Thom Donovan's blog

Despite my affinity for the term relationality, we may need other language to approach the issue that concerns us, a way of thinking about how we are not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well.
~ Judith Butler

Peace On A

presents

Power & Performance
featuring presentations by David Buuck, Julie Patton, and Chen Tamir

Sunday, June 8th 2008 6PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

David Buuck lives in Oakland, where he organizes BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics. He is a contributing editor for Artweek, and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute.

I had disembarked at the Embarcadero, platforming myself into some semblance of public figuration. The bay area rapidly tranced it, from the resident base camps to the clamor and throng. Up and out into the punctuated street-sprawl, shadowed by the public directives. Heaved out then into the scablands, street-rocks popping against the undercarriage of the survival carts. Billboards tower as trees might shadow that. The turn lanes apropos of the new gold rush. Steetside is saddle leather, limbered for the pickets. 425,258 a day, fro and bending to it.
~ from Electricworks

Julie Patton extends her pulpoethic strategies into collaborative spaces via anyone willing to hand-dance—recent activities include stirring up an ArtScience mecca in Cleveland's inner city, "A Roon for Opal" art installation as part of the Olin Art Museum's (Lewiston, Maine) "Green Horizons" exhibition. "Using Blue to Get Black," an extended argument about the color blue forthcoming in Crayon Magazine. The rest is herstory.

riff off of
"Using Blue to Get Black"
(for my mo' there mudder)

blah blah blew light
be lack beat subject
leadible huge margins
lake back eerie bl accents
reeking scalp blue hung
er un
speak a bruised surf
faces mean blood ism Read more

Movement (or shape in writing) is a knowledge that isn’t one’s thinking per se. One’s thinking by itself is movement that is knowledge.
~ Leslie Scalapino

Peace On A

presents

Rob Halpern & Eleni Stecopoulos

Thursday, June 5th 2008 8PM
BYOB & donation: $5

hosted by Thom Donovan at:

166 Avenue A, Apartment #2
New York, NY 10009

about the readers:

Rob Halpern is the author of Rumored Place and Snow Sensitive Skin (co-authored with Taylor Brady). Two collections of poems, Disaster Suites and Music for Porn, are forthcoming this year, and a little chap called "Imaginary Politics" will be out from TapRoot Editions this month. He's currently co-editing the writings of the late Frances Jaffer together with Kathleen Fraser, and translating the early essays of Georges Perec, the first of which, "For a Realist Literature," can be found in the current issue of Chicago Review. He lives in San Francisco.

from MUSIC FOR PORN

Like yr body’s inner edge I feel things everywhere this pure circum
— schisms surround me but whatever happened in the car my
Social vacancy fills with random abductions stories extending

Lonely from the day’s bleak tone rows a landscape or whatever de
— scending points in space can’t see how we’ve been thrown
Out of the thing’s now blank interior it’s always a gamble trade

Being no event no self-evidence inside the dispersion affects
You boy how yr organs go on finding me here as one who might
Still feel a distance even when living in the other room strung

Out between their cries and the inner heat yr body leaves rim
— ming images lips limits what these circumcisions sing around
Me no more optical effects now pure pictures eyeing this — heaven. Read more

TWO NIGHTS, ON THE HEELS OF MEMORIAL DAY

"The Greenroom"
Tuesday, May 27, 2008 - 6:30 to 9:00 p.m.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 - 6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
The New School, Wollman Hall
65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street)
New York City Admission: $8 each night, free for all students, as well as New School and CCS Bard faculty, staff and alumni with valid ID, and members of the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art

Two evenings of special screenings introduce The Greenroom, a
large-scale exhibition exploring the “documentary turn” in recent
contemporary art practice and its heritage in relation to the history of film, documentary photography, and television. Set to open in Fall 2008 at the The Hessel Museum of Art and Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, The Greenroom, curated by CCS graduate program director Maria Lind, will feature works by more than forty artists and extend beyond the exhibition format to include a long-term research project and related publications. The research project is a collaboration between the CCS, Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College, and the artist and
theoretician Hito Steyerl.

These preview screenings, organized by curatorial assistant and CCS
Bard graduate student Fionn Meade and presented in collaboration with the Vera List Center at The New School, include selected works from artists participating in The Greenroom exhibition. Co-sponsored by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

PROGRAM 1, Tuesday, May 27, 6:30-9:00 p.m.
[for program notes scroll down.]

Yael Bartana, "Mary Koszmary" (2007, 11 minutes)
Rosalind Nashashibi, "Ambassador" (with Lucy Skaer), (2004, 5 minutes)

Matthew Buckingham, "Situation Leading to a Story" (1999, 21 minutes)
Chantal Akerman, "D'Est: Au bord de la fiction" (1993, 110 minutes)

PROGRAM 2, Wednesday, May 28, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
[for program notes scroll down.] Read more

Hi everyone,

Here is a section from a paper I wrote for the Oppen conference at SUNY Bflo the week before last, in relation to the work of Nonsite Collective and the poet George Oppen. Tho the section is already posted to the web I thot I'd post it here to share and for curricula...

Thom

Discussing George Oppen with my friend Kyle Schlesinger recently, and contrasting his work with the collaboration of Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern, *Snow Sensitive Skin*, Kyle reminded me that the situation distinguishing contemporary poets from Oppen is not just a matter of generation and historical embeddedness, but of degree. When I proposed that the poetry of Taylor and Rob was a new kind of lyrical reportage, Kyle imagined the daily routines of the poets searching beyond mainstream newspaper dailies for indymedia sources, bringing to bear on these sources minds shaped by radical habits of thought, attention and action. Read more

YOU ARE INVITED TO A BOOK PARTY

On Monday, May 5th, 2008 at the Medicine Show Theater on 52nd Street, NYC, Factory School requests your presence for a pre-Publication Book Party for Charles Bernstein and Ben Yarmolinsky's Blind Witness: Three American Operas, due out in August.

For more information about this event, please click here:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/blog/#04-23-08

For more information about Blind Witness, and to pre-order a copy, please click here:
http://factoryschool.org/pubs/blindwitness/

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT – PLEASE HELP US CONTINUE OUR WORK

If you are unable to attend Monday's event, we hope you will join us online for an important announcement regarding the future of Factory School and its work in the community. We are planning a significant relaunch of our organization, its purpose and orientation. This change will be visible on our website on Monday, May 5th, when we will unveil a 2.0 upgrade to our site. To this end, we are seeking collaborators, projects, and support for our work.

Since 2000, Factory School has sponsored online galleries, an audio archive of poetry readings, as well as resources for teachers and teachers of writing--all this in addition to our books. Hundreds of thousands of visitors have made use of these materials. Since our books are our only source of income, we are pleading with the community to help us continue our work by purchasing one or more of our books. These purchases will allow us to continue to publish books while continuing to expand our organizational infrastructure.

While we will be making a more significant announcement on Monday, May 5th, here is a preview of what our priorities will be in the coming years:

CULTURAL CAPITAL GENERATING MACHINE

--Free University of New York Press: a new academic press without the university. Read more