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 Prosthesis: Noun. Originally from a grammatical concept “prosthetics,” from the 1550s, “addition of a letter or syllable to a word,” from Late Latin, from Greek prosthesis “addition, application, attachment,” from prostithenai “add to,” from pros “to” + tithenai “to put, place, to set down as in a proposition.” Prosthesis in reference to … Continue reading
by Stefan Cieply Events in Ukraine have moved swiftly over the past week, leaving much of the media scrambling to explain an extraordinary series of events. Out of this confusion two powerful memes have emerged: that the current events in Ukraine are sectional in nature and that the radical right has driven the events in … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand I have now read The Utopia of Film by Christopher Pavsek cover to cover twice and the introduction three more times. It is a book well worth returning to repeatedly for its analysis of these films and filmmakers, its rigorous discussion of critical theory (especially Marxism, Modernism/Post-Modernism, and Frankfurt School Theory), and … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand The purpose of Aikido is to elevate ourselves from the world of matter to the world of spirit. Matter descends, spirit ascends. Aikido is a wonderful flower that blooms in our world and bears great spiritual fruit. Aikido should be the basis of our lives, and we should strive to establish true … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand O Lord our God, who made humankind in thine image and likeness and gave it power over all flesh everlasting, and who now has approved thy saints and apostles Philip and Bartholomew becoming partners, not bound together by nature, but in the unity of the holy spirit and in the mode of … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked me if I would be okay with sex workers “plying their trade” in my back yard. Since I’ve been asked to run this thought experiment no less than three times in the past month, by three different friends, all with slightly different queer perspectives, … Continue reading
by Dave Arenas Component Poetics1 Explaining also example2 remove context whittle down to command3 * surrender model maximal giving in minimal narrative shorn of links4 * not what does this mean but how will you tear at it use turn against its originator5 * to start poem critique contort neither me nor counterfeit * speaks … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand The argument, in short, is that the history of hill peoples is best understood as a history not of archaic remnants but of “runaways” from state-making processes in the lowlands: a largely “maroon” society, providing that we take a very long historical view. Many of the agricultural and social practices of hill … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand State rulers find it well nigh impossible to install an effective sovereignty over people who are constantly in motion, who have no permanent pattern of organization, no permanent address, whose leadership is ephemeral, whose subsistence patterns are pliable and fugitive, who have few permanent allegiances, and who are liable, over time, to … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand At a time when the state seems pervasive and inescapable, it is easy to forget that for much of history, living within or outside the state–or in an intermediate zone–was a choice, one that might be revised as the circumstances warranted. A wealthy and peaceful state center might attract a growing population … Continue reading
Foreign Influence 