Hats in the Mail

The reviews of books & magazines in the pages of The Gig & other magazines tend to ignore the more ephemeral or elusive products of the small-press gift-economy, both for practical reasons (there’s little point reviewing something so fleeting that it's out of print by the time the review appears) & because it’s never clear if careful sorting-through is worth the trouble, or if indeed qualitative judgments are quite the point. Cheap, mass-produced flyers and broadsides that are largely given away free trigger all sorts of contradictory responses: is it a gift, a care packet, mail art or just plain old junk mail? The most indefatigable producers of this kind of material in Canada are rob maclennan & Ross Priddle; every so often I get some in the mail, & while the quality goes up & down it's usually worth the sorting-through. Here’s a typical packet, received in mid-May 2004 from Ross. The envelope is stamped 30 times with a concrete poem & there's a handwritten caption: “john m. bennett poem, the five mil. copies proj.” (which poses the “is it art or is it spam?” question with a vengeance). Inside is a card with the same poem printed on top of a woman's yellowed breast; a sticker with the same poem again; a likeable 8pp chapbook called mosquito poetics by “self-taught tiger” (fish magic press, 2003) – “In movement, it finds / a wing-wing situation”; a broadside by Laurie Fuhr (fish magic, 2004) reproducing instructions for using chopsticks (“Tuk under thurnb and held firmly”); a forgettable chapbook, Titled, by Shane Plante from maclennan's above/ground press; and ten different issues of hat, a sequel to Priddle's previous mag van (the title reflecting his move to Medicine Hat, Alberta). The hats are single folded sheets of paper; front & back are usually visual pieces by various contributors from around the world, while the centre of the issue is always by Priddle, an excerpt from a seemingly endless, amorphous string of phrases reproduced in his squashed, stylized, hard-to-read handwriting (the difficulty of decipherment gives the pieces an extra interest). Here's my attempt at transcribing one piece: “one abc scribe, zen zen zen nine nine nine, penny change, now your name, fix drips, painted in air, earthside hoist with care, hag chivychas eve, enos chacked halltraps, shakecards, and weeds, gane, arpil, tillmill, sun today, underground tattoo, hotel concrete, inside reality glass, dack, be dot be, jaz, bany, still comp,” (at which point it breaks off). The most substantial non-Priddle contribution is “My Dandy Longlegs” in issue 29, by Toronto’s John Barlow, himself a legendary producer of unclassifiable publications, zines & ephemera (as well as reams of email). Out of a series of flickering jottings (“Cigarettes are not my lifestyle, / It takes only 5 people to / change the spelling of a word. / Shamanists cannot use locklanguage”) emerges a funny & carefully observed anecdote about a domestic battle with some particularly cussed spiders. Probably all the stuff I’ve mentioned will be long out of print by the time you read this review (most are editions of 50) but if you’re a fan of this zone of d.i.y. guerrilla publishing then drop Priddle a shout & it's a sure bet his xerox machine will have been busy in the interim (21 Valleyview Drive SW, Medicine Hat, Alberta, T1A 7K5; yb396 **AT** victoria.tc.ca).

Nate Dorward

Published on Nether, a now-deceased blog site