by Brian Bergen-Aurand The goal for January 2019 is to read these six books, in no particular order: American Humor: A Study of the National Character by Constance Rourke Stepping out of the darkness, the American emerges upon the stage of history as a new character, as puzzling to himself as to others. American Humor, …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand I’m stretching the boundaries a bit with this list, mentioning some books that brush up against or intrude upon our usual definitions of disability in order to broaden and disturb our conceptions of what disability memoirs and crip lit might exclude. (Synopses from Goodreads.) 1. A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Almost halfway through Helen Keller’s The Story of my Life, which first appeared in installments in Ladies’ Home Journal throughout 1902, is a chapter recalling what Keller labels “the one cloud in my childhood’s bright sky.” Chapter 14 tells the tale of the author’s first adventure in writing–her composition at the age …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Sundays are free admission to the Henry Art Gallery on the campus of the University of Washington, so we made it a family outing to see the new installation Fun. No Fun. by Kraft Duntz featuring Dawn Cerny. I had read Travis Vogt’s interview with Cerny in City Arts, “The Comedic Architecture …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand The Story of My Life by Helen Keller (1903) Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic (1976) The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde (1980) The Me in the Mirror by Connie Panzarino (1994) The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait by Frida Kahlo and Carlos Fuentes (1995) Gary …
by Saravanan Mani The films I list here are tentative, incomplete attempts or “essays” that reflect on a theme while initiating conversations with narrative cinema. These films are fictional and non-fictional explorations that start in specific narrative premises but venture beyond those beginnings to interrogate the film-making process through the making of film. While such …
13/20 March 2017 Morning En Route to the Hospital Snow wafts off the little lake along route 66, momentarily encasing the car in a trance of glitter Live with your puny, vulnerable self Live with her ~Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes The past two weeks have been consumed with close readings of several articles …
6 March 2017 I first tasted electricity in 1959, when I was six. In accordance with my desires at the time, I was exploring the house. Under the couch I found a fresh 9-volt battery. Having no idea what it was, I touched the terminals to my tongue and was appalled to feel the vile …
by Reagan Jackson I hate horror movies. They linger. Long after the screen goes black I am reliving every cringe-worthy moment. So when I saw the preview for Get Out, I was like wait: Is this a horror movie or is this racism? Is this a horror movie about racism? Oh hell no. I definitely […] …
When I think of queer Berlin, I think – albeit narrowly – of the men dancing with me to DJ Boris at the Snax party at Berghain last Easter Sunday: thousands of sweaty revelers, some wearing leathers, some wearing nothing, grinding away all night to the best techno on the planet, seeking out their […] via …
27 February 2017 After a weekend spent revamping the Foreign Influence website, I am ready to return to some projects put on hold at the end of 2016. Four topics in particular continue to hold my attention–Crip Theory and the development of a curriculum for Disability Studies, the ongoing search for the best ways to …
by Courtney Weaver Remember this house and do not forget who built it… Last weekend I sat in the Ark Lodge theater in Columbia City to view the James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro the recent adaptation of the legendary writer and public intellectual’s unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, directed by Raoul Peck […] …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Tention—condition of being stretched or strained, or in which pressure is exerted I have a penchant for exhibition catalogues. Ever since my first encounter with Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, written to accompany the 1990-1991 exhibition of the same name he arranged at the Louvre Museum, …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Spending the last several years studying the thought of Emmanuel Levinas in relation to ethics and comedy has led me to Emma Willis’s 2014 Theatricality, Dark Tourism and Ethical Spectatorship: Absent Others, a book about ethics and tragedy written somewhat at the collision of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Rancière around questions of …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand I’ve spent the last two days rereading sections of Carrie Noland’s 2009 book, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture, and I’m even more impressed with it this second time around. I enjoyed reading the book and learned a good deal from it the first time I encountered it about a year ago. …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand We were young people living in houses seemingly more populated by ghosts than by the living, with the old dead and the new. ~Jesmyn Ward Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped (2013) is a memoir of her life growing up Black in rural Mississippi, the generations that came before her, and the men …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand An early installment in Arsenal Pulp Press’s QUEER FILM CLASSICS series, Helen Hok-Sze Leung’s Farewell My Concubine (2o10) takes a queer cultural studies approach to a close reading of Chen Kaige’s 1992 Chinese film, starring Leslie Cheung, Zhang Fengyi, and Gong Li. After reading this one short (120 pocket-sized pages) study from …
by Sam Cahill Don’t mess with the lady in black, the lady in black, the lady in black. Don’t mess with the lady in black when she’s on the attack. … A spirit so quick to deliver a beating To the enemies of peace, love, logic, and reason. ~ “Lady in Black,” Haroon and Adil …
by Brian Bergen-Aurand There is no doubt that at this point in history the neurotic, the pervert, and the psychotic cannot be adequately defined in terms of drives, for drives are simply the desiring-machines themselves. They must be defined in terms of modern territorialities. The neurotic is trapped within the residual or artificial territorialities of … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain liberation. When that which one had wanted to see isn’t sufficiently revealed, … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand The mise-en-scène of the blind is always inscribed in a theater or theory of the hands. ~Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind It is a question of touch, of touching the screen or being touched by what one sees on screen, or both. It is a question of the relation between how … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand The Myths of Blind Cinema Imagine film, or more precisely, the filmic experience in relation to three figures: Gyges, Butades, and Medusa (in contrast to Polyphemus). These three figures, or more precisely, the relations among these three figures raise for us the possibility of addressing the flimic experience in terms of a man … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand To censor comes from the Sanskrit śamsati, with its references to “recites, praises,” and śasa “song of praise.” To censor something is to praise it, to recite its praises as a thing worthy for its affect and effect. To censor is to give credence to the idea that things, ideas, books, and … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Thus, censorship emerges as a dynamic activity. Taking my cues from Foucault and Kuhn, I seek to show that power is a relation and not a possession by placing censorship in dialogue with film production and reception. ~Monika Mehta From the start, Monika Mehta’s Censorship and Sexuality in Bombay Cinema (University of … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand If God had wanted it, he would have made you a single community, but he wanted, the Koran tells us [5:48], to test you through the gift of difference. ~Mustapha Chérif, Islam and the West I believe that what distinguishes the idea of democracy from all other ideas of political regimes—monarchy, aristocracy, … Continue reading
By Brian Bergen-Aurand Wayne “Matt” Shepard was born 1 December 1976 and died 12 October 1998. In 1998, Matthew Shepard–a white middle-class twenty-one year old university student–was robbed, beaten, and left tied to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming in the United States. His head and face injuries were so severe doctors reported they could not … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Essay noun: essay; plural noun: essays ˈɛseɪ/ 1. a short piece of writing on a particular subject. 2. formal an attempt or effort. verb (formal) : essay; 3rd person present: essays; past tense: essayed; past participle: essayed; gerund or present participle: essaying ɛˈseɪ/ 1. attempt or try. Essay Films are notoriously difficult … Continue reading
by Félix Guattari (1930-1992) Utopia Today [I hate this kind of survey, so I am addressing this answer to you alone; do with it what you like.] Utopia, today, is to believe that current societies will be able to continue along on their merry little way without major upheavals. Social modes of organization that prevail … Continue reading
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