In Memoriam: Raymond Federman

Brilliant novelist, poet and academic Raymond Federman passed away this week. The news left many shocked and saddened, but also disheartening is how few are familiar with his incredible work.

The man could write novels the equal of Beckett's (and I mean the Irish Nobel winner, not Federman's dalmatian). He could write a charged and evocative poem on the impossibility of putting the "human debacle" onto paper, or a half-insane poem about a potato turning into a tomato. A potato. Turning into a tomato. Now tell me that's not someone you must read.

Still not convinced? Just take a look at this excerpt from the definitive encyclopedia of all things Federman:

Have you ever tried to catch a Federman word on your tongue and hold it still? Force it to respond to your theoretical frame? Since such critical desires distort the Federmaniacal word and since so many Federmanesque writers are possessed by parachutal syntax, we tried to create a form that would perform Federman rather than be simply "about" Federman. Since Federman himself as a wearer of reversible jackets (i.e., a writer) is obsessed with lists, with cataloging, with mapping the terrain of intertextual repetitions (echoes blasted from beyond the thunderdome), (parenthetical digressions) outside the domain of quotation marks, we felt that an organization built on the basic premise of encyclopedia and infested with hypertextual hot bottoms would come closest to providing readers with their own Federman experience.

- Doug Rice, "Before Beginning" From Federman A to X-X-X-X: A Recyclopedic Narrative

I mean, come on.

It's quite a blow, losing Federman, and friends and fans around the world are mourning. Let's work to ensure a new generation discovers and falls in love with the work of this one-of-a-kind author.

To visit Federman's personal website, click here, and for his blog, click here.

To take a closer look at Federman, A to X-X-X-X, quoted above, click here.

Nuria Vilanova's BORDER TEXTS: WRITING FICTION FROM NORTHERN MEXICO now available from AMAZON.COM

New! Available from SDSU PRESS, Homer From Salinas: John Steinbeck's Enduring Voice for California

NEW! Now Available Via Amazon.com!

From April to May 2007, some of the most noted scholars and artists of American Literature, cultural studies, painting and photography, gathered at San Diego State University for “An Enduring Voice for California: A Celebration of John Steinbeck,” sponsored by the College of Arts and Letters, SDSU. Homer from Salinas: John Steinbeck’s Enduring Voice for California collects these lectures, screenings, debates, discussions, and artifacts into one handy volume that is a cross between old school “conference proceedings” and next-generation, Web 2.0 journalism. The result is a one-volume meditation on Steinbeck and California that leaves readers knowing more about the Nobel Prize-winning author and America’s singular, West Coast state. It includes pieces by Jeffrey Charles, Charles Wollenberg, William Deverell, Francisco X. Alarcón, Hernán Moreno-Hinojosa, Pam Muñoz Ryan, Fred Gardaphé, Arturo J. Aldama, Michael Harper, Joanna Brooks, Arthur Ollman, Louis Hock, Susan Shillingslaw, with an introduction by William Nericcio. Buy it direct from SDSU PRESS via Amazon.com for 14.95 (plus shipping).

One of the key elements of this book is its focus on John Steinbeck, Mexico, and Mexicans; there's a fine example of this interest in a film entitled The Forgotten Village (1941). Here's a clip--the 1st of 7 parts on YouTube:

Sex sells.. Almost as well as laughs do!

Humor & Eroticism in Advertising, by Maria Cristina da Silva Martins, explores the role of sensual seduction in the workings of an advertising campaign. By closely analysing Brazilian magazine ads published in the 1980's, Martins uncovers the aesthetic, political, and cultural exchanges that take their form in ad space.

The producers of cleaninghunk.com appreciate Martins' research findings. Check out this clip:

SDSU Press Brings Ana Castillo to San Diego State University With a Host of Other Cool Co-Sponsors!

Ana Castillo Comes to SDSU--SDSU Press helps make it happen

What could be more romantic? One of our authors, Oliver Mayer, tells what inspired him to write a play for the woman he loves.

Click on this text to be taken to the L.A. Times feature on Oliver Mayer's 'Dias y Flores.'

[in Spanish] Oliver Mayer, the focus our THE HURT BUSINESS, IN THE NEWS

You can get a copy of The Hurt Business, a work wholly focused on the writing of Oliver Mayer, right here! Or hit the Amazon logo, opposite!

Kathy Acker Critical Study Volume with Hyperbole Books, an imprint of SDSU Press

DEVOURING INSTITUTIONS

Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker
Edited by Michael Hardin

ISBN: 1879691701 | 2005 | 272pp paperback*
illustrated: 2bw photos/map*

HYPERBOLE BOOKS, an imprint of
SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
ORDER NOW | ONLINE | $14.95 plus shipping
FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL HARDIN...

In April 1996, I organized a conference at which Kathy Acker was the keynote speaker,1 but could not imagine how to introduce such a complex writer and artist, and so I delegated that responsibility; now, however, I do not have such a luxury. I had met Kathy before, but it was while she was at this conference that she received the news that her biopsy had come back positive for breast cancer. Thus, when I heard on Monday, December 1, 1997 that she had died the day before, I felt a great loss. I was shocked-I knew she was a fighter and if anyone could beat cancer, she could-but at the same time, I had not heard from her since August. A few days later, I was informed of the news by the executor of her estate, so I asked how Kathy would have wanted to be remembered, thinking a memorial event in Houston might be nice, but he said, "keep her work alive." That was the germination for this collection, and I can happily state that since then, most of her work has come back into print, Grove released two new collections in fall 2002-The Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker and Rip-off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America-and NYU sponsored a conference on Kathy Acker in November, 2002. However, there remains a dearth of critical articles and books on her work, and her fiction is not taught as often as one might expect, given its relevance to contemporary literature and theory. To that end, Devouring Institutions is meant to be an introduction to Kathy Acker, with its essays being merely thirteen ways of looking at one of the most innovative, controversial, and difficult of American writers...

Selected praise for Devouring Institutions:

It is essential--particularly in these beige days through which the narratologically bland lead the narratologically bland--to explore and celebrate the brilliantly mad fictive possibility spaces Kathy Acker left behind. The essays in Devouring Institutions accomplish just that: together, they form a rich, important, multifaceted act of reminding about one of the most significant innovative writers of the last century.
-Lance Olsen

Devouring Institutions is a welcome contribution to the study of Kathy Acker's oeuvre and influence. Hers was a subversive intellect that made an indelible mark on American literature of the 20th century.
-Amy Scholder,
editor of Bodies of Work, Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective, and Essential Acker

Devouring Institutions: The Life Work of Kathy Acker is, to my knowledge, the first book-length manuscript that examines thoroughly, profoundly, and scholarly the Work of Kathy Acker. It will go a long way in introducing one of the most provocative, original, intellectual, and profound American writers of the late 20th century to the American reading public and the Academy. It will shatter the simplistic representation of Kathy Acker as a writer who simply wants to use profanity and pornography to shock the reader. Signifying the Western outlaw tradition of Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, Henry Miller, and William S. Burroughs; appropriating, plagiarizing, and rewriting the Western, canonical texts and art of Cervantes, Dickens, Faulkner, Hawthorne, Genet, Twain, Artaud, Rimbaud, Freud, and others; engaging, reverberating against, and conversing with the poststructuralist and postmodernist theories of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Cixous, and Irigaray; and exposing the violence and repression of the patriarchy and of capitalism in the late 20th century; Kathy Acker produces a body of literature that textualizes, undermines, and critiques the major social, political, sexual, and economic issues/forces confronting Western humanity as it enters the 21th century. Many of the essays in Devouring Institutions unearth and make available to the reader the artistry, the complex vision, the humanity, the beauty, and the political convictions of Kathy Acker and her Work. I think Devouring Institutions will not only establish Kathy Acker and her Work as a site of critical domain, but also will make an invaluable contribution to American scholarship.
-Professor W. Lawrence Hogue
The University of Houston

A welcome and necessary addition to the Acker canon.
-Diane Fare
the Literary Encyclopedia

Table of Contents

Kathy Acker: An Introduction
Michael Hardin

Writing between Madness and Paralysis

"The Madness Outside Gender: Travels with Don Quixote and Saint Foucault."
Carol Siegel
Washington State University-Vancouver

"Kathy Acker and Literary Madness: Erecting a Pornographic Shell."
Robert Mazzola

"The Paralyzing Tensions of Radical Art in a Postmodern World: Kathy Acker's Last Novels as Exploratory Fictions."
Svetlana Mintcheva
Arts Advocacy Project, National Coalition Against Censorship

Building the Body of Desires

"Re-Educating the Body: Kathy Acker, Georges Bataille, and the Postmodern Body in My Mother: Demonology."
Terry Engebretsen
Idaho State University

"Too Much Is Never Enough: A Kaleidoscopic Approach to the Work of Kathy Acker."
Gayle Fornataro
Long Beach State University

"The Lay of the Land: Piracy and the Iterant Body in Kathy Acker's Pussy, King of the Pirates."
Sheri Weinstein
SUNY-Buffalo

"Between Theory and Autobiography: Negotiating Desire, Sex, and Love in the Work of Kathy Acker."
Michael Hardin
Bloomsburg University

Attacking Language

"Residues or Revolutions of the Language of Acker and Artaud."
Carla Harryman
Wayne State University

"Words Hurt! Acker's Appropriation of Myth in Don Quixote."
Jan Corbett
Delaware Valley College

"Kathy Acker's Radical Performance Writing in Eurydice in the Underworld and Other Texts."
Catherine Rock
University of Alberta

Post-Plagiarism

"Beyond Appropriation: Pussy, King of the Pirates and a Feminist Critique of Intellectual Property."
Caren Irr
Brandeis University

"Voice, Politics, Copyright."
Nicole Cooley
Queens College

"Scavenging the E-Wreck: Kathy Acker, the Internet, and Artis Electronica."
Trevor Dodge
Idaho State University.

Kathy Acker
A Primary and Secondary Bibliography

Oliver Mayer's THE HURT BUSINESS! A New Spring 2008 Title From Hyperbole Books and SDSU Press

Hyperbole books is thrilled to announce the immanent release of The Hurt Business: Oliver Mayer's Early Works [+] PLUS in April 2008. More information on the book is here. For the proof of the new title's wraparound cover click here. Or, better, buy it now off Amazon.com.








On the right, L.A. playwright Oliver Mayer with his wife, the actress Marlene Forte.

The Afterlife of Plays

by Jonathan Miller
ISBN: 1-879691-12-4
Cloth / Pages: 64 / $12.50 1992

The author's Distinguished Graduate Research Lecture addresses the implications of repeated live performances for establishing a play's definitive text. Physician, author, stage producer, and director, Miller has produced twelve plays in the acclaimed BBC Shakespeare Series, directed six of them, and has directed at least a dozen opera productions for the English National and Frankfurt Opera Companies.

Adapting Activities for Therapeutic Recreation Service: Concepts and Applications

by Jesse Thomas Dixon
ISBN: 0-916304-48-5
Paper / Pages: 100 / $14.50 1981

This book responds to a growing demand for practical devices which will enable disabled persons to participate in a full range of individual recreational services.

Be directed to amazon by clicking the image below:

An Alle Künstler! War, Revolution, Weimar: German Expressionist Prints, Drawings, Posters, and Periodicals from The Robert Gore Rifkind Foundation

By Ida Katherine Rigby; foreword Earl A. Powell, III
ISBN: 0-916304-62-0
Paper / Pages: 118 / $18.75
second edition, corrected, 1987; first edition 1983

In a scholarly and sympathetic study enhanced by over 100 illustrations, art historian Ida Rigby analyzes attempts by German Expressionist artists to integrate art into the movement for social reform in the wake of Germany's bitter defeat in World War I and during the ensuing revolution.

Oliver Mayer's THE HURT BUSINESS! A New Spring 2008 Title From Hyperbole Books and SDSU Press

Hyperbole Books is thrilled to announce the immanent release of The Hurt Business: Oliver Mayer's Early Works [+] PLUS in April 2008. More information on the book is here. For the proof of the new title's wraparound cover click here. Or, better, buy it now off Amazon.com.

On the right, L.A. playwright Oliver Mayer with his wife, the actress Marlene Forte.

From the Back Catalogue!

Adapting Activities for Therapeutic Recreation Service: Concepts and Applications by Jesse Thomas Dixon
ISBN: 0-916304-48-5
Paper / Pages: 100 / $14.50 1981

This book responds to a growing demand for practical devices which will enable disabled persons to participate in a full range of individual recreational services.



The Afterlife of Plays
by Jonathan Miller
ISBN: 1-879691-12-4
Cloth / Pages: 64 / $12.50 1992

The author's Distinguished Graduate Research Lecture addresses the implications of repeated live performances for establishing a play's definitive text. Physician, author, stage producer, and director, Miller has produced twelve plays in the acclaimed BBC Shakespeare Series, directed six of them, and has directed at least a dozen opera productions for the English National and Frankfurt Opera Companies.

Beyond the Graying of America: Who Cares?
by E. Percil Stanford
ISBN: 1-879691-11-6
Cloth / Pages: 64 / $10.00 Illustrated
1992

This title presents the author's University Research Lecture and a colloquium on the subject of social and cultural attitudes towards aging.

British Activities in California and the Pacific Coast of North America to 1860: An Archival Calendar Guide
by Abraham Nasatir and Gary Monell
ISBN: 0-916304-85-X
Cloth / Pages: 1224 / $175.00 (oversize shipping)
1990

This title provides the raw materials to put the story of English activities in California and the west coast of North America in a historical perspective. Letters are calendared in summary, precise, and verbatim form, with major topics highlighted.

Chant the Names of God: Music and Culture in Bhojpuri-Speaking India
by Edward O. Henry
ISBN: 0-916304-79-5
Paper / Pages: 322 / $19.75
1988

In describing the main occasions of which music enhances cultural events such as weddings, births, and mother goddess worship, Chant the Names of God shows how music responds to its social and cultural contexts.

Coroebus Triumphs: The Alliance of Sport and the Arts
edited by Susan Bandy
ISBN: 0-916304-76-0
Paper / Pages: 304 / $18.75
1989

During the summer of 1984, a collection of scholars, athletes, and artists convened in Coroebus's honor to celebrate the alliance of sport and the arts with the formation of the Sport Literature Association.

Four Trips to Antiquity: Adventures of an Artist in Maya Ruined Cities
by Everett Gee Jackson
ISBN: 1-879691-03-5 (limited, signed) (S) / Pages: 186 / $100.00
ISBN: 1-879691-04-3 / Cloth / $22.95 Illustrated
1991

Four Trips to Antiquity narrates an artist's search through Central America for the space form which inheres in ancient Maya sculpture.

Goat Tails and Doodlebugs: A Journey toward Art
by Everett Gee Jackson
ISBN: 1-879691-18-3, cloth ($22.95)
ISBN: 1-879691-19-1 is limited edition, signed) $100.00

In his fourth book, Everett Gee Jackson recounts tales from his earliest memories through his youth and college years which reveal the gentle nudges that life gave him on the journey to his career as an artist and, especially, as a painter of the Mexican and Central American scene. Jackson was one of several distinguished American artists who worked in Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. He was, for many years, chair of the Art Department at San Diego State University, and he founded the Latin American Committee of the San Diego Museum of Art.

Note: There is a special price for the order of both Jackson books, $38.00--illustrated with Jackson drawings in black and white, plus four color plates of his paintings.

Genetic Chemistry and the Future of Medicine
by Arthur Kornberg
ISBN: 0-916304-80-9
Paper / Paper: 54 / $9.50
1988

This title presents Nobel Laureate Arthur Kornberg's formal San Diego State University Distinguished Graduate Research Lecture. It is followed by excerpts from a colloquium discussion and by a short bibliography.

In the Shadow of Man
by Jane Goodall
ISBN:0-916304-82-5
Paper / Pages: 72 / $12.50
1988

San Diego State University's Fourth Distinguished Graduate Research Lecture, this title features the author's lecture, transcript of a colloquium, and a Goodall bibliography.

Clash of Identities By Dipak K. Gupta

I-879691-50-7
1998
hardback, 70 pp.
US $20.00

Clash of Identities presents Dipak K. Gupta's research on issues surrounding prediction in the social sciences, specifically, forecasting outbreaks of political violence. Honored as San Diego State University's eleventh Distinguished Graduate Research Lecturer, Gupta explores ethnic nationalism, globalization, and the dimensions of reason and intuition in the complex processes of political prediction in a variety of contexts. This book features Gupta's public lecture "Clash of Identities," his colloquium "Can We Predict Humanitarian Crises?", the article "An Early Warning about Political Forecasts: Oracle to Academics," and a comprehensive listing of the author's previous publications. Dipak K. Gupta is Professor in San Diego State University's School of Public Administration and Urban Studies, and Co-Director of the University's Institute for International Security and Conflict Resolution.