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 Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2004 Tropical Malady (Sud pralad) is a film that essays much of what concerns those of us who work at the intersection of Film Studies and Body Studies. In Tropical Malady a young soldier, Keng (Banlop Lomnoi), falls in love with a young man from the country, Tong … Continue reading
by Brian Bergen-Aurand Gender and sexuality are located in time and place. While the two are not just one thing, never the same thing, and should never be conflated, they remain entangled and mutually constituted. These two points organize the essays collected in Historicising Gender and Sexuality, edited by Kevin P. Murphy and Jennifer M. … Continue reading
“We still have chaos here, and you need chaos to create something. There’s no chaos in Europe and you’ve lost your innovation. We have it, it’s dangerous but it’s very hopeful. We need your wisdom, your discipline and will-power, and you need our chaos and our energy, our emotions and our ambition.” Near the end … Continue reading
To redeem: To take back, buy back, procure, deliver from sin. For some time now, I have been thinking a good deal about the poetry of Rumi in the context of the Turkish film Zenne Dancer, which opens with the epigraph: Dance in your blood, Dance, when you’re perfectly free. ~Rumi (1207-1273) More on Zenne … Continue reading
This past week, just in time for Valentine’s Day, the University of Botswana hosted that country’s first LGBTI film festival, The Batho BaLorato Film Festival. The festival was organized by LEGABIBO, the organization in Botswana representing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Interexed people, and a number of other volunteers. Queer relations remain illegal in Botswana, … Continue reading
–חשמל [chashmal] (from Hebrew, “speaking silence”) Born in New York in 1955, Jay Rosenblatt (often in collaboration with Caveh Zahedi, Stephanie Rapp, Dina Ciraulo, Jennifer Frame, or his daughter Ella Rosenblatt) has been making short collage and diary films since 1980, has taught film and video production at various schools in the San Francisco Bay area … Continue reading
Over the past year, I have been considering the Ethiopian photographs of Hans Silvester, especially his collections A Window on Africa: Ethiopian Portraits (2011) and Natural Fasion: Tribal Decoration from Africa (2008). Silvester started visiting the Omo Valley region of Ethiopia in 2003. Since then, he has returned at least two dozen times and has produced … Continue reading
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