Anne Carson's performance

Cassandra Float Can

A Performance by Anne Carson

Friday, February 22, 2008 : 2:00pm to 3:00pm

University Park Campus
Doheny Memorial Library
240

Free

Anne Carson's performance joins essayistic fragments on the famous prophet Cassandra with images of building cuts created by artist Gordon Matta-Clark.

The Programs in Creative Writing, English and the organization of Critical Studies Graduate Students present "Cassandra Float Can: A Performance by Anne Carson" on Friday, February 22, at 2 p.m. in Doheny 240.

Anne Carson is a poet, essayist and translator, trained in classical languages, anthropology and commercial art. Her writing — which includes If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (1998) and Men in the Off Hours (2001) — traverses a wide field of literary possibility, often within the same work. Her sly, slender prose moves swiftly between the ancient and the modern, often approaching the classics in a less than conventional manner. In Autobiography of Red, a work inspired by the Greek poet Stesichoros, central protagonist Geryon is not only a teenager but has wings, is red and is gay.

Carson's translation of Sappho, now considered the foremost in the field, meticulously marks the breaks where the original text was lost, turning the act of translation into a poetic encounter of longing and imagination. Carson excels at making the past and present speak to each other, seating Virginia Woolf, Antonin Artaud and Emperor Hirohito at the table with her perennial Greeks and Romans, who, in her words, "are so exemplary and so screwed up."

On Friday, February 22, at USC, Carson will present "Cassandra Float Can," a performance Carson originally performed as a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in 2006. During her time at the Getty, she worked on several translations of Euripides; her version of Hippolytos was the first play to be performed at the newly reopened Getty Villa in September 2006.

In the preface to her most recent book, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides (NYRB Classics, 2006), Carson writes: "There is in Euripides some kind of learning that is always at the boiling point. It breaks experiences open and they waste themselves, run through your fingers. Phrases don't catch them, theories don't hold them, they have no use. It is a theater of sacrifice in the true sense. Violence occurs; through violence we are intimate with some characters on stage in an exorbitant way for a brief time; that's all it is."

Anne Carson's writings and performances have been recognized with the Guggenheim Fellowship, the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. Originally from Canada, she is currently a professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of Michigan.

webbie: INDEPENDENT

I don't know what this has to do with cultural politics of emotions/consciousness.......

Leo Lament: narcissistic assemblages

Leo Horoscope for week of February 21, 2008

My friend Ronnie, the tattoo artist, told me that people who come in to get their first tattoo are sometimes unprepared for how much it hurts. Most are able to endure the razor-sharp ripping of their flesh for the time it takes, though. There are some sissies who can't, and they tend to be the biggest, baddest macho dudes. Ronnie says she personally knows 15 rough, tough guys walking around San Francisco with a fragment of a tattoo, having abandoned the process in agony before it was done. Here's my question for you, Leo: Is there any situation in your life that resembles a half-completed initiation? Have you ever left midway through a rite of passage? Now is a good time to make plans to go back and finish what you started.

MANY THINGS LOOK HALF-completed. The thing that was never started and should have been completed: dissertation in literary minority representations in the twentieth century. WTF. Yah, that was going to get written

I have a high tolerance for pain. I got my first tattoo this August past. Arabic calligraphy that says MA'SHA' LA or "what God wills." I am a failed and hypocritical ethnic Catholic who talks to the Virgin Mary, worries about saints and superstitions but never attends church and hates 95% of what the Pope and his peeps have to say. I feel married to my religion because it feels, to me anyway and how i bind myself to constructs, that i cannnot extricate Catholicism from Chaldean-ness.

Anyway, the needles felt like good pain and i needed to have some cuts of my own doing/making and not ones imposed on me. It' s kind of addicting and I want one on my neck, across my neck and down my throat. I know, I will think that one through.

I have a presentation on Intersectionality (six writers, seven pieces, crenshaw's standford law review is one of them!) and i feel like i have to 'stand in for/speak for' and i know i cannot. I felt like I sent a fucking ramble instead of a cohesive paper. My professor is going to think I am an ass and then that will end my journey toward academic enclosure. OK, i am feeling ocd/impulsive /anxious and need to go to KINKOS and make copies for class. I should write more, re-read articles but instead, i will head out to WILSHIRE/miracle mile and ensure i get a small amount of sleep before the presentation.

rest and stay warm
nayj

Do we need to take another bath? another kind of chair

With much trepidation, i send this out......

The Literary, Visual and Material Culture Initiative presents:

BEAUTIFUL BOYS, SODOMY, HAMMAMS, AND OTHER TROPES:
A VISUAL HISTORY OF NEAR AND MIDDLE EASTERN HOMOEROTICISM
Joseph Boone, Professor, English and Gender Studies, USC

Wednesday, February 20
12:30-2pm
SOS 250

KABOBfest: Keffiyeh

Thanks to Randa Jarrar at Rockslinga! I thought this would dis-Orient us! there's an interesting table w/ a Kaffiyah as 'decoration'///speaking of TABLES & consciousness & writing nooks/crannies...

i love the word usage: terrorgasm . these guys are funny. i think it's Iron sheik's voice, not so sure. good friend's w/ his aunt and her husband. he's originally from dearborn, michigan.

They are mocking the popularity of the Palestinian/political invasion as a fashion statement, right? IN Kara Keeling's class, we had a dynamic conversation about this very cultural object. We concluded once the object has been co-opted, it no longer has or retains its radical cache. As Professor K pointed out, the object makes that foray into public sphere after it has been divested of its power (my paraphrase)

alex, remember more about that dizzying conversation about scarves and aesthetics?

University Spaces, Academic Bodies: April 4 NYU

University Spaces, Academic Bodies: New Approaches to the Corporate University

April 4th, 2008

New York University

Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Program in American Studies

Neoliberal and corporatist logics are increasingly reconfiguring bodies in and around universities. The work of "diversifying" the academy imposes a disproportionate burden of labor on faculty, students, and staff marked by multiple forms of difference; the pressures of professionalization anticipate and authorize narrow standards of bodily capacity; and precarious modes of transnational expansion involving institutions of higher learning fortify and retrace imperial circuits of acquisition in land, bodies, and knowledge. This calls for a critical account of how neoliberal processes dismantle and rearticulate various sites of the university as well as the contours of bodies allowed to function within it. Our conference will thus engage debates surrounding embodiment within the university as it pertains to the overlapping structures of access, difference, and power. We especially invite papers that address embodiment with primary attention to the historical complexities of sexuality, race, nation, gender, labor, and ability.

As conference organizers, we conceive of the body/university relationship as materially and historically contingent; that is, universities are not simply places where bodies live, labor, die and haunt, but they are also mobile, shifting sites where the substantive body intersects with, is reconfigured by, and defies various histories of regulation. Thus we ask: How are access and ability, marginal bodies and minority status, disciplinary boundaries and hierarchies of authority, produced and policed by academic institutions? How are bodies (dis)placed in relation to remote learning programs, high tech and virtual classrooms, campus security/surveillance, and other reorganizations of higher learning spaces? How are individual and collective bodies affected by the proliferation of global campuses and transnational academic networks? We envision our conference as a platform for academics, students, staff, and faculty to engage in a multidisciplinary discussion that builds on existing debate surrounding the corporate university by placing embodiment at its center.

In an effort to foster new conversations, we encourage not only formal academic presentations but also creative, multimedia, and unconventional modes of address that query or challenge the limits of standard academic discourse.

Possible topics of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

• Corporeality, difference, and labor practices in and against the university
• Strikes, labor organization, cultures of protest
• Campus security, surveillance, and violence
• Migration, empire, and learning
• Bureaucratization, rational institutions, recruitment, professionalization
• Access, excess, process, praxis
• Disciplinarity and departmentalization
• Advertising space, corporate presence on campus
• Alternative mappings of academic spaces

Please send abstracts of no longer than 250 words to EmbodimentConference@gmail.com by Friday, March 7^th, 2008. Visit our website www.embodimentconference.blogspot.com for additional details and updates.