Peter Hoflich: Writings from the distant 20th Century

Caveat Emptor Press: detailed overview

Late 20th Century writings from the House of Caveat Emptor Press.

Caveat Emptor Press was established in 1992 as a concept.  I used Caveat Emptor Press and a photocopier to complete my first book, Toothless In The Blizzard, which I then distributed to my friends and family in un-numbered copies.  Since then it has been my excuse to self-publish other writings that include: a novel, several collections of poetry, several groups of short stories, and an almanac of unpublished articles and essays.  Caveat Emptor Press has moved once, from 1268 Kane Rd., in Mississauga, to its present location in Nishinomiya.  In 1999, Caveat Emptor press published its first work from another author in 1999 when Peter Hoflich and Jennifer Boudreaux published a slim volume of poems entitled Split Poems.

Titles:

CEP00000001  Toothless in the Blizzard (poetry) – 61 pages - 1993
CEP00000002  Void’s Metamorphosis (a novel) – 91 pages - 1994
CEP00000003  123.45 Stories – 135 1000-word stories – approximately 170 pages - 1998
CEP00000004  Travel Diary – 152 pages - 1999
CEP00000005  An Alienation Almanac – 109 pages - 1999
CEP00000006  Tautological Sophisms – 123 pages and counting - 1999
CEP00000007  Split Poems – Peter Hoflich and Jennifer Boudreaux – 27/38 pages - 2000
CEP00000008  the All-Seeing Eye: Illustrations 1993 to 1999 – 34 pages long - 2000
CEP00000009  Peter Hoflich/Self-titled, by Peter Hoflich – (currently 105 pages long) - 2000
CEP00000010  Burn This Book - 2000
CEP00000011  POETALLICA - 2000
CEP00000012  20th Century Home-boy - 2000
CEP00000013  PHomnibus - 2000
CEP00000014  Head Cheese * Year One - 2001
CEP000000015 Four Ages of Travel - 2001
HC0000001  Head Cheese Japan Zine - 2002
HC0000002EB  Head Cheese 2 Electric Boogaloo Zine - 2003

About the authors:

Peter Brian Hoflich: Born 20th of April, 1969, Oakville, Ontario Canada.  Raised and educated in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada except for two years in Salzburg, Austria.  English Literature at the University of Waterloo, further language studies: German in Germany for a summer, and Chinese in Taiwan for three years.  Extensive travel in 45 countries in Europe and Asia.  Currently living in Japan, married to Naoko Fujino of Himeji, Hyogo, Japan, a fellow expatriate he met in Taiwan.  Family divided between Germany, Canada, New Zealand, and Japan.  Divides his time between work (English instruction: students of all levels and ages) and commuting, watching movies on video, reading, listening to music, raising a cat called Zorro, practicing sumo, putting off Japanese language study, and writing writing writing.

Caveat Emptor Press
C/o Peter Hoflich
21-2-206 Hinoike-cho
Nishinomiya, Hyogo
Japan      662-0084

Jennifer Marie Boudreaux: Born in Louisiana, raised and educated in Texad, Indonesia, Salzburg.  Studied information arts in Portland, Maine, and now lives in Texas, working as a librarian, and still in awe with the world around her.
 

CEP00000001 Toothless in the Blizzard (poetry) – 61 pages

252 poems, with an index of 2,112 images included in the poems.
These poems were written by me throughout high school and into university.  As such, they should probably be called juvenilia.  But I see now that at that time I did have a preoccupation with certain images that I can no longer summon, for better or worse, and they still have a ring of eternal truth.  This is perhaps why I don’t feel too ashamed to recall the better ones, and list them with my bibliography.  One of the special features of this collection is the index of images I have included - I don’t recall ever reading a book of poems that included a poem, so I embarked on the grueling and time-consuming process of not just transcribing my poems and laying them out for a book, but also of going through the text and adding index markers, generating an index, printing it out, etc.  My word processor in those days was WordPerfect 3.1, I believe.  The real text contains page references in the index, but I believe now that when they are lumped together they form alliterative poems, letter by letter, all throughout the alphabet.

Table of contents
Sample poems
Index of images
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CEP00000002 Void’s Metamorphosis (a novel) – 91 pages

Void’s Metamorphosis is a novel I wrote in my senior year at college, i.e. my fourth year in the University of Waterloo as an English Literature major.  I took a creative writing course and decided to write a novel based on the concepts of the doppelganger and the metamorphosis it symbolizes in the life of the narrator.  I got a lot of my ideas as I trudged through the winter snow and ice to my student room.  It was a lonely year, since I had been separated from my girlfriend, now my wife, and I was nearly broke, but I was strengthened and disciplined in my mission by writing extensively for the school newspaper.  The story is told in the first person by a university professor who is somewhat buffeted by life, and is about the dangerous people he finds himself involved with - and finally his descent into despair and a kind of madness.  It has four distinct episodes, told to him in the form of stories / recollections/ anecdotes, but is held together by a framing story.  It begins one sunny day when…

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CEP00000003   123.45 Stories – 135 1000-word stories written in the idle summer in 1998 – approximately 170 pages

These stories were written in one mad, energetic summer.  The project started when I realized that my pile of “notes for potentially intriguing story ideas” had become quite large.  I had amassed over fifty or sixty.  During a long period between jobs when I was living my wife’s family’s house in Japan, at a time when I could barely speak any Japanese, I found that the thoughts and words flowed.  I decided that it would be a good idea to flesh out the thoughts I had scribbled down and see what become of them.  I would limit myself to 1000 words, just to see what became of my ideas.  I also thought that 1000 words was a good length for a short story, that being about the length of the average magazine or long newspaper article (which is also what most people prefer to read over fiction anyway).  I kept track of the dates the stories were written on.  On one mad day, I actually wrote ten stories, which should be about 10,000 words.  During the course of the project, several other ideas came to mind, and the whole thing expanded somewhat.  After the stories, I decided to add some appendices: words that intrigues me, concepts that amazed me, synonyms that set me mind on fire, as well as some recent poems I had written.  Now it is groaning under its own unwieldiness.  I hope to some day take the best stories and actually turn them into real stories, although it might be true that the better tales in the collection stand as they are at 1000 words.

Table of contents and descriptions
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CEP00000004    Travel Diary – 152 pages

In my short life, I have been fortunate to have traveled quite a bit.  I have rarely kept a travel diary, yet just after I embarked on the longest trip of my life I sensibly decided to write down what I saw, where I went, and what I did there.  The process of traveling, as well as the fact that I was the sole driver in our two-person team of travelers, kept my descriptions to a somewhat clinical descriptive level – money spent, times, distances, etc.  When I returned from the trip, I added material and rounded out the daily descriptions to the best of my ability

Includes:

Honeymoon trip: June 13, 1997 to March 10, 1998
Japan, Korea, China, Mongolia, Russia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Germany 2, the Czech Republic, Austria 2, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, Greece 2, Italy/Vatican City/San Marino, Slovenia, Austria 3, Germany 3, France, Spain, Portugal, Spain 2, France 2, Switzerland 2, Germany 4, Hong Kong, Taiwan Japan 2
India trip: December 16, 1998 to January 8, 1999
Japan trip: February 10 to February 23, 1996

Table of contents and descriptions
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CEP00000005    An Alienation Almanac – 109 pages

An Alienation Almanac is a collection of short stories that are built up around the theme of alienation, hence the title.  If a psychologist were to put together such an almanac of case studies, it is possible that in a fictional world they might provide some sort of benefit, which is what this collection attempts to do.  Some of the stories were written in 1995, others were begun in 1995 and finished in 1999.

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CEP0000006  Tautological Sophisms – 123 pages and counting

Tautological Sophisms is a collection of the various articles I have written over the years on various themes, from humorous to explanatory to purely theoretical.  Others describe events I have taken part in or witnessed in my years living in Taiwan or Japan, others are my cultural observations.

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CEP00000007    Split Poems – Peter Hoflich and Jennifer Boudreaux – 27/38 pages

In 1999 I organized several of my poems from that year and 1998, and printed them in a split version with my old classmate Jennifer Boudreaux of Houston, Texas.  We have not met in 13 years, but have found it not difficult to communicate through the internet.

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Interviews with the authors:
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CEP0000008 the All-Seeing Eye: Illustrations 1993 to 1999 – 34 pages long

In my collection of short stories called 123.45 Short Stories I put an illustration on each page, sometimes in the middle of the text, sometimes below the text.  This proved to be rather distracting for the readers, whose eyes were often challenged.  I reworked the illustrations so that they would be a book of just illustrations.  It is a small thing, kind of cute.

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CEP0000009 Peter Hoflich/Self-titled, by Peter Hoflich – (currently 105 pages long)

Peter Hoflich/Self-titled is the title for an collection of short stories begun in 1995.

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CEP000000010 Burn This Book

A series of illegible poems on a theme of creative exploration.

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CEP000000011 POETALLICA

New poems, new words, new definitions.  Written on a theme or not.

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CEP000000012 20th Centry Home-boy

Text contents from www.hoflich.com/Peter homepage.
 

CEP000000013 PHomnibus

Literary sampler of Peter Hoflich writings, as seen in these sample pages of CEP1 to CEP11.
 

CEP000000014 Head Cheese * Year One

Text from on-line news satire site Head Cheese.  Including Head Cheese 1, Head Cheese 2, Head Cheese 3, Head Cheese 4, Head Cheese 5, Head Cheese 6 (letters to the editor edition), and Head Cheese 7, but not including Head Cheese 8 (best of Head Cheese) and Head Cheese 9 (the write-in edition).

CEP000000015 Four Ages of Travel

four travel stories: England/Ireland, Thailand, Taiwan, and Japan - 2001

HC0000001  Head Cheese Japan Zine

72 page zine – no ads – with reviews, fiction, comics, etc. – 2002

HC0000002EB  Head Cheese 2 Electric Boogaloo Zine

48 page – no ads – with reviews, fiction, comics, Mick Harvey report, etc. – 2003

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Peter Höflich