A horrifying, heartbreaking, mindfuck of a book—a book unlike anything you will ever read. Schwartz has a unique stylistic approach that uses repetition, disorientation, and a kind of confessional alienation to map interior spaces’ topologies, causing rooms to speak, bringing colonial homes’ blueprints and the imagined people that populated their rooms to a bloody sort of life.
Read the full list at The Quarterly Conversation.
An LGBT group has created an alternative IKEA catalog in response to IKEA Russia’s removal of a story about a gay couple from its monthly catalog.
The group held a photoshoot in the IKEA store in Brooklyn for IQEA, a more inclusive catalog featuring same-sex couples. It also promoted a book about LGBT Russians titled Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories.
IKEA Russia’s monthly catalog was supposed to feature a couple from Dorset called Clara and Kirsty and their IKEA home furnishings, but was reportedly changed to a story about a designer in China to comply with the country’s anti-gay laws.
According to a spokesperson for the Russian store, there are two guidelines for distributing communication materials, which are home interior design and following the law.
Read the full story at Design Taxi.
Bangalore: When Rajathi Samsudeen, was 13 years old, her family forced her to discontinue her studies and shut her away in the four corners of the house for nine years, later tricking her into marriage, against her wishes.
In those nine years of solitude, shunned from the outside world, words and words alone became her sole companion. After marriage, her husband insisted she stay indoors, forbidding her from writing, which by now had become her only mode of expression. Finally when her poems reached the hands of a publisher and were published, Rajathi, who by then had taken the pen name Salma, to conceal her identification, had become a sensation among Tamil readers. Today she is one of the most renowned Tamil poets and her journey so far has only been a beginning.
Read the full article at Twocircles.net.
For your sister who scorned all the people who came down to Occupy Wall Street hoping to see Thom Yorke, a pocket-sized guide for revolution: Beautiful Trouble…
For your girlfriend who has a subscription to Psychology Today, and takes pride in slacking off every now and then, a cutting-edge collection on the science of being idle: Autopilot…
Read the full list at The Airship.
You talked about your geeking out on copyright a little bit. One of the best books on this subject is “Freeloading” by Chris Ruen. He talks about the way copyright needs to be vigorously policed and enforced but also suggests shortening copyright to 50 years. He and others have pointed out that “Happy Birthday to You” is not in the public domain, it goes back to the 19th century, but it’s going to be owned by Warner Bros. for years to come. Are you persuaded by the fact that copyright could be shortened a little bit to 50 years or, say, artist’s life plus 20?
Read the full article at Salon.
Protesters recently went to an Ikea store in Brooklyn to make the point. There, they staged a photo-shoot for an alternative catalog called IQEA, and promoted a forthcoming book about LGBT Russians titled Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories.
Jelezniakov added: “It’s that ‘little’ act of erasing that invalidates the very existence of many, only because of their sexual orientation.” The book and these pictures help put LGBT Russians back in the frame.
Read the full article at Fast Company.
A book-free holiday gift guide for the book lover in your life.
What is it?
A poetic tote bag sporting a quote from one of America’s finest (and most badass) poets, Eileen Myles.
Who is it for?
The poet lover in your life who isn’t afraid of getting dirty.
Read the full gift guide at Buzzfeed.
James Goodale’s Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, $20) is an account, by the New York Times’s counsel, of the crucial Supreme Court battle 40 years ago for the right to publish the Pentagon Papers. The NY Times and Washington Post were accused of criminal treachery for publishing the trove of documents about the conduct of the Vietnam war. Nixon, determined to punish both newspapers for endangering national security, moved for prior restraint. The Supreme Court, by a 6-3 majority, voted that the papers should be free to publish – thereby making it almost impossible for news organisations to be censored in advance by governments. Goodale is a passionate defender of First Amendment rights and his insider account of this crucial struggle is surprisingly racy – and extremely important.
Read the full list at The New Statesman
A story recently featured in an Ikea lifestyle magazine was supposed to be about two young parents reinventing their small living space. But after the furniture giant pulled the piece from its Russian edition, the focus went from storage space to social justice.
Listen to the full interview at CBC Radio.
Like every other woman in her village in Tamil Nadu, at the first sign of puberty Rajathi Salma was confined within the four walls of her family home. Deprived of any further education or social contacts, she began to write. After 25 years of isolation, a twist of political fate saw her elected to lead her local panchayat (village council). This was followed by four years as the head of the state’s Social Welfare Board. Today she is considered one of the most outspoken women poets in India.
Read the full interview at Development in Action
Issue 2 Vol.1 2013 into 2014
A limited edition of 1,000 copies printed. Published by The Third Eye, November 2013.
FEATURING
YOKO ONO • SEAN LENNON • ARTISTS AGAINST FRACKING • FUCK FOR FOREST • DADARA • GUILLERMO ALARCÓN • THE CELESTIAL TWINS • GRAN OM • KATE BELLM • ED COX • JULIANA NABUCO • SARA MAPELLI • NOMADS UNITED • KAREEN KOHN • YOSHIHIRO KOITANI • CAROLINA XAÜLIMA • BHAGAVAN-DAVID BARKI DE LIMA • ION DAVID
Read the whole issue online at The Third Eye.
For more than a decade, Reverend Billy, along with his Church of Stop Shopping, has preached fiery sermons against recreational consumerism — and more recently, against climate disaster. You can often find them greeting the crush of shoppers at Macy’s in New York City on Black Friday. That may not be the case this year. That is because in September, Rev. Billy was arrested after staging a 15-minute musical protest at a JPMorgan Chase bank in Manhattan to highlight the bank’s environmental record and the extinction of a Central American golden toad. He now faces a year in prison for misdemeanor charges of riot in the second degree, menacing in the third degree, unlawful assembly and two counts of disorderly conduct.
Read the full article and view the video at Democracy Now.
Refreshingly different from all that misanthropic Armageddon porn, The End of The World suggests we may already be at the “global going- crazy tipping point” of an already unfolding consumerism-fuelled climate change enviro-apocalypse, the ‘Shopocalypse’. While most prophets of doom relish the prospect of unbelievers engulfed by extreme weather events or whatever, the Rev’s take on the End of the World is strangely uplifting, with an obvious love of people and of life, even if all life on Earth is about to disappear.
Read the full review in issue #309 of Fortean Times.
Rajathi Salma and Kim Longinotto’s Salma: Filming a Poet in her Village is a hugely engaging, disconcerting book that takes you behind the scenes of BAFTA award winning Kim Longinotto’s beautiful film Salma. This is not an academic book but reads more like a travelogue or a personal journal, exploring the experiences of two women who come together to make the film.
Read the full review at Engenderings.
Exciting that three of the novels on our list are a) written by Irish authors (Alan Cunningham, Eimear McBride, Philip Terry), b) experimental, c) published by independent publishers. A pity they’re exiled. (And we have more to say on this in our editorial in issue one.) Anyway… our favourite novels and non-fiction reads of the year.
Read the full story at Gorse.
“Companies seem to become more obsessed with talking about innovation as they become less and less innovative. Today, the phrase “radical innovation” has become popular in contrast with incremental innovation. It describes some absurdly innovative idea that’s challenging for people to understand—if the idea were easily comprehensible it would hardly be radically innovative.
The real conundrum is how to “engineer radical innovation,” as a recent Harvard Business Review article put it. There used to be an answer to that question and it was Bell Labs.”
Read the full article at Quartz.
A group of gay and lesbian demonstrators touched down at an Ikea in Brooklyn, N.Y. over the weekend for a “guerilla photo shoot” in protest of the Swedish company’s decision to nix an article about a same-sex couple from the December issue of the Ikea Family Live magazine, which is distributed in Russia.
The photo shoot was organized by Joseph Huff-Hannon, co-editor of the forthcoming book Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories, Alexander Kargaltsev, a gay Russian artist and photographer who was recently granted asylum in the U.S., and Rusa LGBT co-founder Nina Long.
Read the full article at the Huffington Post.
In response to Ikea’s removal of a profile of a lesbian couple from the Russian edition of the company’s Ikea Family Live magazine, a group of gay and lesbian Russian activists and American allies staged a kiss-in at the Ikea store in Brooklyn.
Ikea cited Russia’s prohibition on “promoting non-traditional sexual relationships to minors” for removing the profile of a couple named Kirsty and Clara and their baby.
Read the full story at Buzzfeed.
Eileen Myles is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, plays, and libretti, including Snowflake/different streets, Inferno (A Poet’s Novel), The Importance of Being Iceland (for which she received a Warhol Creative Capital Art Writers Grant) and Sorry, Tree. A former director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Myles campaigned as an openly female write-in candidate for U.S. president in 1992. She received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2012. She lives in New York.
See the full list at the Advocate.
When our imaginary relationship to our conditions of existence becomes desynchronized with ongoing events, phenomena such as Wikileaks become impossible to comprehend. One snowy Berlin night after the Chaos Computer Congress in 2009, I rather accidentally ended up getting dinner with Jacob Appelbaum and a few other assorted computer security experts. In the context of a rather arcane discussion of routing problems in Tor, the topic of Wikileaks was broached. Not one to mince words, I warned Jake that Wikileaks was going to get him into deep trouble. He cracked a smile in return and said “We’re not dissidents, we’re meta-dissidents. We only provide tools to dissidents.” Alas, the FBI does not make such fine-grained distinctions. Now, the situation is grim; Jacob Appelbaum is on a terrorist watch-list, Julian Assange is trapped in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and Bradley Manning is on trial after being in solitary confinement for far over two years. In the largest leak yet, Edward Snowden has revealed that the NSA is spying on all internet communications, and finds himself a man without a country despite the help of Wikileaks. The contradictions of Wikileaks are apparent to all; the hackers that wished to free the world’s information find themselves caged within fleshspace.
Read the full review at Computational Culture.
Without a doubt one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry, and the type of true original we need more of in literature. This book — and everything else Myles has ever put into the world — should be considered a classic.
Read the full review at Flavorwire
3:AM: What are your earliest and most formative memories of stories?
Schwartz: Well, I have no recollection at all, for instance, of the bedtime story, though I’d like to think there was such a thing, at least on occasion, and I can picture, without difficulty, precisely where a parent would have sat in relation to my bed, the angle of light, some of the accoutrements of the room, and so on. I’m not sure they were stories, exactly, but I liked Richard Scarry’s books, I know that, and I suppose this was fairly early—all those collections of animals costumed as humans, moving through a town.
3:AM: When did your writing-inclined side begin to take shape?
Schwartz: High school. I had in mind a very long espionage novel, filled with ludicrous complications, and I managed to stack quite a lot of paper, and to scatter still more around the room. It was a terrific assemblage of garbage. I prepared elaborate charts—as appendices, I guess—to document the plot, every deformity of the story. All the possibilities, as I saw them.
Read the whole interview at 3:AM Magazine.
Strike Debt – an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street Movement – launched a project to buy up debt belonging to ordinary Americans and abolish it so that they never have to pay it back. A year later the group’s raised more than $600,000 and already used two-thirds of that money to clear nearly $15m personal debt caused by medical bills. And now it plans to go after student debt. We spoke to Andrew Ross from Strike Debt to find out more.
Read the interview at Occupy.com.
And now, 15 long years after that debut, Schwartz is out with his second book, John the Posthumous, which his new publisher, OR Books, calls “a novella in objects.” o call this book a novella is a bit like calling a spaceship a motor vehicle: while the label might be factually true, it’s also wildly inaccurate and inadequate.
This book, like its predecessor, is immaculately plotless, a whirlwind of objects, etymologies, histories (including a history of the American bed), Biblical citations, sisters, adultery, insects, murder. Again, there is an air of ruin, and of relentless unreliability. Here’s how the book got its title: ”The foregoing ignores — or mistakes — several details. Cuckold’s Point, according to the map I have in hand, is closer to Evelyn than to Deptford. And Brockwell, strictly speaking, does not exist — in London, anyway. Furthermore, the horned figure — now gone — was not a gallows, in fact, but a simple post. It had been exhibited at a fair — the Horn Fair — in celebration of a king’s cuckolding. Which king? King Richard or King Edward. (John the Posthumous — usually rendered in red — was a French king, alive for five days.)”
Read the full review at the Millions.
A group of Occupy Wall Street activists has bought almost $15m of Americans’ personal debt over the last year as part of the Rolling Jubilee project to help people pay off their outstanding credit.
Rolling Jubilee, set up by Occupy’s Strike Debt group following the street protests that swept the world in 2011, launched on 15 November 2012. The group purchases personal debt cheaply from banks before “abolishing” it, freeing individuals from their bills.
By purchasing the debt at knockdown prices the group has managed to free $14,734,569.87 of personal debt, mainly medical debt, spending only $400,000.
“We thought that the ratio would be about 20 to 1,” said Andrew Ross, a member of Strike Debt and professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. He said the team initially envisaged raising $50,000, which would have enabled it to buy $1m in debt.
Read the full article at the Guardian.
WHEN A BOOK called Auto-Pilot: The Art and Science of Doing Nothing popped through the Idler Academy’s letterbox, we sat up and took notice. At last, here was the scientific explanation behind the power of idleness.
We immediately invited the author to give a talk on his work, and now Andrew Smart is coming over from his home in Switzerland to address an audience at a one-off Idler Academy symposium.
Read the full details at the Idler.
Front and centre of my New York bookstore’s self improvement section – in between Secrets of the Southern Belle and The Essential Wayne Dyer Collection – is a small blue hardback with YOKO ONO stamped on the cover. It is a copy of Acorn, a collection of enigmatic aphorisms, such as ”Take your pants off before you fight”, by the 80-year-old avant-garde artist and widow of John Lennon.
This new collection of conceptual instructions by Ono, published nearly 50 years after its predecessor Grapefruit, was initially created for a website event. ”Now it’s being published in book form,” Ono writes in the introduction. ”I’m riding a time machine that’s going back to the old ways! Great!”
Read the full article at the Sydney Morning Herald.
Since creating the post-religious Church of Stop Shopping in 1999, the Reverend Billy has held services in churches, community centres, forests, fields, parking lots, shopping malls and – above all – inside brand-name stores across the US and Europe, preaching against consumerism, and for economic and ecological justice.
The creation of actor Bill Talen, the Reverend Billy is a televangelist-style preacher with Elvis hair whose antics were considered sufficiently threatening that Starbucks once issued a memo to its employees explaining how to deal with him (‘What should I do if Reverend Billy is in my store?’). Friends who have taken part in his actions tell me that they were among the most moving activist experiences they’ve ever had.
A genre-defying (and beautifully designed) blend of words and pictures – part sermon, part personal narrative, part surreal fantasy, its brief 118 pages contain 33 images, ranging from a horse’s eye and a slice of pumpkin pie to a decoration from Newton’s Principia – Talen’s latest book attempts to share his ‘personal work at making an Earthy religion’ in response to our environmental crises, the biggest of which, of course, is climate change.
Read the full review at Peace News.
This enormous novel is very short and does not resemble a novel. There are some characters here, I think, but they are never fleshed out. They come as names, existentially fragile inasmuch as they are pointedly graphic (‘Gertrude, in blue ink’, ‘William, in cursive’). It would take no more than ‘a table knife or a razorblade’ to excise them from a text that wants only to call attention to textuality. Several pages are spent comparing translations of the Bible until eventually even its pictorial representations become textual: ‘Satan is often shown without a right hand – or with the letter X in its stead.’ Methodically the narrative makes an inventory of archaic vocabulary and darkly suggestive etymologies. (‘Pigeon’s bone refers to a manacle or a shackle, especially at a hanging.’) But the exacting prose in which it does so turns out to reveal nothing but its own inexactitude. What we find concealed within these falsified (read: creative) definitions is in fact an ontologically precarious murder mystery which, composed by an author for whom text is misleading and meaning unstable, comes largely resistant to spoilers. It is a case built on intimations. We are missing a killing. We are missing a crime scene. We are missing a body, too. If this information was ever put down in writing, it has since been removed. After all, it would take no more than a table knife.
Read the full piece in the Totally Dublin.
Her glitzy, diva’ish concert performance wouldn’t be out of place at that shrine of campy over-the-top-pop Eurovision. Songbird Valeriya Perfilova is one of Russia’s favourite entertainers and with three children she’s become a high profile symbol of motherhood and motherland. She’s also one of the more visible supporters of a Russian law criminalising the so-called ‘promotion of homosexuality’.
‘I think it’s our duty to protect our children from any kind of sexual propaganda. A person’s private life has to be behind their doors. Why should I know who, who does this or that. I think it’s not decent to speak about it.’ VALERIYA PERFILOVA, Entertainer
Masha Gessen is also a mother of three but she she believes the open and vague wording of the homosexual propaganda law means she could be marched off the jail at any time. That’s because she’s a lesbian, raising her children with her partner and that could be interpreted as flouting that law.
‘Theoretically it’s possible to start hauling us into the police station today, several times a day for instances of violation.’ MASHA GESSEN, Writer
Watch the full broadcast via ABC News.
