Twenty-six '76

In 1976 I took a trip to Los Angeles with Jim Petrillo and Betsy Davids, then Rebis Press, so that we could do a number of performances at a theater in Hollywood, meet book dealers, and other things. That trip formed the basis of this book, but the immediate prompting for its title and form was a visit we paid to a young book dealer interested in making his way and ours in the world. His recommendation was to make work that fit various niches. Alphabet books, travel books, books of private letters, books about the bicentennial year -- these were categories that would guarantee sales to collectors of those genres or specialized topics. Thinking myself clever indeed, I returned to the Bay Area and wrote this travel book of private letters as alphabet book composed in the bicentennial year. So cryptic and coded was the text of this book that I think it would require rather an extreme amount of gloss to even signal to a collector that this book is of ANY genre, let alone all of those. The conceptual foundation of the book was more profound, since it was a work about language and landscape, experience and representation. In its first version (the existing pages are the residual half of original sheets twice their size), the book had etching on the top and text on the bottom. For various reasons, logistical and aesthetic, the etchings were ditched. (Logistical -- I was trying to print at CCAC in the hours before the print shop opened so that I could do this undetected and basically illegally before going to work at the West Coast Print Center and all in all it was just too much to try to do). (Aesthetic -- I don't recall the etchings very well, but they weren't coming out the way I had planned. A later book, done in Amsterdam, took up some of the issues in those etching and made them into a book in The Experience of the Medium). The essential issues motivating the book structure were to deconstruct a narrative into constituent elements by collapsing the temporal continuum onto a single plane of present -- the space of the pages. Each acts as such a screen for the sum total of the narrative elements in its small "chapter" of events. A sense of foreground, middle ground, and other references to the spatialized information of projected images (basic perspective) organizes some of the language. But the language themes in this book also include a narrative, found visual language, overheard language, and metalanguage and puns -- all to tell the "story" of our weird trip.