Q.E.D. – Part 2: WHAT MATTERS/WHAT’S MATTER
The MAK Center Schindler House, Los Angeles
9 May 2012
Context Note: In April, May, and June of this year, Les Figues Press hosted a short series of long conversations on queer art and literature. Titled Q.E.D., in honor of Gertrude Stein’s novel by the same name (and one of the earliest coming-out stories), each Q.E.D. event explored the constructions of speech, art, literature, materiality, and sex. The conversations were moderated by Vanessa Place at the historic MAK-Schindler House, L.A.’s original nod to green architecture.
Q.E.D. Part Two featured Brian Teare, Michael du Plessis, and Lincoln Tobier.
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Blocked off by thick and towering bamboo shoots, the hush of the Schindler House is a surprise even given its location on a quiet, residential West Hollywood street. The House belongs to the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles; it was originally built in 1922 as a two-family home and workspace by Rudolph M. Schindler for himself, his wife, and another couple. The House’s then-innovative indoor/outdoor, open-plan design was the basis for the “California houses” that came to litter the landscape throughout the mid-twentieth century. It is hard to imagine anyone actually living in the House as it stands now: almost entirely empty, the structure and its surroundings feel more like a church or a yoga studio. Visitors speak quietly, and it is hard not to step lightly, as if any exuberant move might knock down the concrete walls and let the rest of the world into this sacred bohemia of careful art and right living.
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July 4th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
July 4th, 2012 / 12:00 pm
Selection from Q.E.D. – Part 1, “Things Unsaid”
The MAK Center Schindler House, Los Angeles
11 April 2012
Compiled by Chris Hershey-Van Horn
Context Note: In April, May, and June of this year, Les Figues Press hosted a short series of long conversations on queer art and literature. Titled Q.E.D., in honor of Gertrude Stein’s novel by the same name (and one of the earliest coming-out stories), each Q.E.D. event explored the constructions of speech, art, literature, materiality, and sex. The conversations were moderated by Vanessa Place at the historic MAK-Schindler House, L.A.’s original nod to green architecture.
Q.E.D. Part One featured Melissa Buzzeo, Patrick Greaney, and Simon Leung.
***
“What happens in a work of art when it seems like the artist does nothing?”—(Patrick)
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July 2nd, 2012 / 12:00 pm
July 2nd, 2012 / 12:00 pm
What the Facebook IPO Means For Young Writers
Nothing Left To Buy:
A detailed analysis of the Facebook IPO:
i’m the only finance writer without any understanding of desire. i’m soft like the sound of a dead freeway or the jam band that plays in a warehouse above the impossibly cute shopping district. all the helpful selling colors. this is china in the future. the TVs are 40% thinner in 2050. american is 40% thinner. there are fewer white babies. people want things like food that is free from toxins and movies with uncompromising ethnic super heros. little kids want to grow up to be anything. anything at all would be better than youth. education today is like an expensive prison for brilliant young interns with no tasks to complete. there’s nothing but screens showing images of other screens. jean baudrillard’s nephew was right about that french restaurant – it’s really delicious if you can get a reservation by email. no i can’t give you the email sorry. i was asked not to.
Wife Beaters & Cut-Offs: Southern Summer Comfort Book Tour
Chloe Caldwell, Elizabeth Ellen, Mary Miller, Brandi Wells and Donora Hillard are getting in a rental van and sailing the South.
I’m really excited about this. The Southern part of the US needs as much love as we can get. It’s hot down here, and we’ve got mosquitos and no gay marriage.
If you live in one of these cities (Austin, Houston, New Orleans, Oxford, Tuscaloosa or Atlanta), or if you are feeling generous, you can donate money on the tour’s Kickstarter page here.
If you catch me in Houston, I’ll buy you a beer and we can talk for a long time about racism/sexism/Tao Lin.
Here are the tour dates:
July 11th – Austin, TX – Domy Books, 7pm
July 12th – Houston, TX – Domy Books, 7pm
July 13th – New Orleans, LA
July 14th – Oxford, MS – Square Books, 6pm
July 16th – Tuscaloosa, AL
July 17th – Atlanta, GA – Beep Beep, 8pm
Does the Pulitzer suck, and if so, whom?
Winners of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize will be announced today at 3pm. Any predictions? The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded to no one, apparently. Nominees were Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. I’m curious what you think of the prize (Fiction category or in general). Is it
a) a highly prestigious stamp of approval that guarantees an enjoyable and edifying read
b) a mainstream award given to a conventional, palatable work (though the work may be formally inventive in superficial ways), leading to increased sales, certainly among readers of “serious literary fiction” but mostly among a segment of people who want to acquire cultural capital without too much effort
OR are you an enlightened in-betweener? If you tell me I will put it in a pie chart. I remember “at one point in my life” having a lot of fun making lists in a .txt file of Pulitzer winners and a future reading order that I would never end up following. I also remember (much later) finding Finding a Form by William Gass in the library, [I don’t mean this to sound like a conversion story. Beloved was pretty phenomenal. Lonesome Dove features a river full of snakes.] and reading this on the first essay’s first page:
…the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill…
from “Pulitzer: The People’s Prize” by William Gass
from “Pulitzer: The People’s Prize” by William Gass
Ryan Trecartin is a Mommy Blogger
You may or may not be familiar with the brilliant, confounding, and now frequently imitated work of Ryan Trecartin. He is perhaps the most important artist of this decade. I’m not the first to say so. Here is one of his popular videos.
In the course of my commercial work, I came accross a video produced by a team associated with the Blissdom Blogger conference, defined in the About section of their website as “the premiere conference for women who find and express their bliss by publishing online.” OK, what?
ILUAAF if i have to
Tonight White Castle expects about 6,400 people during its candlelight dinner event (they take reservations). Love writing? Love to be writing or to have written? You date a short story, marry a novel, so what’s a poem? Will we watch more or less porn today? (It smells like more.) It’s easier just to watch TV. TV is closer to reality anyway; it’s truer than the book. (The insanity of TV is the insanity of human life.) Liars of the heart. I wrote today might just mean a check to your garbageman or lord or where some say we lost our romance, our thumbs (oh those ghost phones): LH6, NSA, RUH? I read that book means you’ve heard of the title. It all a circle jerk in here, isn’t it? In the beginning was the word, but what type of love was that? Ah, the seduction of eloquence. I read for plot. Do you? No, but in 1990 David Letterman, in an odd reversal of his usual policy, paid Miss USSR to appear on his show. And then what happened? (The fee was four cartons of Marlboros.) I don’t know but it was lyrical to have her in the Green Room and ever put bananas in your coffee filter and made the coffee (why not?) so I pray to the big brassy lie of books.
First love is pretty great until you meet your second love at a bar one night. A man spends $1.60 today for every dollar a woman spends. Love reading a book or to have read a book? The insanity of reading is the synapses lifting 2D to 3D—you believe this shit? Or, why do we write/read books at all? Because, as you well know from your own clip-clopping, books are not pills that produce health when ingested in measured doses. Books do not shape character in any simple way-if, indeed, they do so at all-or the most literate would be the most virtuous instead of just the ordinary flesh-sacks with larger vocabularies. Sadly, my second wife caused me either horror or horripilation during love (her kisses decalcomania). Or, can we bring more love around here? Time kills it all, your passion, your dachshund and/or funny hamster, and then the stacks of books you’ll never read. (Words are clocks) I mean can we stop with all this literature and art stuck in the self-reflective light of the here and now, a lonely place inhabited by the solipsistic me. Also can I get some greasy fries? I mean big ol’ gas station gloopy tater wedges? If no, then GYPO. And beer me. Then shut out the light and let’s get to writing.
This Friday in Brooklyn: “The Case of Nicolas Chauvin” (White Review reading & magazine launch)
When: Friday, 10 February 2012, 6:30–8:30 pm
Where: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map and directions here)
How: Free; no RSVP necessary
More importantly: “Beer for this event has been lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery.”
Why: Please join the London-based White Review for an evening of Chauvin, chauvinism, and their many inheritances. Featuring Ned Beauman on carbon chauvinism and humility in the universe; Joshua Cohen on the absolute best Chauvin biography never written; Jeremy M. Davies on whether any form of literature, however ambiguous, indeterminate, playful, or condemnatory, can escape being a chauvinist for something; and Diego Trelles Paz on Chauvin and national progress in Latin America.
More Who: