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Welcome.
This is the 3rd Anniversary Issue of Hamilton Arts & Letters, a biannual online journal published by Samizdat Press. HA&L reflects the ethos of a place and strives to create a sympathetic environment where a mood of engagement signals a haven for readers. That reflection can be comprised of poetry, prose, essay, article, cartoon, comic, fine art, photography, film, sound, etc., bound in a digital magazine.
HA&L is not an animal hospital or a shrine, although it has been documented that a touch from the hands of the Art Director will cure pretty much anything that afflicts the descendants of every creature that made it onto the ark before the rain came. We are also told that those who send money to the Art Director via the post feel pretty good too.
We welcome you as readers. We are indebted to our contributors. We list them here as a testament.
We send our love to Bryan Prince, our dear friend who has retired from the book selling trade in order to travel and spend more time with his family. Tracey Higgins and Kerry Cranston, long-time employees, have assumed ownership of the bookstore. Good.
Congratulations to David Cohen on winning the Hamilton Literary Award for his piece "What to do about 2-1" which was published in this magazine. (The folks who present the award might consider naming the publication that brought the piece to its readers. No magazines – no awards.)
Bravo David. Now get back behind your typewriter.
Banks? Credit Unions? You decide. Healthcare & Municipal Employees Credit Union, HMECU, is one of the oldest and most respected credit unions in Ontario. If you need a little help with your big idea, try a credit union.
Wolsak & Wynn book publishers, gosh, even their logo makes you proud. Check out their audio and pdf files.
Welcome to Goethe-Institut Toronto and thank you for your support as Hamilton Arts & Letters continues to document the career of Greg Rennick, (1965-2008).
Hamilton's Film & Television Office (www.hamilton.ca/Film) is hard at work promoting the city as a location for film, but more than that, they are nurturing local filmmakers.
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By the way, people link to us.
It's true.
The Art Director told me that people (humans) [parenthesis mine] link to us of their own free will and it does not harm us or change our relationship with gravity.
Those Who Link To Us
Contributors: Kim Neudorf features HA&L on her blog The Writing Shed. Sally Cooper has us on her Facebook page. Iris Häussler has us on her website. J. S. Porter has us on his website. Anna Jane McIntyre links to HA&L from her blog. Samara Leibner features HA&L on her website.
And: Artword Artbar, James North Art Collective, PresbyKirk, Wolsak and Wynn Publishers, Staircase Cafe Theatre, Hamilton Poetry Centre, Hamilton Writers, Ugly Duckling Press out of Brooklyn NY, Electronic Literature Directory, Luna Park out of York College of Pennsylvania, wordsinhere, publisher of Versal magazine (Amsterdam), Open BOOK Toronto –they all link to Hamilton Arts & Letters.
You too can link to HA&L – a small envelope of cash is all it takes.
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Rumblings of discontent have rumbled from the Art Director and Vikram Bondai.
The gist of the rumbling grumbles concerned disappointment that the magazine, (this magazine, which is officially titled Hamilton Arts and Letters, also known as HA&L, and sometimes referred to as HAL [see "Open the pod bay doors HAL." "I'm sorry Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."]), had not expressed the mandate that it had been based on. Where was the publication of the manifesto that had been formulated in the barrio as the guns fired?
It was in 1979 that Vikram and the Art Director transcribed into various languages the declaration that had been dictated to them: "The days of this society are numbered; its reasons and its merits have been weighed in the balance and have been found wanting; its inhabitants are divided into two sides, one of which wants this society to disappear."1
They were there. I was not. But let me say this in my defence: the last issue of Hamilton Arts & Letters has been read in over 15 countries and over 100 cities. Of the cities in which the magazine has been read, the first seven are Canadian and the eighth is Stuttgart. Consider, if you will, the person in Shanghai China who has read the magazine from cover to cover.
Consider as well the fact that the 2nd Anniversary Issue of the magazine has now been read in over 200 cities around the world. The number of subscribers has doubled in the past year.
Yes, we have entered the realm of the spectacle. How else can the spectacle be subverted? And yes, there may be a general sense of malaise; authority acts with self-righteous disregard, but is not in fact good. Despite fences and batons and the denigration of the environment, the dialectic is stalled.
Other places have entered their time of action.
Here, the fetishism of the commodity still dominates. It is too soon or too late for barricades. HA&L reflects the ethos of a place, and its digital manifestation is a landscape through which you journey. For its readers, HA&L is neither work nor leisure. There are readers, and there are HA&L's readers, (those who journey).
HA&L is of the spectacle and separate from it. Such a journey is not for everyone. Some visit but are disappointed. The commodity they are presented with does not reaffirm. It does not fit. It is not a soma holiday.
dérive a dérive
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They are legend:
HAL-vik-bib-issue-1
HA&L issue one
First, be clear in your thoughts.
HAL-vik-bib-issue-1-2
HA&L issue one.2
You are like me; you are different from other people.
HAL-vik-bib-issue-2
HA&L issue two
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Vik-Bib will assist you in finding them. To see them as they were when we made them, visit the digitally archived copies held by Bibliothèque et Archives Canada. Visiting archived issues will require you to make a clever manœuvre [geschicktes Manöver {n}] in order to find your way here again. |If a Disclaimer page presents itself, click 'Continue to Document.' |
Thanks to the Vostok 700, we were able to produce:
HAL-vik-bib-issue-2-2
HA&L issue two.2
The path of least resistance.
And thanks to you, our readers, we had plenty of socks.
No socks, no puppet shows. No puppet shows, no happy commuters.
Vik-bib-issue-3-1
HA&L issue three.1
Après nous, le déluge.
Our Second Anniversary issue welcomed the ghosts.
Vik-bib-issue-3-2
HA&L issue three.2
Time has eaten the event.
The event was, indeed, eaten. David Cohen won a Hamilton Literary Award. James Deahl wrote "A Hamilton Suite." We got our measuring cup back.
Welcome to Pier 8 Group, Tucker, Photography for Artists, and Vikram Bondai Technologies and its Bibliographic Services Subsidiaries.
HA&L would like to acknowledge and celebrate the support of the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the government of Ontario.
Send a Box of Currency to HAL.
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The Editor is most grateful to all those who have so kindly helped in the production of this issue, especially to the contributors and to all others who have generously allowed pictures and MSS. to be reproduced.
Access past issues via the Vik-Bib interface. Vik-Bib [will assist you]
Keep in touch. (post)
Of course some of you want to advertise with us. Refer to our exorbitant Ad Rates.
Read what the Hamilton Spectator had to say about Hamilton Arts & Letters here.
Read what OPEN BOOK TORONTO had to say here.
Read what Broken Pencil had to say here.
HA&L is listed on NewPages. Utne Reader describes NewPages as: "One of the 15 websites that could shake the world..."
We love hearing from you. Email us.
HALmagazine (at) gmail.com
Drop us a line and we will put you on the Subscriber List.
You will continue to find us at www.SamizdatPress.net.
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Continuing thanks to Bryan Prince and everyone at his bookshop for having hosted the exhibition:
The Lost World | The End of Days
Paul Lisson's short story In Progress continues to appear in Versal #8. You can now read it online at Luna Park.
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This is HAL issue four.1
Elect
Thank you to all of the contributors past and present. Thank you Peter and thank you Fiona.
This is HAL
Paul Lisson, Editor
Art Director: Peter Stevens
Fiona Kinsella: Designer &
HA&L's Associate Editor
1 Debord, Guy. 2008. La sociedad del espectáculo. Buenos Aires, Argentina: la marca editora. See also: McDonough, Tom. 2004. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: texts and documents. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
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Everything that's extreme is difficult. The middle parts are done more easily. The very center requires no effort at all. The center is equal to equilibrium. There's no fight in it.
~Daniil Kharms
Peter Stevens
Vikram Bondai
Michael Allgoewer
David Cohen
Mark Mavrinac
Sara Knelman
Caroline Moran
Kåthe von Nagy
J. S. Porter
Samuel Isaac Robinson
Robert Clark Yates
Jim Chambers
John C. Weaver
Kim Neudorf
Jason Avery
Bryan Prince
Assertion I
Objects have disappeared.
Assertion II
It used to be that the numerical series began with 2. One is not a number. One is the first and sole perfection. The first quantity, the first number, and the first departure from perfection is 2.
~From The Eleven Assertions of
Daniil Ivanovich Kharms
Paul Ropel-Morski
John Kinsella
Endre Szkárosi
Frank Kerr/Frankie Venom
Mister Harry Marshall of Mount Hope
Robert Oldham
Mark Mavrinac
Tim Gibbons
Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
Wim Wenders
Shakespeare & Company, Paris
~Linda Fallon
Peter Stevens
Vikram Bondai
A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.
~Italo Calvino
Ferdinado Bilanzola (1956–2001)
Paul Ropel-Morski and Judi Burgess
Bryce Kanbara
Lee Sharkey
Mark Mavrinac
Anna J. McIntyre
J. S. Porter
A Statue Misconstrued
Bibliothèque et Archives Canada Karen Krzyzewski
Armillary Sphere ~Wayne Allan
Peter Stevens
Vikram Bondai
"Is painting only a whim which seized you one day when you felt bored? Is it no more than a pastime, a subject to discuss, an excuse for evading the law classes? If so, I understand your behavior; you are right not to force the issue and cause further trouble with your family. But if painting is your vocation and that's how I have always seen it, if you feel confident of achieving something by painting after working hard at it, then you are an enigma to me, a sphinx, someone indescribably contradictory and obscure. One of two things must be true; either you don't want to be a painter, in which case you are realizing your aim admirably, or you do want to, in which case I don't understand you at all."
~Émile François Zola to Paul Cézanne found in Mortal victory; a biography of Paul Cézanne by Lawrence Hanson, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston [1960]
Greg Rennick
Sally Cooper
Sima Rabinowitz
Anna Jane McIntyre
Catherine Carmichael
f.ward
Mark Mavrinac
Kim Neudorf
Samara Leibner
Robert Clark Yates
David Cohen
David Brace
Jackie Washington
Jason Avery
Peter Stevens
Vikram Bondai
Fleets — even fleets sail back to shore.
Trains — even trains pull in at their station.
Well, and I — I'm pulled all the more,
pulled to you by sheer adoration.
~V. Mayakovsky
Jim Burant
Robert Clark Yates
George Wallace
Martha Baillie
Iris Häussler
Daniel Coleman
J. S. Porter
Dorothee Lang
& Jeff Crouch
Jeff Mahoney
John Kinsella
Mark Mavrinac
Frank Buchwald
Peter Stevens
Michael Allgoewer
Dan Achen
Picone's in Dundas
Kåthe von Nagy
Events do not coincide with time. Time has eaten the event. Not even the bones are left.
~Alexander Vvedensky
Sara Knelman
Robert Mason
Jim Burant
James Dheal
Jason Avery
Bernadette Rule
Eliza Griffiths
Ian McLean
Andrea Rabinovitch
Megan M. Garr
Marco D'Andrea
Norma West Linder
Anna Jane McIntyre
Lalie Douglas
Peter Abbot
Mark Mavrinac
Kipling
Peter Stevens
Vikram Bondai
"Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: 'What are we here for?' is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!"
[Gysin, Brion. 1969. The process; a novel. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday]
John Terpstra
Jim Burant
J. S. Porter
Regina Haggo
Greg Rennick
Debra Antoncic
Paul Cvetich
Tor Lukasik Foss
Jeff Seffinga
Mark Mavrinac
Rui Pimenta
Travis Kurowski
Donna Ibing
Michael Allgoewer
Endre Szkárosi
Peter Stevens
David Collier
Next:
"To launch a manifesto you have to want: A.B. & C., and fulminate against 1, 2, & 3"
~The 2nd DADA Manifesto:
Tristan Tzara, 1918
"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
Description of and instructions for the operation of an astronomical clock with an armillary sphere.
Incipit: Erstlich, was das sphaera sampt sein enzeigern, vnd auch derselbigen lauff belangt. Soll man wissen . . .
Language(s): German
* f. 1. Cartouche and book curse added at a later date; the date "1543 (?) appears to be in yet another hand.
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