The Past: The Occasion of the Future

There is an opportunity with new technologies and the agitation of the status quo to make creative spaces more connected to their communities and audiences, but it also comes with its share of risks that should be considered every step of the way. I guess my point is: let’s not exchange one exploitative system for another, where a handful of multinational corporations reap huge profits off user activity and we call it fair because any single post has the potential to pass before 1 billion pairs of eyes.

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Nicholas Grosso
PhD in Publishing at Oxford Brookes University

With the pervasiveness of desktop publishing, the increasing availability of (and reliance on) an internet connection, and the rise of print-on-demand services, juxtaposed with the hyper-consolidation and corporatization of publishers, gentrification, and austerity, the art, business, and craft of publishing have come to a crossroads in North America and Great Britain.

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Nicholas Grosso
HAUS RED

Seasonal newsletters recount the story of a featured title and trace its path from the writing and editing processes through to production, marketing, and sales . . .

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Nicholas Grosso
Interview with Stefanie Fishel

Have you ever felt like the work-in-progress of billions of microorganisms? 

When looking for a work to juxtapose with Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka, we sought something that walked the line between wonderment and existential crisis. Poe wrote about a universal one-ness and the fluctuation from it + back again, Stefanie Fishel writes from somewhere in the middle of that arc. In her analysis of human + international relations, guided by Walt Whitman, Fishel develops new vocabularies and seeks new metaphors (with a little help from the human microbiome) to understand the current state of the world with greater precision and more nuance. 

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Nicholas Grosso
On the State of Literary Publishing

... But, at the top, I wanted to focus on the corporatization of publishing as it highlights many of the key issues not only in publishing but also in our culture at large. Whether it be the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the austerity cuts moving across Europe, to the current US election season, we have reached a crossroads, a true point of reflection to understand the forces at work in our daily lives and the balance of powers between individuals, institutions, and corporations. ...

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Nicholas Grosso
Featured Readings in "Rhapsody in Letters"

“In 1947, Max Bense refines the argument in postwar terms that would be especially important to the multilayered form of [essay] film by noting: ‘The essayist is a combiner, a tireless producer of configurations around a specific object ... Configuration is an epistemological arrangement which cannot be achieved through axiomatic deduction, but only through literary ars combinatoria, in which imagination replaces strict knowledge’ ...”

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Nicholas Grosso