Alle Kunstler: War--Revolution--Weimar : German Expressionist Prints, Posters, and Periodicals from the Robert Gore Rifkind Foundation

Visual Arts on the U.S./Mexican Border edited by Harry Polkinhorn, Rogelio Reyes, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz

Visual Arts on the U.S./Mexican Border edited by Harry Polkinhorn, Rogelio Reyes, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz | ISBN: 0-916304-93-0 Paper / Pages: 170 / $12.50 Illustrated (1991)

Click the image opposite for more details and to order this back-in-print volume via Amazon.com

BORDER LIVES: PERSONAL ESSAYS ON THE U.S./MEXICO BORDER

surTEXT: San Diego State Univesity Press Titles Focused on Latin America, Mexico, and the American Southwest

...click here for the link!

Lou Dobbs recent rantings have SDSU PRESS Intern Whitney Black holding forth on Nuria Vilanova's BORDER TEXTS: WRITING FICTIONS FROM NORTHERN MEXICO

Previous CNN anchor Lou Dobbs has risen up a controversial opinion on that of immigration. Reports from FAIR: Fairness in reporting and accuracy, " Dobbs' tone on immigration is consistently alarmist; he warns his viewers (3/31/06) of Mexican immigrants who see themselves as an "army of invaders" intent upon reannexing parts of the Southwestern U.S. to Mexico, announces (11/19/03) that "illegal alien smugglers and drug traffickers are on the verge of ruining some of our national treasures," and declares (4/14/05) that "the invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans" through "deadly imports" of diseases like leprosy and malaria. And Dobbs makes no effort to provide a nuanced or balanced picture of the issue; as he told CNN Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz (4/2/06): "I'm not interested—are you interested in six or seven views, or are you interested in the truth? Because that's what I'm interested in; that's what my viewers are interested in." When did we give one man the power to decide our truth? Personally, I AM interested in six or seven views, I AM interested in formulating my own opinion and definition of the truth and I resent his arrogance in assuming that his opinions are "truth".

Nuria Vilanova presents a more compassionate articulation of the issues concerning our borders through her compilation of essays in Border Texts. Vilanova’s experiences living in Mexico City between 1993 and 1998 shaped her examination in creating this novel, she writes, “I have come to realize that my attraction to borders translated into a certain love of the temporality and excitement of living between cultures, peoples, symbols, and territories”. Using fiction produced in the area of Northern Mexico, Vilanova takes a Mexican Point of View in analyzing the relationship between the Mexico-U.S. border. Her scrutinizing the use of the border’s physical entity in works of art and fiction from a society whose cultural perception is profoundly influenced by their associations with borders; Vilanova is able to illustrate how the idea of the border as a barrier influences the themes and work of artists, intellectuals and writers of the region. It is the application of physicality and emotion to the spatial entity of the border, with connotations of distress and violence, that allow Vilanova to uncover the relationship between the physical territory and symbolic representation in her work, Border Texts.

Noam Chomsky and the Gilmore Girls: As Tight as the JoBro’s Skinny Jeans

Noam Chomsky: professor, leftist thinker, creator of the Chomsky Hierarchy of Formal Languages, all around rabble rouser and... CW star?

That's right. Everyone's favorite anarchist philosopher was regularly featured on the CW's hit teen drama Gilmore Girls.

Take a look at these snippets:

Rory (refusing to dip fruit in her chocolate fondue): We're fondue purists, Grandma.
Lorelai: Yeah, we dip old school.
Emily: The government says you should have nine servings of fruits and vegetables per day.
Lorelai: Imperialist propaganda.
Rory: Noam Chomsky would agree.
Lorelai: I bet Noam doesn't dip fruit.

Or in a dramatic showdown between Rory Gilmore and the Senior Class President about the school rules on appropriate hemline lengths:

Francie: This is politics. If you've got a problem, tell it to Noam Chomsky.

Yes, folks. Chomsky's in, like Ed Hardy t-shirts or Megan Fox—but sexier. Well, not really, but he’s still this season’s must-have theorist.

Feeling a little worried that you’ll be the only one at your local sock hop without any delectable Noam tidbits to share? Wondering where you can find some Chomsky to chomp on before the next Open Mic Poetry Night at that indie coffee joint?

Look no further, because the SDSU Press has got you covered. With this:

Even saying the title makes you seem smart! And it's only $6.95! For Real!

It’s written by Chomsky himself, my friends. Trust me, be the first kid on your block to score this, and you can turn up your nose at that girl down the street that managed to get tickets to the Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Tour and has been lording it over you ever since (not that you wanted to go, anyway).

What are you waiting for? You can order it here! You know you want to.

P.S. Does anyone else think “Noam doesn’t dip fruit” would make a great t-shirt slogan?

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.