This Land is My Land

This Land is My Land
Thad Higa
2021

5.5 × 8.5 in. closed
100 pages and two multi-page foldouts
Coptic binding with uncovered boards
Digital printing

Thad Higa describes This Land is My Land as “a fictional narrative from the imagined headspace of current day white supremacists.” Artists rarely approach such a project with the required radical empathy, attempting to deepen their understanding of someone with opposing views, no matter how repulsive. The resulting works fall short, with straw men for subjects; narratives with no protagonist with whom the reader can relate. This Land is My Land cleverly avoids this trap, though Higa’s representation of the white nationalist perspective is anything but subtle. The book’s writing, design and structure create an immersive, polyphonic experience more like a collective consciousness than the headspace of a single character. Higa knows he can’t dismantle white nationalism in an artists’ book, but as a poet and graphic designer, he can battle on linguistic and symbolic terrain – a field where white supremacy is active (and inherently visible).

It is in examining the language of white nationalism that Higa achieves the necessary depth and empathy. This Land is My Land is a showcase of the various and complex ways that words and symbols are used to promote white supremacy. The book weaves together all manner of rhetorical devices and strategies, creating an experience familiar to anyone who has read the comments on an online article or listened to attendees at a Trump rally. With this chaotic aesthetic, the book is less a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, and more like a classical symphony with separate movements. The movements address particular themes with distinct visual treatments and correspond to the book’s structure (six signatures and two elaborate foldouts). The exposed spine of the Coptic binding and raw book board covers emphasize the role of the book as more than a mere container.

Animated GIF of all 4 openings of the second interior foldout in "This Land is My Land" - on the theme of freedom

This Land is My Land is designed and printed digitally, but Higa is clearly invested in the tactility of reading. I have never encountered foldouts quite like the ones in this book, but simple, strategic design elements like color and typeface were enough to guide me through the unfamiliar folds. Higa also plays with visual versus tactile texture, the most obvious example being actual torn pages and facsimile paper tears. Subtler contrasts, such as coated and uncoated papers, add further texture – literal and figurative – to the reading experience.

This tactility is one way Higa demonstrates how language inhabits and informs the physical world. He also manipulates symbols, letters and words in layouts that turn these bits of language into objects and agents interacting in space. In Higa’s hands, words inhabit the real world – cemeteries and supermarkets – and create their own environments from pure typography. They form dense walls of vitriol and elsewhere they dissolve into cyberspace, a ragged trickle of characters. The reality of language cannot be overstated in a book about land and borders, nations and countries. Such constructs are, after all, a matter of definition. And since much of the book’s appropriated imagery is from the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate Symbol Database, the physical impact of the language is easy to feel.

This Land is My Land, inside opening from early in the book. A black and white photo of a neglected cemetery spans the full spread. Red, abstract symbols based on the "othala rune" are centered in the composition, with black and white stars at the top and bottom left

Yet the materiality of language is only one half of This Land is My Land’s examination of white nationalist rhetoric. Higa identifies a dangerous and seemingly contradictory attribute of words and symbols – they are flexible, fluid, fungible. Especially online, white nationalists have harnessed humor, irony and plausible deniability to great effect. The power of these distancing devices is on display in This Land is My Land, whose narrative is disrupted by stark white spreads with one word each: lol, lmao, rofl. These spreads are later echoed by a series of pages spelling out the phrase “I want to break free,” as if the subconscious desire has bubbled up beneath the crust of internet irony.

This Land is My Land, inside opening with torn pages on the verso - the images are full color photos of pavement or gravestones. The recto is a white page with the word "lol" centered, and a right margin edge with a facsimile torn edge, mirroring the verso.

By playing with the gap between the explicit and implicit, conscious and subconscious, This Land is My Land can engage more deeply with the ways white nationalism appeals to individuals. This is not an attempt to empathize, but rather to deconstruct and disentangle intersectional issues. Higa shows how white supremacy corrodes institutions and ideas, from electoral politics and consumer capitalism to masculinity and parenthood. These intersections are easier inroads for the reader than the often-obscure hate symbols, but their familiarity breeds discomfort. Even progressive readers may find themselves reexamining what abstract concepts like ownership, inheritance, freedom and family mean, and how they ought to impact our daily lives.

This Land is My Land, inside opening with a full bleed image of a mass of stacked shopping carts. The photo is tinted red. The top half of the composition is a block of white text on a read background, around the theme of fear.

This Land is My Land doesn’t answer those questions, but Higa does insert his own voice (or at least that of a narrator from beyond the white nationalist headspace) to offer clarity amid the cacophony of soundbites and insults. In fact, this more poetic, reflective voice poses even more questions — and offers a few insults of its own. These interventions reinforce the connections between land, body and language and give the reader a critical perspective to cling to as they navigate the noise. This is especially important for the book’s conclusion, which exits the white nationalist headspace and deconstructs its rhetoric from the outside.

This dialectic from inside and outside the white nationalist perspective is calibrated to keep the reader from simply setting the book down in disgust or skimming through tired old stereotypes. (The engaging foldouts and tactile elements help with this as well.) The result is a fairly long artists’ book that can nevertheless be read in a single sitting – an immersive, cohesive experience in the book form. The work’s duration weighs on the reader, raising the stakes and hinting at life inside a right-wing echo chamber. One doesn’t feel particularly rosy after reading This Land is My Land, but it is empowering to witness an accomplished artist fight white supremacy with their linguistic and symbolic weapons.

Eulalia #3

Eulalia #3
Hope Amico
Gutwrench Press
2020

4.25 × 5 in. closed
32 pages
Binding: Dos-à-dos sewn with a 3-hole pamphlet stitch
Letterpress cover and laser insides

Eulalia #3 front cover of Before side; title reads: if i could tell my then self something now...

Eulalia #3 is the third in a series of zines which center on the generative constraint of Amico’s practice – the content for each themed issue is completed in a single sitting. In reality, the series is less rigid than it sounds. Issue two came out twenty years after issue one, and this third issue is a double issue. The zine’s dos-à-dos structure accommodates two themes, a Before side dealing with grief and healing and an After side about new love and friendship. Although these two sections were produced in two different sittings, Eulalia #3 retains a key feature of the series – a stark yet complicated division between the initial content creation and the subsequent production of a publication to carry that content. This manner of production, in concert with the zine’s form and content, speaks to the importance of storytelling as a way to make sense of life.

Amico works to emphasize the division and juxtaposition inherent in the dos-à-dos structure. Though each section has its own title, the colophon refers to them as Before and After, which clarifies the sequence for the reader and connects the spacial and temporal functions of the book form. Both sides feature a framed 2.5 × 3-inch composition of text and image on each page, but they are visually opposite. Before is printed in black and white, After is printed in color. Compositions in Before are framed by white borders, while the pages in After are black. Both sections use hand-written text, but the image-making varies from mainly drawing in Before to collage in After. The decision to gather these two sequences in a single publication only to then play up the contrasts between them calls attention to the role of the author, to the way Amico’s reflections on themes and events construct the narrative that is ultimately available to the reader.

Eulalia #3 inside spread from Before side. Verso is a collage, recto is a drawing. Text reads: are the patterns really new? Am I a monster?

The straightforward chronology of before and after is challenged by the letterpress-printed titles on each cover. The title on the front cover (Before) is if i could tell my then self something now…, and thus reverses time as well as the roles of author and reader. The zine’s actual reader is left to eavesdrop on the cryptic confessions and consolations of Amico’s past and present selves. Yet the intimate pull of the second person address is powerful, and the reader can almost forget over the course of sixteen pages that they are not the you to whom Amico is speaking. This voyeuristic tension is heightened by the recurring theme of public displays of emotion in regard to grief, heartbreak and healing. One spread reads, “in the silence, all I had drowned resurfaced. / IF YOU’RE NOT CRYING AT WORK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY YOU MIGHT BE A MONSTER / it’s all too much.”

Eulalia #3 inside spread from After side. Verso and rectos are collages. Text reads: Obvious in its numerology / 7 7 7 25 14 42 here we go

Of course, we don’t give advice to our past selves to change anything; we do so to reflect on the trajectory of our lives, to find patterns, identify critical moments and learn for the future. We use narrative because there is a difference between story and plot, and meaning lies in the latter. The second section of Eulalia #3 references another way of doing this – Tarot. The social media sign-off of writer and Tarot card reader, Michelle Embree, serves as the title: BIG LOVE. BE BLESSED. Equally intimate, the After side is far more hopeful than Before with themes of new love and friendship. Still Amico focuses on the gap between the story (what is) and the narrative (what we notice): “Something dormant awakened. / A SURPRISE / LAID BARE IN HINDSIGHT.” Elsewhere references to numerology and life’s great questions place Amico’s personal experiences in dialogue with more universal manifestations of the same challenge, to make meaning out of events we cannot control.

The sense that the narrative is pieced together from separate moments is furthered by the consistent and self-contained compositions. The margins around each page and the undisturbed gutters between them nevertheless permit a sophisticated approach to sequence and rhythm. The visual content remains firmly on one page or another, but ideas can play out within a page, across a spread, or through the turn of a page. There is always a relationship between the verso and recto, but it is never the same. Amico achieves as much variety as the relatively short sequences can unify into a cohesive expression through simple formal devices. Among these, the timing of the writing and the sense of depth in the drawn and collaged imagery are especially effective. Together text and image create a relatable experience for the reader within the psychic space of the artist’s interiority.

The zine’s materiality however testifies to the constructedness of this experience. The juxtaposition of black and white and color printing reminds the reader that Eulalia #3 resulted from two distinct art-making events, and that its pages offer only mediated access to the original thirty-two compositions. In the After section, the dimensionality of Amico’s collages is visible but absent to the touch. Nowhere is this more apparent than the inclusion of pink thread sewn into the collages, echoing the book’s pink pamphlet stitch. This detail quite literally ties together the book even as it widens the gap between its creator and its reader, between reality and facsimile. The covers play with the same tension by placing paper and print production at odds with one another. The letterpress-printed titles imply an edition of multiples, while the pink patterned paper evokes a scrapbook, a private object rather than a publication intended for distribution. These material contradictions ultimately raise questions about what constitutes the work and who it is for. Is the finished zine the primary work or merely documentation of the durational performance in which Amico generated the content of its pages?

In either case, the clarifying power of narrative is central to Eulalia #3, for the reader and the artist alike. Just as the zine synthesizes a cohesive reading experience from two separate art-making sessions, so too do those sessions bring thematic and chronological order to the artist’s disparate memories and emotions. That Amico returned to Eulalia for a second issue after twenty years shows the value of structuring one’s thoughts through a publication. The dos-à-dos structure of this third issue elegantly inhabits the messy space between life and narrative, embodying both linear and cyclical time. Eulalia #3 fully engages the ways that grief and friendship and romance color one another despite the bargains we strike with our past and future selves.

Zines are ideal for exploring such deeply personal themes because they bridge the public and private, magazine and diary. Amico seems comfortable breaking down those barriers, whether crying at work or publishing Eulalia. Readers will no doubt be grateful for a place to turn to when it’s all too much.

The Job

The Job
Woody Leslie
2019
Large Home Tiny Idea
woodyleslie.com

4 × 5 in.
32 pages
Binding: 5-hole pamphlet stitch
Ink jet cover and laser inside

The Job is the second book in Woody Leslie’s “Tiny Ideas” chapbook series. Through his imprint, Large Home Tiny Idea, Leslie harnesses the authority of the book form in order to examine everyday phenomena, often through the lens of language. The Job achieves this by reflecting on Leslie’s experience working in restaurants, and the familiar struggle to balance work with one’s outside interests. Tellingly, that tension never resolves. The workplace that inspires the book is, in Leslie’s words, “no place for creative writing.”

Though it touches on political issues, The Job remains resolutely personal. The writing expresses a common sense solidarity with fellow food service workers (and a visceral resentment of those who profit off their work) that is more sympathetic than an ideological label. Even when Leslie uses insider slang, the specificity is relatable rather than exclusive. Many readers will have shared the experience of starting a new job and finding something funny or confusing, only to accept it and forget how weird it is until they quit or another new employee joins. In fact, the similarities among jobs – whether the author’s or the reader’s – is another powerful political point made implicitly through the observations in The Job.

Fans of Leslie’s work will find plenty of continuity with previous pieces. Considered alongside his 2011 comic, The Adventures of Super Cafe Douche Bag Man, The Job shows the evolution of Leslie’s work-inspired art. Words and Vegetables (2017) shares its highly detailed introspective style. The organization of ideas, not quite stream of consciousness, is similar to Some Definitions of Vegetables (2019) and Parsely (2016), with which it also shares an emphasis on the visual arrangement of text on the page.

The visual treatment of text in The Job is subtle, but it is enough to put this work of nonfiction into dialogue with visual poetry. In some passages, the text is treated as prose. Elsewhere, enjambment gives a more poetic feel to the few lines on a page. The conversation with visual poetry begins in earnest on the fourth spread, where a map of Leslie’s workplace is rendered on the recto. Interestingly, it’s not clear if the representation is spacial or temporal, or some psychogeographic mixture. This uncertainty is later complexified when the same layout is used to visualize Leslie’s body, mapping the aches and pains of restaurant work.

As a text in the book form, The Job does more than visual poetry alone. On a basic level, layout on a page or a spread within a codex is different than, say, a broadside. For example, a recto that says only, “Waste.” has a different meaning than the same word with the same amount of white space around it on a broadside. The page is a unit, and the word uses (or perhaps wastes) the entire unit. A similarly sparse page bearing the phrase “I quit.” highlights other features of the codex. Has the author quit writing; are the subsequent pages blank? The way the turn of a page conceals and reveals adds to the impact of The Job – it would be a different piece outside the book form.

Leslie also engages the codex as a mnemonic device. In the first half of the book, he writes:

So much of The Job is about short term memory.
Remember for five seconds to ten minutes,
and then forget.
Too many things are the same,
or slightly different, repeated over and over.
You must forget each to remember the next.

The same text, with identical formatting, repeats in the second half of the book. The self-reflexive relationship between form and content tempts the reader to flip back to the first instance. Is the phrase the same or slightly different? The codex is ideal for this sort of non-linear access.

Even with this short text, Leslie takes full advantage of these affordances to play with linear and cyclical progression throughout the book. The page as a temporal unit is disrupted to convey a quintessential experience of an unsatisfying job: the days are long, but the years are short. The opening page features the repeated phrase, “We set up the blocks, they knock them over.” Time crawls by, and the page ends with “Day after day.” Later in the book, Leslie ruminates on mopping:

Leaves.
Slush and salt.
Mud.
Grass.

A whole year flies by, just like that. The stakes are raised as the pamphlet’s bulk shifts from the reader’s right hand to the left hand. Will the author escape The Job and focus on his creative work? Or will an earlier phrase repeat and place the reader back into the cyclical existence of wage labor? The suspense of each progressive revelation is heightened in the user-determined, time-based medium of the book.

In fact, The Job’s successful marriage of form and content points to the historical role of the chapbook as a democratic form. Leslie is subverting the authority of the book to assert the importance of the personal and quotidian, but he is doing so within a long tradition. The Job is noteworthy for the ease with which book art, visual poetry and non-fiction meet and make meaning in a humble pamphlet. Perhaps it is a large idea in a tiny home.