philosophy

  DAVID MAHLER is an Australian filmmaker and visual artist based in Melbourne. Selected by the City of Melbourne to partake in the 2017 Signal Screen Arts Commission, he has…

“I strive to incorporate the practice of meditation throughout the entire publishing process. Poetry and books are patient, waiting to be created and read, so we attempt to work and grow like a small but well-tended garden. We search for flowers. We try to subvert the hurry of everything around us. I don’t have a car, so when it’s time to deliver chapbooks, I walk on a trail to the post office and look at trees as I follow the creek that runs through our town.”

I will say that the beauty of a small press is that you can take small risks, and ideally use any limitations as assets. One of the things that I love about the stories of Black Mountain College is that they had little in terms of resources but nevertheless had a tremendous cultural impact. Of course it’s easier to think like that now that we have a degree of stability, but especially in the beginning we had little to no overhead. Which is a good thing, because it took about four years before the first two books we’d published paid for themselves. Since then the press mostly maintains itself, but definitely I would say it’s a lucky thing to break even on a project and any earned income goes into future publishing projects.

Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood Princeton University Press, 2014 1344 pages – Princeton / Amazon   Strictly…

Bad Sex by Clancy Martin NY Tyrant, 2015 180 pages – NY Tyrant / Amazon   Contrary to what its title might suggest, Bad Sex is heartwarming. It’s intimate. It’s a sincere…

for Marcus Castro     Part I: Relaxing This Bent of Mind     We led our lives / or they led us, and how would we know which? —William…

Sylvère Lotringer started Semiotext(e) with a group of friends and grad students at Columbia University in 1974. It quickly evolved from a journal of semiotic theory to a popular magazine, juxtaposing high theory and underground culture, after the publication of the “Schizo-Culture” issue in 1978. The issue brought together artists and thinkers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, William Burroughs, and Lee Breuer.

The Order of Things: An Archaeology  of the Human Sciences by Michael Foucault Random House, 1970 416 pages – Amazon To answer why do things make sense, in The Order of…

I admire the hell out of how Barney Rosset ran Grove back in the day. He took risks for literature—much bigger risks than I’m taking now. It is that blood-in dedication to brave books that I want Sator to embody, regardless of scale. Since the press is basically a one-man operation, Sator’s aesthetic is my aesthetic, and so is as mutative and day-to-day as my tastes.

Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze Originally published in 1968 Translated by Paul Patton – Columbia University Press, 1994 Amazon This is my second time reading this book. I think the first…

Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser University of Michigan Press, 1994 Originally Published in French in 1981 UofM Press / Amazon This is not an easy book…

On Hopelessness, Simulation, Superintelligence     I.   Some form of the Simulation Hypothesis has been around for a long time. It’s the idea that we might be in a…

Ultimately, all of life is a big piece of shit the universe dumped out in a random moment of thwarting constipation that is still flushing its way down the cosmic…