Thursday, June 27, 2013

MONTANA GOTHIC


A few days ago this announcement appeared in my email:

Hormone Derange Editions & Peter Koch Printers 
are proud to announce the publication of 
The Complete Montana Gothic.

This is DIY publishing so tell all your friends, bookstores, and local librarians.

If you would like a copy, you can find ordering instructions here: 


. . . . . . . . . . . 

A few days later, this message came from Koch:

I just received this about Dirck found dead a month ago!!  Any one heard anything??

Begin forwarded message:
From: Patia Stephens>
Date: June 25, 2013 10:31:23 PM PDT
To: Peter Koch <peter@peterkochprinters.com>
Subject: Dirck

Hi Peter,

Congratulations on your new book. I look forward to reading it.

Perhaps you already know, but it occurred to me I should tell you. Sadly, Dirck passed away a month ago. I received an email from a family friend. His body was found May 23 in his apartment. It was a heart attack. 

I'm sad, but I know he was lonely and missed Evva terribly. Hopefully they are together now.

The final chapter, as it were.

Patia Stephens  http://www.patiastephens.com/about/personal/

Peter Koch Printers Website

CODEX Foundation Website 

The Complete Montana Gothic collects in a single volume all six issues of Montana Gothic: An Independent Journal of Poetry, Literature, and Graphics published from 1974 to 1977 by Peter Rutledge Koch at his Black Stone Press in Missoula, Montana. Original copies of the journal were scanned and are here reproduced in facsimile. Additionally, this edition includes seven illustrations, thirteen photographs, a complete contributors list, and seven new, previously unpublished articles and essays written expressly for this occasion by Adam Cornford, Edwin Dobb, Peter Koch, Milo Miles, Rick Newby, Aaron Parrett, and David E Thomas.
"Forty years ago, Koch and his “wild bunch” of cowboy surrealists rode up into the mountains to stir up a bit of excitement and trouble in the dense forests and alpine peaks of the Big Sky Country. Gang members included Montana originals, “expats” in Kathmandu and Tangier, and seekers of the marvelous from San Francisco to New York, Paris, London, Mexico City, and beyond. The world may have changed but these wildly poetic works have retained their freshness in spite of, or perhaps because of, the great grinding-down process of too much information in an age of mechanical reproduction."

PRICE: 43.41 (includes US shipping + tax ) 
Enquire for foreign rates and trade discounts

To order please make out your check to Peter Koch Printers
and send it to:

Peter Rutledge Koch
Hormone Derange Editions
2203 Fourth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
Telephone 510 849-0673

______________________________________________________________________


This is essentially a visionary genre, so it seems right that there should be a whole flickr group dedicated to photos of “montana gothic.”  The above is one of them.  Ghost towns.  The ghosts may have come with you.

This is a download of the original book.  Dubious morality in terms of rights.

I blogged about the earlier “Montana Gothic” paperback on Thursday, October 21, 2010.  I’m disappointed never to have met Dirck van Sickle, but then I haven’t met any of these other people except for Patia and Parrett, both of whom were writing about van Sickle.   Patia Stephens, to her great credit, managed this interview when van Sickle’s death was still only a rumor.   http://www.amazon.com/Interview-Sickle-author-Montana-ebook/dp/B0082RYGRQ

Koch is probably better known in Montana for his ancestor’s writing, which I blogged about on March 13, 2011,  “Splendid on a Large Scale: The Writings of Hans Peter Gyllembourg Koch, Montana Territory, 1869 - 1874,” edited by Kim Allen Scott.

Also for his luxury book/portfolio, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, written by Debra Magpie Earling; illustrated by Peter Rutledge Koch.  Berkeley, CA: Editions Koch, 2010.  I haven’t blogged about it because I haven’t really looked at it.  It’s far beyond my price range and even that of the smaller libraries.  It doesn’t travel by interlibrary loan -- too precious. 

Consult Koch’s website: http://www.peterkochprinters.com.  From early on, Peter Koch -- following the Conrad descendants to California -- has made his own unique way in a context of high refinement and aesthetics.  He is an elegant art printer, not a scribbler like the others.

Dirck van Sickle captured a view of the West that the Blackfeet knew: the surrealism induced by an environment that is hard on human beings, deforming their brain contents into strange visions, so that the Blackfeet never needed any psychedelic drugs: just living was surreal enough.  Also enough of a gamble.  Also enough of a high.  Only in Missoula need one consult a pharmaceutic formulary of sorts, but then that’s so true of academia everywhere.  This unique Montana movement towards visions of emotion and transcendent connection is related to the earlier European surrealisms and also the later “pop” surrealism of steam punk, vampire lit, and the many permutations of identity trying to invent new definitions of atypical bodies and their desires.  It’s a shuttling set of horror boxes that never really stops moving because there is so much appetite for the contents.  Whatever the media insists, what the media constantly offers is mostly boredom.

A lot of well-read mainstream people have loved “Montana Gothic,” the book with the cowboy skull on the front.  Its extravagance, its darkness, its iconic interplay of screaming eagles and screaming stallions.  It makes “Deadwood” seem like suburbia.  Robert Kroetsch comes the closest to capturing this menacing grandeur of the prairies, but he’s on the Canadian side of the Line.  That glass wall has not yet shattered though there are cracks.

When Marie Heavyrunner’s body was found mummified and wrapped in plastic, pushed back against the foundations under her own house, I thought of this book.  (I hope you didn’t think I’d forget Marie.)   Earlier when I read the class assignment written by her step-grandson about Baker, who led the massacre of the Heavyrunner band, conflating him with Vlad the Impaler, leaving old ladies speared onto the pointed tops of fort palings, I thought of this book.  (Vlad is said to be the original vampire.)  I didn’t loan "Montana Gothic" to him, because he would never have given it back.  I thought that reality was too close to the fiction and the fiction was not quite as horrifying as the reality.  He made do with "Heavy Metal" graphic mag.  But there is something in this genre that people crave.  A search for resolution maybe.  Or is it transcendence?


Here’s Richard Matheson who wrote horror and sci-fi, achieving considerable fame before he died just a few days ago.  Richard looks a little like Tim in this photo but not in other more informal snaps.  I have no idea what van Sickle looked like.  Couldn't find an obit.  I don’t have any idea what accounted for the difference between the fates of van Sickle and Matheson, which in the end were the same anyway except on opposite coasts.  Matheson was a concept writer, like Stephen King: suppose this or suppose that -- what might happen?  

But van Sickle was a personal writer, the lyric poet turned demonic, giving testimony.  I prefer the latter.  It’s not learned but earned.  One only hopes to survive to tell about it.  If anyone will believe it.  The literary embellishment is just so they will.





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