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Two new books that are on my shelf and now I just need time time time to read them:

1)

Three Sea Monsters: Our History of Whose Image, Tod Thilleman.  Spuyten Duyvil.

Thilleman, the Maurice Girodias behind Spuyten Duyvil (publisher of my novel Multifesto: A Henri d’Mescan Reader), always intrigues me with his probing take on modernism-into-postmodernism and his careful attention to the rhythmic packaging of language.

2)

Cutting Across Media: Appropriation Art, Interventionist Collage, and Copyright Law
This emerged from a 2005 conference at the University of Iowa, and aside from my own humble essay on William S. Burroughs and Danger Mouse, there is some very col stuff inside. Here’s the info:

Description

In this collection of essays, leading academics, critics, and artists historicize collage and appropriation tactics that cut across diverse media and genres. They take up issues of appropriation in the popular and the avant-garde, in altered billboards and the work of the renowned painter Chris Ofili, in hip-hop and the compositions of Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, and in audio mash-ups, remixed news broadcasts, pranks, culture jamming, and numerous other cultural forms. The borrowing practices that they consider often run afoul of intellectual property regimes, and many of the contributors address the effects of copyright and trademark law on creativity. Among the contributors are the novelist and essayist Jonathan Lethem, the poet and cultural critic Joshua Clover, the filmmaker Craig Baldwin, the hip-hop historian Jeff Chang, the ’zine-maker and sound collage artist Lloyd Dunn, and Negativland, the infamous collective that was sued in 1991 for sampling U2 in a satirical sound collage. Cutting Across Media is both a serious examination of collage and appropriation practices and a celebration of their transformative political and cultural possibilities.

Contributors
Craig Baldwin
David Banash
Marcus Boon
Jeff Chang
Joshua Clover
Lorraine Morales Cox
Lloyd Dunn
Philo T. Farnsworth
Pierre Joris
Douglas Kahn
Rudolf Kuenzli
Rob Latham
Jonathan Lethem
Carrie McLaren
Kembrew McLeod
Negativland
Davis Schneiderman
David Tetzlaff
Gábor Vályi
Warner Special Products
Eva Hemmungs Wirtén

About The Author(s)

Kembrew McLeod is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Freedom of Expression®: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property and Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership, and Intellectual Property Law, and co-creator of the documentary film Copyright Criminals.

Rudolf Kuenzli is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Iowa, where he is the Director of the International Dada Archive. He is the editor of the journal Dada/Surrealism.

***
Can’t wait to dive into both! (Actually, I just read McLeod’s interview with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee…fantastic)

5 thoughts on “Two new books that are on my shelf and now I just need time time time to read them:

  1. Cutting Across Media is right up my alley — I’m working on a short piece about conceptualism and appropriation and this will fit well into my current reading list. And I’m an inveterate collagist/re-mixer. Thanks for posting this, Davis. I met Rudy Kuenzli briefly — nice man. I remember he was talking some shit about Apollinaire…

    So far I’ve been disappointed with Aram Sinnreich’s Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010) but am really liking Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying (Harvard UP, 2010)… I actually just suggested it to Adam Jameson.

    By the way, I liked your presentation/performance at the New School — I like how the piece evolved through several iterations of manipulations.

  2. Thanks Michael.

    I’d love to see your piece when it is done. Marcus’ work is fantastic, and he and I are working on a new Burroughs/Gysin project. We met at the U of Iowa conference lo many years ago that generated this anthology.

    I am teaching an unwriting/mashup/remix workshop in the fall, and will probably use this anthology (along with Goldsmith and Dworkin’s new _Against Expression_).

    1. The piece is in the early stages — the rough plan is for the Winter 2011-2012 issue of Modern Language Studies (I’m adapting it from a talk I gave at the last NeMLA) — but I would be happy to show it to you once it’s done.

      I’m excited to hear about your Burroughs/Gysin project! There was a Gysin show at The New Museum not too long ago…it was pretty good. I enjoyed seeing, among other things, the manuscripts of Gysin’s combinatorial poems.

      Your class sounds fantastic. I’ve taught some mashup/remix techniques and had a kid do a pretty impressive anagram of an Oscar Wilde poem…I should send you, by the way, some of my remixes when the come out later in the year…one will be a book and one will be a chapbook.

  3. I can’t wait to read that Cutting Across Media book, so I hope someone shares a pirated copy of it on Arg Dot Org soon!

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