The Brooklyn Rail

“Are you a bore?,” “What now?,” “Change yes, upheaval no,” “Precision,” “Do many things that matter,” “Don’t wait for tomorrow,” and “Don’t rub it in.” These found texts from this plump little paperback volume are either self-help exhortations conveying urgent advice or the ransom letter-like ravings of a mad scientist running with scissors—or both. Bern Porter (1911–2004) was a concrete and visual poet and book artist who also happened to be a brilliant scientist, physicist, and inventor that worked on cathode ray tube technology, which led to the creation of television. When the US entered WWII, he was drafted to work on the Manhattan Project, a job he quit after Hiroshima, clearing the way for the rest of his life as a trailblazing, self-publishing peacenik.

Working out of the Bay Area starting in the 1940s, he eventually published a Henry Miller anti-war tract and tirelessly championed other young innovators: Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Ray Johnson, as well as Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Rexroth, and Anaïs Nin, while managing to successfully publish both Kenneth Patchen and Philip Lamantia under his own imprint. By the time a new generation of publishers came along in the 1960s, Porter emerged as the new underground hero of appropriated “founds,” his word for re-contextualized fragments from books, magazines, newspapers, manuals, advertisements, and junk mail, isolated and reframed as witty assertions and philosophical inquiries. The ongoing body of work he shaped over the next five decades has stood the test of time.

Now, for a new hashtag generation that Porter saw coming, a substantial collection of his analog “founds” have been compiled anew into a self-help book for post-modern times, something between candor and caricature, integrity and irony. In the form of questions, statements, and prompts for our weary twenty-first century hearts, minds, and souls, this sagacious and learned collection of fortune cookie-like snippets shines a light on self-help—both as an industry and as a timely personal pursuit we might desperately need. While the mindfulness aspect of Porter’s work has not been the stated purpose of any of his previous one hundred books, scrutiny herein reveals his recycled interrogations and contentions (such as “Drink every day” or “No blades, no blood”) have a guileless knack to push us giddily toward self-correction as GPS and AI descend menacingly from afar.

Despite his vast output, this compilation comes to us from just six of his previous best, each a milestone in the world of DIY culture (not so far from self to help). Comparing Porter to Walt Whitman in his introduction to The Wastemaker (1972), Richard Kostelanetz called Porter’s tiny snippets the key to “an assiduous discovery of America writ large” much the way a self-help book might pit the individual against the encroaching masses or group think. Similarly, in Found Poems, a 1972 critique against commercialism and bureaucracy issued by Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press, a theme of self-possession then now potentially derails our obsession with FOMO and must-have-ism. Indeed, Porter never owned a telephone, yet in The Manhattan Phone Book (1975), Porter assembled his own directory from A-Z by parlaying typographic ad fragments into a narrative on the human need for connection as ‘70s technology encroached, now more relevant than ever. In this new context, excerpts from the two companion volumes, The Book of Do’s (1982) and Here Comes Everybody’s Don’t Book (1984), (with the latter’s pages all containing the word, “don’t”) are the kind of “just do it” admonitions disguised as gentle “suggestions” that the “helping” professions now insist upon. Porter’s hilarious scraps from ad copy channel all the sensitivity of a frenzied Jimmy Fallon shouting his way through the Tonight Show. Finally, the morsels from Sweet End (1989), Porter’s fourth, last-completed of a planned seven-part series, and a somber narrative on mortality, read here like permission slips for the soul, but not at the expense of edginess. In the editors’ thoughtful and arduous attempt to reimagine Bernard aka “Bug” for these fraught times, they have lifted founds from these previous tomes for new audiences freed from the mesmerizing shackles of late-night TV but still surfing for meaning.

In the spirit of keeping Porter alive, in 2011 art director and designer Fredrik Averin sent an email to Mark Melnicove, executor of the Porter Estate, asking deadpan about Bern, knowing full well that he had passed seven years previously. The two agreed to collaborate and identified various themes in Bern’s “founds” to push out, settling on self-help. They edited the volume electronically. The authors ask, in some unctuous promotional copy for this new release, are we “too busy to think without a phone in hand,” are we our “best self,” or have we “wished for a different kind of self-help book to embark you on a new kind of journey toward discovery, understanding, and recovery?” It reads like a critique of late capitalism, much as Porter’s work usually did. Are they kidding? Was Bern? It is entirely possible the recontextualizing of corporate neediness as a spiritual balm is just a ruse to reissue the work of a cultural sleuth. But there is a chance that the copy jumping off the pages of this book from before might just help someone.