The Pain Itself 1
Channel: Insert Press
Date: 2021-08-12

The Pain Itself 1
kevin mcpherson eckhoff

Video commissioned for We Made It
Insert Blanc Press 15 Year Anniversary
Friday June 11 and Saturday June 12, 2021

Find the book at insertblancpress.net

Hardbound, Dustjacket, 142 Pages  
Matte Case-Laminate Cover  
ISBN: 978-1-947322-00-4  
Cover Price: $33.99  

Molestus, deus meus, hoc libro. Labore interdum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur lector aliquo, sed non unus. Quis enim par-quinque grammars ipsum dolor. Odio et facile, deus meus. Ille/Illa/Est omnem contentionem inconsultius pulpiness ad me. Non dico vos voluntas promisit mihi.  

Annoying, my god, this book. Occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure a reader some great pleasure, but this isn't one of them. Fifty-one grammars duel for the pain itself. And the easy hatred, my god. He/She/It's all ill-advised pulpiness to me. Don't say I promised you pleasure.   
~ Rachel Zolf, winner of the Trillium award for Human Resources  

 
Kevin McPherson Eckhoff mansit in lectione quae ad illegible vel indifferens, vel denique quod Robertus Smithson potuisse referri “lingua inquirenda” potius quam verba legantur. Minimeque ad numerum, locum tenens, ut e vulva assituationem intelligitur tantum spatii per geometriam vertit. In processu et efficit “non euphemism, [sed] est”: quod in sola materiale est, quamquam lingua mini semper obvolvere operam, perturbare, aut ignorare.  

Kevin McPherson Eckhoff has persisted in reading what was meant to be illegible, or irrelevant, or what Robert Smithson might have referred to as "language to be looked at" rather than words to be read. Undesigning the cipher of a place-holder, the matrix of layout meant merely to give space, he has transformed geometry into signification. In the process he renders "not the euphemism, [but rather] it": what the sheer materiality of language insists on continuing to say despite our best efforts to muffle, disrupt, or ignore it.   
~ Craig Dworkin, author of Reading the Illegible and The Perverse Library   

 
In de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, Cicero deliberates on the ethics of pain and pleasure. It was an edition of this work that a 15th-century bookmaker used to birth lorem ipsum, or placeholder text. An indispensable tool of contemporary publishing, placeholder text facilitates a graphic design process void of semantic interference. The Pain Itself renovates Cicero’s work by swapping the original manuscript with lorem ipsum and placing this alongside its translation from broken Latin to English. The result is an absurd, agonizing meditation on the virtues of suffering, hermeneutics, and hedonism. 
 

Interior layout and design by Jason Dewinetz.  
Dustjacket and cover designed by Matt Normand  
with dustjacket designed as a poster to be removed.  

kevin mcpherson eckhoff is a writer, teacher, editor, actor, comedian, daddoo, and hubbub. His most recent books are Dieting Herb Wit (above/ground) and their biography (BookHug), which the Globe & Mail described as “wide-ranging” and “incredibly playful,” while his work has been anthologized in The New Concrete, Why Poetry Sucks, BAX, and the forthcoming Experimental Praxis. He has won the Robin Blaser Award and Kelowna’s Comedy Bloodsport. He lives with a gal and two boyos on unceded Syilx territories where Okanagan College pays him to hang out with gnarly undergrad folks.