Bøger udgivet af Punctum Books

Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle moves across the landscape of European performance in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, recounting performance in circulation across national borders and across the itinerant bodies of spectators who travel to meet performances that travel. Itinerant Spectator/Itinerant Spectacle suggests spectating is a practice - an act of interpretation engaged in more than simply receiving the affects of a performance, a companion practice to the making of performance. The work forms a part of Skantze's ongoing explorations of what she terms the 'epistemology of practice as research.'IS/IS theorizes spectating as a practice that extends beyond the theatre, as a practice of writing as recollecting (and recollecting as writing) at the center of what has been called "criticism." The book grounds spectatorship in the subjective, embodied, differenced practice of spectating not from a fixed location or standpoint but from a ground that constantly shifts, that is, from the ground of the roving positionalities of the "itinerate spectator." Following Walter Benjamin, for example, Skantze importantly adopts the privileges of the flaneur as a feminist and rather queer project, one that refuses to be tied to the minor position, to that of the impossible "flaneuse."The methodology of the book takes inspiration from the writings of W.G. Sebald and his employment of something Skantze describes as "a staging of memory," a way to offer the reader an example of how memory works in the midst of a description of a particular recollection. This construction invites the reader/participant to 'discover, ' to 'remember' alongside the writer. Further, this methodology invites the reader to incorporate her/his own ideas and memories of the practice of spectating through an openness in the language of remembering and description.Individual sections of the book demonstrate spectating as itinerant 'on the job training' in various modes of reception. Topics include: the idea of reparation in performance about nations, the past and injustice; the power of sound and the intricacies of seeing/hearing performance in many languages; the architectural information absorbed by the spectator and its role in fashioning story; the shifts made in spectating at festivals between theatre and dance; and the political consequences and traps of mobility and immobility.

The devotional, unrelenting, deviant Crush is a linguistic feast: the word is everything in Stockton's and Gilson's world, except when it isn't, except when it's time we "shoved // our jeans down and stepped / into the world." This is a sensual - perhaps a better word is bodily - collection, the scent of shit and frowsy hats and bleach and the boy who "always smelled / like cat litter" adding some much-needed filth to poetic longing - for what is longing, frankly, without the cleanup after? There are texts and subtexts and Facebook-stalks; there are at times startlingly tender moments, as in the poems about a brother's suicide and an uncle's AIDS-related decline. "I'm thinking of what any of us / can tolerate," the poets write in "Fall, Then Falling." I feel as if I need a shower after reading Crush; I can think of no higher praise. Randall Mann, author of Breakfast With Thom Gunn and Straight RazorThe louche candor of Crush, like Calamus before it, makes a ravishing case for poetry as queer theory. Smitingly smart, smartingly sexy, frank as nerve endings, and swoony as the first warm nights of Spring: these poems are as vividly compelling an account of erotic multiplicity as any I know. Michael Snediker, author of The Apartment of Tragic AppliancesIn Crush, a stunning collection of erotic poems and queer meditations delineating Stockton' and Gilson's mutual crushing on each other, but also all of the ways in which, sweetly and also sadly, affection ameliorates the anguishes that, despite our deepest devotions, are never constant, Stockton and Gilson write, In Aranye Fradenburg's words, Shakespeare's sonnets describe "the love you feel for inappropriate objects: for someone thirty years older, thirty years younger. The kind of love that makes a fool, a pervert, a stalker out of you." Let's start here, for much of this description applies to Petrarchan conventions as well. Let's start here, with this affective entrance into the poems and the impossibility of dispossessing the other's voice in the manufacture of one's own machine. Let's start here, with a vision of poems as indexes of crushes rendered inappropriate, unhealthy by some gradation of difference and level of intensity. With the question of what distinguishes a crush from love if both turn you into a different self.Under oak trees and sunlight, in coffee shops and locker rooms, steam rooms and seminar rooms, and in conversation with Milton, Shakespeare, Frank O'Hara, Narcissus, Allen Ginsberg, Jacques Derrida, Aranye Fradenburg, Mary Magdalene, Freud, Oscar Wilde, José Esteban Muñoz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elton John, and Prince, among other poets, harlots, saints, and scholars, Stockton and Gilson explore the ways in which friendship, desire, falling, swerving, possession, holding, faggoting, falling, longing, poeming, and crushing open the self to queerly utopic, if also difficult, deflections - other, more improbable modes of being, as Foucault might have said.

The texts which comprise this small book - forms of essay, talk, dialogue - at one time saw themselves as individualists who went somewhere (to small press magazines) on their own. Now they are here, collected with the chance of going nowhere together. As it should be: since they represent the fate of language and translation in the memory of aliens living inside America - like a family going nowhere together, but at home.The philosopher Jacques Derrida and his family are part of this family in the dead letter office, and curiously they are named going nowhere together at home. Along the way, so are the poets Charles Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams and Emmanuel Hocquard and Juliette Valery and Charles Olson, as well as Horace's Odes in translation.You will find in this Memoir what it means for an alien to search for his family in a book outside the time of its writing. You will find him discovering that translation is a personal story and that poetry might not have a home without it. You will find him wondering: whose voices are these which we hear around us as we write, as Babel turns to rumor through the fact of translation, wherein a book is being made and remade from American to French and back again? You will find him through translation like a Being in the Poetry of the Extraterritorial, an un-owned territory which is neither French nor American but is negotiated by the rumor of a poetry which emerges from both, a future condition (État) which seeks the name it could be but is not.Follow this alien Being's trajectory: he is not of America but grows up in it. He publishes a book in French translation before it appears in the American English original. He becomes native to a writing whose eloquence is always in question, at times because it is passive, at other times because it is unpronounceable.Who, over time, finds his Memoir?In the dead letter office, we do. We find someone somewhat like ourselves, who uses language and translation as if these were a poet's gifts in the making of history, a history which is foreign yet integral to his homeland. We find someone who uses it to return to his own people and place, so that he can "only stand more/revealed." We find someone who will act the new basis for his identity - the consciousness whose coming into Being must be premised on his existence in another world.

Artificial Earth: A Genealogy of Planetary Technicity offers an intellectual history of humanity as a geological force, focusing on a prevalent contradiction in the Anthropocene discourse on global environmental change: on the one hand, it has been argued that there are hardly any pristine environments anymore, to the degree that the concept of nature has lost its meaning; while on the other, that anthropogenic environmental change has become so prevailing that it ought to be conceived of as a force of nature, in the literal sense of the expression. Artificial Earth argues that to fully grasp the stakes of this discourse, we need not only understand the contemporary scientific and technological transformations behind the Anthropocene, but also explore the history of an ontological concern tied up with it.In order to do so, Artificial Earth examines reflections on the ontological dualism between nature and artifice within the history of earth science from the late eighteenth century onwards. Paying particular attention to its consequences for how human subjectivity has been conceptualized in the Anthropocene, it then enrolls these resources in an effort to problematize attempts since the 1980s to formalize earth science in systems theoretical terminology. In sum, the aim is to investigate the historical conditions for the possibility of conceiving human artifice as an integral part of the earth's terrestrial environment, with the conviction that such an investigation may assist in resolving the aforementioned contradiction or at least to understand it better by tracing its historical lineage. J. Daniel Andersson is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department for Thematic Studies, Linköping University. His research interests lie at the intersection between the technical cultures, political imaginaries, and historical processes that have shaped the ways in which the global environment has been understood and valued. A general fascination with how concepts and discursive vocabularies become solidified in scientific modes of organization has consistently informed his theoretical and methodological approaches. He has previously written about, for instance, the relationship between future-orientation and valuation in integrated assessment models, climate engineering as a sociotechnical imaginary, and the intellectual history of risk management in global change science. His writing has appeared in journals such as Environment & Planning, Anthropocenes, and Cosmos & History.

In Sappho, Jonathan Goldberg takes as his model the fragmentary state in which this sublime poet's writing survives, a set of compositional and theoretical resources for living and thinking in more fully erotic ways in the present and the future. This book thus offers fragmentary commentary on disparate (Sapphic) works, such as the comics of Alison Bechdel, the paintings and cartoons of Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Reid-Pharr's "Living as a Lesbian," Madeleine de Scudéry's Histoire de Sapho, John Donne's "Sapho to Philaenis," Todd Haynes and Patricia Highsmith's Carol, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, writings by Willa Cather, and the paintings and writings of Simeon Solomon, among other works. Goldberg challenges readers to imagine and experience what Sarah Orne Jewett named the "country of our friendship," a love both exceedingly strange and compellingly familiar.Just as Sappho's coinage "bitter-sweet" describes eros as inextricably contradictory - two things at once, one thing after another, each interrupting, complicating, each other - the juxtapositions in this book mean to continually call into question categories of identity and identification in the wake of a quintessential woman writer from Lesbos. Over and over again, Goldberg's Sappho: ]fragments inquires into how race, sexuality, and gender cross each other. The theoretical genius of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick presides over this set of meditations and mediations on likeness and desire. Rather than homogenizing its many subjects, it invites the reader to explore and inhabit new transits within and through what Audre Lorde called "the very house of difference."With an Afterword, "After-Party: Sappho Meets Freud," written by L.O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy.

"A.W. Strouse's entrancing epigrams combine tough-minded bawdiness and neoclassical beauty. In his deft hands, acute sociological analysis arrives via subway voyeurism. Take this fearless book on your next ride. Notice how Strouse's lines and Patty Barth's lucid drawings sharpen your yearnings and make them newly available for blame-free inspection." Wayne Koestenbaum"Literarily incorrect." John Waters, on why he didn't want to review this book.Cruising the New York City subway, the Transfer Queen is on the prowl! These voyeuristic figure drawings-both poetic and visual-sketch the men of Gotham's transportation system. A.W. Strouse and Patty Barth spy on strangers with a special kind of anonymous intimacy. Transfer Queen is ideal reading material for kinky commuters. But remember: "A crowded subway car is no excuse for unlawful sexual conduct!"

TROUBLE SONGS: A Musicological Poetics is a hybrid serial work that tracks the appearance of the word "trouble" in 20th- and 21st-century American music. It reads (and sings) songs and poems, with reference to cultural events ranging from the death of a pop singer to the growth of popular resistance movements. The trouble singer invokes the word "trouble" in place of actual trouble-the song is a spell that conjures trouble (from bad luck and disaffection to infidelity, impotence, destitution, and the specter of death) in a temporary form that can be dis-spelled, if only for the length of the song. Singer and song also open a critical space for making trouble, for stirring the heart and mind. This space is a disjunction in time (and a superimposition of events) where singer and listener collaborate on meaning (un/)making as they temporarily transform trouble.TROUBLE SONGS enacts its poetics with the use of footnote and body text as modular, contiguous, and porous fields of writing and imagination, a corollary for overlapping singer/listener roles. In effect, the footnotes sing along with (and trouble) each chapter, providing chorus and counterpoint to these Trouble Songs, as the compositional horizon between body and notes rises and falls. These cultural investigations suggest that the way we sing about trouble, and the way we receive those songs and cultural transmissions, says much about what preoccupies us spiritually and intellectually-what moves us and disturbs us, brings us together even as we keep some things to ourselves.

In recent accounts of rhetoric's storied productivity, commentators have implied, along systematically Kantian lines, albeit with the occasional protestation, that agency must be coextensive with subjectivity. But is that all there is (to 2,500 years' worth of hypothesizing about the ways in which communication might promote social change)? Les Belikian's answer, drawing not only on traditional and contemporary rhetorical studies but also on Deleuzean thinking, actor-network theory, and object-oriented ontology, takes the form of a quadruply contrarian thesis: Rhetorical agency inheres, irreducibly so, in subjectivity, in conventionality, in transcendence, and in materiality, all of which are themselves under production.TABLE OF CONTENTS //Chapter 1: Productivity as a Context for Theorizing Rhetorical Transaction - A Miscellaneously Self-Effacing Rhetorical Agency? - Rhetoricity Bound, Unbounded, and Both - Variegation (Not Conglomeration) - Chapter 2: A Four-Folded Rhetorical Agency - Tetradic Due Diligence - Disaggregating a Constitution - A Willfully Productive Rhetorical Agency - Assemblage-Theoretical Resources - Triangulation - An Investigative Itinerary - Chapter 3: Subjectivity in the Social-Structural Landscape - Co-Constructing Constraint - Can the Speaker Speak? - An Ineffectual Agency - Subtracting from Rhetorical Practice - What Else Is Wrong with This Paradigm? - A Chimerical Agency for a Colossal Agent - Chapter 4: Conventionality in the Rhetorical-Humanistic Landscape - De-Leviathanizing the Normative - From Normativity to Shared Values - A Tribe of Equals - Keeping Shared Values between the Ceiling and the Seat - Staying the Same by Doing Something Differently - Maximizing Assent by Minimizing Recalcitrance - Still Missing So Far - Chapter 5: Transcendence in the Existential-Transversal Landscape - Existence, Transcendence, and Transversality - Philosophizing for the Living by Getting Rid of Their Materiality - The Two Styles of Transcendence - The Fideistic Appeal - Correcting Forgetfulness through a Material Phenomenology - Rhetorical Agency and the Existential Self - On Pivoting, Transcendence, and Emergence - The Rhetorical Agent and the Original Body - A Re-Corporealized Transversality - Chapter 6: Materiality in the Material-Semiotic Landscape - A Parable of Materiality-and-Relationality - Assemblaging, Stratification, and Circulating Reference - Entering at Biblical Precept - Crossing over to Race - From Race to Gender - Rescaling the Envoy - And A'n't We a Meshwork? - Chapter 7: Agency in the Rhetorical-Theoretical World - No More Homogenization Now! - On Keeping Difference Different - A Fluctuating Rhetorical Agent

Reflecting upon his experience making his 2010 feature film Mothers, a cinematic triptych interweaving three narratives that are each, in their own way, about the often tenuous lines between truth and fiction, and one of which actually morphs into a documentary about the aftermath in a small Macedonian town where three retired cleaning women were found raped and killed in 2008 and the murderer turned out to be the journalist covering the story for a major Macedonian newspaper, the Oscar-nominated Macedonian-born and New York-based writer-director Milcho Manchevski writes that, "Most of us look at films differently or accept stories in a different way if we believe that they are true. We watch a documentary film in a different way from the way we watch a drama. We read a magazine article in a different way from the way in which we read a short story. Sometimes, we even treat a film that employs actors differently than a regular drama because we were told that it is based on something that really happened. We treat these works based on truth or reporting on the truth in different ways. Why? What is it in our relation to reality or in our relation to what we perceive to be reality that makes us value a work of artifice (an art piece) differently depending on our knowledge or conviction of whether that work of artifice is based on events that really took place?"In this extended essay, or letter, Manchevski ruminates the different ways in which both filmmakers and audiences create, experience, and absorb the cinematic narrative with a certain trust and faith in the artwork to render, not the factual truth, per se, but the importantly shared experience of trusting "the plane of reality created by the work itself," such that "we trust its inner logic and integrity, we have faith in what happens while we give ourselves to this work of art." Truth becomes a question of what artist and audience can see and feel together: what feels real becomes the world we inhabit.The book also includes an Afterword, "Truth Approaches, Reality Affects," by internationally renowned film scholar Adrian Martin.

Carbon dioxide. This small book aims to open a door. It is an experiment in thinking about an object made extremely familiar to many people across the world in recent years through science, the news, governments, and public discourses. One of the first names given to carbon dioxide was spiritus silvestre or wild spirit, a moniker that has fallen out of favor. This experiment is a chance to hold what we think we know about this object in our hand and ponder our own knowledge for a while by looking at it in one particular historical context long after more modern names became familiar.Music. The reader is asked to create a space of visualization where the potential for new understandings arise when seemingly unrelated things and practices are taken seriously next to one another and where previous conceptions of wildness may have continued to emit sound even after formal names changed. In the 20th century, Charles Keeling was one of the major scientists interested in the wild spirit - he was also a musician.Illumination. Denzil Ford highlights relationships between the musician and the scientist and further considers conceptualizing an object of scientific inquiry through the framework of a piece of music. Her narrative approach does not spell out every point but uses text and image together; this is a work of experimental thought written in experimental form. She joins other scholars looking at the multiple meanings of carbon dioxide across time and space, and her historical and philosophical approach allows the reader a moment to remember some of the social layers of scientific research that have led to our understanding of climate change, one of the greatest environmental problems of the 21st century.

Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-matter tells the story of small matter such as bacteria, coral, fungi, lichen, pollen, protozoa, and viruses. With short entries that are organized like a herbarium or similar specimen collection, the book is a "microbium"-both the term for a single microbe and a play on "microbiome."As such, Microbium makes visible the often overseen but huge impact of miniscule matter on human culture and the environment. Each entry is a "microscopic reading" that describes the natural history and scientific discovery of a particular form of micro-matter, while also telling a story about the cultural and artistic roles it has played over the centuries. From the poetry of Emily Dickinson to the "coralness" of coral reefs to contemporary literature about the COVID-19 pandemic, this book places micro-matter under a cultural microscope and translates the significance of the invisible interspecies social realm to the human scale, magnifying the many ways in which micro-matter matters. Ultimately, Microbium shows the potential of micro-matter to teach us how to revitalize our political and cultural systems, habits of thought, and aesthetic or representational modes.

This dead letter presents a rendition and exploration of the immanent materialism of Deleuze & Guattari as theorised in 1000 Plateaus and as a means to analysing everyday life. The evidence that will be presented to back up and expand upon such an analysis consists of art, film and objects from life that relate to and suggest the complex ways in which we are affected by traffic jams. A picture of a reciprocating substrata of everyday life is presented that includes and builds upon the unconscious, and shows how the abstract turbulence of everyday life forms eddies and flows that may be followed and understood. The immanent materialism of Deleuze & Guattari is a philosophical construction that leads to the formation of 'plateaus' as they were executed in A Thousand Plateaus. The plateau of this dead letter is [21 October 2011: the Petro-Citizen]. The writing contained here populates this plateau with traffic jams, car crashes, global environmental concerns and the psychological and sociological contingencies that accompany the petro-citizen. Connections between the strata that make up the plateau of the petro-citizen will deliberately be left as open-ended and speculative to show how the petro-citizen functions as a flagrant construct in everyday life, and such a postulation and designation includes the desire for petrol and explains the resulting panpsychic petro-political landscape. The double-articulation of the plateau will be explored in this letter through the ways in which the petro-citizen and petro-politics create reciprocating realms of motivation and drive that tend towards contemporary double-articulation, paradox and contradiction with respect to the usages of oil. In this letter, the double-articulation results in a multiple chequered flag or illusionary global end game that designates the current human relationships with oil.

In June and July 2014, philologist Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and photographer Marco Mazzi undertook the Albanian Lapidar Survey, a project to map, document, and photograph the large majority of Albanian lapidars, a particular type of monument, mainly produced in the period that the communist Labor Party of Albania ruled the country (1945-1990) to commemorate the partisan victims, battles, and military units from the National Anti-Fascist Liberation War (which coincided with World War II), as well as historical figures from before the liberation and the accomplishments of socialism in Albania afterward.These lapidars, which can still be found, albeit in ever decreasing numbers, all over the country --- in cities and villages, alongside roads, in forests and on mountain passes --- are witness to an enormous expenditure of labor and resources to turn the landscape into a site of what was called "monumental propaganda." The Albanian Lapidar Survey aimed to capture these monuments as fact.The results of this project are collected into a three-volume, dual-language (English and Albanian) catalogue, under the title Lapidari. The first volume comprises a series of critical reflections on Albanian monumentality of the period 1945-1990 from a variety of perspectives, as well as historical documents and a full indexation of all inscriptions found on the documented monuments. Volumes 2 and 3 feature the photographic documentation of all 649 recorded monumental sites by photographer Marco Mazzi.Table of ContentsVolume 1: TEXTS: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei // Introduction -- People's Republic of Albania, Ministry of Education, Directorate of Culture // Circular to the Prefectural Executive Committee (Section Education): Regarding Lapidars (1946) -- Ramiz Alia // Report on the State and Measures for the Development and Further Revolutionizing of Monumental Propaganda (1968) -- Kujtim Buza & Kleanth Dedi // Dignified Symbols for Historical Events (1971) -- Muharrem Xhafa // Natural and Cultural Monuments during the Years of Socialism -- Gëzim Qëndro // The Thanatology of Hope -- Raino Isto // "We Raise Our Eyes and Feel as if She Rules the Sky" The Mother Albania Monument and the Visualization of National History -- Kosta Giakoumis & Christopher Lockwood // Pilgrimage Centered at Text and Memory: The Lapidar in Qukës-Pishkash -- Matthias Bickert // Lapidars and Socialist Monuments as Elements of Albania's Historic Cultural Landscapes -- Julian Bejko // About the Film Lapidari -- Ardian Vehbiu // Texts Chiseled on the Calendar: A Semiotic Reading of Inscriptions on the Commemorative Monuments for the Period of the National Liberation War -- Monument Descriptions: Index of Names, Index of Places, Index of DatesVolumes 2-3 feature the photographic documentation of all 649 recorded monumental sites by photographer Marco Mazzi.

Superhero meaning making is a site of struggle. Superheroes (are thought to) trouble borders and normative ways of seeing and being in the world. Superhero narratives (are thought to) represent, and thereby inspire, alternative visions of the real world. The superhero genre is (thought to be) a repository for radical or progressive ideas. In the superhero world and beyond, much is made of the genre's utopian and dystopian landscapes, queer identity-play, and transforming bodies, but might it not be the case that the genre's overblown normative framing, or representation, serves to muzzle, rather than express, its protagonists' radical promise? Why, when set against otherwise unbounded, and often extreme, transformation-human to machine, human to animal, human to god-are certain categories seemingly untouchable? Why does this speculative genre routinely fail to fully speculate about other worlds and ways of being in those worlds? For all their nonconformity, superhero stories do not live up to the idea of a radical genre, in look, feel, or tone. The mainstream American superhero genre, and its surrounding discourses, tells and facilitates an astonishingly seamless tale of opposing ideologies. But how?Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes: Un/Making Worlds serves a speculative response, detailing not so much a hunt for genre meaning as a trip through a genre's meaningscape. Looking anew at superhero meaning-making practices allows a distinct way of thinking about and describing the creative, formal, and ideological conditions of the genre and its protagonists, one removed from corralling binaries, one foregrounding the idea of a synergy-often unseen, uneasy, and even hostile-between official and unofficial agents of superhero meaning and one reframing familiar questions: What kinds of meaning do superhero texts engender? How is this meaning made? By whom and under what conditions? What processes and practices inform, regulate, and extend superhero meaning? And finally, superhero narratives present a new question: How might we reimagine its agents, surfaces, and spaces? Centering the experiences and practices of excluded and marginalized superhero fans, Recovering the Radical Promise of Superheroes reveals that genre meaning is not lodged in one place or another, neither in its official creators or fans, nor in "black and white" conservatism or in a "rainbow" of progressive possibilities. Nor is it even located somewhere in the in-between; it is instead better conceived of as an antagonistic, in-process nexus of meaning undergirded by systems of power.Ellen Kirkpatrick, based in northern Ireland, is an activist-writer with a PhD in Cultural Studies. In her work, she writes about activism, pop culture, fan cultures, and the transformative power of storytelling. She has published work in a range of academic journals and media outlets and her writings and work can be found at The Break and on Twitter @elk_dash.

"While Ostranenie takes its title from an obscure Russian term for feelings of defamiliarization, and while its form foregrounds the cerebral, footnotes pushing poetic text off the page, and while its author is shamelessly intellectual, dropping, for instance, "Verfremdungseffekt" in the book's first fifty words, and while we might thus expect coolness, austerity, or flippancy from such a set of particulars, quite the opposite is true: this is a deeply moving book about the experience of grief, about how our books do and don't prepare us for it, about how our closest human connections are both alienating and familiar, how grief takes us out of ourselves and returns us to ourselves. Bowker comes through the books and thinkers and languages to a very human place, as if to say, why shouldn't thinking also make us human? And, why is this a surprise? Required reading for grad. school people from working class roots." Ted Pelton, Starcherone BooksOstranenie, the term for defamiliarization introduced by Russian writer and critic Victor Shklovsky, means, among other things, to see in strangeness. To see in strangeness is to participate in an illusion that is more real than real. It may be achieved by (re)presenting the surface as the substance, the play as the thing, or by examining (from exigere: to drive out) what is present before one's eyes. Ultimately, ostranenie means confessing one's complicity in making known what is known.M.H. Bowker's Ostranenie: On Shame and Knowing is a meditation upon the moment of a mother's death: a moment of defamiliarization in several senses. The body of the work consists of footnotes which elaborate, by exegesis, by parataxis, and sometimes by surprise, the intimate and often hidden relationships between parent and child, illusion and knowledge, shame and loss. These elaborations raise questions about the power of the familiar, the limitations of discursive thought, and the paradoxical nature of the interpersonal, political, and spiritual bargains we make for the sake of security and freedom.Ostranenie treats the personal relationship between the author and his mother in both direct and oblique ways. In a candidly unsettled examination of this relationship and its influence upon the reflections and concerns of the author, the reader is invited to experience a family, a disintegration, a psyche, and its defamiliarization, from the perspectives of both an adult and a child.

John Gardner's career was permanently changed by his publication of On Moral Fiction (1978), a controversial and derided assessment of the state of literature as Gardner saw it. By arguing for a return to greater seriousness and moral commitments in literature, Gardner found himself attacked on all sides by critics and writers who found his conservatism suspicious or simply irrelevant.In this short tribute to Gardner's late intellectual concerns, Phil Jourdan looks at some of the difficulties in On Moral Fiction, and asks whether Gardner was rigorous enough in his deployment of various philosophical concepts through his book. Convinced that, despite any problems of argumentative method or intellectual honesty, On Moral Fiction's basic message should not be dismissed outright, Jourdan tries to determine what is superfluous to the book, so that we may focus on its core: a call for writers not to forget their moral influence on readers.Now that Gardner's career is half-forgotten, it is worth remembering this impassioned and public debate on the role of literature has been around far longer than we care to pretend: throughout the centuries, as literature attempts to define itself over and over, the question of morality is always lurking in the background. In John Gardner: A Tiny Eulogy, Phil Jourdan tries to separate the man from the argument, and insists that the latter should not be dismissed because of the imperfection of the former.

The recent 10,000 year history of climatic stability on Earth that enabled the rise of agriculture and domestication, the growth of cities, numerous technological revolutions, and the emergence of modernity is now over. We accept that in the latest phase of this era, modernity is unmaking the stability that enabled its emergence. But we are deeply worried that current responses to this challeng are focused on market-driven solutions and thus have the potential to further endanger our collective commons. Today public debate is polarized. On one hand we are confronted with the immobilizing effects of knowing "the facts" about climate change. On the other we see a powerful will to ignorance and the effects of a pernicious collaboration between climate change skeptics and industry stakeholders. Clearly, to us, the current crisis calls for new ways of thinking and producing knowledge. Our collective inclination has been to go on in an experimental and exploratory mode, in which we refuse to foreclose on options or jump too quickly to "solutions."In this spirit we feel the need to acknowledge the tragedy of anthropogenic climate change. It is important to tap into the emotional richness of grief about extinction and loss without getting stuck on the "blame game." Our research must allow for the expression of grief and mourning for what has been and is daily being lost. But it is important to adopt a reparative rather than a purely critical stance toward knowing. Might it be possible to welcome the pain of "knowing" if it led to different ways of working with non-human others, recognizing a confluence of desire across the human/non-human divide and the vital rhythms that animate the world?We think that we can work against singular and global representations of "the problem" in the face of which any small, multiple, place-based action is rendered hopeless. We can choose to read for difference rather than dominance; think connectivity rather than hyper-separation; look for multiplicity - multiple climate changes, multiple ways of living with earth others. We can find ways forward in what is already being done in the here and now; attend to the performative effects of any analysis; tell stories in a hopeful and open way - allowing for the possibility that life is dormant rather than dead. We can use our critical capacities to recover our rich traditions of counter-culture and theorize them outside the mainstream/alternative binary. All these ways of thinking and researching give rise to new strategies for going forward.TABLE OF CONTENTSPart I. Thinking with Others // The Ecological Humanities (Deborah Bird Rose) -- Economy as Ecological Livelihood (J.K. Gibson-Graham and Ethan Miller) -- Lives in Connection (Jessica K. Weir) -- Conviviality as an Ethic of Care in the City (Ruth Fincher and Kurt Iveson) -- Risking Attachment in the Anthropocene (Lesley Instone) -- Strategia: Thinking with or Accommodating the World (Freya Mathews) -- Contact Improvisation: Dance with the Earth Body You Have (Kate Rigby)Part II. Stories Shared // Vulture Stories: Narrative and Conservation (Thom van Dooren) -- Learning to be Affected by Earth Others (Gerda Roelvink) -- The Waterhole Project: Locating Resilience (George Main) -- Food Connect(s) (Jenny Cameron and Robert Pekin) -- Graffiti is Life (Kurt Iveson) -- Flying Foxes in Sydney (Deborah Bird Rose) -- Earth as Ethic (Freya Mathews)Part III. Researching Differently // On Experimentation (Jenny Cameron) -- Reading for Difference (J.K. Gibson-Graham) -- Listening: Research as an Act of Mindfulness (Kumi Kato) -- Deep Mapping Connections to Country (Margaret Somerville) -- The Human Condition in the Anthropocene (Anna Yeatman) -- Dialogue (Deborah Bird Rose) -- Walking as Respectful Wayfinding in an Uncertain Age (Lesley Instone)

Minóy is a rescue operation with several life rafts. Minóy-the-book provides an introduction and overview to the important noise music artist Minóy - the pseudonym of American electronic art musician and sound artist Stanley Keith Bowsza (1951-2010). Minóy's audio compositions, often conjuring up an enigmatic world of almost dreadful depth, earned him a key position in the homemade independent cassette culture scene of the 1980s.Minóy-the-CD+cassette+mp3s (available HERE) makes available nine of Minóy's audio compositions that span the years 1985 to 1993. These were drawn from recently discovered archival material and selected by the editor and artistic director of the project, Joseph Nechvatal, in collaboration with composer Phillip B. Klingler (PBK). Klingler (co-producer and sound engineer) houses the Minóy archive and has re-mastered the tracks, most of which have never been heard before (it was thought that Minóy stopped recording in 1992).Minóy-the-book contains two written monograms of Minóy, one by close friend Amber Sabri and one by artist and art theoretician Joseph Nechvatal. There are three additional essays by Nechvatal, the first of which, "The Obscurity of Minóy," recounts the history of the recovery of the audio material from obscurity. In the subsequent essays ("The Aesthetics of an Obscure Monster Sacré" and "Hyper Noise Aesthetics"), Nechvatal reflects on the artistic benefits of obscurity and situates Minóy's deep droning palimpsest soundscapes within an original aesthetic-theoretical context of an obscure monster sacré, and also examines Minóy's legacy in terms of current aesthetic responses to the surveillance state, couching Minóy's mysterious and excessive compositions in terms of a general art of noise. In total, Minóy's work undergoes a critical intricacy in terms of a contemporary art practice engaged in the fragile balance between production of, and resistance to, perceptibility. Nechvatal brings a subversive reading to Minóy's work by presenting it as a form of hyper-noise artistic gazing, based in the flipping of figure and ground. The book also contains sixty black and white portrait images from the Minóy as Haint as King Lear series that photographer Maya Eidolon (Amber Sabri) created before his death in collaboration with Minóy (then known as Haint) and Stuart Hass (Minóy's lifetime partner).

Ballads uses the lyric form to explore the effects of global Capitalism from a sharp Marxist perspective. Recognizing the congruence between folk song circulation and the circulation of money, the "currency" of the ballad alongside supply-side economics, Owens hails Wordworth's Lyric Ballads experiment (undertaken at the dawn of England's Industrial Age) as one touchstone. But he also understands the built-in obsolescence of the form, its tendency to hearken back to imaginary origins. "[E]veryone has an idea they know what a ballad is," Owens writes in his "Working Notes." "It's this degraded thing shot through with a sense of pastness, cultural infancy and a charming but sometimes dangerous rusticity that needs to be carefully framed and reined." Thus Owens' Ballads playfully engages with language, figures, and forms from medieval and early modern England, with nods to the caesura-based, alliterative line, and Barbara Allan, Thomas the Rhymer, and Piers Plowman making appearances in the book's brief lyrics.

Sam Lohmann's UNLESS AS STONE IS presents variations from Dante's sestina beginning Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra. The sestina is a form in which words repeat regularly, intricately, appearing and reappearing in new contexts with new meanings. Sam Lohmann's UNLESS AS STONE IS emerged from a few years of living with Dante's sestina, "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra". He allowed the text to appear in its own new-if irregularly scheduled-contexts. New translations, new scenery, new meanings; new phrases entered the poem (from García Lorca, from Sappho, from strangers and from loved ones) and found their own patterns. What resulted is a serial poem in seven movements, incorporating several strategies of reincorporation. "Quandunque i colli fanno più nera ombra"-"All our oddity operates / on changing verity"."The only way out of Dante is to drill straight through. Whether his Comedy, his sonnets to Beatrice or in Sam's case resetting the ribcage of this exquisite sestina. Lohmann allows a designer Italian grass stain to bleed up from in between purely engraved snatches of song. A recurring dislocation that invariably uncovers several chambers bursting with light. 'Eros who locks us as in amber / leers from shadows where he is'."-Cedar Sigo"Sam Lohmann's rift on Dante's sestina forms an archipelago of inducements to renew love and re-experience language."-Standard Schaefer

Onde se encontra a análise fílmica hoje? O que é que a teoria de cinema anda a desenvolver na obscuridade? Este campo, tal como foi definido profissionalmente (pelo menos no mundo académico anglo-saxónico), encontra-se actualmente dividido entre historiadores interessados no contexto das grandes formações da modernidade e connoisseurs que reclamam o regresso estilístico de coisas antiquadas como a visão autoral, o tom ou a mise-en-scène. Mas há também outras correntes, vitais e inventivas - na crítica, na internet, em pequenas revistas, em conferências renegadas um pouco por todo o lado -, que não estamos a conseguir escutar em nenhum dos canais oficiais. Último Dia Todos os Dias, de Adrian Martin - nesta edição acompanhado do ensaio "Avatares do Encontro" -, lança uma luz sobre estas novas e excitantes avenidas.Publicado originalmente como Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez, em 2012, por Dead Letter Office, uma série da editora punctum books. Esta edição foi produzida conjuntamente por Centro de Estudos Comparatistas Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa e punctum books, 2015.

In June and July 2014, philologist Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei and photographer Marco Mazzi undertook the Albanian Lapidar Survey, a project to map, document, and photograph the large majority of Albanian lapidars, a particular type of monument, mainly produced in the period that the communist Labor Party of Albania ruled the country (1945-1990) to commemorate the partisan victims, battles, and military units from the National Anti-Fascist Liberation War (which coincided with World War II), as well as historical figures from before the liberation and the accomplishments of socialism in Albania afterward.These lapidars, which can still be found, albeit in ever decreasing numbers, all over the country --- in cities and villages, alongside roads, in forests and on mountain passes --- are witness to an enormous expenditure of labor and resources to turn the landscape into a site of what was called "monumental propaganda." The Albanian Lapidar Survey aimed to capture these monuments as fact.The results of this project are collected into a three-volume, dual-language (English and Albanian) catalogue, under the title Lapidari. The first volume comprises a series of critical reflections on Albanian monumentality of the period 1945-1990 from a variety of perspectives, as well as historical documents and a full indexation of all inscriptions found on the documented monuments. Volumes 2 and 3 feature the photographic documentation of all 649 recorded monumental sites by photographer Marco Mazzi.Table of ContentsVolume 1: TEXTS: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei // Introduction -- People's Republic of Albania, Ministry of Education, Directorate of Culture // Circular to the Prefectural Executive Committee (Section Education): Regarding Lapidars (1946) -- Ramiz Alia // Report on the State and Measures for the Development and Further Revolutionizing of Monumental Propaganda (1968) -- Kujtim Buza & Kleanth Dedi // Dignified Symbols for Historical Events (1971) -- Muharrem Xhafa // Natural and Cultural Monuments during the Years of Socialism -- Gëzim Qëndro // The Thanatology of Hope -- Raino Isto // "We Raise Our Eyes and Feel as if She Rules the Sky" The Mother Albania Monument and the Visualization of National History -- Kosta Giakoumis & Christopher Lockwood // Pilgrimage Centered at Text and Memory: The Lapidar in Qukës-Pishkash -- Matthias Bickert // Lapidars and Socialist Monuments as Elements of Albania's Historic Cultural Landscapes -- Julian Bejko // About the Film Lapidari -- Ardian Vehbiu // Texts Chiseled on the Calendar: A Semiotic Reading of Inscriptions on the Commemorative Monuments for the Period of the National Liberation War -- Monument Descriptions: Index of Names, Index of Places, Index of DatesVolumes 2-3 feature the photographic documentation of all 649 recorded monumental sites by photographer Marco Mazzi.

"... the word ["hacker"] itself is quite old. In fact, the earliest record of the noun "hacker" is medieval: a type of chopping implement was known as a "hacker" from the 1480s. Evidently, over time the term moved from the implement to the person wielding the implement. Today the grammatical slippage remains, as "the hacker hacked the hack" is grammatically sound, if stylistically unfortunate. Notably, even in its earliest uses, "hacker" and "hacking" referred to necessary disruption. Arboriculture required careful pruning (with a hacker) to remove unwanted branches and cultivation necessitated the regular breaking up of soil and weeds in between rows of a crop (with a hacker). Such practices broke limbs and turf in order to create beneficial new growth. Such physical hacking resembles the actions of computer hackers who claim to identify security exploits (breaking into software) in order to improve computer security, not to weaken it." Kathleen E. Kenndy, Medieval HackersMedieval Hackers calls attention to the use of certain vocabulary terms in the Middle Ages and today: commonness, openness, and freedom. Today we associate this language with computer hackers, some of whom believe that information, from literature to the code that makes up computer programs, should be much more accessible to the general public than it is. In the medieval past these same terms were used by translators of censored texts, including the bible. Only at times in history when texts of enormous cultural importance were kept out of circulation, including our own time, does this vocabulary emerge. Using sources from Anonymous's Fawkes mask to William Tyndale's bible prefaces, Medieval Hackers demonstrates why we should watch for this language when it turns up in our media today.This is important work in media archaeology, for as Kennedy writes in this book, the "effluorescence of intellectual piracy" in our current moment of political and technological revolutions "cannot help but draw us to look back and see that the enforcement of intellectual property in the face of traditional information culture has occurred before. ... We have seen that despite the radically different stakes involved, in the late Middle Ages, law texts traced the same trajectory as religious texts. In the end, perhaps religious texts serve as cultural bellwethers for the health of the information commons in all areas. As unlikely as it might seem, we might consider seriously the import of an animatronic [John] Wyclif, gesturing us to follow him on a (potentially doomed) quest to preserve the information commons."

In 1994, at the age of twenty-five, when the "terrible brokenness that comes with sexual assault" was folded deep within her body and thoughts of suicide were always close by, Erin Manning wrote The Perfect Mango at an almost feverish pitch: nineteen chapters in nineteen days, a sort of self-rescue operation, where writing became a form of making (and feeling) life otherwise. Throughout those nineteen days, and although not able to fully articulate it to herself at the time, Manning wrote her way into a "composition that asks how else life might be lived." And in the rhythms of that composition, which was also a living, Manning was, and is, able to refuse the category and norm and stillness of "victim" (while still understanding the inheritances of violence) in order to follow instead the more-than-I as well as the joy of the "more-than of experience in the making."Twenty-five years later, Manning allows these earlier writings to find their way back into the world, which is also a way of giving "voice to those moments of messy survival" while also asking us, who share in (and help to bear) those moments as readers, to consider "other ways of listening to the urgency that is living." To (re)publish the book now is to give it a place in the world in a way that honors its force as something that is always beyond anyone's claim to it, even Manning's. In this sense, The Perfect Mango invites us, with Manning, to be in excess of ourselves, and also to consider, in Manning's words, "how to create conditions for living beyond humanism's fierce belief that we, the privileged, the neurotypicals, the as-yet-unscathed, the able-bodied, hold the key to all perspectives in the theatre of living." Ultimately, The Perfect Mango and Manning's reflections on its composition ask us to consider living "in the fierce celebration of a world invented by those modes of life which tear at the colonial, white, neurotypical fabric of life as we know it.""The Perfect Mango is a book about the body, about learning to see it as an entity that has no end, something that is never permanently marked by the violence of history, that can swim into a new skin. The sexual trauma that haunts this book is being painted and purged across its pages, and the young woman who refuses to remain caught in the capture of trauma is also learning to feed herself, to become a body-being that will endure in new forms and through new forms of mutual making. I know this girl, for she is many. I love this girl, as I love us all-we misfits whose hurt provokes us to live through other styles and modes of becoming-together." (Julietta Singh, "Afterward," The Perfect Mango)"How to confront victimization, while refusing the role of the victim? How, after trauma and abuse, can one regain a sense of life's possibilities and plunge headlong into their pursuit, without defensively hardening the boundaries of the self? Without immunizing it against the outside, knowing that it is in the great outside of the world's roil and commotion that potential radically resides - tooth-to-jowl with continued danger? How to grapple with the horrors of the past, without paradoxically binding oneself to them in a Sisyphian attempt to exorcize them through feats of memory and analysis (terminable or interminable)? How, not to own the past, but repossess the future of that past? In The Perfect Mango, Erin Manning charts a path of resistance, resilience, and journeying toward health that is starkly different from the currently dominant identity-based strategies. She writes survival, in what can best be described as a fabulatory autobiography that is rooted in real events but opens them up to each other, and out to a different future. The path is signposted with a motto, implicit here, subsequently expressed in the title of one of her works of philosophy: always more than one. If this is me ... what else? If this is life ... once more!" (Brian Massumi)

In 1994, after following a character in Peter Handke's novel Repetition into what is now Slovenia and after traveling in landscapes of Handke's youth, Zarko Radakovic and Scott Abbott published a two-headed text in Belgrade, Ponavljane (Repetitions). The possibility of narration in two voices, complicated by the third voice that is Peter Handke's own narrator, is the main focus of deliberation while traveling and reading and writing. Repetitions begins with Abbott's text, a fairly straightforward travel narrative. It ends with Radakovic's account of the same events, much less straightforward, more repetitious, more adventuresome.First, the book is written by two authors whose native languages are Serbian and English respectively (German is their only common language). The authors' perspectives contrast with and supplement one another: Radakovic grew up in Tito's Yugoslavia and Abbott comes from the Mormon American West; Radakovic is the translator of most of Peter Handke's works into Serbo-Croatian and Abbott translated Handke's provocative A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia for Viking Press and his play Voyage by Dugout: The Play of the Film of the War for PAJ (Performing Arts Journal); Radakovic was a journalist for Deutsche Welle in Cologne and Abbott is a professor of German literature at Utah Valley University; Radakovic is the author of several novels and Abbott has published mostly literary-critical work; Radakovic was married to a theoretical physicist from Belgrade and Abbott was married to a homemaker with whom he had seven children; and so on. Two sets of eyes. Two pens. Two visions of the world.

In an increasingly technologized and connected world, it seems as if noise must be increasing. Noise, however, is a complicated term with a complicated history. Noise can be traced through structures of power, theories of knowledge, communication, and scientific practice, as well as through questions of art, sound, and music. Thus, rather than assume that it must be increasing, this work has focused on better understanding the various ways that noise is defined, what that noise can do, and how we can use noise as a strategically political tactic.Noise Thinks the Anthropocene is a textual experiment in noise poetics that uses the growing body of research into noise as source material. It is an experiment in that it results from indeterminate means, alternative grammar, and experimental thinking. The outcome was not predetermined. It uses noise to explain, elucidate, and evoke (akin to other poetic forms) within the textual milieu in a manner that seeks to be less determinate and more improvisational than conventional writing. Noise Thinks the Anthropocene argues that noise poetics is a necessary form for addressing political inequality, coexistence with the (nonhuman) other, the ecological crisis, and sustainability because it approaches these issues as a system of interconnected fragments and excesses and thus has the potential to reach or envision solutions in novel ways.

Intimate Bureaucracies is a history from the futurelooking backward at the present moment as a turning point. Our systems of organization and control appear unsustainable and brutal, and we are feeling around in the dark for alternatives. Using experiments in social organization in downtown New York City, and other models of potential alternative social organizations, this manifesto makes a call to action to study and build sociopoetic systems. One alternative system, the Occupy movement, suggests lessons beyond the specific historical moment, demands, and goals. This manifesto suggests that the organization and communication systems of Occupying encampments represent important necessities, models, goals, and demands, as well as an intimate bureaucracy that is a paradoxical mix of artisanal production, mass-distribution techniques, and a belief in the democratizing potential of social media.

This book touches at hot stuff. Not only have we 'never been modern' (Latour) or postmodern, but even not so contemporary. C.B. Johnson offers a glimpse into what is, at best, a strange and Utopian, millenaristic condition (Agamben), at worst, an arrogant attempt on the part of power to put an end to the flow of time. (Franco La Cecla, author of Against Architecture)Entering the 21st century, the postmodern succession has given way to a doom-laden, apolitical orthodoxy. This book offers suggestive readings of "the contemporary" in light of high modernity, postwar modernity, and postmodernity, as framed by the influential institutions of modern art and the spectacles of millennial architecture. Modernity without a Project critiques and connects historical avant-garde currents as they are institutionally expressed or captured, and scrutinizes the remake of New York's Museum of Modern Art, Minoru Yamasaki's vanished Utopias, the "anarchitecture" of Lebbeus Woods, recent work of Rem Koolhaas, delirious developments in Dubai, and the unexpected contribution to architectural debate by the late Hugo Chavez.This book makes an important contribution in defining and evaluating the alternative concept of 'contemporaneity' . . . . Scholars and students of modernism, of museum history and of modern architecture in general will find Modernity without a Project highly relevant and stimulating. (Bart Verschaffel, Professor of Architecture at Ghent University)This provocative and interesting book argues that the celebratory discourse of 'the contemporary' is not as innocent as it seems, but is geared towards cancelling out or negating the capital-unfriendly scepticism of modernism and postmodernism. This study contributes significantly to the field of what might be termed critical cultural studies, particularly with regard to the understanding of art and architecture as they are mobilised in the first part of the 21st century. (Professor Ian Buchanan, Director of the Institute for Social Transformation Research, University of Wollongong)

In 2008 the authors published, in Belgrade, Vampiri & Razumni recnik, which is now published in English as Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary. Vampires is Radakovic's fictionalized account of a Serb living in Cologne, Germany while his former country disintegrates. He travels in the American West, ostensibly looking for the vampires causing chaos in his own country, and then returns to Europe, having found no vampires. It is a dark text, a story of destruction told in a narrative that refuses all the solaces narrative has traditionally afforded. A Reasonable Dictionary is Abbott's personally troubled account of his and Radakovic's trip up the Drina River between the civil wars, a journey made with Peter Handke, a trip during which some of Abbott's specifically American stories lost their moral structure.Both works, along with Radakovic and Abbott's earlier work Repetitions (published by punctum books in 2013), examine generic distinctions and question storytelling in general, all in the context of travel in Yugoslavia, in the former Yugoslavia, and in western America. Two aspects make the books unique. First, they are written about experiences shared by two authors whose native languages are Serbian and English respectively (German is their only common language). The authors' perspectives contrast with and supplement one another: Radakovic grew up in Tito's Yugoslavia and Abbott comes from the Mormon American West; Radakovic is the translator of most of Peter Handke's works into Serbo-Croatian and Abbott translated Handke's provocative A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia for Viking Press and his play Voyage by Dugout: The Play of the Film of the War for PAJ (Performing Arts Journal); Radakovic was a journalist for Deutsche Welle in Cologne and Abbott is a professor of German literature at Utah Valley University; Radakovic is the author of several novels and Abbott has published mostly literary-critical work; and so on. Two sets of eyes. Two pens. Two visions of the world.