On Wednesday, June 14 at 7 pm, in conjunction with their Reading Room at Bard Graduate Center, Wendy’s Subway is pleased to present an evening of readings organized by the annual journal Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe. The evening will feature a special presentation of Eirik Steinhoff’s A Fiery Flying Roule (a series of pamphlets handed out during Occupy Oakland in 2011-2012, Station Hill Press) and readings by Andrea Lawlor, Miranda Mellis, and Matt Longabucco. Readers will read new work, variously engaging with titles in the Reading Room collection and its guiding theme, “ritual and capital.”
Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe (PM Press)
As the serial disasters of capitalism’s current crisis—economic, political, environmental—continue to batter the world, Black Box: A Record of the Catastrophe is a device for recording, analyzing, and transmitting events as they happen. But it offers neither dire predictions nor false hopes. Instead, it embraces the mystery of what might transpire. The word “catastrophe” has not always signified “disaster”; during the sixteenth century, especially in theater, it came to mean “a reversal of what is expected.” Black Box is ultimately a documentary project, a record of the catastrophe, but it’s an open question where the inquiry will take us. It may be a record of the disastrous end. Or it may be a record of the turning.http://www.blackboxcollective.org/
A Fiery Flying Roule (first circulated circa Occupy Oakland; forthcoming from Station Hill Press)
What is the rule of crisis? What role might we play in the metamorphosis? What might we contribute to a movement’s momentum—to keeping it on a roll? A roule is an experimental response to these questions. Using the permissions of the commonplace book, on the one hand, to yoke heterogeneous materials together, and the potential of poetry, on the other, as a uniquely responsible medium in which one might, as Robert Duncan once suggested, “keep | the ability to respond,” A Fiery Flying Roule is both a call and a response to a collective attempt to figure out new forms of belonging together as well as forms fit for communicating these new forms.http://afieryflyingroule.tumblr.com/
Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, edits fiction for Fence, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Lawlor’s writing has appeared in various literary journals including Ploughshares, Mutha, the Millions, jubilat, the Brooklyn Rail, Faggot Dinosaur, and Encyclopedia, Vol. II. Lawlor’s publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (forthcoming from Rescue Press in November 2017).
Matt Longabucco is the author of the chapbooks The Sober Day (DoubleCross Press, 2016) and Everybody Suffers: The Selected Poems of Juan García Madero (O’Clock Press, 2014). He is a co-founder of Wendy’s Subway, an independent library and meeting space for writers, artists, and readers. He teaches at New York University and Bard College, and lives in Brooklyn.
Miranda Mellis is the author of Demystifications, forthcoming from Solid Objects. Other books include The Spokes, None of This Is Real, and The Revisionist.
Eirik Steinhoff is a member of the Black Box Collective. He lives in Olympia, WA.
Wendy’s Subway is a non-profit library and writing space located in Brooklyn. Wendy’s Subway hosts a range of public programs, including readings and screenings, interdisciplinary talks and lectures, discussion and reading groups, and writing workshops. The non-circulating library holds a collection of books and documents with a special focus on poetry, art, theory, and philosophy, as well as the Laurin Raiken Archive, an extensive resource for the study of art history and criticism. Wendy’s Subway is operated by its membership of poets, curators, novelists, artists, and critics with an interest in hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary discourse. Originally designed by Tyler Polich and Hannah Wilentz, Reading Rooms have previously been installed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York); White Columns (New York); NADA New York (with Aeromoto, Mexico City); Brown University, (Providence, RI); and the Carnegie Mellon University School of the Arts (Pittsburgh, PA).
Join us for our last reading event on July 12!
