T minus < 1 day / We're Reading at Kootenay!

I get final papers for my online class this evening. By 3 am. I am either going to stay up late or get up early and grade them. And then we are going to Vancouver. Mark is giving a reading on Friday and a talk on Sunday, and I'm giving a reading on Sunday. Ye Haw! Eee! Etc.

http://www.kswnet.org/

Friday, May 11, 2007 @ 8 pm

Spartacus Books
319 West Hastings

" If MARK WALLACE did the comedy circuit, all that big hair and those sweet drinks would riot in the streets. Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn't There is a series of one to six line stanzas all revamping the idea of the one-liner. But the joke is always frightening, a world where the 2x4s pounding the cat are hitting our heads and they hurt damn it, as they always make us stop and consider what we are. He is the existential joker: if Batman met the poet and it was for real."
--Juliana Spahr

RACHEL ZOLF writes of her most recent book, Human Resources: "Human Resources makes a vain attempt to answer Anne Carson's question around Paul Celan's poetry: "What is lost when words are wasted and where is the human store to which such goods are gathered in?" The subject of the book, a poet, wastes words writing "plain language" marketing and employee communications for pay, turning into a kind of writing (or rhetoric) machine in the process. As the two worlds of poetry and plain language collide, overlap and merge in the book, we enter a nonsense state of fractured subjectivity, experiencing the psychic cost of selling things with depleted words. Psychoanalytic, general-economic and transmission-theory rhetorics fed into the writing machine are spit out as bungled associations among money, shit, art production and communication. In the end, the new-look body without organs organizing the text is semi-recuperated through ethical confrontations with the multiple voices within and without her, while her book-machine frame crumbles before it can really form."

Sunday, May 13, 2007 @ 2:00 pm

Kootenay School of Writing
309 - 207 West Hastings

A talk by Wallace + a reading by Graham

"I have seen Graham's work compared to that of the late Kathy Acker, she's got something of Acker's sexual frankness, voracious intake, the sense that anything can come into the writing, but even if she isn't, you know, Kathy Acker she's got something that Acker never had. I can't really characterize it right now, but I'm a sucker for Graham's writing and this is the best example of it I can name." - Kevin Killian, on Graham's book Terminal Hunting