Dominic James Jaeckle
(Assorted Books & Paper Matter)
A press called Tenement
A magazine called Hotel
Dominic J. Jaeckle is an author, publisher and editor. (Present) Jaeckle runs & manages Tenement Press, and (Past) curated & collated the irregular magazine series Hotel (& its adjacent projects), 2016 to 2023. Jaeckle is at work on a series of “paper planes” under the banner John Cassavetes.
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As John Cassavetes (in order of appearance) ...
An occasional publication series, the ‘Cassavetes’ titles are a set of books in a sequenced, cumulative thread (named not for the filmmaker’s body of work but for his “kitchen sink” forms of low / no budget production). An occasional assembly of collaborations and experiments; a series of spines entitled Veronica Lake, Walden Pond, & River Phoenix, a ‘Legend of Duluoz’ in which the author argues with varied objects of attention in a borderless field of enquiry; a run of autotelic studies of inherited ideas.
1 36 Exposures / A Bastardised Roll of Film
978-1-7393851-4-9 / 2024
390 pp
tenementpress.com/36-Exposures
A collaborative weave of 36 photographs (Hoagy Houghton)
and 36 texts (Jaeckle); a near-novel, a broken love song, an experiment
in a direct and indirect address of ideas in both high and low resolution,
at high and low tide, when the moon is up, and when the sun is near. A
bastardised roll of film. Designed and typeset by Ana Baliza, with an
afterword by Chris McCabe.
Does language need to be reinvented in order to talk? Or even, to see? Dominic Jaeckle thinks so, and provides a compelling, propulsive essay poetry to accompany a year-long suite of pictures by Hoagy Houghton. This twitterverse feed takes philosophy personally, mixmasters it up with best friends and late-night movie simulations. While there are encounters by the galore, and biographical instants dropped like crumbs on a forest walk, the focus here is not on the story, but the lighting, the staging, the choreography of digression. Talk about talking. In these mirrors are reflections of a lost brother, an almost date, an almost self, on the times we used to have, the blood rites we shared until we couldn’t. Black and white photos offer starting points to think about colour. What colour is the memory of brother? The photographs offer shadowy basement creatures caught in the half light, as if the camera wasn’t even there, vacuuming up every decisive moment. Pensive, coiled, we are dropped in the midst of a drama that will need to bury a few Russian philosophers before life can begin again. And coursing through it all this essential belief: that the right painted apple, the right sentence, the right thought: would change the world. The revolution is in the waiting room.
Mike Hoolboom
2 Magnolia or Redbud / Flowers for Laura Lee Burroughs
978-1-7393851-5-6 / 2024
188 pp
tenementpress.com/magnolia-or-redbud
A thread of cut-ups, a paean to William S. Burrough’s mother, anchored
in three works on flower arrangements written for the Coca-Cola
corporation, circa 1940. Designed and typeset by Traven T. Croves, with
accompanying collages by Lucy Sante, and an afterword by David
Keenan.
Magnolia or Redbud is a beguiling, intoxicating mystery garden. In its hothouse alcoves, groves and bosquets, figures and figurations merge into shadowy projections that flit between domestic and psychic scenes. Like cut flowers, Jaeckle’s poems sit in a medium that both nurtures and traps them, formally thwarting their speaker’s quest for secrets and centres. What to do with the floral impulse to locate a centre, when the centre is understood to be a trojan horse filled with market forces, and the alienated variegations of desire? Jaeckle demonstrates how the cut-up’s disruption is also its irrigation, suspending these poems in quiet menace and beauty.
Daisy Lafarge
Jaeckle’s strange homage—is it really?—to William S. Burroughs’s mother Laura Lee takes the form of poetic assemblages that are invariably funnier and more subversive than the language of their anodyne source material would suggest. But this beautifully composed volume also goes beyond the more familiar uses of the cut-up, fashioning an unpredictable array of gifts through its trance-like modalities: These perishable arrangements / are the needle that holds our colder climates together.
David Grubbs
3 Buyer’s Remorse / Forthcoming
As Tenement Press (in order of appearance) ...
Founded in 2021, Tenement Press—a house for homeless ideas—is an occasional publisher of esoteric, accidental, angular and interdisciplinary literatures in which the poetic and the political intersect; a table of content(s) subdivided into two discrete trains of thought, the Yellowjackets, and No University Press.
The “Yellowjackets” Tenement’s yellow brick road, a sideways resuscitation of Penguin’s abandoned, yellow-topped miscellany series, an effort to win the colour back from cowardice, Tenement’s “Yellowjackets” are a thread of angular and experimental works in English and first-time English language translation.
No University Press NoUP will publish argumentative work of any field, so long as it is also work that strives beyond its field. We seek work possessing a presentist enthusiasm that works beyond the policies of enclosure that define and underwrite the mission of academic publishing.
Tenement’s titles are designed and typeset
by Matthew Stuart and Andrew Walsh-Lister
(under the nom de guerre Traven T. Croves).
* The above typeface owes to Alix Chauvet, a script formed of cracks in city surfaces, Amsterdam: “I notice small cracks in the walls of the stairwell of my flat. I take a closer look and realise that some forms strangely evoke letter shapes. I see an O, an I, an X... All these marks, born of accidents, can be read as typographic signs. My mind starts to instil meaning in these meaningless defects. Walls become the epicentre of communication.”
(See here.)
(Other) Assorted Collaborations & Ephemera ...
• with Benjamin Pickford,
The Paintgrinder : Ralph Waldo Emerson & Karl Marx
on a Horizon of Thought
(see here), ℅ a journal called Capitalism / Penn Press
• with Nadia de Vries,
Verse & Chorus : A radio work, a sonic collage ...
Featuring an assembly of verses (de Vries & Jaeckle) amidst a patchwork quilt of borrowed noises (& a score by Matthew Shaw, & accompaniment from Mark Lanegan & Duke Garwood); with readings by Nadia de Vries, Diamanda La Berge Dramm, Cíntia Gil, Mark Lanegan, Stanley Schtinter, Becket Flannery, & Vilde Bjerke Torset.
See Spotify ...
dominic.james.jaeckle@gmail.com
editors@tenementpress.com
+44. (0)7532 128558
@dominic.james.jaeckle
@tenementpress
Tenement Distribution
℅ Asterism Books
568 1st Avenue South, Ste 120
Seattle, WA
USA, 98104
asterismbooks.com/publisher/tenement-press
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