Saturday, April 02, 2016

Tripwire 10: A Pestschrift for CA Conrad

An updated and extended version of my essay, “None of us have rules, none of us have scripture”: CA Conrad’s Advanced Elvis Course and the Politics of Spirit, appears in Tripwire 10 along with many other essays, remembrances, and tributes to CA Conrad.


TRIPWIRE 10 * A Pestschrift for CAConrad, with an interview, prose, poems, & a play by CAConrad, plus TC Tolbert, Magdalena Zurawski, Frank Sherlock, Anne Boyer, Marianne Morris, Allison Cobb, Jen Coleman, d/wolach & Elizabeth Williamson, erica kaufman, Thom Donovan, along with work from Danielle LaFrance, Juliana Spahr, Lila Matsumoto & Samantha Walton, Sarah Hayden, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, Frances Kruk, Sheila Mannix,  Jenifer K Wofford, Alicia Cohen, Cesar Moro (trans. Esteban A. Quispe), Heriberto YĆ©pez, ko ko thett, Steven Farmer, Nachoem Wjinberg (trans. David Colmer), Ghayath Almadhoun (trans. Catherine Cobham), Bert Stabler, Julian Francis Park on Claudia Rankine & Fred Moten, Tyrone Williams on Jocelyn Saidenberg, erica kaufman on Frank Sherlock, Eric Sneathen on Chris Nealon, William Rowe on Joshua Clover, Danny Hayward on Lucy Beynon & Lisa Jeschke, David W. Pritchard on Marie Buck, Kristin Palm on Wendy Walters, Linda Russo on Lorine Niedecker, James Sherry on Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, Laura Moriarty on Syd Staiti, Nich Malone on Towards. Some. Air. (eds. De’Ath & Wah), & Ryan Gato on P. Inman. Cover by Yuh-Shioh Wong. 340 pages. April 2016. $15.

Friday, April 01, 2016

Interview with David Buuck in The Conversant

Thanks to Caleb Beckwith and The Conversant for publishing this interview I conducted with David Buuck! 


I think also about unlearning as much as deskilling, to let go of mastery as the threshold of the literary and let the materials and questions lead the work. Kaia Sand & Jules Boykoff have written about inexpertise as a method—“inexpert investigation” is one way they phrase it—and I find their line of thinking about research and poetics compelling. At the same time, it’s a delicate balance between forging forms of politically committed work through methodologies of deskilled inexpertise (‘rigorous amateurism’ I’ve called it elsewhere) and simply half-assing a bunch of genres/media one has only half-studied & calling oneself a cross-genre performance artist or whatever. And of course to then try to corral everything into a book, when so much of the work exists off the page, either at/on specific sites or in/as time-based performances, means that failure is inherent in the book form. Could we unlearn the book?--David Buuck