemic practice: however paradoxical it may seem, the intrinsic coherence of asemicism generates meaningfulness while stimulating the aptitude of readers to scan symbols in a meaningful way.
Asemic works act as blank tapes, simultaneously activated, recorded and erased again while watched. Each reader is, as such, an accomplice of the writer and possibly its desired alter ego.
A mirror is not an image in itself, but it has the property of imaging, likewise each asemic text does not exhibit a meaning of its own, but it is some sort of filter, capable of simulating and stimulating meaningfulness, engaging the reader into this unprecedented task.

- Federico Federici

Click here for Works & Interviews:  http://postasemicpress.blogspot.com/2017/04/works-interviews-by-michael-jacobson-is.html

100 Hybrids by Jefferson Hansen is available now in the shop at Minnesota Center for Book Arts & Eat My Words Bookstore here in Minneapolis!

Jeff and I dropped off some copies of his new book 100 Hybrids at Minnesota Center for Book Arts today. We also dropped off copies at Eat My Words bookshop here in NE Minneapolis. These are the only 2 physical bookshops currently offering Jeff's book at the moment. 100 Hybrids is available for $12 at these 2 locations. So if you are local, or are visiting Minneapolis, these are 2 great bookstores to support where you can find Jeff's book while browsing the shelves. Next month, on Saturday September 22 at 6pm at Boneshaker books (another great local shop here in Minneapolis), there will be a poetry reading/asemic writing hybrid event and book release party for 100 Hybrids. More details of the reading will be coming soon. All Post-Asemic Press titles are currently available at MCBA. Jeff's book is the only PAP title at Eat My Words.

3 Great Amazon Reviews for Works & Interviews by Michael Jacobson | Post-Asemic Press #001

Click here to purchase Works & Interviews by Michael Jacobson at Amazon!

 

Top customer reviews:

 

Todd

Jacobson’s Works & Interviews is quintessential ‘reading’ for anyone interested in asemic literature

July 24, 2018

Format: Paperback

The Giant’s Fence is an evolving asemic visual narrative, written in trans-symbolic script, that can be read aesthetically. Any meaning the reader constructs from the text is a correct translation; it is open to personal interpretation and exploration—Michael Jacobson

Jacobson’s Works & Interviews (1999-2017) is quintessential ‘reading’ for anyone interested in asemic literature. The book includes three asemic stories—the “Giant’s Fence” (my favorite), “Action Figures” (reminiscent of Kenneth Patchen’s picture poems), and “A Headhunter’s Tale” (asemic glyphs punctuated by facial expressions). The asemic stories are followed by interviews, which give insight into the philosophy of asemic literature. Following the interviews are several other asemic works: “THAT: A Planet,” “The Paranoia Machine,” and “MK JCBSN” (Michael Jacobson’s avatar).

“The Giant’s Fence” is a story composed of asemic glyphs i.e. “trans-symbolic script” or symbols that do not reflect anything. This is the raw aspect of language, language without meaning; residue of language after it has been fully deconstructed. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein made two contributions to the philosophy of language, which should have ended the philosophy of language itself. First, Wittgenstein responded to the “picture theory” of language, which suggested that language’s function was to create a picture of the world. The philosophical task was to determine how to make the most accurate depiction of the world. This would amount to understanding how language pictures the world, but Wittgenstein argued that this cannot be done, because it would just be more language ad infinitum. This is where he cites his famous dictum at the end of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: 'That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.’

In his later theory on language, he dropped the idea that language was designed to picture the world—or at least that was not the only function of language. Instead, language was simply a tool that humans used to get things done and that all this philosophy of language was wasting its time. Later on, Jacques Derrida argued that meaning—in language—comes about through difference—a combination of difference and deference. Therefore, an absolutely true meaning of a term is impossible. Although he tells us that this is impossible, he does not get rid of the notion of meaning, he simply hides it in the metaphysical ether.

Asemic text, such as the “Giant’s Fence,” is the residue of language when it has been fully deconstructed and meaning is lost in the metaphysical ether. Its loss is not to be lamented, but instead it is to be celebrated and this is what asemic writers do—they celebrate the loss of meaning by mimicking language with aesthetic glyphs. This is what Jacobson means when he tells readers that the “Giant’s Fence” can be read aesthetically and that any interpretation is correct.

Reading Jacobson’s asemic text is an experience. As suggested one does not simply read asemic literature, instead one experiences it and there’s no better place to start than with the work of Michael Jacobson.

He is also very active in the asemic world, he runs a website that introduces the works of asemic artists throughout the world: The New Post-literate: A Gallery Of Asemic Writing.

Robert A Ellison

Some thoughts by Rosaire Appel on "Works and Interviews" Jacobson’s ...

July 29, 2018

Format: Paperback

Some thoughts by Rosaire Appel on "Works and Interviews"
Jacobson’s lucid articulations about asemic writing put you in the right mind-set for reading his, or anyone’s, asemic work. It is a different kind of reading, one that you invent on the spot –letting it evolve as you interact with the pages over time. Although very different, I think of Xu Bing’s “Book from the Ground”, which consists entirely of emojis. We know these symbols, but reading a book of them requires a focus that is different from, and more individualistic than, conventional word-symbol reading. Jacobson’s “The Giant’s Fence” and “Action Figures” both included in this volume, don’t use any conventional symbols. Instead, he creates conventions of his own. The reader decides how to move through these lines of configurations, at what speed, with what in mind. This kind of writing is a form of freedom – artistic and conceptual. Jacobson’s use of this freedom is so highly controlled and aware of itself that his language becomes readable. This turns reading into an act of freedom, when you let it.

J.P. Hansen

Asemic Writing and Its "Meanings"

July 21, 2018

Format: Paperback

This book offers reprints of three important asemic works by Jacobson: "The Giant's Fence," "Action Figures," and "A Headhunter's Tale." Each is a world onto itself, and is written using a style specific to the book. Most of the rest of the book is composed of interviews of Jacobson that concern the history, import, and "meaning" of asemic writing. Not only does this book offer some wonderful extended examples of asemic writing, but it helps ground the reader in the movement itself.

Click here for more information about Works & Interviews by Michael Jacobson | Post-Asemic Press #001