John Trefry: As we were talking about walking around Kansas City last week, my writing practice and then subsequently my publishing vision emerged out of my education and professional experience as an architect, and possibly more out of my early years teaching architecture in a university setting, these years being right around the time I published PLATS and was starting to see Inside the Castle as a thing. I think attempting to distill my education and practice into something I could teach to students ended up being essentially, “Buildings are inert, mute objects that we rarely look to for their communicative effect. The better architects however are constantly interested in what their buildings communicate. How do you reconcile your urge to communicate through your work with the fact that nobody is listening?” So it was this being heavily on my mind that really started to crystallize my thinking about literature. I am fascinated by people like you and Kitchell who I think were interested in writing first and then came toward architectural theory. I wonder what the resonance for you is. Do you think you see a book being like a building? Or is there some other lens that architecture gives you?
Mike Corrao: I think in writing, or more in reading, it felt like there was the absence of a building where one should be. The structures of a lot of prose writing (and to a lesser extent poetry as well) felt very one-directional. You walk in a straight line, and when you’ve reached its end, then you’ve successfully experienced what the line has to offer. Maybe you’ve ‘misinterpreted’ the meaning of the line, but you’ve still fully endured it. A building appears much more complicated. It has many lines going to many different places which interconnect amongst themselves as well. When you go to work, you are experiencing only the iteration of the building that is accessible as a worker–and a worker only in your specific field, space, schedule. If you re-enter the building from a different perspective or a different intention, you’ll experience the building differently. This versatility of engagement is much more compelling to me.
JT: That’s so well-said and insightful. It is something that took me quite a while to learn about buildings. An architect has to both be totally committed to the artistic expression creating an experience and totally committed to the fact that nobody will experience the work in the terms the architect envisioned. That second part didn’t come to me until well into my time practicing. I think a lot of architects and the vast majority of writers are in Renaissance mode where they are saying, “You must stand RIGHT HERE to experience this properly,” and that hasn’t been the deal culturally for a long long time. The thing about a building like you said is that you can choose your path (I think de Certeau writing about walking broke that for me) but you also can choose how to turn your head, what to look at, to walk straight through a room or meander… etc… every single time you go to a building it is completely different whether you are registering it or not. The greatest buildings didactically materialize that difference for us. I think that is something that has grown to excite me about books and why I like to think about books as objects in the world. That they shouldn’t be seen as something that is always the same when you engage with it. The idea that each reader gets something different is not new, but the idea that a single reader can have a variety of experiences doesn’t get talked about much.
MC: There’s something really exciting to me about the seemingly infinite variations to an encounter–the way each microscopic difference in behavior and gesture can rewrite the work. It seems like very few books seek to do this–to superimpose a building onto themselves–instead you’re forced to look at the building head-on, and to read about what buildings do, rather than what books interested in buildings (in this multi-directionality) do. But, that being said, in one of our first conversations about architecture, I somewhat guiltily admitted that I mostly read architecture books about theory (not about buildings at all). When you’re designing and typesetting books for ItC, do you feel that the titles often have these architectural qualities inherently, or more that this is something that you as the publisher / designer instigate through that materializing of the book into a physical object.
JT: There is a pretty wide variety I think. Some things, like SMUT-MAKER for example, seem to avail themselves to a translation from manuscript to book, not because the text on its own is uninteresting or doesn’t have properties I like, because I wouldn’t ask someone to publish their book solely on whether they would let it get messed with… but it probably also has something to do with the person’s openness to that manipulation, or my comfort-level with that person. I feel ok doing stuff to Grant’s books because I have a relationship with him. With someone I don’t know I would find it hard to write an acceptance to them that has notes about how I want to design the situation of their text. This probably leads me to pick manuscripts of two types, those that I think function the way I like just as a text (ie, possessing a legible texture, a visible tone through the word choices, and doesn’t start with, “The Marquise went out at five o’clock.”) and books that already embrace the typographic and design sensibilities I might try to bring to them myself (like Yarrow’s DEATH AND). Consequently I might be missing some opportunities to exploit these potentials a bit more. That being said, I don’t think something like BELFIE HELL would be served by some kind of elaborate visual style. And my own books do not either. Like I was telling you the other day, I am pretty conservative in the realization of my books because I want them to be solely words. I really like the idea of exploring the architectural subjectivity we were talking about through the most conventional constraints of text, not grammatically per se, but the way words conventionally work on a page. PLATS explored the constraint of the paragraph and tried to understand how it could be a vessel that functioned in the larger scale of the book. MASSIVE is exploring the constraint of verb tense (which is leading to a lot of jargon) and the columnar structure of a newspaper. I think I like that in a building you pretty much always have to have a level floor. There is a building code that essentially requires it but also it just the way a building needs to be to get used. As crazy as some buildings get, they just have flat floors. What you juxtapose with the flat floor is unconstrained. Like in Peter Eisenmans’s Wexner Center museum in Ohio he was trying to approach the juxtaposition of things like windows, railings, superstructure, etc. through the lens of linguistic deconstruction. By having the systems that typically coalesce into a building each having their own agenda they come into conflict with one another in a way that brings about questions like “Well, what IS a column?” I guess I like to think of text as the level floor of my writing practice. You are very different from me in your approach to conceiving a work from the get-go as a lot more heterogeneous. How would you say that has evolved for you from something like MAN, OH MAN to something like UNDER REEF?
MC: I think that you make a very good point, which is that the design can’t project that sense of multi-directionality / architecture / unconventional movement onto a work that doesn’t already have it. And this is to say as well that this kind of sensibility isn’t limited to hyper visual works like SMUT-MAKER. Those qualities are still overtly present in the much more straightforward design of something like BELFIE HELL (although aided by the typeface which you note in the front matter as looking ‘thoroughly like shit without trying’), and in your own writing as well. More difficulty, it doesn’t feel like there is a set of clear guidelines that say, ‘this book is trying to act like a building.’ We’ve talked before about the sense that these books can be started at any page, read for a bit, skimmed through, jumped around. So maybe then, we can say that these are books that feel like that they have multiple entrances, or that these are books that feel like their value (or maybe better put, their writing) occurs within the characteristics of the language itself, rather than in the larger work that language is working to construct (i.e. a narrative). In my own work, I find that I am often interested in gestures rather than stories. I become interested in modes of presentation and movement. With my first book, MAN, OH MAN I was driven by an fascination around the use of untagged dialogue, which strips back narrative and turns the readers focus towards this strange act of both speaking and transcribing speech. As I’ve continued writing, a lot of that interest has shifted towards form and visual language more directly. A book like UNDER REEF is more abstractly exploring how these different facets of this relationship between text and image can coalesce on the page, change our interaction with the book. Maybe more microscopically, rather than thinking of a book that you can open to any page, that book is starting to think about a page where you can start at any line or image. But at the same time, I have often run into a question about the value of these added design elements and images. It can be exciting to see them on the page, but I want to make sure that they have purpose, and beyond that, to make sure that they feel as important as the text. I don’t want these scenes to feel like an image and its caption or like a paragraph paired with a fun illustration. It should all be part of a larger composition. And I think that is reaching towards that same core question of form that you work, and the books published by ItC are asking. I don’t know the exact wording of that question, but I often feel its inarticulated presence in what we publish. Do you feel that as well?
JT: I go back to Gérard Genette in thinking about that. Reading PARATEXTS is probably the main framework I can give to someone for thinking about the potentiality of book-design beyond the text itself. But when you are talking more specifically about like a shape on a page, I do wonder if that is a paratextual object? Are the photographs in Sebald an adornment of or in addition to the text, or do we read them in the way we are reading the text? When my foot was broken last year I read this huge tome about the history of the atomic bomb and there were two collections of photographs in it, basically at each ⅓ point of the book. Those were clearly not meant to be “read” in the text. I would just kind of absently flip to them here and there. There was not even like a reference in the text that would say “see fig. 24” or anything. But a photograph in Sebald may not even have a caption, it’s just “in” the text. Kitchell is probably the elevation of that, where text, image, layout, pattern are all within the confines of the book seeming to be equivalently burdened with meaning. I wonder if it has to do with the totalness of what he does? There isn’t a clear hierarchy between text and image. Even in SMUT-MAKER the graphic materials are literally stage-sets for the words. They are hierarchically there to support the text. But with Kitchell and the stuff you are doing with your press Cloak the “design” doesn’t have that supporting role. Is it because you are conceiving it from the outset? I can’t really conceive of the visual situation of a book that someone else has spent a couple years working on and then sent to me.
MC: I think Kitchell is a good example of leveling out this hierarchy, yes. IN THE DESERT OF MUTE SQUARES in particular feels like a work where the removal of any image or texture would have the same impact as removing any paragraph or stanza. That collaging of image and text is so inherent to the project that you don’t stop to assess the image as a separate supplement. But I think to an extent this is true with something like SMUT-MAKER as well–where the imagery is lower in the hierarchy but still very present / relevant. The mise-en-scene of a play is maybe less required than the actors, but it still so strongly guides our experience of the performance. The set dressing of SMUT-MAKER guides our path through the text as walls guide our way through a building. With Cloak I find myself in a similar position to you. Often what I accept is work that is very open to being visually manipulated or expanded in some way. But I come into titles as well, like our most recent release THE NEW UTOPIA, which is largely formatted as a traditional novella would be. In these situations I’ve come to examine the book design around the text more–thinking of how different title treatments, headers, footers, margins, can affect the text. These elements often feel invisible, and altering them can change a work that might otherwise look conventional into a completely different experience. In the case of NEW UTOPIA, embodying the claustrophobia of the book’s environments. So maybe then it is worth saying that even on titles like BELFIE HELL or THE NEW QUARANTINE there is still an attempt at subverting that traditional directionality, if only through the subtleties of typesetting. Eisenman in a conversation with Rem Koolhaas talks about his interest in a ‘non-legible non-spectacle’ which I feel is approaching this same idea we’re discussing of a work which requires an alternative, maybe counterintuitive even, mode of interaction. I remember when I wrote about Mike Kleine’s LONELY MEN CLUB a few years back, you seemed horrified by the fact that I had read the entire book. How do you see the relationship between the work ItC publishes and the act of reading?
JT: You were talking about the idea of not just a book that you can enter at any point but a book whose pages you can enter at any point and that really resonated with me. We think of access points as doors, but what about the criminal who breaks in through a window? Do they not experience the building? My grad school mentor Perry Kulper has been a huge influence on how I see architecture but also literature. He and his wife at the time, Amy, turned me on to Perec and Huysmans among others. Perry talked about where a building “begins.” Does it begin when you cross the threshold and shut the door behind you? Does it begin when you first catch a glimpse of it in the city or landscape? Does it begin when you first see a photograph of it? We think about buildings as fulfilling a functional imperative because that is the whole reason they are built (a horrible and flawed legacy of the functionalism of early modernism), but they are capable of and responsible to so much more whether we charge them to it or not. So the idea that a book has multiple access points, that you are “reading” a book even when it is sitting closed on your nightstand, that it is part of your intellectual life even when you have only seen a blurb or cover or the 3dimensional proportions of the book in a photograph (stuff that Genette would call the peritext), that is what I having been striving to capitalize on in the last 10 years of doing stuff, especially in my own writing. I think these considerations have evolved not just out of my architectural practice but also out of carefully interrogating my reading behavior. Not just what I choose to read, but how I physically look at books or text when I am reading them. I think that has changed a lot in the last 10 years. My attentions have gone hinky. I can’t read line after line in order. I don’t know what to blame it on. Having kids? The internet? Disinterestedness? And even before that I would find myself gravitating to typographic landmarks on the page like when spaces between words would align for several lines in a row (I did some drawings like 15 years ago where I would put tracing paper over a page and draw lines as far as I could connecting spaces between words) or coagulations of really geometrically similar letters like ones with lots of i’s or l’s. I got interested in the neuromechanics of the eye, the idea of saccades, where the eye takes in information through darting around. I have tried to adopt all of this in my approach to writing and formatting MASSIVE. You talked about it in your Action blog essay, the playability of the book. I think the formative kernel of that is the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. They set the stage for a reader to become aware that they have some agency. INFINITE JEST and Roubaud’s “projet” are very similar in their initiation of the book’s external agency but at a level that is really not far off from “Choose Your Own Adventure.” It’s the same function a great building has in getting a person to become aware of things like window frames, material transitions, the choreography of space. Someone goes to Scarpa’s Castelvecchio and they are “trained” to look at the edges and corners of surfaces and volumes. Then they go to a Walmart and they have the knowledge to look at and appreciate the smashed edge of the styrostucco facade where shopping carts have interminably crushed it, or the weird improvisational tile pattern around a floor drain in the bathroom. I don’t think Eisenman would cop to it, but that really is the non-legible non-spectacle. I don’t think Eisenman could achieve it because he has intentionality. In Scarpa you know what to look at because he tells you through the hierarchy of detail and the signal of unconventionality. In Walmart, the world is your oyster. There is nothing there, only everything. You can have at it. So are ItC books Scarpa? Maybe? I wanted MASSIVE to be Walmart, where there is no foothold. It is a harsh noise novel. It is a ganzfeld novel. There is nothing there, but everything is there.
MC: Then intentionality is the issue. I see this in the Choose Your Own Adventure and Danielewski, and Foster Wallace as well. There is a freedom of movement there, but it is a limited freedom. In the Choose Your Own Adventure, you can follow different paths, but you will still end up at one of a handful of rooms, which branch off from the same trunk. Your image of Walmart is additionally compelling because its detail, hierarchy, and composition are initially constructed with intention yes, but incredibly susceptible to the actions of the user. It reminds me of an essay by Ranciere in which he talks about the Belvedere Torso, and the how its value doesn’t come from the fact that its a classical statue, but from the way that the limbs and head of the statue have broken off to leave this isolated, damaged remainder. The role of the reader then, in these books, is as the criminal, breaking in through the window, damaging the base work, and altering it to their benefit or interest. In an abstract sense, this sounds very exciting to me, but in a practical sense, I’m not sure what form this could take. In a very direct sense, I can see a book which asks to be folded and torn in different ways. But less directly, I think we can see this in that ambiguity of movement within the page spread. To cross directly through one of SMUT-MAKER’s set dressings could be seen as breaking through a wall to see what’s on the other side. Maybe this is applicable on a larger scale as well when we jump between pages. It is difficult to say. But as we continue building this catalog at ItC, I feel we are finding more examples of this multi-directionality. This is something I am very thankful to you for. Not only in allowing me to join you in working on each of these books, but in creating a space, where there used to be none, for these books to exist and to become real objects. With each new title and author, it feels like we are seeing approaches to language, form, design, textuality, navigation that you and I would not have conceived of in our own writing. It is a very exciting time to be reading (in whatever form that might take) what’s out there in the expanded field of literature.
JT: Fuck yes.
John Trefry is an architect and the author of the books Plats, Thy Decay Thou Seest By Thy Desire, and Apparitions of the Living. Current works-in-progress: Massive (a novel) & Inanimism (a nonfiction poem). More diminutive writings have appeared in various other outlets. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas. Twitter: @incastellated
Mike Corrao is the author of numerous works including Gut Text, Rituals Performed in the Absence of Ganymede (11:11 Press), Desert Tiles (Equus Press), and Smutmaker (ITC). His work often explores the haptic, architectural, and organismal qualities of the text-object. Twitter: @ShmikeShmorrao
minor literature[s] 