Auteur: Marco Giovenale

To critics, asemic writers, essayists, curators, journalists and all the people dealing with the *recent* history of asemic writing:

DO NOT trust incomplete essays, poor bibliographies and books or –generally speaking– texts improvised by authors who do not mention important web pages, mag articles, projects, personal and collective exhibits, blogs and groups which have been flourishing everywhere in the recent –say– twenty years.

I find an astonishing lack of data in –poorly written– Italian essays I’ve recently read (on line and in books), so I want to strongly point out there’s no space for amateurishness, narcissism and ignorance when talkig about the work of thousands of authors. One cannot mention them all, yes. But it’s impossible to forget some basic elements and fundamental sites and texts.

To critics, asemic writers, essayists, curators, journalists and all the people dealing with the recent history of asemic writing:

DO NOT trust incomplete essays, poor bibliographies and books or –generally speaking– texts improvised by authors who do not mention important web pages, mag articles, projects, personal and collective exhibits, blogs and groups which have been flourishing everywhere in the recent –say– twenty years.

I find an astonishing lack of data in –poorly written– Italian essays I’ve recently read (on line and in books), so I want to strongly point out there’s no space for amateurishness, narcissism and ignorance when talkig about the work of thousands of authors. One cannot mention them all, yes. But it’s impossible to forget some basic elements and fundamental sites and texts.

It’s not possible to ignore Jim Leftwich’s thousand pages about asemics, the work of Peter Ganick, Miron Tee, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Karri Kokko, Rosaire Appel, Lina Stern, Riccardo Cavallo, Roberto Cavallera, Marc van Elburg, Valeri Scherstjanoi, Jay Snodgrass, Miriam Midley, Bruno Neiva, Jeff Hansen, Orchid Tierney, and a bunch of other artists, or Tim Gaze’s Asemic Editions (http://asemic-editions.blogspot.com/) or Avance Publishing (http://avance.randomflux.info/), or DeVillo Sloan’s work (at IUOMA etc) and with https://asemicfront.wordpress.com/, or Cecil Touchon’s sites http://asemics.com/ and https://ceciltouchon.com/, or Michael Jacobson’s http://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.com/, or the AsemicNet founded in 2011 by me and others, https://asemicnet.blogspot.com/ (& related link pages), or https://gammm.org, or the asemic googlegroup https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=it#!forum/asemic, or the Mycelium samizdat (first of all: https://it.scribd.com/doc/294236718/Without-Words-Exhibition-Catalogue), or Gleb Kolomiets’ “Slova”, or Mark Young’s “Otoliths”, Timglaset, Utsanga, or the most important facebook group of asemic writing, The New Postliterate, https://www.facebook.com/groups/76178850228/, and many others, e.g. Arte Asemica (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1642082306096440/), Asemic Reading (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1646865992070563), Asemic New Babylon (https://www.facebook.com/groups/895027887247653/), Extreme Writing Community (https://www.facebook.com/groups/202128996613211/), Writing Against Itself (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1208959535830352, founded by Jim Leftwich), or Quimby Melton’s site SCRIPTjr, http://scriptjr.nl/, or the items one can found perusing tags & categories here and there, e.g. in https://slowforward.net/tag/asemic/, https://slowforward.net/category/asemic/, https://slowforward.net/tag/scrittura-asemantica/, http://liquidocomoeltiempo.blogspot.com/search/label/ESCRITURA%20AS%C3%89MICA, or the amount of vids one can find in YouTube or Vimeo, or the tons of interviews hosted on line. Or lots of tumblr blogs, the findings at Pinterest, or the images and infos Twitter spreads every day.

Not to mention the bibliography on paper (Asemic Magazine first: …take a look at https://asemicnet.blogspot.com/p/mags-groups.html and http://asemic-magazine.blogspot.com/).

Well… Yes: the steps of an asemic path can be traced back to the first years of the 20th century. It will be a hard job. Years of hard study.

But one can of course focus on the new authors and mags only, and still face an impressive amount of documents, on line stuff, archives.

Do not tolerate people who (deliberately) ignore them.

This is what I wanted to say. Plain and simple.

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