First, it’s Avital Ronell’s new book Loser Sons, which just came out, and is fabulous—a really serious look at authority, how it gets established and maintained, incorporating a history of childhood and the connections of both and all to Kafka, Kojève, Arendt, and many others. Ronell is brilliant at revealing intricate interconnections and their subterranean pathways. And doing so with amazing style. She’s the most fun philosopher writing today—someone who loves sculpting language, working it as a tight, compressed, and attitudinally explosive material.
And I’m reading Jean-Christophe Bailly’s The Animal Side, Catherine Porter’s beautiful translation of Bailly’s Le versant animal. It’s a really important contribution to the theoretical/critical re-examination of the human-as-animal and our relation to non-human animals that has been raging over the past ten years. Bailly’s consideration is distinctly poetic in that it’s open both in statement and in style—“we have to force ourselves to remain on a threshold that precedes all interpretation.” It’s a deeply opening book in every way that phrase can be taken.
And I’m reading Stacy Doris’s Fledge—gorgeous! Very slippery, and very soft. It has a sweetness to it that’s just heart-breaking. And a lot of humor. “Formerly we combed owls.” It covers such range, and yet also has a distinct intimacy; the reader feels directly spoken to, swept in, gathered up, held.
DB & WNPR event on "Exploration"
The Hartford Consortium for Higher Education in collaboration with WNPR and Drunken Boat [drunkenboat.com], international online journal of the arts, invites you to a panel on “Beyond the Extremes: Contemporary Narratives of Exploration” moderated by radio personality John Dankosky for “Where We Live,” introduced by CCSU poet-in-residence and Drunken Boat Executive Director Ravi Shankar, and featuring snow leopard conservator and Himalayan anthropologist Shafqat Hussain, visual artist and expeditioner Adriane Colburn, University of Hartford historian Michael Robinson, Director of Trinity’s InterArts Program and poet, Clare Rossini, and Coordinator of Maritime Studies at UConn-Avery Point, Helen Rozwadowski.
Come learn about the history of exploration, see tools of the trade, and discuss what new frontiers exist for us to discover in the new millennium.
Where: University of Hartford’s Wilde Auditorium, Harry Jack Gray Center, 200 Bloomfield Avenue (Route 189), West Hartford, CT 06117
When: Thursday, May 3rd from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM
Contact: Michael Robinson, [microbins@hartford.edu], (860) 768-5951
Refreshments will be served. Free and open to the public.
PARTICIPANT BIOS
San Francisco based artist, Adriane Colburn has spent the past several years traveling on expeditions with scientists who study climate change in remote terrains, such as the Arctic and the Amazon. Adriane’s recent work consists of large-scale installations (comprised of layers of hand cut paper, digital prints, video and projected light) that investigate the complex relationships between human infrastructure, earth systems, technology and the natural world. These works, derived from scientific data, images and video, look at how mapping is used to investigate fragile and inaccessible ecosystems along the edges of the Earth’s last vestiges of wilderness. More information: www.adrianecolburn.com<http://www.adrianecolburn.com/>
John Dankosky has been working in radio – mostly public radio – for 21 years. Since coming to Connecticut in 1994, he’s helped to build WNPR’s award-winning newsroom – cultivating one of the most talented news staffs in public radio. He has reported for National Public Radio on presidential elections, crime, education, drug abuse, immigration and more. He’s edited award-winning documentaries on Connecticut history, 9/11, and the mental health of children, and has been involved in editorial planning for Public Radio News Directors, Inc., The Public Radio Exchange, and NPR’s Local News Initiative. He’s won awards for reporting, hosting Where We Live, and “overall station excellence” from the AP.
Shafqat Hussain is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Trinity College, Hartford, CT. Shafqat obtained a Ph.D. from the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Yale University, USA. He is from Pakistan and has worked in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of northern Pakistan. His PhD research was a historical ethnography of Hunza region in northern Pakistani, focusing on Victorian explorers’ encounters with local people during the era of the Great Game in the 19th c. Shafqat has also designed and initiated an innovative project for snow leopard conservation in northern Pakistan. In 2009, Shafqat won the National Geographic Emerging Explorer award for his work in the region.
Michael Robinson is an associate professor of history at the University of Hartford. He is the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) which won the Forum for the History of Science in America Prize in 2008 and received positive reviews from the Times Literary Supplement and other journals. He has given lectures on exploration at the Explorers Club, the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History, and NASA Headquarters. He speaks frequently to the media on matters of exploration including The Associated Press, USA Today, Pravda, NPR, and PBS. He writes a blog about science, history, and exploration at Time to Eat the Dogs which has received awards from Research Blogging, Tripbase Reviews, and Raveable.Com.
Clare Rossini is the author of three collections of poetry: Lingo (The University of Akron Press, 2006); Winter Morning with Crow (University of Akron Press 1997), chosen by Donald Justice for the Akron Poetry Prize and one of two finalists for PEN’s first Joyce Osterweil Award; and Selections from the Claudia Poems (Minnesota Center for the Book Arts, 1996), an art book edition. Her poems and essays have appeared in a range of journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Poets for a New Century, and the Best American Poetry. At Trinity, she serves as Director of Trinity’s InterArts Program teaches creative writing courses for the Department of English. Her scholarly interests include English, American, and world poetry; the imagination of place and eco-criticism; the history of science; folklore and folktales; the community cultural development movement; and community-based learning. She is currently working on a fourth book of poetry whose subjects include late-medieval science and global warming.
Helen Rozwadowski is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut and coordinates the Maritime Studies program at shoreside the Avery Point campus. Her teaching includes environmental history and history of science, as well as interdisciplinary maritime studies courses. She is currently researching undersea exploration in the 1960s, a time when ocean boosters had optimistic dreams for working and living in the sea. Her work considers ocean exploration as a category of exploration of extreme environments including outer space and the polar regions. She is currently guest curator for an upcoming exhibit at Mystic Seaport titled “Sinister Seas.” Her award-winning book, Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea, is a scientific and cultural history of 19th-century interest in the ocean, manifested in maritime novels, in the popular hobby of marine zoology, in the youthful sport of yachting, and in the laying of a trans-Atlantic telegraph cable.
Ravi Shankar is the founding editor and Executive Director of Drunken Boat [http://www.drunkenboat.com], one of the world’s oldest online journal of the arts, and chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust. He has published or edited seven books or chapbooks of poems, including the National Poetry Review prize winning “Deepening Groove,” and W.W. Norton’s “Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond,” called “a beautiful achievement for world literature,” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has won a Pushcart Prize, appeared on the BBC and NPR, been featured in The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and has performed his work around the world. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at CCSU.
1. Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, Etgar Keret. Every decade or so, it seems someone reinvents the short story – there was Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Lydia Davis, and now Etgar Keret. Even though his stories are only a few pages long, I limit myself to one per day because I want this book to last as long as possible.
2. Here Comes the Sun: the Spiritual and Musical Journey of George Harrison, Joshua M. Greene. A fascinating portrait that takes George’s devotional side seriously. When was the last time a rock star bio made you want to be a better person? This one will.
3. George Oppen: New Collected Poems edited by Michael Davidson. These poems are challenging, but not because they’re impenetrable or obscure. In fact, what’s most provocative is their clarity and candor.
4. The Gastronomical Me, MFK Fisher. When I tire of watching Iron Chef, I return to these feather light essays that capture not just appetite but also the manners, customs and rituals that surround it. MFK Fisher is the Jane Austen of food writers.
5. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. I love hearing about the early days of modernism from such a reliable source. Whether he’s delivering a baby, hanging out with Ezra Pound, or writing a poem, Doc Williams calls it as he sees it.
This month I’ve been reading Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s new poems, especially “People on Sunday (1930),” re-reading giovanni singleton’s Ascension from Counterpath, and David Graeber – a printout of a piece on nonviolent direct action. I’m also trying again with Swann’s Way. In the past, his hyper-slow meditations on bourgeois life made me grumpy when I was working so hard to earn a living and write. My women’s reading group decided to read Proust (we chose the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright version), I was nervous, having been a shameful Proust drop-out Now I have fallen in love with Proust: delicious sentences you can wrap around yourself, each a whole universe. I can’t wait to get into bed at night and read Swann’s Way. Eric Karpeles’ excellent Paintings in Proust helps track the paintings and is gorgeous. As Proust’s perceptions unfold, each has intensity, grammatical fascination and surprise. His sentences have been even helpful for thinking about the future of Occupy, paving the way for a new kind of time, indeterminate and flexible.
2012 Chapbook Festival and Mixer’s Five-year Anniversary Reading
Sometimes I don’t fit the form of a poem.
Sometimes I just want to stare directly without demanding metaphor or make something solid with my hands or I want to be inside a place that feels like the inside of my head.
These posts see the style stories that travel our literary circles–this week’s post has shots of fashioned folks traipsing about and enjoying the 2012 Chapbook Festival and Mixer’s Fifth Anniversary Reading before I accosted them with my camera and growl-sneered, Lemmelookatyou…And surprisingly, they let me! And you can look at them, too.
Future posts will include some literary leaning craft projects and style/inspiration boards ala literary figures.
Questions? Comments? Flower bombs? Email me: faceturnsread@gmail.com.
2012 Chapbook Festival, CUNY Graduate Center, NYC
Sally Wen Mao, Honey Badger
Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein and Nicholas Adamski of The Poetry Brothel
She’s wearing an awesome maxi prairie dress.
Amy from Greying Ghost Press
This braided bead necklace was made by poet Paige Taggart and worn by a lovely woman whose named I did not get.
Lynne Desilva-Johnson of The Trouble with Bartleby and Exit Strata.
Cindy Jordan, poet, from UpSet Press, rocking cobalt.
Mixer’s Five-year Anniversary Reading
Tiphanie Yanique and Rebecca Keith
Helen.
Trent Morse of ArtNEWS
Hossannah Asuncion: This and that. Here, here and 
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