Graphic Text Readings

I know Christopher Higgs just posted his superb fall semester reading list, so I’m being a sort of copycat perhaps, but also, would just love to get some thoughts and ideas from you all.

I’ve been teaching a class called Graphic Texts: Looking at Text and Image Combined on and off for a couple years now, and am always looking for new material to fold into the class.

The class is basically a survey class that looks at various different kinds of “graphic texts” in all senses of the world. Students read, have critical discussions, and create graphic text projects of their own.

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Behind the Scenes / 40 Comments
August 29th, 2011 / 4:07 pm

A Conversation With Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of three poetry collections: Lucky Fish(2011); At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize; and Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the Tupelo Press Prize, ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award, the Global Filipino Award and a finalist for The Glasgow Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. She has won a Pushcart, an NEA fellowship and many other accolades and she is a faculty member in the English Department at SUNY-Fredonia. Her most recent book, Lucky Fish, blends the political and personal and is a really exciting and textured collection of poetry. I had a chance to talk to Aimee about her poetry and what influences her writing.

A lot of your poetry is deeply connected to the natural world. What is it about nature that you find so poetic?

Hmmm…I guess I love to let nature do the talking for me, so to speak. And why not—she has a much richer palette than I could ever conjure up! When I first started writing seriously in college, my subjects weren’t very broad: I basically wrote these sappy love and un-requited love poems. As I learned about the power and loveliness of metaphor (and as I began to get bored with myself!), I started to draw upon nature as an alternate lens to re-imagine ‘relationshippy’-issues and what it was like growing up Asian American in predominantly white towns.

Growing up, my father always took the time to make sure my sister and I knew the names of constellations, tree names, and most types of rock, etc. He did this on what now seems like these luxuriously long nature walks in the desert foothills of central Arizona and in the rich greenery of western NY—basically anywhere we lived, he found ways to make sure we didn’t just stay parked in front of a television. Many of those places have become gentrified and paved over so now in particular, I feel an urgency to witness and celebrate the natural world in my writings.

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Author Spotlight / 11 Comments
August 29th, 2011 / 1:00 pm

A Consciousness of the Luxury of Art: An Interview with Jon Leon

Last month I received a copy of the first issue of a new project by publisher James Copeland called Content, a series that releases uniform length and shape books each filled with “content” from an individual author without restriction. The first issue is by Jon Leon, a piece titled Elizabeth Zoë Lindsay Drink Fanta, which is at its most basic a series of photographs of the three famous women referred to in the title, manipulated and arranged by Leon throughout.

I didn’t quite know what to make of the book at first. I think I immediately thought, Why? But the book stayed out on my desk and I found myself continuing to look at it, and to think about the things Leon mentioned in the one page letter that accompanied the volume (reproduced here on Leon’s website), which includes the lines, “I wanted to talk about ‘the demented power of the lights,’ how literature is evil, the end of my ‘career,’ the end of the artists editions, my conceptual death, my simulation of life, my meltdown in print and on tape, my public facade, my disappearance from Los Angeles, my disappearance from the Atlanta scene, my disappearance from New York in the holiday of 2009. My resolution to ‘end this shit’ in 2010. To kill off the poems.”

Last week I had an email correspondence with Mr. Leon regarding the concept of the book, its assemblage, the context of creation and aging with creation, Lindsay Lohan, modeling, and disintegration in general, among other things.

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Author Spotlight / 15 Comments
August 29th, 2011 / 12:59 pm

Reviews

Fantasies of Trauma and the Experiment of Coherency

The Flame Alphabet
by Ben Marcus
Knopf, Jan 2012
304 pages / $26  Buy from Amazon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ben Marcus wrote this book, which is to say he either typed it into a computer or used a stylus, pen or pencil to scratch pigment into a page or roll of paper—the tools available to us humans at our particular anchor in time.* He did this in roughly a year, after developing the concept: a man—through his own somewhat distorted lens on reality—relates his recent experiences in a world wherein language, spoken and written, is discovered to harm its producers and recipients. I will try not to ruin it for you, but the inhabitants of this world eventually determine that the formation of meaning itself—the moment of insight, in which the gestalt of the lexeme coalesces in the mind of the listener/reader—is the problem; i.e. when you understand a word, you become sick: and more words, more understanding makes you sicker.

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14 Comments
August 29th, 2011 / 12:00 pm

Fall Semester Reading List


Starting next week, I’ll be teaching two sections of an undergraduate course in Postmodern American Literature. For those who might be interested in what we’re reading, here’s the list:

John Barth – Lost in the Funhouse (1968)
+ excerpts from Metafiction by Patricia Waugh
+ “Mapping the Postmodern” by Andreas Huyssen

Joanna Russ – The Female Man (1975)
+ “A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway
+ “Change of Dominant from Modernist to Postmodernist Writing” by Brian McHale

Clarence Major – My Amputations (1986)
+ “Postmodern Blackness” by bell hooks
+ “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” by Jacques Derrida

David Markson – Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988)
+ “The Precession of the Simulacra” by Jean Baudrillard
+ “Poetics of Postmodernism” by Linda Hutcheon

Lara Glenum & Arielle Greenberg, eds. – Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics (2010)
+ “The Laugh of the Medusa” by Hélène Cixous
+ “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” by Frederic Jameson

Behind the Scenes / 135 Comments
August 28th, 2011 / 4:42 pm

much more interesting than this is whether or not UFOs are real: an interview with Matthew Rohrer

I feel like there’s not much I can say about Matthew Rohrer that hasn’t been said already.  He is a poet.  He is the author of several books.  He teaches at NYU.  His poems are funny and sad and familiar and strange.  There’s a liveliness in their voice and a deep reverence in their construction.  They take place outside and inside, in the city and nature, alone and with others,  somewhere where the imagination and concrete reality intersect.  Despite all of Matt’s experience and worldliness, his poems also have this remarkable ability of never seeming  “above the reader,” while at the same time never resorting to familiar tropes.  His poems always level with you and remind you what’s good about poetry.

His new book, Destroyer and Preserver, was released this year by Wave.  You can read poems from it here, here, and here.  We emailed over the past few days to talk about the new book, other people’s books, punctuation, and hurricane Irene gets a shout out too.

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Author Spotlight / 10 Comments
August 27th, 2011 / 11:43 pm

Scorch Atlas: One Critic’s Consideration

Author Spotlight & Technology / 15 Comments
August 27th, 2011 / 5:22 pm

30 Beginnings: Mary Miller

My sister is inside watching a movie and bleeding.

Mr. Fuller was the new choir teacher.

He shows you his drawings, sketchbooks full of naked women.

The whole time I was manipulating him I was telling him how it was done.

Now that I’ve finished grading, finished everything here that there is to finish, I’m in bed, watching the occasional big-winged bird fly by, listening to the crackheads smash their words together.

File his stories in your head: Homosexual experience, Threesomes, prostitution, Asian girls.

They were talking about their diseases.

Denis called his fiancée my old lady.

There’s a leak, I told him, it’s right over my bed.

He had an air gun, a beer box set up to shoot.

You’re making out with a stranger in a trailer when the bed breaks.

I went to a wedding reception at the house of a man who painted with his ass.

It was a summer program.

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Author Spotlight / 9 Comments
August 26th, 2011 / 3:32 pm

Reviews

not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them

not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them
by Jenny Boully
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011
80 pages / $14  Buy from Tarpaulin Sky

 

 

 

 

 

 

First, there was the 1902 novel The Little White Bird, by J.M. Barrie, which we all might know of, but probably haven’t read. It blossomed into a play, “Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” which became the 1911 novel Peter Pan and Wendy, or, later, just Peter Pan. In 1953, Disney presented the world with a lasting image: chipmunk-faced, androgynous Peter Pan.  Playboy-bunny Tinkerbell. Matronly Wendy in her prim blue nightgown. Hook, with his long, angular face, knife-sharp mustache, wild black curls.

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9 Comments
August 26th, 2011 / 12:00 pm

Robert Henri on Writing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The picture that looks as if it were done without effort may have been a perfect battlefield in its making.”

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Craft Notes / 6 Comments
August 26th, 2011 / 6:06 am