Contains work pertaining to Seance: A Two Day Public Meditation on the Condition of Language and Narrative in Contemporary Writing, held in Los Angeles October 29th and 30th 2004. Contributors include Matias Viegener, Charles Berstain, Christian Bok, Eileen Myles, Janet Sternburg, Dennis Cooper, Dodie Bellamy, Christina Rivera-Garza and Jen Hofer, Robert Gluck, Kevin Killian, Kenneth Goldsmith, Shelley Jackson, Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Steven Shaviro, Ben Marcus, Joan Retallack, Christine Wertheim, Jaap Blonk, and Tracie Morris, all of whom contribute writing and writing on writing.

SÈANCE was a pure conjecture; we were still figuring out our speculative field.  This was our first attempt to create a communal space where writers with very diverse aesthetics, politics and practices could gather for prolonged discussion. We chose the idea of the séance—channeling spirits and talking to the dead, as well as a current French term for a screening or session because many of these writers do not often speak with each other. Indeed many were actively hostile to others, metaphorically wishing them dead, at least from the scenes of writing. Thus we deliberately chose writers from different literary camps for each panel, pairing poetic formalists and sex writers, language poets and ‘pataphysical researchers. The conference examined the translation of the ordinary into words, from the extraordinary writing of sex to the supposed disappearance of the author, with panels focused on the phenomenological training of the person, textual hauntings, radical artifice, and the magic of letters freed from the paged grid.

2006 | SOLD OUT