The Adventurists, by Richard Butner
The Adventurists. Richard Butner. Small Beer Press. 2022.
Richard Butner’s new collection of SF stories is a wonderful look at his long-established but back-burner career as a writer of speculative fiction. Richard is beloved by many in Raleighwood for his quirky and often endearing local theatre roles, his championing of local music and its venues, and (among the cognoscenti) his loyalty to Modernist architecture. This review is overtly from the perspective of a Raleigh native who enjoys the many local references in these stories and the bits and pieces of RB rendered in the protagonists.
The past, though gone forever, can seem so real. Recognition and familiarity run like reinforcing wire through these stories. The past seems hazy but here the cliched futurism of science fiction is reversed and the past makes the content so real through the tangible details of memory. The past is all the content any of us have, when you think about it. Most of the stories end in an unrealized present that is left in your, the reader’s hands, to make of it what you will- armed, perhaps, with the newly discovered possibilities that have just emerged from the story’s view of the past.
Nostalgia for old Raleigh was ignited for me with “At the Fair,” a send-up of the State Fair hoochie-cooch show, which enthralled me as a young teen and lasted amazingly far into the 20th century. But only Richard Butner could make this setting into an anarchic scheme for a socialist utopia. More social commentary is embedded in the most well-known story in the book, “Horses Blow Up Dog City.” Also full of Raleigh bits, from scents of RB’s band, “Angels of Epistemology” to the founder of Humble Pie, it chronicles a viral media star being eaten alive by his life. Perhaps the strongest dose of Raleighwood is found in “Under Green,” featuring a temporarily homeless young woman who takes up residence in the Rose Garden and haunts Raleigh’s magnificent greenways. In a book full of slightly underemployed, sexually cautious male nerds, this is the strongest female character, whose efforts to be a good Samaritan fail but who nevertheless finds a not unhappy ending.
The SF aspects of these stories often involve virtual reality, sometimes close to the most recent developments in the real life versions of the technology. One of the most gripping stories for me, “Give Up,” mirrored my memory of student parents who broke up over the man’s attempt at climbing Everest. In Richard’s story, extreme abuse of the technology is complicated by a criss-cross of realities which sets in with a vengeance. In the final story, “Sunnyside,” the VR is so believable you could imagine donning the all-enclosing suit and joining the wake celebration that brings its subject back to life in the midst of impossibly detailed relics from the past. And if the past is all in our heads, but can become as real as it does in these stories, maybe we really can apprehend the past – or make it more to our liking. These stories make you wonder.
Whoso List to Hunt
Happy to announce the current publication from The Paper Plant, this broadside of a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt. One of the very first sonnets written in English, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem is based on Petrarch, the Italian master who established the form. The broadside is executed on hand-laid recycled paper with 25% banana tree fiber (from my yard), letterpress printed with a stenciled monoprint. Available here.
Truth Responds
Mail Art Titled “Truth”
for John Dancy-Jones
Truth comes to me in the mail
wrapped grey in hand-made paper,
a gift and memorial
from an old friend to his friends,
to those who remember all
his letters, lovely labors.
Truth kept over time will tell
beautiful truth without end.
Or so it seems. It could end.
Or rather crawl like a snail.
Steady. Even on razor’s
edge, it makes a slow slick trail.
Truth can be like that, my friends.
Gaps here and there, serial,
zigging, zagging, circular,
and like this art, not for sale.
Pick it up later, send again,
Truth, and all it recommends,
in a phrase—whole or partial—
in a stamped posted parcel
sent from friend to distant friend.
Paul Jones
Thanks so much to my dear friend Paul Jones for sending this poem after receiving Plague Daze, and Beautiful Truth, two pieces of pandemic mail art. Paul is retired as professor and digital librarian at UNC-CH, and is an accomplished and widely published poet.
Utopian Dreams at Fruitlands Museum
The Fruitlands Farmhouse in Harvard, Mass.
So proud to have my letterpress work displayed at an exhibition at The Fruitlands Museum. Fruitlands was the site of Bronson Alcott’s 19th century utopian community, and the show Recruiting for Utopia: Print and the Imagination explores past and present examples of “the capacity of print and the schematic imagination to build community.” For over a decade, I have been creating hand-laid paper printed objects to give away at the annual Black Mountain College conference conducted by the BMCM+AC. Shana Dumont Garr, curator at Fruitlands and former Program Director at Artspace in Raleigh, received a couple of these at the conference and learned of my tradition. She asked to display these items for the show. The museum purchased all the available items I sent, and now is collecting my mail art pieces!
Below is the Wayside Gallery, a large Fruitlands outbuilding which hosts the exhibit.The pictures zoom in a bit to show my pieces, with the Anni Albers Red Meander and Ted Pope’s blue broadside reasonably visible. The show now runs through March 21, 2021.
My photo below shows the collection of of conference handouts involved. I make about 50 and give away to the visiting scholars and the conference regulars that provide most of my friends in my retirement town.Click on the phrases to read about these pieces. Fish by Ted Pope, Harper Lee bookmark(BMC Museum workshop), Red Meander, Cut-up, Jacob Lawrence, John Dewey on reason.
The larger show in which my pieces take part is a fascinating duel show with a historical collection and a contemporary collection of visual artifacts. Shana Dumont Garr, curator at Fruitlands, explained the overall premise of the exhibit: “To look at New England in two specific time periods: the 1840s and 2019-2020. And to explore how print and design helped express peoples’ worries and their desires to make the world a better place.” There is a local feature article here. I hope to make it to the show to see printing from the time of my favorite Transcendentalists, and see some creativity from my fellow artists in the show.
Plague Daze Zine Features in Asheville Zine Fest Exchange
September 20th, 2020 marks the scheduled day for the Asheville Zine Fest, a long standing venue for the numerous micro-publishers in Asheville as well as zinsters across the state. The Paper Plant was set to participate, and I was very excited to network with other publishers and display the Paper Plant catalog at The Center for Craft in downtown Asheville. Alas, the event was cancelled but then replaced by a wonderful idea: a zine exchange among the publishers. That motivation pushed me to one last version of Plague Daze, the May 2020 mail art project that I also had converted to poster form for a mail art show at The Flood Gallery in Black Mountain. Above is the zine I created along with a spread of the zines I received in the exchange.
The packet I received contained a predictably wild variety of graphic designs and content. The organizers used the now-closed Asheville Bookworks as headquarters, and Laurie Corral, Jessica Smith and Mica Mead and Colin Sutherland of Woolly Press, a west Asheville publisher and risograph shop, worked to make this happen. I enjoyed all the entries, particularly Laurie’s risograph project “Forager’s Favorites,” and a wonderful textless mini-comic by Carrboro artist Julia Gootzeit called “B-Sides.”
I enjoyed all the entries and hope to meet many of the publishers in person at next year’s Zine Fest. A dominant theme in the collection above is risograph work, which was new to me until I discovered Woolly Press a while back. To quote the School of Design at the University of Illinois,
The Risograph is a stencil duplicator. Think of it as a cross
between screen printing and photocopying. The Riso prints
one color at a time in bright, vibrant colors. It is ideal for
posters, graphic prints, zines, comics, and other graphic arts.
Each color requires a separate print run. The colors are like strong watercolor tones, and I like the effect very much. Asheville is a hot scene for alternative arts, and zines and fine art printing are no exception! Below is a description of the rather laborious process used for my own contribution.
Plague Daze started as a mail art project sent out on May 1, 2020. Rubber stamping was the primary means of making images, with collaging of hand-laid paper some monoprinted and marbled. The poster version I created featured a collage and marbled version of the “40 days” concept from the mail art piece. That image, along with the art of guest artists, was color photocopied and then cut out and glued on to the background pages. Those pages are my secret ingredient for this zine. In printing covers for my book, The Natural History of Raleigh,” I set aside a ream of 11×17 copier paper to use in clean-up. The excess ink was removed with these, leaving strategic marks of the curved platen, the brayer marks, and various accidents of the cleaning motions. I collected over 200 of these and when the call for a zine came, I knew these were the perfect background for some pandemic content! Enjoy the contents of my zine below, and be safe!
Connie Bostic is a founder of the River Arts District in Asheville, and a leading figure in the Black Mountain College Museum community.
You may recall that Mary’s booklet, reproduced and stapled into the middle of the zine, was featured, along with the Anna Weaver poem below, in a post here. (full size scans).
Bonniediva is a mail artist with whom I came into contact through a national mail art organization.
Sure honored to have this set of zine publications for the Paper Plant archive of zines and other alternative art and publishing from the 1980’s.
raleighrambles.com
portrait by Guillermo Velasco
Raleigh Rambles 