Insert Blanc Press at The Last Bookstore

Nick Adams, Rare Form 2010 

Insert Blanc Press at The Last Bookstore
Thursday, September 27 from 8 - 10 p.m.
453 S. Spring St., Downtown Los Angeles

Please join Insert Blanc Press at the Last Bookstore in downtown LA for a September celebration of all things new and forthcoming on the press. The night will include readings and performances from the wide and vibrant variety of Authors, Artists, Printers, Designers, Editors, Interns and Friends of Insert Blanc Press including: Harold Abramowitz, Byron Alexander Campbell, Teresa Carmody, Kate Durbin, Janice Lee, Joseph Mosconi, Vanessa Place, Christopher Russell, & Ben White. The evening will also possibly include the performance of an auction that will actually really be a real auction! This event is free and open to the public, yet a $10 donation to the press for such an evening of wild wonder and beyonsense is much appreciated. Insert Blanc Press will happily introduce the Rabble series and the new Knock-Out Editions with titles such as Stingray Clapping by Andrew Choate as well as new issues of PARROT and and number of titles forthcoming on the press and just generally celebrating all the Authors, Artists, Printers, Designers, Editors, Interns and Friends of Insert Blanc Press. And Yes, that means you too! Have a glass of champagne with us because we will be celebrating all of us together and you. Yes, you! 

Rabble: derek beaulieu

Rabble: derek beaulieu

All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy

"In Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, author Jack Torrance slowly loses his grip on sanity while ensconced in a winter-long residency as caretaker for the seasonally-closed Overlook Hotel. Over the season Jack, a struggling novelist, uses the solitude (interrupted only by his wife Wendy and son Danny) to attempt to construct his new novel. Only a few pages of Torrance’s efforts are revealed in The Shining, but every page consists wholly and entirely of the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” repeated ad infinitum over a presumably several-hundred-page manuscript. In the filmic reveal of Torrance’s creative masterpiece, Wendy emotionally collapses as she finally realizes the extent of her husband’s crumbling rationality. Under the mental anguish of this Sisyphean task of nonlinearity, Jack Torrance’s grip on reality is weakened, much as readers feel the strain of such a non-traditional manuscript."




Rabble, an imprint of Insert Blanc Press, is co-edited by Holly Myers and Mathew Timmons. Rabble prints single author issues of critical essays of about 1500 words on a subject of the author’s choosing. The subject will be an artwork (or series of artworks), but broadly defined: could be visual art, literature, music, architecture, film, design; could be contemporary or historical. The essay will be printed in pamphlet form, with room for a couple full color images, and distributed at a reasonable price.

Rabble seeks to be a venue through which to interrogate the nature of criticism, a laboratory for prodding at the boundaries of criticism as a form. The idea is to begin with a framework that reduces criticism down to its two fundamental components—the thing that's been made and the person who responds to the thing that's been made (i.e., the art work and the critic)—and then to invite a lot of smart people to take up that framework as they see fit. We’re not looking for the average book or exhibition review, but something that tests out a new direction, whatever that means to the individual author.
We have great confidence in the potential of Rabble to make a lasting contribution to the cultural discourse on the West Coast and beyond. It is our hope that, in charting a path between the two prevailing poles of the genre—the ever-narrowing shutters of print journalism on the one hand and the ponderous obscurity of the academy on the other—Rabble will go some way in restoring the sheer excitement of criticism.

ISSN 2168-7439