Now Available! pacificREVIEW 2011...

get it HERE!

The 2011 edition of pacificREVIEW: A West Coast Arts Review Annual edited by Lindsey Messner with undergraduates and graduate students from SDSU and published by San Diego State University Press; contributors include: Melissa Castillo-Garsow, Doug Cox, Jason Joyce, Paul David, Paris Brown, Shane Roeschlein, Joshua Gage, Vivekanand Jha, Alan Britt, Elisabeth Sharp McKetta, Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Frank Scozzari, Deepak Chaswal, Ken Poyner, James B. Nicola, Eric Barnes, M. Kaat Toy, Janice Pisello, Roger Camp, Kent Cooper, Scott McFarland, Guy J. Jackson, Stephen Lackaye, Catherine McGuire, Darren Fernando, Kelly Talbot, Carroll Susco, and Christopher Mulrooney.

You Know Where You Are Now: A Look Inside Border Lives

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There is no faster or more effective way to mainline the feeling of existential vertigo than spending time along the borderlands dividing Mexico from the United States of America. Life along this border is an incongruous, sensory-overloading experience: visions of ludicrous corporate wealth propelled by extreme social poverty; floating, malleable identities and competing histories; no fixed addresses; no clear, concise version of any one lasting truth to tie it all together.

It’s a psychically battering experience, but a rewarding one as well, in terms of expanded insight and cross-cultural empathy, and SDSU Press’s essay collection Border Lives: Personal Essay on the U.S.-Mexico Border/Vidas Fronterizas: La Crónica en la Frontera México-Estados Unidos , has all three—the battery, the insight, and the empathy—in spades.

The ten essays collected in Border Lives (each one presented back-to-back in Spanish and English translations) offer deeply personal and haunting snapshots of life and death along the border, but amidst the varying tones, backgrounds, and approaches employed by the writers here assembled, some common narrative threads emerge to provide the reader with an explosively visceral experience of life along this interzone of cultural, political, and economic conflict.

Strongest amongst these commonalities is the feeling that to live a border life is to experience a sense of disconnect on a daily basis, but a disconnect one cannot disassociate from. It’s always present, a source code of freeway signs and graffiti tags, bible verses and rock lyrics, corporate sloganeering and calls for la revolución, Prozac prescriptions and cocaine addictions, that constantly throw off one’s effort to express a thought as simply cogent as “This is who I am and this is where I’m from.”

In the end, this disconnect is what renders the essay as the perfect literary form to explore the vast complexities of life on the border. As SDSU Press Director Harry Polkinhorn puts it in the collection’s opening piece, essays “provide us with a unique blend of philosophical meditation, travel impressions, character sketch, autobiographical reference, and journalistic observation, all inflected by the wit, irony, or lofty sentiments which color the quality of their writer’s lives.”

The writers of Border Lives present the reader with stories both intimate in emotion and all-encompassing in scale: Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz undertakes a time-traveling dissection of his youth in northern Mexico and coming-of-age as a rock & roll-loving medical student in Jalisco; William Nericcio questions the tenets of memory and truth while exploring the contrast between border towns like Laredo, Texas, where class, not race, is the dominant factor in the social fabric of society, and San Diego, California, where ethnic and political prejudices assign class to each race; Emily Hicks injects a flair of performance art into her story of betrayal, breakdowns, and single motherhood; and James Bradley, amidst his own personal reflections of border life, ruminates on the United States’ shameful history of land-grabs, political power plays, and military interventions in Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.

Border Lives is an excellent resource for anyone hoping to gain a more comprehensive perspective on life along the U.S-Mexico border, but be warned: You may be thrown off by what you find when you get here. The landscape is jarring, jagged, much of it an industrial wasteland bled dry by corporate interests. People here travel through time-loops and commune with ghosts. The weight of history, and the desperate efforts of those who wish to re-write or wish it away, makes it nearly impossible to know where you’ve been, where you’re going, or who you even are anymore. The only thing that can be known along the border is where you are right now; the rest is up for grabs.

Fluxus! Our Best-selling Study of Fluxus by Owen F. Smith...

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Fluxus: The History of an Attitude is based on the Owen F. Smith's exhaustive archival research tracking the physical remains of this fascinating interdisciplinary and international arts movement that began in the 1960s. In his dynamic introduction, Smith recalls how:

Fluxus was once called 'the most radical and experimental art movement of the sixties,' but for anyone seeking to learn more about the historical nature of Fluxus and its conceptual framework it might more readily seem to be just plain frustrating rather than radical. This is in part the case because Fluxus is historically complex and philosophically difficult to define. This very ambiguity, however, is an aspect of its radicality. Fluxus is both an attitude towards art-making and culture that is not historically limited, and a specific historical group. As an attitude, Fluxus is part of a larger conceptual development that is a significant, although often overlooked, current of the twentieth-century Western avant-garde. This attitude is in part traceable to the network of interrelated ideas about culture, politics, and society explored earlier in the twentieth century by the Futurists, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists. Some of these same ideas were later explored after World War II by artists associated with groups such as Letterism, International Situationism, Nouveau Realisme, and Fluxus itself.

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Also, Smith claims the Fluxus is still very much alive today and that "Fluxus is by nature anti-reductivist, for it does not seek the illumination of some end or fact but celebrates participation in a non-hierarchal density of experience. In this way Fluxus does not refer to a style or even a procedure as such but to the presence of a totality of social activities. Fluxus seeks to shift from traditional utilitarian-based proscriptions to an open-ended, less evaluative participation in the processes themselves." Smith's singular study is emerging as one of the more important meditations on Fluxus--our SDSU Press volume is provided with a comprehensive bibliography and index.

Order it now from SDSU Press via Amazon.com.

New Books from SDSU PRESS and Hyperbole Books! Mark Wheeler, ed.DARWIN 150 Years of Evolution and Spencer Dew's ACKER Learning for Revolution

Buy these new books by Marc Wheeler and Spencer Dew here; high-res covers for the book appear below--just hit the images to enlarge...

SDSU PRESS Announcing a New Collection of Essays on Charles Darwin

New and IN PRINT: Learning for Revolution: The Work of Kathy Acker by Spencer Dew

Hyperbole Books! Studied in Graphic/Rhetoric Textbook

Hit the image to see it huge; this link for the googlebooks source.

New Books Coming Spring 2011 from SDSU Press and Hyperbole Books! Spencer Dew on KATHY ACKER! Mark Wheeler et al on CHARLES DARWIN

pacREV 2010 has LAUNCHED

Beyond the Graying of America: Who Cares? | E. Percil Stanford

Want to live forever?  Tough!  It's impossible (unless you have some mad scientist friends, of course).  If you're really worried about it, take a peek at SDSU Press' Beyond the Graying of America: Who Cares?  This publication is a chronicle of SDSU's Albert W. Johnson University Research Lecture Series in which Dr. Stanford presents and explains two major ideas that have changed the study of gerontology is America: the cultural equity and ethics of aging in the population and the significant role aging Americans have in our society.  

Stanford elaborates on how growing old is, indeed, a “serious social, economic, and sometimes political issue,” for he estimates that by 2030, that the 85+ age bracket will represent one in every eleven older persons (26).  This, of course, is diversified b the many ethnic groups that make up the United States.  Within these diverse groups, however, are four similar concerns: “1. the lack of adequate income; 2. health; 3. high energy costs; 4. housing, 5. transportation; and 6. social support systems” (27).  Stanford continues by stating that with these worries are predominantly popular within immigrant populations, and that these immigrants will create a change within the profile of San Diego’s aged population and the overall population of the city.  He believes that the Baby Boomers are also contributing to this; “as the median age of the population increases, life expectancies, falling fertility rates, substantial in-migration of employment in aging persons, and a large number of retirement-related migrants add to the reasons the median age is apt to rise beyond the age of 30” (28).  Life styles and government programs must change to meet these social changes – consequences of the aged population will not wait.

In the second half of the lecture, Stanford describes the aged population’s significant role in American society, that the aged are not and should not be seen as a burden, for

“the future, as we know it, will have its foundation laid by the elderly.  Their wisdom, insights, and dedication to preserving our society will have been the foundation on which our future lies.  We would be extremely uninformed to assume that the elderly would not be an essential element in framing our future.  It is the elderly moreso than anyone who can begin to anticipate the nature of things to come.”

           

The “era of the aged” is upon us – graying is a sign of maturity, not of decay (45).  See?  Nothing to worry about.  Aging is something to expect and rejoice about.  When you are 85 years old, you will provide the future with everything they need to know about how to succeed.  How could that bring you down???

Since E. Percil Stanford’s lecture, “he has served as the Regional Director for the West Region for AARP since 2002 and as the interim director of the National AARP State Affairs Department working on state advocacy issues.  Dr. Stanford was given the title of Chief Diversity Officer for AARP in December 2005.” He has been a pioneer for gerontology and of the aged population.  Bravo!

pac REV's Call for Submissions flyers are DONE, and they are fabulous!

San Diego State University's annual literary journal has finally released its call for submissions flyer collection.  Look at those beauts!

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more info

Special thanks to Svante Morgan Nilson for creating these masterpieces.

New Books Coming Fall 2010 from San Diego State University Press! SDSU Press

We've got a great new anthology available this December, 2010 from SDSU Press. 150 Years of Evolution: Darwin's Impact on Contemporary Thought and Culture is in final proofs and will be available here and @ our amazon.com storefront soon! Hit the image on your left to see the new coverspread.

Jane Goodall on 60 Minutes | In the Shadow of Man | SDSU PRESS

One of the best moments in the history of SDSU Press came that day in 1988 when we published Jane Goodall's In the Shadow of Man (Distinguished Graduate Research Lecture, 4th). Goodall is still doing amazing work as you can see in the October 2010 episode of 60 Minutes that features this singular anthropological sojourner--an original thinker and writer who revealed the world of chimpanzees in ways that taught us about higher primates, to be sure, but about ourselves as well.

Screen the piece on Goodall below and don't be shy about scooping up a copy of Goodall's book, in hardcover, from SDSU Press for only $7.95.

Get your competitive vibes goin' and submit to the 30 Below Contest!

  Narrative magazine, a nifty non-profit org. that promotes the art of storytelling (also nifty), wants your submissions (I sure hope they're nifty too)!  Their annual competition, 30 Below, is upon us, and the deadline is coming up.

Here are the specs:

"The N30B Contest is a once-a-year event for all young writers, visual artists, photographers, performers, and filmmakers between eighteen and thirty years old. 

We're looking for short stories, short shorts, essays, memoirs, photo essays, audio and video stories, graphic stories, all forms of literary nonfiction,and excerpts  from longer works of both fiction and nonfiction. The editors of Narrative have discovered and published the works of many writers who have gone on to become household names, and we continue to look for and to encourage the best new talent to be found.  Don't miss this chance."

Deadline: October 29th. Midnight. PST.

$1,500 First Prize  (WHOAH!)

$750 Second Prize

$300 Third Prize

Ten finalists receive $100 each

The prize winners and finalists will be announced in Narrative. All N30B entries will be considered for publication. All are eligible for the $5,000 Narrative Prize for 2011 and for acceptance as a Story of the Week.

If you're curious about past winners and their work, click here.

Reading Street Art

In the early chapters of An ABC of Contemporary Reading, Richard Kostelantz reflects upon the ideas of originality and the avant-garde, especially in terms of literary greats of the experimental form (e.g. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound). However, Kostelantz’s opinions of modern art, including modern writing, prove exceptionally interesting; he claims, “The aim of art in our time is the creation not of ‘beauty’ but of rare experience; the effect of innovative art is not ‘pleasure’ but unusual perception” (45).

Based on Kostelanetz’s opinion of modern art, the fashionable, even trendy, popularity of street art falls into the realm of “unusual perception.” Few traditionalists would classify street graffiti as beautiful, definitely not high art; however, if we follow Kostelanetz’s philosophy, modern art thrives on the extraordinary experience of the viewer and his/her ability to perceive a work outside the accepted setting (gallery, museum, etc) and outside the common response to works of art classified as “beautiful.”

Even in our own humble city, a street art experiment exploded in what appeared to be a lurking reminder to look around and perceive the world, and art, a little differently. MCASD’s exhibit entitled Viva La Revolucion: A Dialogue with The Urban Landscape literally brought modern art to the streets and captured its dialectical relationship to the traditional art setting. Massive murals bombarded city streets while taglines (OBEY) and artists’ infamous logos (See Space Invader above) splattered against the sides of buildings.

Kostelanetz continues, “In our time, experiments with insufficiency are more interesting, more sympathetic, and ultimately more heroic than the exploitation of virtuosity” (43). Does this trend force us to actually “experience” modern art? Does this presence of street art alter our perceptions regarding the traditional way we view and consider beauty? See: Banksy.