Seder in the Streets
March 20, 2013, New York City

It's time for Seder in the Streets - a raucous action connecting the Exodus from Egypt to the struggle for justice against discriminatory policing. Through protest and performance, JFREJ will connect the celebration of Passover to our campaign for real police accountability.

Seder in the Streets!
Wednesday, March 20 fr/ 4:00pm - 7:00pm
Foley Square (between Lafayette, Worth, and Centre Street)

Full Schedule

Richard Kostelanetz Presents One Dozen New Books
March 25, 2013, New York City

On Monday 25 March, 2013, at 7 pm. at McNally-Robinson, 52 Prince Street, between Lafayette and Mulberry Streets, Richard Kostelanetz will present over one dozen recent books rarely, if ever, seen before, many of them mostly produced with the new technology of “on-demand printing” and thus reasonably priced.

Among them are Epiphanies, two vols., 1000 pages, one story to a book page, culminating thirty years of work with resonant single-sentence fictions.

Conceptual Fictions, a long essay with examples about the framing of implicit narratives.

Visual Fictions, collecting pages designed more than a decade ago for my Openings and Complete Stories, along with his Leonardo and Me.

Verbal Fictions, various narratives that are not visually enhanced.

Vocal Shorts, an expanded edition of his texts designed for live performance.

Openings Short Fictions, the initial sentences of otherwise nonexistent stories.

Reflections on Loving and Relationships, his aphorisms continuously on right-hand pages against drawings of men and women made by the prominent choreographer Frances Alenikoff.

A Universe of Sentences, his continuous selection of lines by others worth remembering, the whole representing a universe of experience.

1001 Stories Enumerated, single-sentence fictions meant to be complete in themselves.

Erotic Minimal Fictions, a variety of alternatives.

Fields/Arenas/Pitches/Turfs, which completes the publication of geometric poems begun thirty years ago.

1-99: A Book, another narrative composed only of numerals.

Ghostories, which are fictions created by boldfacing certain letters within a single word.

Homophones: Stories, where narratives are composed from two or more words that sound alike if spelled differently.

To & Fro &, where narratives depend upon turning the book’s pages.

Ops & Clos, where opening and closings, each set with its own typography, are interspersed.

English, Really English, in which he collects English words that seem incredible—over five thousand of them alphabetically in several perfectbound volumes.

What I Didn’t Do, which epitomizes intellectual nonhistory as Kostelanetz’s record of proposals that were never supported.

A Book of Eyes, photocopied and velobound, which explores the richly various ways that the letter I appears in contemporary typography

His presentation may also include such slightly older books as Skeptical Essays (Autonomedia), his latest collection of mostly severe criticism; Three Poems (NY Quarterly), where his experiments with three strains of one-word poetry appear interspersed; and Micro Fictions, a limited-edition hardback with 900 pages of imaginatively designed narratives all three words and less.

All these books should add to acknowledgments of Kostelanetz’s books in critical histories of literature, poetry, fiction, and book art.

Design/History/Revolution Conferenmce
New School, NYC, April 27-28, 2012

CFP: Design/History/Revolution
Deadline: December 7, 2011
Conference: April 27 & 28, 2012, The New School, NYC

Keynote speaker: Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of
Architecture & Design, The Museum of Modern Art

Whether by providing agitprop for revolutionary movements, an
aesthetics of empire, or a language for numerous avant-gardes, design
has changed the world. But how? Why? And under what conditions? We
propose a consideration of design as an historical agent, a contested
category, and a mode of historical analysis.

This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore these questions and
to open up new possibilities for understanding the relationships among
design, history and revolution.

Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy Conference
Sussex, England, December 8-9, 2011

Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies &
The Centre for Material Digital Culture present:

Staging Illusion: Digital and Cultural Fantasy
December 8th and 9th, University of Sussex
Tickets £190 (£85 student)

Keynote speakers: Professor Vanessa Toulmin (Director of the National Fairground archive), Dr Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths) and Professor Sally R Munt (Director of the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies).

Plenary speakers: Dr Astrid Ensslin (Bangor), Dr Melanie Chan (Leeds Met), Professor Nicholas Till (Sussex), and Dr Jo Machon (Brunel).

From magicians and mediums to immersive media, and from the circus to cyborgs, the celebration and/or mistrust of illusion has been a central theme across a range of cultures. Notions of fakery and deception remind us that our identities that are performative. The figure of the ‘mark’ of the fairground scam remains culturally ubiquitous, perhaps more so than ever, in an era of (post) mechanical reproduction. Is new technology a flight from the real or merely a continuation of older cultural forms? Is it necessary, or even possible, to define reality in relation to the illusory? What realms of ‘otherness’ remain to be embraced? This international conference will discuss staged illusions across a spectrum of historical, geographical and cultural contexts, featuring original and exciting papers and performances.