Sunday, March 05, 2006

Blinkity Blank's Greater Dada Issue


I've recently posted here some of my early dada/concrete poetry. I decided now to scan the whole (well, the most) of the first dada issue of my deceased poetry mag, Blinkity Blank. (Which, by the way, got its name from the famous and delightful experimental animated film by the Canadian Norman McLaren. In case you didn't know. (I think knowing at least some of McLaren's oeuvre is part of general knowledge.))

This is the cover. I don't remember anymore where the illustration is from, but I suspect that it's from a Western juvenile from the fifties. (I do remember I cut it out from a photocopy, not the original book! Heavens!) The logo that I sliced was made by my mother who had a small printer's shop* in the late eighties. The text "Suuri Dada-numero/The Greater Dada Issue" was made by Letraset adhesive letters which I still miss.

This is from 1989 or so. As I said earlier, I didn't date the mags. (I have the BB timeline somewhere and will post it here, if I find it. It's in the old IBM SXI2000 in the basement...)

* Well, actually she did only texts for the printers who didn't have their own machines; this was pre-PC time and what mom did was done digitally, but then she printed the texts out on film and then the printers reproed the film. Mom got some small press and self-publication work too. I remember typesetting a book for her in '88 or '89. It was a war memoir and pretty badly written at that! I remember that I wanted to make corrections all the time, but mom wouldn't let me. "He pays for it!"

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