Crack the lush pages of "The Inevitable June," a tiny heavy tome as thick as thought as it is with glossy quality, texture, vividity. This is no overstatement -- this hand-sized volume published by theNewerYork (theneweryork.com) has been printed on heavy, glossy stock bound in a laid paper and foil cover, and is obviously intended to be as much a curiosity-inducing volume of work by surrealist Bob Schofield as a miniature coffee table book, a book to be left out for guests to peruse and -- of course, inevitably -- acquire for their own.
The content matches the quality of the physicality of "The Inevitable June." Schofield's style invigorates the classic techniques of Breton and his contemporaries, applying a modernist spin to a protracted round of "cadavre exquis fait écho seul." Breton's "pure psychic automatism" is prevalent throughout the sparse, carefully chosen phrases in Schofield's dense construct of oblique language and stark sketch. These sketches that bridge many of "June's" entries are Schofield's own blunt black-and-white renderings, tendrilous images that call to mind Masson's automatic drawing as they riff-or-not on the daily entries themselves, images that feel like Schofield spent a day playing a game of Picture Consequence with a mirror (though his cephalopod motif leads me to believe he simply may have stared too long at Duchamp's "Hat Rack").
Once inside, the reader succumbs to a quick immersion in Schofield's counterpoint of striking shards of negative space and concise, coruscating language; on the 1st you, reader, know you are in for a darkfall, an enlightening, an unbearable curiosity itching a burn through your turning muscle.
On the 5th you are granted a breather or so you believe; the visual fermata of the following pages serves only to morph you from want- to need-to-know the rest of this apocrophy.
According to "The Farmer's Almanac," June will see high heat in the US Northeast spreading to Europe and Asia; lightning in the Southwest that backlashes and crisps the Pacific; muggy, cool, cloudy laundry throughout the midwest; and hungry, cloud-borne octopii across South America. According to the author, the Farmer's Almanac is likely to be spot on. By June 10th, you will know he iswas spot on.
By the 12th you realize this is a trichotomy of runted stages, a conflict of mitochondria exposed on billboards and collapsing under the tritone weight of the harmony of crows; to quote the author, "I've heard the glass airplane industry is going through some hard times. You can see it all over the ground." Imagining this brilliant thought through from beginning to end explodes in the reader's mind.
Between June 18th and 19th do not stare too closely at the box on the physical 94th and 95th pages unless you are gleefully inviting your dark elastic schism. But I recommend choosing to be gleefully inviting. Schofield is inviting you in, gleefully indeed, though he's mum on exactly where it is he's taking you.
This is a book that makes you watch the sky for laughing glass tendrils and flexing invertebrate hectocotilii, all moving toward your magnet with your mirrored gasmic anticipation. (There is a hint the week of the 25th, but don't skip ahead and ruin your surprise.)
This volume is a place you have not been before -- this I can guarantee.
Break the seal. Run your fingerprint across the foil of the cover. It may not bite. Infest yourself with June 1st. Hungrily creaking open every subsequent spreadhead will become inevitable.
Take this book and find this book iswas inevitable.
("The Inevitable June" is available in a perfectly rendered Kindle edition, though I highly recommend [also] purchasing the physical book, which is of impressively tangible quality and a pleasure to hold.)
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