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INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL KA5PERWoody Leslie

Michael Kasper is a writer, visual artist, and retired librarian. He was born in the Bronx in 1947, lived abroad for many years, and eventually settled in western Massachusetts, where he spent most o f his career working as a librarian at the Amherst College library. In over forty years o f writing, he has published a dozen books, translated afew others, and wri tten for a number magazines and periodicals (including JAB on several occasions).

His work is a combination o f writing and image, inhabiting a world somewhere between comics, concrete poetry, and illustration. It is in turn thoughtful, clever, and humorous, often political, and not above the occasional use o f a bad pun, expertly applied. Though his verbo-visual work, and short-prose writing stems back to the ‘70s, it feels incredibly relevant in the current atmosphere where image and text cohabitate with ever increasing frequency.

I conducted this interview with Michael Kasper view email, to hear his own thoughts on his work and the verbo-visual landscape.

Woody Leslie: Your work inhabits a space neatly in the middle of the verbo-visual landscape. It is not exactly comics/cartoon, nor visual/ concrete poetry, nor illustrated story, nor infographics, yet it seems to borrow from and adapt aspects from all of these fields. Certain works come closer to one or another of these categories, but as a whole, your work appears to defy strict categorization. How do you see your work in relation to these other categories?

Michael Kasper: You’re right that I adapt aspects of those fields, and others. I guess what I’m doing is I’m making use of them. Like many writers and artists, since Dada or earlier, I often just appropriate appropriate settings for my ideas. Some of my pieces are original, some mimic, some plagiarize, some merge those strategies. I like the special expressiveness of combinations, of collage. And I like the term verbo- visuals because it’s a broad, useful umbrella for all those categories you mention, as well as for my work, and a way of suggesting shared features in disparate formats.

WL: What artists/writers directly influence(d) your own work? Are there artists/writers working today in a verbo-visual vein that you admire?

MK: I’ve always read a lot, and looked at a lot of art, so it’s a long list. Early on, Blake, Max Ernst and other Surrealists, and Edward Gorey were particularly inspiring. Over the years dozens of authors have influenced me: European modernists such as Allais, Scheerbart, Walser, and Kharms, Gertrude Stein, Brecht, anglophone colonials, American short-prose writers from fifty years ago like Marvin Cohen and Russell Edson. Visually, Constructivist graphic designers have been important, and psychedelic posters, and mail art in all its wild variety. Lately, I’ve been taken with the found-text work of Eduardo Paolozzi, the British Pop artist: his versions for Ambit magazine in the 1960’s and ’70’s, his bookKex, with Richard Hamilton.

As far as recent work in the verbo-visual vein, I ’m out of the

Excerpts from A ll Cotton Briefs. Expanded Edition.

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OPEN-BOOK REVETMENT DEVELOPED IN THE SAME EPOCH AS THE CODEX

DO THEN BOTH INVITE VIEWERS TO READ? TO READ IN? LATE CLASSICAL

COMMENTATORS ADMIRED HOW RANDOM FORMATIONS IN THE STONE

SUGGESTED REPRESENTATIONAL IMAGES, IN PARTICULAR RELIGIOUS OR

POLITICAL ONES. NATCH, BEING GLERICO-IMPER1AL PROPAGANDISTS

Doub le page sp read fro m O pen-Book. Each spread has a f iv e - lin e te x t on top o f a co m p u te r g e ne ra ted im age re m in is c e n t o f m arb le .

loop. I was more up-to-date before I retired, though even then I was only partially-informed, maybe we all are, given the spottiness of distribution. With respect to artists’ books, my taste, in any case, runs more toward the conceptual, “multiples” wing of the scene, rather than structures and materials. That said, to name just a very few of the titles that have caught my eye in recent years: Erica Baum’s Dog Ear,Meg Cranston’s Good Morning, Evil Genius, Niko Courtelis’ Philatelic Atrocities, Tan Lin’s Annotated Index to the Photographic Work o f Diana Kingsley, Suzanne Doppelt’s Ring Rang Wrong. Also, I’m always attentive to new stuff by Phil Zimmermann and Paul Zelevansky, who just happen to have the same initials.

WL: Several of your pieces are visual essay — essays where their visual layout is a significant part of the information conveyed (Open-Book for example, or parts of Billy! Turn Down that TV!) Illustrations or diagrams aren’t even the key part, so much as the way the words are presented, or even the structure of the book that presents them. “Palm-Wine” from The Shapes and Spacing o f the Letters, is a key example, which beautifully and simply presents visually an essay with words alone. How do these essays develop? Are they written pieces first, and then you find

(j) Palm-Wine

In 1952, The Pahn-Wiiie Drinkard, the Nigerian Amos Tutuola’sFrom between the lines

folkloric novel, its English as thick and radically strange as published ofTutuolas work peek out: D.O. Fagurnua's Yorubtt-language novel Tor- prose gets, was issued, little corrected, by Faber in London. It created est oi a Thousand Daemons, 1939 (which Tutuola certainly knetv, and a slight stir. Dylan Thomas, among others, applauded its inventiveness used); and decades o f sporadic fiction in English in West Africa, in Ghana and supple style, whereas in Nigeria many considered it inept and etn- IGold Coast) more than Nigeria (perhaps Tutuola had read Cusely barrassing, and its publication condescending. These days, Tutuola s Hayford’s 1911 Ethiopia Unbound, or Mabel Danquahs stories from the complicated collage o f indigenous orality, literal translation, appropri- Thirties. or Obeng's Eighteenpence, 1941); and the vibrant, voluminous ated colonial languages, and personal quirks, not to mention gram- Euglish-lauguugepamphlet literature o f Oniuha, in eastern Nigeria, he- matical and lexical “errors,” is generally acknowledged, at least, as ginning in 1948, But none o f those predecessors was ns sustained or ,<•( provocatively rich with anthropological meanings, and influential in assured an exercise in linguistic hybridity as The Palm-Wine Drinkard. language and liberation debates.

E xcerp t o f "P a lm -W ine" fro m The Shape an d S pacing o f th e L e tte rs . A te x t and a s u b te x t a re in te rw o ve n in fo each o th e r u t i l iz in g tw o co lo rs to keep the m d is t in c t.

a way to present them, or is it a simultaneous process?

MK: My essays usually start with an idea, an interest in expressing and/ or investigating something. Then I move on to information gathering (I worked for years as an academic librarian, teaching people how to do that, so it comes easy). As I research, I write...sentences, paragraphs... and as I write, the mode of presentation develops, somehow, maybe from things I encounter in my daily visual environment, or from the files of printed scraps I’ve collected for years. I’ll sketch or do a rough layout, pick fonts, make an illustration, work out details of the page- design, whatever, then write more, edit the text, fitting it into the visual presentation, back and forth, they grow in tandem.

WL: There are a number of artists these days who are taking advantage of the short-attention-span nature of social media to create ultra- short works that in many ways parallel your ideas of short-prose. Two quick examples off the top of my head are Lou Beach’s 420 Characters (a collection of ultra-short stories which began as Facebook posts), or Alex Temple’s Zip Code Memoir on Twitter (an experimental memoir of one tweet for every zip code she’s been in up to age thirty, in numerical order). What are your thoughts about Twitter and other social media platforms as a method for creating and presenting short-prose? Is it something you would ever consider for your own work? (As a side note, it seems Felix Feneon’s newspaper fillers, which you write about in The Shapes and Spacing of the Letters, would be a shoe-in for Twitter!)

MK: Though I’m embarrassed and somewhat regretful not to have used them, social media are obviously perfect for short-prose, and uncomplicated images, and their combinations. “No scrolling, no ‘next page.’ Short-prose fits on one screen.” Social media are fascinating in the ways they set constraints, and in how they’re distributed directly. My hesitation to get involved is generational, I suppose, and personal. I cringe a little at the self-advertising aspect, I’m shy, and nervous about surveillance, and I hate the commercialization. But short-prose is a democratic genre, and social media a democratic platform (in some respects), so there’s loads of potential, just not for me.

(Y’know, New York Review o f Books brought out Feneon’s complete three-line novels, translated by Luc Sante, a few years ago)

WL: Gould you address the nature of humor in your work? The last essay in The Shapes and Spacing o f the Letters, “Laughing Stock,” would suggest you view humor as a useful device for communicating, which seems to be evident in much of your work. Some of your work seems directly intentioned to be funny (the work of yours that comes closest to cartoons for example, like some pieces from Picture-Captions, or Verbo- Visuals) though generally in clever ways, through word play, puns, and

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concoct, but the joke was exactly what I wanted. Days later I learned Loos had indeed been institutionalized before he died!

WL: Your work runs the range from fictional story {Plans for the Night) to non-fiction essays (selections in The Shapes and Spacing o f the Letters). All Cotton Briefs really blurs the line between fiction and non­fiction, with its combination of personal anecdotes, historical sketches, parables, and inventions, all augmented by a boxed-in, hand-lettered, illustrated format, rather reminiscent of Ripley’s Believe It or Not newspaper panels. What’s seemingly true could be invented. And of course if you introduce the idea of parable, then even fiction takes on the possibility of reality.

In “Non-Fictional” from The Shapes and Spacing o f the Letters, you eloquently dismiss the idea of anything being 100% fiction or non-fiction, but rather somewhere in between, fictional or non-fictional.How do you feel about fiction/non-fiction in your work, and the importance (or unimportance) of distinguishing them?

Excerp ts fro m P ic tu re C aptions.

image-text juxtapositions. But even in “serious” essays, you can’t resist the urge to throw in a good joke or pun when the opportunity presents itself (for instance, Adolf Loos losing his marbles in Open-Book).

MK: I’ve always wanted my work to be conversational. I keep things brief, for instance, to enable reader response. Humor’s a big part of the conversations that I value most, so I make sure it’s in all my books. I include it consciously, to entertain, and yes, also to help make a case, though I’m not at all sure it works for that. Sometimes, by the way, the humor flows, sometimes it’s harder to compose. Then, I rely on Herbert Giles’ Quips from a Chinese Jest-Book for guidance.

A true story, honest, about that line in Open-Book: it wasn’t so much that the opportunity presented itself as that I stumbled into it. The book (which is about, um, marble walls) needed humor, so I invented, made up a biographical detail about Adolf Loos the architect —about whom, at that point, I’d barely begun research—that he’d lost his marbles at the end of his life. I was unsure about using it, it seemed a bit much to

MK: Yes, I’ve often made up real-sounding vignettes, and embroidered factual accounts—especially in All Cotton Briefs—though I always wanted them to be, I don’t know, true, even if inaccurate. Depending on the message, I’ll use whatever effective way of delivering it I can imagine, or find. Sometimes, at least, I’ve wanted to conflate fiction and non-fiction just to be playful. Or just because. Because that ambiguity runs through everything we experience. Though I presume readers can distinguish when they have to, in most cases.

Almost all my work over the last while is non-fictional. I lost interest in story-telling.

WL: Translation seems to be a key part of your professional life— translating written works from one language to another. Translation is a notoriously tricky field, where one must balance between conveying meaning, word choice, cultural context, and the author’s voice. I’m wondering if your work in translation has had any effect on your verbo-visual work as an artist, especially in regard to striving to convey meaning, and thinking about the potential failings of words, and the

assistance of images/visual presentation?

MK: I didn’t start translating until fairly late in my creative life, after most of my verbo-visual routines were established, so I’m not sure what if any effect it’s had. Recently I’ve been translating visual literature and reproducing the look of the original-concrete poetry, hand-written texts, that sort of th ing ... facsimilizing.

Some say the interaction of words and pictures in verbo-visual work involves translation from one medium into another, and I’d agree that there are parallels, especially if one includes in the analogy all the un-literal, experimental translating done in recent decades: homophonic, homolinguistic, etc.

I should say that I don’t consider myself much of a translator. I’m not fluent enough to do it without help from someone who is, so I’ve depended on collaborators. Except in the case of my version of Paul Scheerbart’s Aerial Militarism, which I desperately wanted to read and was convinced no one else would translate (now, Scheerbart’s hot; if only I’d waited). That one I did alone, laboriously, with dictionaries, online translation services, and final corrections (way fewer than anyone expected, I’m proud to report) from some top- notch Germanists.

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there's 0 large mosaic floor w it vignettes from the myth of

Thetis, each of which has its own gorgeous border So far. notmuch of ancient Amisus 1 Somsun' name in Greek. Roman, and

Byzantine times) has been excavated Anyway, little w ill have

survived intact It was sacked s often Currently the site'sinside a restricted m ilita ry zon 3. one im agines a tra in ing

ground for U S -armed Kurd-kille s. littered w ith shards

July s SomaunHistory is most often most useful 0 those in power, obviously

Prophecy too "Blessed are those servants whom the Master

finds awake when He comes "

Icon oc lasm In Pontus.

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Selected books by M. Kasper:

Kirghiz Steppes: Accumulated Verbo Visuals. Black Scat Books, 2013.A collection of short verbo-visual pieces, including some reprints from Picture Captions, and Verbo-Visuals.

Open-Book. Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010. A short-prose essay about marble

revetment (slab facades of stone used as decoration in ancient architecture),

presented in the form of a long unfoldingaccordion.

The Shapes and Spacing o f the Letters, highmoonoon, 2004. A collection of essays (many illustrated) about writing and art.

Picture Captions. Left Lane Must Turn Left Press. 2001

A short collection of cartoon-like verbo-visuals.

Plans for the Night. Benzene Editions, 1987.An illustrated parable of a rag-tag group of displaced people, and their adventure over the course of a night. The illustrations resemble blueprint plans.

Verbo-Visuals. Left Lane Must Turn Left Press, 1985.A collection of short verbo-visual pieces.

..

OPEN-BOOK

M. KASPER

All Cotton Briefs, Expanded Edition.Benzene Editions, 1992.

A collection of one-page shorts: anecdotes, fictions, parables,

historical events-all hand lettered and illustrated.

Chinese English Sentence Cards. The Imaginary Press, 1979.

A short story told in the form of Chinese language learning cards,

including illustrations.

Iconoclasm inPontus. Women’s Studio Workshop, 1999.Dual interspliced anecdotes of the same place on Turkey’s Black Sea coast from different periods of history, one from the Byzantine era, and one from a trip made by the author. The book is shaped like a tombstone, with illustrations.

Billy! Turn Down that TV! Diana’s Bimonthly Press, 1983. A series of short-prose and verbo-visual pieces about television, presented as if the reader were flipping through channels, coming across all these snippets.

Border Crossing. Klein Bottle Books, 1973.“An anecdote about a South Asian border passport check, with collage illustrations.”—MK

Plus several translated works, including Saint Ghetto o f the Loans by Gabriel Pomerand (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006), and various verbo- visuals and articles in a long list of different periodicals since 1972, including JAB: Journal o f Artists’ Books, and The North American Review.

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