Release of A Cosmology of Bliss in Amsterdam
Sunday 11th October, 5pm
with Rowan McNaught
San Serriffe
Sint Annenstraat 30
1012 HE Amsterdam
The Netherlands
**
Release of A Cosmology of Bliss in Brussels
Wednesday 14th October, 6.30pm
with Rowan McNaught
rile*books
Rue des Commerçants 62
1000 Bruxelles
Belgium
**
Release of A Cosmology of Bliss + Mysteries of a Communist Cave in Stockholm – double event with Rowan McNaught and Lytle Shaw
A Cosmology of Bliss (OEI #112-113 2026) with Rowan McNaught, Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg
Mysteries of a Communist Cave (Park Books 2026) with Lytle Shaw
Friday October 16
5.30pm
konstbokhandeln Konst-ig
Åsögatan 124
116 24 Stockholm
**
Release of A Cosmology of Bliss in Berlin
Wednesday 21st October
with Rowan McNaught
Hosted by Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin
Location and time TBD, see @hopscotchreadingroom closer to date
OEI #112–113: A Cosmology of Bliss concerns Bliss (aka Blissymbols or Semantography) — an unspoken language made of countless little geometric symbols, many resembling the things they point to, others remaining more mysterious. Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985) began the project in 1942 while a stateless refugee in the Shanghai International Settlement, and who, after emigrating to the Australian beach town of Coogee, worked on it for the rest of his life. After 30 years of obscurity, the language was picked up as a communication system for nonverbal children in a small hospital school in Canada, with great promise. This, however, led to acrimony between its creator and its first genuine users, who sought to amend it for their needs—an event which Charles likened to ‘a new Babel of symbols’.
A Cosmology of Bliss reconsiders the histories, forms, and dreams of Bliss and its many contributors. It includes a new picaresque biography of Charles, the chemical engineer, wounded refugee, and amateur semanticist; essays that draw out affinities and resistances, such as with the history of 20c Australian poetry and experimental pedagogy; unpublished material from Bliss’s manuscripts and correspondences, including an extensive selection of the barely-published Blissymbols Picture Book—Charles’s final work; and commissions by some thirty artists and poets who put the symbols to new and unruly use. Together they seek to lodge Bliss into the history of Australian visual art and poetry as a remarkable exception.
Against received accounts of a failed auxiliary language or an outmoded therapeutic aid, A Cosmology of Bliss is the first study to insist that Bliss is a poetic project. Taken as such, the symbols begin to speak—silently—of a world of lucky faults, chemical grammars, speechless inscriptions, and untenable, incandescent loves.
Rowan McNaught is an artist-researcher based in Melbourne, where he is secretary of Darpa (https://darpa.press).
"There are many accounts of structuralist Marxism, but none that have considered what this theory might mean for an actual Marxist structure, like the building Oscar Niemeyer was commissioned to design in Paris in 1965 to represent the French Communist Party. In Mysteries of a Communist Cave, Lytle Shaw investigates each component of Niemeyer's elegant headquarters in relation to the transformations in politics, architecture, art and philosophy that were being played out both in the building's front yard and across the world, including in Brazil, from where its Marxist architect had himself recently fled."
Lytle Shaw is a New York-based writer and professor at New York University whose books include Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006), The Moiré Effect (2012), New Grounds for Dutch Landscape (2021) and, most recently Mysteries of a Communist Cave (2026).
Books by Lytle Shaw published by OEI editör: Fältarbeten. Från plats till site I nordamerikansk efterkrigspoesi och -konst (2016), New Grounds for Dutch Landscape (2021), teori med små bokstäver och den platsspecifika vändningen (2021)