The Essay as Transgenre

Try this:

SEVEN FATHOMS DOWN

Steven Church

http://www.thediagram.com/13_5/church.html

Next Week Bathhouse Readings

Upcoming: BATHHOUSE EVENTS 11/5 & 11/6

Join us on November 5th and 6th as BathHouse Events and the Creative Writing Department welcomes Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant!


Readings by Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant
Tuesday, Nov. 5th, 4 p.m. – 6 p.m.
EMU Student Center Auditorium

And:“Textual Orality: African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices” 
A Discussion with Douglas Kearney and Tisa Bryant
Wednesday, Nov. 6th 3 p.m. – 5 p.m.
EMU Student Center Auditorium

 

Texual Orality: African Diasporic Aesthetic Practices
The aesthetic and formal roots of African diasporic cultural production are often determined in relation to oral tradition, from poetic expression and practical education, to transmission of cosmologies and the genealogical storytelling of village griots. Celebrating and analyzing solely the oral can come at the expense of the written word, from signs and pictographs of ancient Egypt or Haiti, to the ‘spirit writing’ of African American mediums and healers. In response to this enduring but insufficient binary thinking, Tisa Bryant and Douglas Kearney devised the concept Textual Orality. Textual Orality is a way of naming this site of generative tension within African diasporic literature. Using this concept as a critical frame, Bryant and Kearney will explore the ways in which both the (il)legible and aural, the stylized mark and the spoken word, experiments in writing and traditions in performance (or vice-versa), are distinct and interdependent features of their individual writing practices and pedagogies.

 

Tisa Bryant:

            Though she hails from Boston, received an MFA from Brown University, and lives in Los Angeles, Tisa Bryant grew into her writing within San Francisco’s vibrant literary/arts communities, serving in various capacities with ATA, CineLatino, Frameline, New Langton Arts, the San Francisco International Film Festival, Small Press Traffic, and Intersection for the Arts, among others. She is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of hybrid essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature and visual art; co-editor/founder of the ongoing cross-referenced journal of narrative and storytelling, The Encyclopedia Project, and co-editor of War Diaries, an anthology of black gay men’s desire and survival, nominated for a 2010 LAMBDA Literary Award. Bryant is currently on a reunion tour with the poets and writers of The Dark Room Collective, celebrating the 25th anniversary of their nationally-renown African diasporic arts exhibition and reading series and she teaches fiction and experimental writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts.

Douglas Kearney:

           Poet/performer/librettist DouglasKearney’s second, full-length collection of poetry, The Black Automaton (Fence Books, 2009), was Catherine Wagner’s selection for the National Poetry Series. It was also a finalist for the Pen Center USA Award in 2010. His newest chapbook, SkinMag (A5/Deadly Chaps) is available. Red Hen Press will publish Kearney’s third collection, Patter, in 2014. He has received a Whiting Writers Award, a Coat Hanger award and fellowships at Idyllwild, Cave Canem, and others. Two of his operas, Sucktionand Crescent City, have received grants from the MAPFund. Sucktion has been produced internationally. Crescent Citypremiered in Los Angeles in 2012. He has been commissioned to write and/or teach ekphrastic poetry for the Weisman Museum (Minneapolis), Studio Museum in Harlem, MOCA, SFMOMA, the Getty and the Poetry Foundation. Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley. He teaches at CalArts.

gagapocalypse

Read J. Halberstam's Gaga Manifesto chapter and then watch some of Gaga's video's particularly these (live performance and the Telephone video)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDDsm_xOQCk (sun is down)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AimU35Qoceg&list=RD02tDDsm_xOQCk (blues)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsPn6KXH9wE (telephone)


also for more on The Invisible Committee and social activism and aesthetic anarchy: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/coming-insurrection

Some announcements

Blog responses to the readings are due every week. Look to the list at the right and see what others are writing, and thinking, about... There's some brilliant and thoughtful ideas and insights in some of those pages. Remember, writing in any form can help one think through and process ideas, which is only beneficial to more and future writing and thinking...

 Also, come prepared to look at Halberstam and DuPlessis briefly again on Monday. And your drafts of Project 2.

Also, two events this weekend, go if you can:

(...): An Evening of Contemporary Poetry/Performance

Tomorrow at 8:00pm

128 W. Michigan Ave Apt 5

https://www.facebook.com/events/380207835444205/

 

 

Flyer for Barrett Watten reading @ Evidence with Benjamin Paloff, this Saturday, October 19, 8 PM, 407 W. Marshall, Ferndale (west of Woodward, south of 9 Mile): http://bit.ly/1bZ8HU4.

This Week and Next

Keep thinking about Dictee and how it incorporates ideas from some of our other readings, how you can think about it in terms of your own writing, work, educational and intellectual endeavors, etc., and how it may be useful for thinking, at least in part, about the relationship between writing, identity, and the world.

Today (Wed) we are doing the first of the presentations of outside texts. Think of this as a time to listen and learn more about the variety of kinds of texts that are out there in the world today. Think about the relationship between form and content particularly in texts that transcend or exceed genre in some way: what kinds of things do you notice in terms of formal and structural issues and strategies, and what do you notice about how and what kinds of content are used in the various texts. Think about your own writing and creative practices and how you can challenge yourself to go beyond your comfort zone, to try some different approaches and strategies in the construction of your next project, how you can think beyond your own conceptions of what genre is and what it can be. Consider engaging with the presenters of the outside texts by asking questions and helping all of us work through some thoughtful ideas and responses to these various kinds of work.

For Monday: read DuPlessis and Halberstam (on EMU Online) and write a 1-2 page creative response to one or both of the texts. The what and how of the response is up to you, be creative. Print and bring this with you to class.

Also start working on, thinking about your creative project 2. This will be similar to the first project but will be longer and may ask you to incorporate some specific practices or strategies that come out of some of the things we have talked about. Still it will be wide open to interpretation and construction based on your creative interests

Write it and Submit it

this is fun: http://www.3elementsreview.com/submission-guidelines.html

some great cross-trans-hybrid-visual poetic projects and innovative writing

try this: http://www.thevolta.org/ewc-mainpage.html


and this: http://www.innovative-fiction-magazine.com/