We’re gonna read some epic poetry!
Sunday, October 10 at 8pm
Free

Welcome to Epic Poetry… SLAM!

We’re gonna read some epic poetry… out loud! AND THAT IS ALL!

The first rule of Epic Poetry Club:
there will be no discussion, philosophizing, or theorizing of epic poetry!

The second rule of Epic Poetry Club:
there will be no discussion, philosophizing, or theorizing of epic poetry!!!

We will have a stack of EPIC POEMS!

We will have everything you could possibly want!

We will have Heavy Books!

We will have Books with Well Designed Covers!

WE WILL HAVE THE WORKS!!!

Epic Poetry! How does it work???

Someone will pick up some epic poem!

They will read it for five minutes!

Then they will put it down!

Then the next reader will begin!

It will go on as long as it has to!

Booze it up with Milton and Virgil, just like they did in the Ye Olden Days!

It’s Epic Poetry… SLAM!!!

Brian Castro / Andrew Allport / Colin Dickey
Wednesday, May 6, at 8pm
Free

• Shanghai Dancing: naval slang for syphilis.
• Shanghai Dancing: the attainment of disorientation and instability.
• Shanghai Dancing: a fictional autobiography by Australian writer Brian Castro.

“Brian Castro plays with past and present in this complex, teasing, polyrhythmic, carnivalesque dance through phantom Shanghai.” — J.M. Coetzee

Combining photographs and written images, author Brian Castro’s fictional autobiography asks if life’s meaning is to be found in the moment or the memory. Kaya Press is thrilled to bring the work of one of Australia’s most acclaimed literary talents to the United States for the first time.

ALSO!

• Poetry by Andrew Allport!
• Stolen Heads by Colin Dickey!
• “Special Musical Guests”?

Andrew Allport’s chapbook, The Ice Ship & Other Vessels, was published by Proem Press in 2008. His work has also appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Denver Quarterly, and The Antioch Review.

Colin Dickey is the author of the forthcoming Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius, due out this fall from Unbridled Books. His work has appeared in Cabinet, The Santa Monica Review, and TriQuarterly, among other places. He is the co-editor (with Nicole Antebi and Robby Herbst) of Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and Social Practices.

Brian Castro was born in Hong Kong in 1950 of Portuguese, Chinese and English parents, and arrived in Australia in 1961. His novels include Birds of Passage (1983), which shared the Australian/Vogel Literary Award; Double-Wolf (1991), winner of the Age Fiction Prize and the Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction; After China (1992), which also won the Victorian Premier’s Award; and Stepper (1997), for which he received the National Book Council Banjo Award. His books have been translated into German and French. He currently resides in the Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne.

form-body-surface-material-method-growth-sound-mass-condensation
atmospheric-nebulae-clarity-reveals-recreation-currents-groundless-texture
connectivity-dense-manifest-rhythm-decenter-collaborate-surprise-confer-disperse

LA-Lit: Clouds ::
Perform and Celebrate at Betalevel
Friday, November 21, 2008 at 8pm

Come celebrate LA-Lit’s three year anniversary on Friday November 21 at Betalevel and on Saturday November 22 at Center for the Arts Eagle Rock. For over three years, LA-Lit has developed a new space for the literary culture of Los Angeles to develop and exhibit itself. Reflecting the shifting nature of Los Angeles, LA-Lit has conducted well over thirty interviews with poets and writers who have lived in LA all their lives as well as writers who have visited LA for only a few days. Please join us for LA-Lit: Clouds :: a two day conference in Los Angeles connecting the decentered literary culture of LA in an effort to investigate it’s current manifestations and to develop a sense of LA’s inherent literary spontaneity.

with performances by:
Stan Apps, Teresa Carmody, Amarnath Ravva, Lisa Samuels, Christine Wertheim

for further information about LA-Lit: Clouds :: please visit LA-Lit.com

A New Poetry Reading
Wednesday, November 5 at 7:30pm

New poets in the Ph.D. in Literature & Creative Writing Program at USC, Stuart Grace, Brandon Som, and Elizabeth Wilcox, will be joined by Andrew Allport, author of THE ICE SHIP & OTHER VESSELS, in an all USC evening. Mark Irwin will introduce.

La Medusa
Book Party Party
Saturday, September 13 at 7:30pm

Join US for An evening of food & drink, riddled with entertainment. Dancing to follow. De-light to ensue.
feaTuring aMazing *bRief* perFormances by many of the folloWing:

JANET SARBANES flame-eating la difference!

JUDITH FREEMAN whistling Mother!

JOHANNA BLAKELY washing her dotter in soda water!

CHRISTINE WERTHEIM finding the petit objet “a”!

TERESA CARMODY unicycling transubjectivity!

SISSY BOYD autoharping autodictat!

ANNA JOY SPRINGER joiassance on a stick!

BRIGHDE MULLINS daring the adorable detail !

STEPHANIE TAYLOR oh-de-lady-oh!

VANESSA PLACE rendez-vous des cheminots?

Reading
with Michelle Detorie, K. Lorraine Graham, Amanda Ackerman, Vanessa Place, and Carribean Fragoza
Saturday, August 2
Doors open at 7pm; Reading at 7:30pm
Free

~

Ice Age art

Something beautiful …

Archaeologists at the University of Tübingen have recovered the first entirely intact woolly mammoth figurine from the Swabian Jura, a plateau in the state of Baden-Württemberg, thought to have been made by the first modern humans some 35,000 years ago. “You can be sure,” Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas J. Conard told SPIEGEL ONLINE, “that there has been art in Swabia for over 35,000 years.”

The figure of the woolly mammoth is tiny, measuring just 3.7 cm long and weighing a mere 7.5 grams, and displays skillfully detailed carvings. It is unique in its slim form, pointed tail, powerful legs and dynamically arched trunk. It is decorated with six short incisions, and the soles of the pachyderm’s feet show a crosshatch pattern. …

~

Michelle Detorie grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. She currently lives in Goleta, California where she edits WOMB, an online magazine for poetries by women, and Hex Presse. She is also a contributing editor for Little Red Leaves and Narrative Magazine. Michelle is a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts literary fellow. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in How2, Chelsea, Bird Dog, Blackbird, Verse Daily, The Notre Dame Review, Typo, Dusie, POOL, Pindeldyboz, DIAGRAM, La Petite Zine, Cranky, Caketrain, The Tiny, The Potomac Review, FOURSQUARE, Confrontation, The Southern Poetry Review, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel(2007), Poetry East, Letters to the World, and The Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets. (http://mdetorie.blogspot.com/)

K. Lorraine Graham is a writer and visual artist. She is the author of Terminal Humming, forthcoming from Edge Books in 2009. She is also the author of several chapbooks: including Large Waves to Large Obstacles, forthcoming from Take Home Project. Ron Her poetry, critical writing, and visual art has appeared or is forthcoming in Traffic, Jacket, Area Sneaks, Fold, Magazine Cypress, HOW2 and elsewhere. A limited-edition CD of her work called Moving Walkways is available Narrowhouse Recordings. Lorraine has taught poetry and memoir at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, DC and at California State University in San Marcos. She lives in southern California with her partner Mark Wallace and Lester Young, a pacific parrotlet. (http://terminalhumming.blogspot.com/)

Amanda Ackerman lives in Los Angeles where she writes and teaches. She is co-editor of the press eohippus labs. She is a member of UNFO (The Unauthorized Narrative Freedom Organization) and writes as part of Sam or Samantha Yams. She is also a member of the event space Betalevel. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in flim forum; String of Small Machines; The Physical Poets; WOMB; and the Encyclopedia Project, Volume F-K. With Harold Abramowitz, she is also co-author of the book Sin is to Celebration, soon to be published by House Press in the fall. (www.eohippuslabs.com)

Vanessa Place is a writer and lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is the author of /Dies: A Sentence/, a 50,000-word, one-sentence novella, the post-conceptual novel /La Medusa/ (Fiction Collective 2), a chapbook, /Figure from The Gates of Paradise /(Woodland Editions/Five Fingers Review) and the forthcoming
/Conceptualisms: An Ill-Conceived Guide to Kinda Conceptual, Post-Conceptual, Extant and Taxonomical Writings, etc.,/ written with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Presse). Her nonfiction book, /The Guilt Project: Rape and Morality/, will be published in Fall 2009 by Other Press. Her collaboration with artist/performer Lamya Regragui will debut at Cent Quatre in Paris/Los Angeles in 2009, and she is collaborating with conceptual artist Stephanie Taylor on “Olady,” a visual/sound project. She lives in Los Angeles.
(http://www.lesfiguespress.com
http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2008/07/vanessa-place-round-one_10.html)

Handsome Fish Offices
Book Release Party for Ara Shirinyan
Saturday, July 19 at 8pm

Handsome Fish Offices Book Release Party for Ara Shirinyan with readings from the text and other performances.

“While office supply products and tropical fish might at first thought seem to have nothing to do with one another, once side by side they reveal the interconnections between global acquisitions, multinational capital, and environmental destruction” -Juliana Spahr.

One Break, A Thousand Blows!
Book Release Party for Maxi Kim
Friday, July 18 at 8pm

One Break, A Thousand Blows! Book Release Party for Maxi Kim with performances by Christine Wertheim, Gina Clark, Daiana Feuer, and Gerard Olson.

One Break, A Thousand Blows! is a novel about Japan. The protagonist is a metaphor, wanting to negate Japan, but not by writing a novel about Japan, but by writing falsely about it, using Japan as a screen for the author’s innermost hopes and desires. One Break, A Thousand Blows! aims to express the claim that there is no gap between sexuality and textuality; it aims to be anti-metaphorical, to escape the logic of modernism and postmodernism and express a pre-modernist, post-human morphogenetic aesthetics in all its wild sacred expressivity.

Maxi Kim is the grandson of illiterate Korean peasant farmers. He is a recent graduate of CalArts MFA Writing Program, currently researching a Phd at the University of Greenwich. He has worked with performance artists Gina Clark & Janice Lee, editorially with Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim, and organised events with Chris Kraus and Mark von Schlegell. This is his first novel.

LA-Lit interviews Kristin Palm
Sunday, June 1 at 3pm

The LA-Lit podcast (and this event) lasts a little over an hour and will be about 30 minutes of reading and about 30 minutes of questions / answers / and further questions.

Because we will be recording, please try to arrive on time or very quietly.

For more information, see: LA-Lit.com

Kristin Palm’s writing has appeared in LVNG, Bird Dog, Boog City, Chain, There, Dusie and the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), as well as numerous magazines and newspapers, including Metropolis, Planning and the Detroit Metro Times. Her book The Straits (two long poems about Detroit, her former hometown) was published this year by the serendipitously named Palm Press. Kristin currently resides in San Francisco, California.

Reading
(a Reading)
with Susan Gevirtz and Steve Dickison
Saturday, May 10 at 7:30pm
Free

I have been able to catch up on some reading lately. Finished __________ by __________–I really like it but __________ does get a bit technical in talking about the brain and how it functions in the role of the emotion life. Have had the Winter 2007 issue of __________ sitting around to finish–title is “__________.” It is about the rise, of __________–one article talks about “monastic groupies,” people who connected themselves to a monastery, practiced some of the disciplines but lived outside in the world. I have tended to go to different monasteries, three I think at this point but was a regular at a retreat center for about a year.

Also Just finished reading __________ on “__________.” They have excellent material in that __________, maybe I need to re-subscribe? Of course, I have had this one lying around for 6 months and only now finished it. One article talked about the problem of __________ and how so many __________.

I am moving slowly through __________ but hope I can sustain my concentration enough to finish it this time–likely will take a few months. Re-reading __________ and the book that __________ says had a significant impact on him (in the __________ I just finished). I should finish __________ by the __________ of my recently completed _________–hmmm, if I am saying should, that is not a good sign. Also have a couple of chapters to finish in __________–that is one that started out very promising but couldn’t sustain itself and so I put it aside–maybe having two __________ to finish had something to do with it. What is next? A couple on my desk that I am looking at longingly—__________ by__________, __________ by __________and __________by __________. I do want to head back and finish __________ that I started last summer.