Posts tagged "audio"

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Nicola Masciandaro audio commentary para-academia theory fiction workshop writing medieval studies

Jun 23

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 1: Nicola Masciandaro on Commentary

Thursday, May 19, 2011 
Observatory at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn 
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

Blogs, Speculative Medievalisms, Collapse, Cyclonopedia, Lovecraft, print-on-demand: the idea of “para-academia” has arisen in recent years as an addendum and an ultimatum to established disciplines and practices.

The Public School New York will explore these emerging ideas and modes of expression through a series of discussions and writing workshops.

Questioning the concept of the ‘marginal’, this session will consider commentary as a para-academic and theory-fictional mode of thinking and writing. Specific topics to be discussed include geometrics of commentarial thought, contemplation vs. speculation, hidden writing and acontextual scholarship, philological eros, and destructive reading. A theoretical introduction will be followed by open discussion of the texts and the futures of commentary.

Nicola Masciandaro is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College and a specialist in medieval literature. He is founding editor of Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary and co-director of the open-access press Punctum Books. For more information, see The Whim.

For related texts and more information, go to http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3268

Audio from the second session in the series featuring Wythe Marschall on Gnostic Vertigo in Bataille and Lovecraft can be found here.

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Bataille Lovecraft Wythe Marschall audio para-academia theory theory fiction workshop writing horror

Jun 27

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 2: Wythe Marschall on Gnostic Vertigo in Bataille and Lovecraft (Audio is part one of two)

Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Observatory at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn 
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

The para is the “alongside,” that which comments on the official or normative. While academics debate the finer points of Shakespeare and Kant, para-academics aggregate around shadow-commentators whose works do not so much categorize (striate) and enlighten (bring light into) difficult terrain, but produce that terrain, creating obscure spaces and nebulous discourses that are immune to traditional academic approaches.

Blogs, speculative medievalisms, Cyclonopedia, Charles Fort, teratology, print-on-demand—these and other tentacles of a polycephalic (many-headed) para-academia have entwined to produce an addendum and, finally, an ultimatum to established disciplines and practices.

The second session of the Para-Academia & Theory Fiction series considered links between two highly disparate authors whose work during the 1920s and 30s concerned, among other things, the unspeakable, the limits of philosophy, heterology (study of extreme “Otherness”), and cosmic terror.

Though they were on different planets politically, French anti-philosopher Georges Bataille and American horror luminary Howard Phillips Lovecraft shared a common concern for the foundation of a new, materialist mythology that can see beyond Reason, reconnect man to the world of things (and shit, and horrible creatures), and speak to the unutterable terror of being alive—of being trapped on a ball of mud circling a much larger ball of fire hanging in a void. (The realization of this terror produces “gnostic vertigo.”)

Wythe Marschall is a writer and artist. He works in advertising during the week and teaches writing at Brooklyn College on the weekend. With illustrator Ethan Gould, Wythe is the founder of the Hollow Earth Society, a pacifist army, conceptual art movement, and para-academic educational network.

For related texts and more information, go to: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3448

Audio from the second part of the class can be found here.

Audio from the first session in the series featuring Nicola Masciandaro on Commentary can be found here.

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Bataille Lovecraft Wythe Marschall audio para-academia theory theory fiction workshop writing horror

Jun 27

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 2: Wythe Marschall on Gnostic Vertigo in Bataille and Lovecraft (Audio is part two of two)

Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Observatory at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn 
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

Information about Wythe and this class can be found in this related post.

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Nicola Masciandaro audio commentary para-academia writing medieval studies

Jun 30

The Future of Commentary

A roundtable discussion on the future of commentary with David Greetham, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Avital Ronell, Jesus Rodriguez Velasco. Moderator: Nicola Masciandaro. Glossing is Glorious: The Past, Present, and Future of Commentary, CUNY Graduate Center. April 9, 2009. Sponsored by Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary

Related links:

“Talk to me about the Ontology of Commentary” (Illumined) by kvond via Frames/Sing
Affects and Their Gravities: Commentary as a Capacity of Care by Dan Remein via Wrætlic: The Notebooks of Egil on the Trammes of Tresoun

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China Miéville Lovecraft audio fiction octopus para-academia speculative philosophy theory fiction weird weird fiction writing horror

Jun 30

The Weird: a discussion of fiction and politics with China Miéville
March 2, 2011, Kingston’s London Graduate School and School of Humanities
via Backdoor Broadcasting Company

At the start of the twentieth century, H. P. Lovecraft summed up the encounter between horror and strangeness as ‘pictures of shattered natural laws’ and encounters with ‘cosmic outsideness’. At the start of the 21st century, the weird has alerted us, once again, to the persistence of this ‘mood or feeling’. The new weird—generically indeterminate as it is—offers a potent trope linking pasts and presents and opening new terrains for writing creatively and differently even though its political, philosophical and cultural ramifications may be less easy to fathom. This talk with China Miéville and the Faculty of Kingston’s London Graduate School and School of Humanities seeks to revisit the idea of the weird in fiction and politics. The session will betake the form of an open discussion where contributions from faculty and audience will consider the relevance of the idea of the weird to various fields of study in the humanities.

Responses to this talk:

That’s Weird by Fabio Cunctator via hypertiling
Weirdos: A Response by Ben Woodard via Naught Thought

China Miéville links:

rejectamentalist manifesto: China Miéville’s waste books
2010 Interview with China Miéville on the visual arts via An Iguanodon Studies

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Rick Prelinger Prelinger Archives audio archive archiving film

Jul 05

Rick Prelinger 
Thursday, May 5, 2011 
Memorabilia. Collecting Sounds with…Lecture series 
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) 
mp3 and related links via Ràdio Web MACBA

For the past twenty-five years, the founder of the Prelinger Archives has amassed film material that is generally ignored by traditional archives, resulting in a collection that prioritizes access and reuse as methods of preservation. Focusing on films on human perception, speech and sound recording and playback, Prelinger’s talk contextualises the history of the collection and looks at the future of archives and the possible end of archival institutions.

Related links

[PDF] Conversation by email between Rick Prelinger, Anna Ramos, Vicki Bennett and Jon Leidecker, which took place in April 2011 via Ràdio Web MACBA

Prelinger Archives: http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger

Rick Prelinger’s website: http://www.prelinger.com

Prelinger Library: http://www.prelingerlibrary.org

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Nabokov audio para-academia workshop writing Steve Aubrey

Sep 28

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 3: Steve Aubrey on Nabokov, Coincidence and Otherwordliness (Audio is part one of two)

Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Observatory at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn 
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977) is perhaps most famous for Lolita and Pale Fire, novels of startling linguistic and literary playfulness. But as his wife, Vera, wrote in a foreword to a collection of his poetry in 1979, the true watermark of Nabokov’s work is the concept of “potustoronnost” or otherwordliness. Though much of Nabokov’s work may seem straight-forward and realist, lurking underneath his fiction is an entire pantheon of ghosts, shades, demons and devils that comprise the true world of Nabokov’s writings. 

Stephen Aubrey descends from hardy New England stock. He is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, dramaturg, lecturer, storyteller and recovering medievalist. His writing has appeared in Publishing Genius, Commonweal, The Brooklyn Review, Pomp & Circumstance, Forté and The Outlet. He inexplicably holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Hollow Earth Society and is an instructor of English at Brooklyn College. 

He is also a co-founder and the resident dramaturg and playwright of The Assembly Theater Company. His plays have been produced at The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Flea Theater, The Collapsable Hole, The Brick Theater, Symphony Space, the Abingdon Theater Complex, UNDER St Marks, The Philly Fringe and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where his original play, We Can’t Reach You, Hartford, was nominated for a 2006 Fringe First Award. 

He has an MFA from Brooklyn College where he received the Himan Brown Prize and the Ross Feld Writing Award and a BA with Honors from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University. 

He is—for the record—not a Christian singer-songwriter. He does, however, hold the dubious distinction of having coined the word “playlistism” in 2003.

For more information, including the related readings and writing assignment, go to: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3562

Audio part two of this session can be found here.

Audio recordings of the entire series can be found here.

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Nabokov audio para-academia workshop writing Steve Aubrey

Sep 28

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 3: Steve Aubrey on Nabokov, Coincidence and Otherwordliness (Audio is part two of two)

Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Observatory at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn 
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

Information about Steve and this class can be found in this related post.

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Ben Woodard Reza Negarestani para-academia audio writing workshop theory theory fiction

Sep 28

Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 4: Ben Woodard on Complicitous Continuums: The Horrors of the Cosmicist Earth

Saturday, September 17, 2011
Observatory at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn 
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

This course explores the Geo-philosophical earth as theory-fictional node for explaining a cosmicism/universalism in which the outside is continuously advancing upon all purportedly firm grounds and solid bodies. Weirdness, as in the weird of weird fiction and the darkness of dark romanticism and the crumble of the gothic, is explored as the intrusion of the non-local upon the local, arguing that all stability is in fact subject to continuous degradation, shift, and collapse. 

Ben Woodard is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His work focuses on the concept of Nature in German Idealism, philosophies of becoming, contemporary philosophy, as well as in Weird and Speculative fiction. In addition to On an Ungrounded Earth, his book Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life is forthcoming from Zer0 books. He blogs at Speculative Heresy and Naught Thought.

For more information, including the related readings and writing assignment, go to: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3562

Audio recordings of the entire series can be found here.

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Eileen Joy dark ecology object-oriented ontology speculative realism vibrant materialism weird realism audio

Oct 02

Toward a Speculative Realist Literary Criticism
Facilitated by Eileen Joy
September 15, 2011
Van Alen Books, 30 West 22nd Street, New York

This class was co-produced by the Public School New York and BABEL Working Group.

Download the audio file, here.

Relative to the current debate over “close” versus “symptomatic” (New Historicist + psychoanalytic) reading strategies, I’d like to outline a series of leading questions relative to what an inhuman or post/human “close reading” might look like, especially under the cross-disciplinary influence of the movements known as “speculative realism,” “object-oriented ontology,” “dark ecology,” “weird realism,” and “vibrant materialism” (as mainly typified in the work and thought of Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Timothy Morton, and Jane Bennett). This will also serve as a springboard to collectively explore what Michael Witmore, in his essay “We Have Never Not Been Inhuman” (published in the inaugural issue of postmedieval on the post/human), suggested with respect to the inhuman characteristics of literary narrative:

Mathematics and diagrams have often been associated with an anti- or inhuman reduction of complexity into ‘graphs and numbers’, a reduction that we associate with the rise of experimentalism in the seventeenth century. Why should this be so? Are there not, on the one hand, ways in which narrative itself is—particularly in terms of plot—designed to implement a strategic reduction in complexity among the social and physical sources of change and transformation in the world?

And further,

Our work with narratives puts us in touch with forms of reduction or compression that are every bit as diagrammatic and so (potentially) inhuman as those who study the compression algorithms of physics or planetary biology. The key for us is the way in which narratives of human action introduce counterfactual ideals—impossible, limiting, but also operative and effectual—that are immanent in the objects we study, not simply projections of the creators or interpreters of those objects. The issue here is where one locates the absence of the human, just as a century ago, it was where one located its essence.

This class will work to open up new questions relative to the possibilities and problematics of what might be called close, inhuman reading—an “inhuman” reading, moreover, that does not dispense with “humanist” reading ethics, per se, but rather, fortifies them through non-human-centric lenses and concerns.

Eileen A. Joy teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and has published various articles and book chapters on Old English literature, cultural studies, embodied affectivities, violence, ethics, and the post/human. She is the founder and co-editor of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, the Lead Ingenitor of the BABEL Working Group, and co-director of punctum books: spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion. She is also the co-editor of The Postmodern Beowulf (West Virginia University Press, 2007) and Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages (Palgrave, 2007).

For more information, please visit: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3659

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