Philip Trussell Book Launch
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Please join Cuneiform Press and Super Secret Records for a very special evening of poetry, paintings, and music at the Museum for Human Achievement celebrating the releases of Philip Trussell's literary debut Sentences and of Adam Ostrar's album The Worried Coat.
The celebration will include a reading by Philip Trussell as well as musical performances by Thor & Friends, Adam Ostrar, Spliff Kazoo and a showing of Philip's paintings.
There will be copies of the book and the album.
Phillip Trussell
Philip Trussell is a painter & a poet who lives in Austin, where he mentors artists, writers, and other truants. Born in South Texas in 1943, he trained as a painter at The University of Texas at Austin and at Yale School of Art and Architecture. In the 1970s, Trussell worked with Harvey Brown at Frontier Press in West Newbury MA, drawing ads and designing books for Stan Brakhage, Al Glover, and Ed Dorn, with whom he became lifelong friends. Trussell returned to Austin in 1982, becoming a sort of godfather to the outsider artists and literary scenes here, hosting salons, guiding the reading of counter-academic students, and connecting spiritual isolatoes like himself. On Dorn’s tip, he worked closely with Skanky Possum Press and made art for their publications for over a decade. In 2012, he started writing discontinuous sentences as a daily practice. He soon began arranging them into sequences on postcards, and mailing them out to map what he calls a ‘speculative geography’ of his fellow dog-paddlers in the river of shit.
Philip Trussell’s Sentences are fallen aphorisms from a hermetic cosmos: quotidian and mystical, cantankerous and surprisingly humane. These cutting ripostes to the information age are more Elizabethan than postmodern, yet timeless in their devotion to the craft of disciplined observation. Trussell’s truncated satire probes at the habits of social life and the routines of ego with a nihilist’s shtick, discontinuous and unabashedly promethean. Sentences is a singular literary debut by a seasoned outsider artist. The book was edited by Bradley King, a poet, editor, and teacher living in Austin.
