| AWAREing Press
AWAREing Press strives to entertain, educate, enlighten. Our publications reflect a new awareness toward the composition of life, beyond the tangible aspects that are evident to most every body. We are a very small press; the esoteric nature of our work currently demands this. New titles out every year, in theory. Available or Forthcoming from AWAREing Press - ANTICS: Passionate Stories About Folks in the Antiques Trade; by Carol BergéThe Intelligence of Moving Bodies; by Carl Ginsburg Light Years: An Anthology on Sociocultural Happenings (1960-1966); edited by Carol Bergé ANTICS: Passionate Stories About Folks in the Antiques Trade
From award-winning author Carol Bergé comes this collection of short stories about the men and women who people America's antiques malls, swap meets, flea markets, trade shows and high-end shops. Published with the assistance of Regent Press (regentpress.net) in 2007, this is the first post-humous edition from Bergé. And ANTICS is a delight, with each of its 22 interlocking tales born of decades of wisdom and laced with tricks of the trade. More about the legendary writer and her work can be found at carolberge.com.
Discounts on bulk orders of 3 or more copies of ANTICS. The Intelligence of Moving Bodies
Forthcoming in 2010: The Intelligence of Moving Bodies: A Somatic View of Life and its Consequences, by Carl Ginsburg, Ph.D., with the participation of Lucia Schuette-Ginsburg. In life we take embodiment into action. Thus movement is essential to biological development, learning, structural coupling, plasticity, and all the major life functions. In our book we ask these questions: How do you close the gap between the tools of functioning (sensory surfaces, neuromuscular system, etc.) and the functioning itself? How does developmental learning happen? How can we learn or recover our grounding functions after injury, illness or trauma has resulted in impairment of our tools for functioning? These include, for example, the effects of stroke, sports injury, rehabilitative surgery, neurological impairments, damage to the sensory surfaces, and the effects of incomplete learning. Our thesis is that the experience of embodiment through kinesthetic and kinetic awareness can become a pathway to learning and recovery for many life difficulties. We are practitioners and trainers of long standing using the work of Moshe Feldenkrais, D.Sc., a pioneer in using somatic development as a way of evoking mind ~ body plasticity. In our book we show that the gap can be bridged through exploring ourselves in movement. Our techniques include using gentle but increasingly complex, mostly slow movement sequences in which we begin to experience the normally subliminal characteristics of our moving experience. Recovering awareness of what we don’t normally experience gives us clearer knowledge of our moving in daily life. We contend that developing awareness evokes self-organization in the nervous system network, and results in the development of new patterns of mobilization and action. Our book develops an experiential and experimental basis for the possibility of somatic (mind ~ body) development at all stages of life. We explore many new insights from modern biology, coordination dynamics, and the growing science of brain plasticity to support our thesis. We ask the following questions: How is it possible to change life-long patterns? What are the possibilities of improving posture and movement or even your emotional and cognitive abilities after establishing your normal habits? Is it possible to recover from trauma, neurological injury, or other illness through evoking self- organizing processes through developmental learning? The somatic practices such as Alexander Method, Gindler work (sensory awareness), Rolfing, Eutony, Body Mind Centering, Feldenkrais Method were developed during the twentieth century. All practices work from processes of self-learning guided by trained practitioners and self explorations. While we emphasize the Feldenkrais Method in the book, we believe our thesis applies to many of these somatic practices. The key is uncovering the conditions for self-learning through observing learning in development and how quieting the mind ~ body and thus the nervous system allows patterns to shift in attending while moving. The Intelligence of Moving Bodies takes the reader into direct experiences that illustrate our thesis and provides a guide for continued exploration of our theme. Light Years: an Anthology on Sociocultural Happenings (Multimedia in the East Village, 1960-1966) This compilation contains 36 essays by avant-garde, miscreant, seeker, fringe and artist poets who coalesced in coffeehouses on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to further the development of the spoken word as it pertains to poetics as an oral art form. The coming together of this history book took more than two decades from start to finish, and is considered by some to be Carol Bergé's masterwork of vision and editing par excellence. With the help of Spuyten Duyvil (spuytenduyvil.net); for a look at the cover art visit the Bergé site (carolberge.com). AWAREing Press plans to release the anthology summer 2010.
Vivid personal stories of the poets and writers who leaped out of the literary traditions of the 1950s, blending with other artists to create the excitement of a new art mix called multimedia. Light Years tells the story of a unique group of poets, novelists, playwrights and book people who associated with visual and performing artists at the core of New York's emerging East Village Scene in a creative renaissance during the 1960s. The memoirs illustrate how these writers took poetry off the page, how they developed the heady amalgam multimedia. Voices and words were thrust into perspectives where the body and the space around it became extensions of poetry; this is what made the Light Years poets different from others of their era: taking skills into the realms of audio and visual experimentation, and exercising freedom to reconstitute academic learning so as to create new arts. In the intervening decades, the people of Light Years, while achieving as professors, translators, editors, novelists, playwrights, actors, and filmmakers, have also received recognition for work in multimedia. Their chapters intimate how the avant-garde becomes classical and is incorporated into culture, with innovative performances and adventurous objets d'art forming a basis for a mainstream of the future. No other anthology better illuminates how these poets' words, music and bodies in motion helped transpose American and European consciousness about the possibilities of modern communication. The Light Years assemblage was at the leading edge of the evolution into process art, conceptual art, and performance art, moving onto stages, art spaces and sites; therefore, it is entitled to be viewed as part of a First Generation of multimedia artists. Each artist's chapter shows the development of their art in the years before making it into major museums, Documenta and high-visibility art expositions and publication by art presses, international media and literary presses. The mini-memoirs are like the people who wrote them: frank, brilliant, gossipy, bawdy, sweet, nasty, humorous, revealing, sensual, scholarly -- filled with the discerning, variegated discoveries of people driven to be immersed in the art world. THE GROUPS. From 1960 to 1966, the poets and other artists who gathered at Tenth Street Coffeeshop, Les Deux Megots and Le Metro in Manhattan formed a Salon des Independants, a unit discrete from other non-academic arts groups in New York and from other groups of writers. It had its own individual texture and characteristics. It was the only cluster moving toward the evolution of a new art form which would jump literature rapidly in the direction of the new century at the edge of new technology, including development of the computer. Four of the larger groups outside of academia have already been given attention in studies and books: The Beats, of San Francisco's North Beach; the Black Mountain College poets, who mostly read at university and bookshop venues; the original members of and descendants of the New York School as centered on the West Side in upper Manhattan and later at St. Mark's Poetry Project in the East Village, who advocated a particular style of poetry related to glorifying personal events and details of one's life in a cool, semi-humorous style similar to the elite linguistics of The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly; and Fluxus, "the radically democratic, proto-conceptualist, collective [international] art movement" (definition from Connoisseur Magazine). At first glance, the Light Years group appears to be a random gathering, but an underlying configuration becomes evident. With a close look, one can establish "order, pattern, arcs of behavior... patterns other people can't see..." (Shareen Joshi, The Joshi Effect, Santa Fe Institute). This would be the one New York group who propelled poetry onto stages, arenas, halls, lofts and garages as an ingredient of multimedia. Variety would seem this group's most immediately perceptible characteristic, both as to personae and artistic product. Without a concise name by which it could be quickly identified, people referred to it by the name of the coffeeshop where the weekly readings took place. The other groups, each practicing a particular kind of writing, have been easier to label than one which covered the entire range of writing, from the classically sourced to the crisp corner of the avant-garde and even extending into the new merging of the arts. There was a highly specialized energy held in common by over 180 apparently disparate artists. Armand Schwerner, a Light Years poet, used "a horde of elective affinities" to describe this group of writers and other artists who came together at three coffeeshops, sequentially from 1960 to 1966, to read their work aloud, exchange gossip and news of the tribe, and develop social relationships of every stripe imaginable (yes, the one you just thought of included). The artists in the Light Years arena were open to many visions and perspectives; they were in a period of intensive personal growth and outreaching in the development of their art. Concurrent groups influenced and had input toward the formation of the individual art being produced at Tenth Street and Deux Megots. These were academia, Fluxus, experimental theater, multimedia, intermedia, happenings, Abstract Expressionist Art and Pop Art, dance, and contemporary film. QUESTIONS. What drew these people together? What binding elements, common beliefs, and energy sources caused this group to unite and then keep up a bond for six years? These artists could be found living and working in an area of the city which was on the edge of gentrification -- what effect did that locus have? What was the relationship of the Light Years group to the other arts groups of that era? What were the demographics of these people, i.e., what was the personal makeup of the participating artists: point of origin, background, education, spheres of interest, motivations for being involved intensely in producing art? And, very importantly, what were the ingredients that made these group readings internationally famous quite rapidly after the group coalesced?
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