My new website

Josh and Cal, my two sons and pillars of support, built a new website for me: www.steveberer.com. What an astonishing surprise. It is not fully populated, but in the next month we should be adding much more content, so check it regularly. It will supplant, over time, my long-enduring website www.shivvetee.com. Much more modern in look and feel, and more efficient in use, I think you'll really like navigating it as you explore my work.

Thanks Josh! Thanks Cal!

Here are a couple of images from the new site:
In the late 70's I rebound my worn, one volume paperback edition of Blake's Complete Works. I turned it into 2 volumes, with embossed leather spines and cover papers made from linoleum cuts put on a roller. You can see the roller system I designed, below:

 Here are a few rollers I cut, altho the Blake roller is not shown. It was much larger. I'd apply multiple colors (acrylic) to the roller, letting the pressure from rolling mix and spread the paint, creating a different effect with every roll:

Finally, here's Josh and me working with a group of students doing a little binding project. A small collection of pigments, art supplies, and tools is in the foreground:

Bill Sigler's comments about meta-English

If you have read any of my poetry, you know I am engaged in a project to transform the language into one that can facilitate a more accurate understanding and description of the world. Existing grammars not only constrain vision and understanding, they distort and tend to polarize reality. Thus my project.

It has had many names. It was first dubbed Stevespell by a friendly critic, at a time when the main thrust was to normalize English spelling. As it evolved and I began to focus on grammar and new modes of thinking and describing, I started calling it Stevetok. But more recently I am inclined to think of it as meta-English, and "standard" English as "old English."

Recently, as I began work on turning Bouk 3 of The Song ov Elmallahz Kumming into an ebook, I discovered that a couple of other authors had worked on the same underlying text, the Sumerian Nin-me-sar-ra text, that lies beneath my Bouk 3. One of those authors is Bill Sigler, who has written a notable re-translation.

We began a conversation, and I sent him links to my poem and some short essays on meta-English. What follows are some comments Bill made, which were very gratifying. I don't think anyone else has understood so clearly what I'm doing:

I appreciate the hat tip on your lucid yet wide-ranging linguistics pieces. The poetics are intriguing, the idealism familiar. ... Still, call me weird, but I think "Blak Fiyer on Jennettek Fiyer" explicates the whole thing so beautifully and perfectly, without trying to patiently shine the pearls in the swine's ass. Your essays call to mind a more sober Finnegan's Wake, but your poems are something else entirely, like those filters that turn music into pure sound and break up the hegemony of melody and harmony. In other words, because word meanings are so intangible, the implications need to enigmatized for the sake of the holy transportation away from mind into spirit through the word. Few have been called for such work, fewer are chosen. I for one honor that you've created and maintained this reality in the face of Blakean odds. It does not need more justification, in my view, only more time ( from me and others). I haven't had much chance to delve in much yet, but nothing I've seen yet would discourage that. I will get to it in my own way, and will undoubtedly report back. For now I'll just say the Sumerian tree of life is on the edges of our existence, waiting to be found...

Thanks Bill! You can find Bill's poetry and ideas at:
http://billsigler.blogspot.com/ and other sites (check his profile).
His translations of the Nin-me-sar-ra are at:
http://billsigler.blogspot.com/search?q=Nin-me-sar-ra