Dean’s work is often concerned with the play of legibility through the creation of private lexicons. The relation between spoken word performance and its graphic representation, often in the form of private, personal and self-made typefaces, is one key to his work. The otherwise mute objects are inscribed, via clues, or fragments of lettering, with a personalised form of writing, which gives the opportunity of animating the artwork. Here the book operates as a form of sculpture, inscribed with both a personal and bodily form, to be read, spoken or carefully deciphered. Designed by Michael Dean, with Fraser Muggeridge.

‘NOW LEAVES describes leaving and having left. Glossolalia like, against noise, about the bones of a writing, written in tongue graphics legible by reason of the trees with as many words as there are leaves. The percussion of these leaves is f***ing news. The percussion of these leaves is not his news. The percussion of these leaves is not her news. The percussion of these leaves is definitely not their news.’ – Michael Dean

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership:

In Francis McKee’s first novel, observations of séances, scientific advances, group education outings, Kurdish protests for the ‘disappeared’, become mixed with his own Tarot influenced visions: a haunting spirit appears; the relation between political resistance and Spiritualism is cast as an insurrectionary force and a millenarian energy, celebrating the ecstatic moment. Histories of isolated early Christians and twentieth century mystics affect the psyche, all of this documented through journal entries that move from Scottish islands to Puerto Rico. Influenced by forms of 1960s new journalism, McKee pushes language to match the raw material of the stories, which become more erratic, signalling the looming fate of the text and its author.

Francis McKee is an Irish writer and curator working in Glasgow. He is Director since 2006 of the CCA, Glasgow, and a lecturer and research fellow at Glasgow School of Art.

You can hear the author discuss the book here.

• ‘N u there p?
• L yes b.
• N Working on this Diego thing
• L how is it
• N It’s making me think about my Kreol. Did I tell you how I lost it?
• L I know you mourn it
• N It was the first language I knew
• L the first one you spoke?
• N y. the only one. Til I went to nursery school and no one understood me. They told my folks to speak English to me. So Kreol became language of adults/familial authority
• L Didn’t you know any kids who spoke it?
• N nope.
• N I never stopped understanding it
• N but the speaking seized up
• L Funny when you think how under colonialism, use of pidgins/creoles by colonised subjects = justification for colonials to infantilise them, while English = language of authority…
• L Have you read Moten’s ‘Blackness and Nothingness’?
• N No. Send!’

—Enn Gramaten

A cautionary tale of academic privilege and misadventure in Diego Garcia via a Kreole translation, and parallel live chat.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

Dean’s work is often concerned with the play of legibility through the creation of private lexicons. The relation between spoken word performance and its graphic representation, often in the form of private, personal and self-made typefaces, is one key to his work. The otherwise mute objects are inscribed, via clues, or fragments of lettering, with a personalised form of writing, which gives the opportunity of animating the artwork. Here the book operates as a form of sculpture, inscribed with both a personal and bodily form, to be read, spoken or carefully deciphered. Designed by Michael Dean, with Fraser Muggeridge.

‘NOW LEAVES describes leaving and having left. Glossolalia like, against noise, about the bones of a writing, written in tongue graphics legible by reason of the trees with as many words as there are leaves. The percussion of these leaves is f***ing news. The percussion of these leaves is not his news. The percussion of these leaves is not her news. The percussion of these leaves is definitely not their news.’—Michael Dean