I’ve just completed a much-needed update and redesign to ring in 2011. The weeks between classes during breaks are increasingly the only time I have to accomplish tasks such as this, and it’s been a busy time indeed.
Another project I’m pleased to be focusing on is a new, small-chap series for Habenicht Press, with unique covers designed by artist Carrie Kaser, who previously contributed images for two broadsides to celebrate Hoa Nguyen‘s visit to Buffalo last winter. Look for news on that series soon.
Tina and I will also continue the House Reading Series with a visit from Aaron Lowinger and Morani Kornberg-Weiss next Friday, Jan. 14 at 7.30pm. If you’re in Buffalo, drop on by!
Since I have nothing much to say myself at the moment, I want to direct attention to a recent post by Richard Owens on Damn the Caesars.
The post responds to a piece by Keith Tuma in the most recent Chicago Review (55: 3/4). The Tuma essay critiques the avant-garde by way of the American Hybrid anthology, released last year. Here are some of the juiciest tidbits from Rich’s post:
the only thing at all advance about what passes for a contemporary avant-garde is that we can anticipate being bored in advance by generally anything that identifies itself with avant-garde practice. Too many careers and too much needlessly mediocre work are too easily built on hopelessly banal pretenses to avant-gardness, innovation, experimentation and newness.
…
The fact of newness, of innovation, is always already built into efficacious work — work that productively intervenes in a situation at a specific moment in time — and so the desire to fetishize newness, avant- or advanced-ness, is to slavishly subordinate our labor to the stagflated market value of a transcendental signified that wrenches our attention away from the far more immediate, material conditions of our making.
I’ll leave it with that, and urge you to visit DTC for the full text. Happy new year!
