The Plum in Mr. Blumâ€™s Pudding is Los Angeles native Tosh Bermanâ€™s first printed collection of poetry. In 1989, Berman left the United States behind, moving to Japan after learning his wife's (artist Lun*na Menoh) mother was ill in Kitakyushu. The Plum in Mr. Blumâ€™s Pudding was penned while both rapt and lost by this transition. Gracefully toiling between the quirky and earnest, these poems describe the liminal space of the foreigner caught between the strange and the familiar. The result is surreal and unclassifiable, a book of love poems overshadowed by isolation and underscored with curiosity and lust. Originally published in 1990 by â€œCole Swift &amp; Sonsâ€ (Japan) as a small hardcover edition of two hundred copies, this new edition acts to preserve this work and features an introduction by art critic and curator Kristine McKenna and an Afterword by Ruth Bernstein.

The Plum in Mr. Blum's Pudding (Success and Failure Series)

Literature & Fiction

Berman, Tosh

Poetry

Penny-Ante Editions

Cinema remains the last medium for speaking and performing love culturally. While much emphasis has been placed on the visual iconography of love, with the exception of music very little attention has been given to love as an aural phenomenon since the tradition and practice of amour courtois. Partly inspired by Christian Marclay's ontology of time in cinema, The Clock, and René Magritte's word paintings, which textualized the visual tropes of painting with "written" images, Love Sounds, a 24-hour sound poem and montage, dematerializes cinema's visual legacy and reconstitutes it as an all-tonal history of critical listening. Love Sounds, an audio history of love in cinema, concludes Tupitsyn's immaterial trilogy, and will be presented as a 24-hour sound installation, accompanied by a catalogue published in a limited edition by Penny-Ante featuring written works by Masha Tupitsyn and contributors McKenzie Wark, Berit Fischer, Isiah Medina, C. Spencer Yeh, and Yaniya Lee. In 2011, Masha Tupitsyn commenced her immaterial series with LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, the first book of film criticism written entirely on Twitter. LACONIA experimented with new modes of writing and criticism, updating traditional literary forms and practices like the aphorism and the fragment. Re-imagining the wound-and-quest story, the love narrative, and the female subject in love in the digital age, Love Dog, published in 2013, was the second installment in Masha Tupitsyn's trilogy of immaterial writing. Written as a multi-media blog and inspired by Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse and Mourning Diary-a couple in Tupitsyn's mind-Love Dog is an art book that is part love manifesto, part philosophical notebook, part digital liturgy.

Love Sounds

Masha Tupitsyn

Memory assists perception, grounding our understanding of those around us and those who have left their traces through time â€“ but how reliable is memory really? Memory is malleable, shaped and shifted through consolidation and reconsolidation. Consolidation is the neurological process that stores memories after an event's occurrence; reconsolidation refers to a process whereby consolidated memories later become unstable, causing false or loose recall. Reconsolidation: Or, it's the ghosts who will answer you is a lyrical montage born out of the eternal loss of a loved one. Powerfully crafted during griefâ€™s inertia, Janice Lee elegantly weaves the present with recollections of a tenuous past, arresting memory's flexible and vulnerable position in the lifelong process of mourning. A eulogy for a loved one â€“ pure and honest â€“ Reconsolidation is a poetic search for a lost connection.

Reconsolidation: Or, it's the ghosts who will answer you (Success and Failure Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Lee, Janice

Community & Culture

Weâ€™ll call it poetry. â€œIâ€™m not fucking anne carson,â€ Abigail Adams retorts... Abigail Adams is reluctant, rebellious, bored and better looking; a poetic voice for the queerly acute in a post-everything world. At times, ABIGAIL ADAMS resembles a shrine to a muse or a raison d'etre; at others, a hard-edged declaration of independence â€“ an act of grave resistance against political fatigue and complacency. Led by a judicious eye for diversion, poems like â€œFashionâ€ dress-up ennui in pop fabrics and read like an afternoon spent vaping with the BrontÃ« sisters. More searching and sinister are lush passages like â€œNut Crackerâ€, or â€œBaby Fatherâ€, which offer longing in the image of God or a revolver. Raw and personal, Chaves proves another medium evocative, and much like his paintings, yields yet another colorful work of distinct genius. ABIGAIL ADAMS is the first book of poetry by visual artist Alex Chaves and a work in "The Amerikan Green Cross" (Night Gallery, September 2015).

Abigail Adams (Success and Failure Series)

Chaves, Alex

Penny-Ante is proud to announce a deluxe reissue of Stewart Homeâ€™s classic political satire Defiant Pose, newly introduced by McKenzie Wark with an afterword by Home. Originally published in 1991, this brutal "assault on culture" remains relevant in today's torrid times. Employing pastiche, dÃ©tournement and outright plagiarism, Richard Allenâ€™s skinhead novels get a perverse makeover, going head to head with Hegel, Hobbes, and the heretical tracts of Abiezer Coppe in a wild ride where no subject is taboo. From fashionable pseudo politics, knucklehead neo-nazis, middle-class masculinity, the art world, and literature's so-called "outlaws," Homeâ€™s targets are mercilessly skewered. A contemporary of Kathy Acker born from the punk era, Home has worked outside major cultural institutions for much of his career, and is unafraid to call a spade a spade---an impulse sorely lacking in todayâ€™s culture.

Defiant Pose: 25th Anniversary Edition (Success and Failure Series)

Home, Stewart

Humor & Satire

In 1997, the world obtained a grainy video revealing lurid excerpts from honeymooners Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's post-wedding celebration aboard a small yacht. Laying bare the mysteries of their intimate lives, this video became the first spark in a long and culturally supported trend: the leaked celebrity home movie. Aligning criminal histories with transcribed extracts from such broadcasts, If You Won't Read Then Why Should I Write? documents the bathetic moments beyond a publicist's protective shield, while offering a sobering appraisal of American social justice. * Kimmy K at Burger King * The petit shamanism of Miley smoking salvia divinorum * Vince bouncing on a bed.

If You Won't Read, Then Why Should I Write? (Success and Failure Series)

Kobek, Jarett

History & Criticism

"...Doc took a hamster run on a wheel of paranoia. He was wide open, exposed on every side. His reputation was shit. If they wanted him for a patsy, fuck it, they only needed to send a goddamned meter maid. No need for an extended set-up or charade, Doc was a scapegoat for the asking. Fourteen Valium had finally put him to sleep, but then he was unable to wake from the nightmare. And it was some fucking nightmare. Usually Doc came out of bad dreams screaming, but in this one, he was screaming going in."

Road Movie (Success and Failure Series)

Farren, Mick

Erotica

Epithalamium: A song or poem in honor of a bride and bridegroom. "Antiepithalamia: &amp; Other Poems of Regret and Resentment" is John Tottenham's second book of poetry, a sequence of mean-spirited love poems, paying particular respect to the institution of marriage, and a meditation on the subjects of regret and resentment. Morbid, bitter, self-pitying… perhaps, but offered in the spirit of giving as a tonic to those who are not blissfully content in love and work, and as a bracing antidote to the disease of unconvincing positivity that seems to infect almost every area of contemporary culture.

Antiepithalamia: & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment (Success and Failure Series)

Tottenham, John

Charlie Templeton, his wife Mandy, and student mistress Mary-Jane Millford survived the London terrorist bombings of 7/7, but history has yet to be made. To save the future of western civilization, Charlie, a schizoid cultural studies lecturer with a penchant for horror films and necrophilia, must fight the zombies of university bureaucracy and summon the will to become the last in a long line of mad prophets announcing the end of art.

Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane: A Novel (Success and Failure)

Contemporary

In 2011, Masha Tupitsyn published LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, the first book of film criticism written entirely on Twitter. LACONIA experimented with new modes of writing and criticism, updating traditional literary forms and practices like the aphorism and the fragment. Re-imagining the wound-and-quest story, the love narrative, and the female subject in love in the digital age, Love Dog is the second installment in Masha Tupitsyn's series of immaterial writing. Written as a multi-media blog and inspired by Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse and Mourning Diary-a couple in Tupitsyn's mind-Love Dog is an art book that is part love manifesto, part philosophical notebook, part digital liturgy.

Love Dog (Success and Failure Series)

Tupitsyn, Masha

Arts & Photography

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