Just opened at the Metropolitan Museum in New York is “Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage,” a small exhibition that’s well worth a visit. Originally at the Art Institute of Chicago, the show presents collages from long before the word “collage” was even used. In the 1860s, upper-class Victorians took to using photographs of themselves as visiting cards; people assembled collections, much like baseball cards. Inevitably, someone realized that sticking a photograph of somebody’s head on somebody else’s body was hilarious – and thus began a small fad for collaging photos of one’s family or friends with painted or drawn backdrops. Albums of these were created, almost always by women. Some are predictable, some less so. Here’s a sampling: (Georgina Berkeley, untitled page from the Berkeley Album, 1867/71, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.) (Elizabeth Pleydell-Bouverie and Jane Pleydell-Bouverie or Ellen Pleydell-Bouverie and Janet Pleydell-Bouverie, untitled page from the Bouverie Album, 1872/77, George Eastman House.) (Marie-Blanche-Hennelle Fournier, untitled page from the Madame B Album, 1870s,The Art Institute of Chicago.) While these are figurative, many are more abstract than you might expect from the era. Particularly interesting ..read more

Nick Smith (aka “ulillillia”) The Legend of the 10 Elemental Masters (Lulu, 2009) Nick Smith became well-known on the Internet a few years ago for his labyrinthine website which describes, in excruciating detail, video games that he would like to construct. Smith’s games are largely concerned with physics: characters can jump this many thousand feet at a time, their speed is some extremely large number. Animated GIFs detail his creation; he also has a number of YouTube videos. But his is a beguiling voice: both for its utterly self-deprecating quality (he openly despairs of his programming ability), and because of its rarity. We don’t hear people like this very often: his website has given Smith a voice, and that’s fascinating. Last year, he published his first book, using Lulu. It’s worth looking at as an example of the sort of writing the Internet makes possible. It doesn’t take much poking around to come to the conclusion that Smith is somewhere on the autism spectrum. To you and me, the idea of jumping 10,000 feet in the air is not very different ..read more

A new piece is up in the Library: Richard Kostelanetz’s “Endings: A Collection of Closing Sentences (of Otherwise Nonexistent Stories)”. We’ve presented this piece as both an online Java applet and as a downloadable application: if you’re in need of endings, download the application, and you’ll have an ending at hand whenever you need one. Richard Kotelanetz is something of a legend in the New York avant-garde; his list of books is enormous, but if you’d like to get a handle on his work, you might look at 35 Years of Visible Writing: A Memoir (Koja Press, 2004). Kostelanetz is perhaps best known for his visual poetry in a variety of media, but he’s also written critical histories of the avant-garde in the tradition of Gertrude Stein and John Cage. His self-description on the back cover of 35 Years of Visible Writing might serve as an introduction: Though I once said that my creative work made me “a poet,” I now speak of myself as an “artist and writer,” nonetheless wishing that there was in English a single term that combined the ..read more

At long last, my interview with Damion Searls is up in the Interrogation Room. Damion wrote two of the most interesting books from last year – a book of short stories, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, and a new version of Melville’s Moby-Dick entitled ; or The Whale. He’s a prolific translator (three stories by Robert Walser just appeared in Vice), and his translation informs his writing (see “Sits the Queen” in the same issue). I talked with him about his various writing projects: I suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot from him in the future.