Matthew Stadler
Between 1990 and 2000, Stadler published four novels that focus on children, sexuality, and art: Landscape: Memory (1990); The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee (1993); The Sex Offender (1994); and Allan Stein (1999).
[5] Reviewing Allan Stein in the New York Times, Edmund White wrote, "What makes Allan Stein unusual is the lyric suppleness and restraint of the writing, a kind of mandarin American casualness that is peculiar to such West Coast writers as Dennis Cooper, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian and Robert Gluck, a school of refined but deceptively offhand stylists.
In Allan Stein we encounter the trademark passages of stark beauty...With it Stadler demonstrates that he is among the handful of first-rate young American novelists, one with a wide reach and a quirky, elegant pen.
"[6] In the early 1990s, while living in Groningen, the Netherlands, to research his novel, The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee, Stadler was invited to take part in an architectural conference at the Technical University at Delft.
Through this conference and subsequent invitations to write about architecture for the Dutch journal Wiederhal, Stadler became involved in that country's discussion of urban planning and design.
In his talk, subsequently published as "I Think I'm Dumb," Stadler characterized the sprawl of the American West Coast as "the native home for bigness," and endorsed it as a productive, urban landscape.
But rather than condemning this landscape as a failure, Stadler asserts that "this place has given rise to a peculiar, dumb and lovely pattern of work that [as Rem K ponders in his manifesto] 'reconstructs the whole' and is doing something with the collective (it's hard to describe exactly what that is), plus it sheds some light on 'the real.'"
Stadler's inclination to look for positive potentials in the shapeless new landscapes of sprawl matured over the next decade as he read (and published) the essays of the poet Lisa Robertson.
Writing as the Office for Soft Architecture, Robertson pursued what she calls lyrical research into the new, dynamic forms of cities, especially her home (then) of Vancouver, B.C., Canada.
"The public is created through deliberate, willful acts: the circulation of texts, discussions and gatherings in physical space, and the maintenance of a related digital commons.
"One thing led to another, and before long we were organizing classes for writers and artists in a self-generating night school called The Extension Project," Stadler wrote in the introduction to an unpublished manuscript.
Clear Cut Press applied the viral, community-based marketing that Jensen had used to cultivate audiences for music at Sub Pop and Up to promote new books by the authors Stadler had been publishing at Nest and The Stranger.
[21] The publication project called suddenly developed from conversations with the curator, Stephanie Snyder, who directed the back room and joined the Using Global Media workshop in 2006.
"[24] Among the writers and artists published by Publication Studio are Lawrence Rinder, Walter Benjamin, Ari Marcopoulos, Lisa Robertson, Thomas Sieverts, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, and Matt Briggs.
Publication Studio is a publisher founded in Portland, Oregon in 2009 by Matthew Stadler and Patricia No, that "marries the common view of DIY practice with global reach"[23] by using cheap, widely available print on demand technologies.
[24] Publication Studio has published over 300 books (April 2016) by authors including Aaron Peck, Thomas Sieverts, Matthew Stadler, Lawrence Rinder, Travis Jeppesen, Paul G. Maziar and Walter Benjamin.
