The image above is from my walk to the studio each day. Some new destruction followed by construction is in progress not far from APEC.
It became clear that various collaborations, three in total, needed to be dealt with before proceeding with more autonomous activity. My initiative with ABC Artists' Books Cooperative, ABCOA, needs some more attention before its release date. We had been thinking about 1st April for this but there is a debate on Slack. Likewise a book containing the transcribed communications with Tomasz Madajczak in Skibbereen last summer, is in its final stages. Once again he and I were looking at 1st April to launch that. Then there is a mail art project being conducted by people here at APEC Studios and beyond, and it is my turn to take what I have been given, do something with it, and pass it on.
Today, I set things up on Zoom, with a comment instead of the name, pointing out that I might not interact. Invariably, a few turned up that I could not resist communicating with, not least painter Nick Carrick, with whom I used to share this very studio. Whilst chatting about the perennial problem of how to deal with too much stuff, Nick, hilariously brought up the antiquated notion of defragmentation: 'What's the word in computers? You Defrag it or something?'. I had flashbacks to the 1990s when a PC would be put to this task every so often, taking hours, whilst providing what seemed like accurate visualisation of the process. The process of walking over to and back from the studio, each day, and walking generally, seems to play that Defrag role for me.
I had an important meeting with Tomasz yesterday, where we looked at the latest version of the book again. I had made more changes, including one which reduced the number of pages from 200 to about 170 but we decided to reverse that. The Forward text was adjusted though and we now call it Onward. It's easy to work with Tomasz: at the risk of sinking into bro-mance clichés, differences feed the decision making, everything is utterly relaxed but then we converge on solutions at lightening speed; things and are in tune. We opted for a better quality of paper (which later that was reversed again) because his versions arriving in West Cork seemed to be absorbing moisture and warping noticeably. Lol, wheel in Flann O'Brien please: this is straight out of An Béal Bocht. Once changes are made, new copies are ordered and, fuck me, do we have a lot of versions now. Each duff copy or slight aberration will be worth millions in years to come ;) We discussed launching the publication on the least eventful or most unimportant day of the year which, according to scientists, is 11th April. Samuel Beckett's birthday is two days later. We could opt for that and cynically - not really - drink from B-word aura. Rather than releasing on 1st April as originally planned then, either of these two later-in-April options would give more time to check the final quality. And is Fool's Day not too self-deprecating anyhow? This book is no joke: it's fucking great. It being precisely 200 pages long and containing exactly 50,000 words is beautifully neat. Yea, we both agree that the NoSpace book is fine achievement.
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