The Happy Merchant
Influence is always a relationship between living beings.
I haven’t put out a newsletter in a few weeks, but that’s not to say I’ve been inactive. The writer and photographer Dave C. Porter asked me to contribute some writing to his new online literary magazine, KEEP PLANNING, and so now I have two short prose pieces, “Street of the Alsatian” and “Oaxacan King Kong”, available for your readerly enjoyment.
A sudden early thunderstorm—(first of the season)—pelts excavated cobbles piled up along a formerly ecclesiastical sidestreet. Regional arts and entertainment districts: they demand!—they demand inventory to meet demand—they demand gas and sewage and electricity and other municipal services. Get to work, then? Not in this rain.
You can read the rest here. Dave has assembled some serious talent. Other contributors include B.R. Yeager and a fellow ergot. magazine contributor Perry Ruhland. Dave has his own newsletter, Garden Scenery, with original fiction and criticism, and I highly recommend you check that out as well.
In other news, Paradise Editions will be releasing a new pamphlet next month by Israel A. Bonilla. It contains writing I’ve mentioned before in this newsletter, aphoristic essays about Goethe, Emerson, and Hazlitt. I’ve decided to anthologize and typeset these into a brief, hand-assembled booklet.
Influence is always a relationship between living beings. Yet it is mainly an asymmetrical one, where achievement allows the flourishing of action. We are all indebted. We all seek either to conceal the debt or repay it with allusion. Spiritual debts, however, cannot be paid in full. Influence is a phoretic relationship: an organism travels by being carried on the body of its host. Perhaps when Voltaire, as he neared death, argued with Pascal’s Pensées line by line, he had stumbled upon the only commendable approach.
In Phoretics, the works of Goethe, Emerson, and Hazlitt jump-start a series of aphorisms on life, memory, creation, and morality.
The impetus for this particular release was twofold. I wanted to bring into print some of the shorter works that Israel has published over at his blog. It felt like a loss not to have these elegant and perceptive essays in physical form. While I’m not as categorically dismissive of online writing as other critics, I believe that the process of editing and designing for print further refines writing and, if we’re thinking about the long or even medium term, gives it the best chance of surviving into the future. Online platforms change ownership or change their business model. Domains expire. File formats become obsolete. But the printed word already contains within itself the optimal medium for storage and preservation. Books can last a thousand years or more if left in a dry, clean environment.
The second impetus is closely related to the first. I wanted to further refine my design and printing skills. I recently acquired a laser printer, a Canon imageCLASS, and so can do short-run publications with a high degree of print quality, and in color too. This has opened up a lot of creative avenues for presenting text. It’s economical too. I compared the cost of getting 100 copies of Israel’s pamphlet professionally printed with just getting the printer and doing it myself. The printer was less expensive. I could have used, like I usually do, a print-on-demand service and not had to worry about ordering in volume, but that comes with far more limitations on the paper stock and other aspects of printing.
The trade-off I’m making is cost for labor. I’m the one who’s going to be printing, folding, and stapling these booklets. Considering the very modest volume at which I’ll be selling, this is fine, ideal even; I can take risks and experiment. I’ll be developing more miscellaneous printed matter in the future and hope I can announce that soon. Meanwhile, order the pamphlet if you’d like. For those outside the USA, Phoretics can be shipped internationally at a very reasonable rate through Paradise Editions’ distributor, Asterism.
