Cover of the Attica Book, illustration by Antonio Frasconi.

“In 1972, the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), in partnership with the organization Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam, published the culmination of their swift response to the September 1971 rebellion at Attica State Prison—the Attica Book. The publication featured black-and-white reproductions of works commissioned from forty-eight artists affiliated with these organizations and their allies. This robust set of ruminations on the event ranged from images of suffering and isolation (Vivian Browne, Mary Frank, and Benny Andrews) to sparse abstract works on paper (Irving Petlin and Jack Sonenberg) and clustered prints indicating bars, chains, and crowds (Melvin Edwards and Jacob Lawrence). One collage work by Rudolf Baranik makes use of the type of blurred aerial footage that suffused the media’s coverage of the rebellion. A collection of texts by incarcerated writers, mostly poems, was assembled in…

Energy saving mode. Not the same as being asleep. Still ticking along but not doing a great deal. Ready to wake up if called upon.

Computers have energy saving mode. So do new cars. So why not us?

How handy it would be to have energy saving mode when you’re doing one of those academic tasks which can easily spiral out of control. The tasks you still need to be awake for but where it’d be helpful to conserve your focus and effort until it’s needed. Like reviewing literatures.

One of the tasks that can easily take huge amounts of energy for not much return is reading and reviewing literatures. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of reading. Reading and writing are pretty well inseparable in my view. And I do like having a bit of an aimless browse around the journals just to see what I…

“Source: Music of the Avant Garde, 1966-1973 was a radical form of new music entrepreneurship that defined experimental publishing attitudes of the the 1960s. I well recall discovering it in the stacks as a graduate student at the university library at Colorado State, flipping the pages and sensing that you could leap off the edge of the known musical world. This was not a journal that provided information or mere perspectives on new music: it showed you the music itself. It brought you into direct contact with the excitement, provocation, beauty, audacity, ingenuity, and insight of the leading experimental musicians of the day. You might be offended, intrigued, inspired, amused, baffled, but the point was that you were right in there, seeing what was going on and deciding for yourself what you wanted to make out of it. The anthology was edited by Larry Austin, the most active editor…