Lab and Field Reports for the Organism for Poetic Research on the Skin of Space/Pelt No. 1 Release

opr-logo-copyDate: Friday, May 25, 2012
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: FREE
Presented by: the Hollow Earth Society

The Organism for Poetic Research consists of exactly what its name says it does. The publication PELT constitutes its epidermal organ, its interface with the world. Operating at the crux of empirical and humanist methodologies, fascinated with differentiation, the OPR has been studying the problem of the Skin of Space as an important political effort.

This event marks the release of the first volume of PELT, titled ‘The Skin of Space,’ and heralds the occasion with the presentation of additional field and lab reports on the subject, in the form of poetry, lecture, and findings presented in printed graphic arts.

Lytle Shaw is the author of Cable Factory 20 (Atelos), Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, articles on Smithson, and the forthcoming Specimen Box (Periscope) and Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetry (Univ. Alabama Press). He is associate Prof. of English at NYU.

Ed Keller is Associate Dean of Distributed Learning and Technology and Associate Professor, School of Design Strategies, at the New School. He is also a co-founder with Carla Leitao of AUM Studio, an award winning architecture and new media firm, and his work and writing has appeared in Praxis, ANY, AD, Arquine, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Architecture, Parpaings, Precis, Wired, Metropolis, Assemblage, Ottagono, and Progressive Architecture.

Jeff T. Johnson‘s poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in 1913 a journal of formsdandelion magazine, Slope, and Whiskey & Fox, among other publications. Critical essays have appeared in The RumpusColdfrontSink Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, is Editor in Chief at LIT, and edits Dewclaw. He is currently working on LIVE FROM THE VOID, a typographic projection digitally rendered in architectural model space. For more information, visit jefftjohnson.wordpress.com.

Daniel C. Remein and Ada Smailbegović are colleagues as Ph.D. candidates in the English department at NYU, and are co-founders, with Rachael Wilson, of the Organism for Poetic Research.

BF Bifocals is a collective that does contemporary design, free.

Gracie Leavitt‘s first book of poetry—Monkeys, Minor Planet, Average Star—is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. She is also the author of the chapbook Gap Gardening, out this year from These Signals Press. Poems have appeared or will soon in such journals as The Brooklyn Review, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, LIT, The Recluse, Sentence, and SET. Transatlantic collaborations appear in Whiskey & Fox‘s series “Parks and Occupation.”

The Odditorium: The Architecture and Allure of Extremes

covodditoriumIllustrated lecture and booksigning with Melissa Pritchard, author of The Odditorium
Date: Monday, May 7
Time: 8:00
Admission: $5

Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Tonight, please join-Melissa Pritchard, award winning fiction writer, essayist and journalist-for an illustrated lecture on some of the more extreme and unusual historical personalities and architectures featured in her highly praised new collection of stories, The Odditorium. From the enigma of the German feral child, Kaspar Hauser, to St. Pelagia, Russian “holy fool,” to Robert Ripley of Believe it or Not fame and the Wild West Show’s sharpshooter Annie Oakley, Pritchard will discuss her own fascination with the bizarre, the haunted, the fantastic and the grotesque, including short excerpts from several stories while asking of herself and her audience the bigger question: What lies behind our cultural obsession with extremes, from the tragic to the sublime, from the monstrous to the transcendent?

Melissa Pritchard is a Flannery O’Connor, Janet Heidinger Kafka, and Carl Sandburg Award-winning author. She has also been an embedded journalist in Afghanistan, where she befriended Ashton Goodman, a young soldier she memorialized for O, The Oprah Magazine, and authored a biography of Virginia Galvin Piper that US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’ Connor called “a delight to read.” Founder of the Ashton Goodman Fund and a member of the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, helping to promote literacy and education for Afghan women and girls, she teaches at Arizona State University.

Panel Discussion on Para-Academic Publishing & Book Party

panel-discussion-on-paraDate: Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Time: 7:00 PM
Admission: FREE
Presented by: the Hollow Earth Society, The Public School New York, and punctum books

The term “para-academic” captures the multivalent sense of something that fulfills and/or frustrates the academic from a position of intimate exteriority. Para-academia is that which is beside academia, a place whose logic encompasses many reasons and no reason at all (para-, “alongside, beyond, altered, contrary,” from Greek para-, “beside, near, from, against, contrary to,” cognate with Sanskrit para “beyond”).

The para is the domain of: shadow, paradigm, daemon, parasite, supplement, amateur, elite. The para-academic embodies an unofficial excess or extension of the academic that helps, threatens, supports, mocks (par-ody), perfects and/or calls it into question simply by existing next to it.

Following a series of classes organized through the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York on the subject of “Para-Academia and Theory Fiction,” this event brings together a group of editors whose work in publishing falls within the para-academic, in one sense or another.

Presenters will address the practice and theory of para-academic publishing, its relation to various areas of life (art, pedagogy, politics), and present some of their recent titles.

  • Katherine Pickard & Miguel Abreu, Sequence Press
  • Paul Boshears, continent
  • Eileen A. Joy & Nicola Masciandaro, punctum books
  • Sina Najafi, Cabinet Magazine
  • Dan Remein, Whiskey & Fox, Pelt
  • Valerie Vogrin, Sou’wester, Peanut Books

SUSPICIOUS ZOOLOGY Book Launch!

pinball-lizard-coloredSUSPICIOUS ZOOLOGY Book Launch!
With creators Wythe Marschall, Stephen Aubrey, Ethan Gould, and Grace Baxter
Special guest David Greenwood
Date: Friday, October 7
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: FREE – The book itself costs $8, and we very much appreciate our supporters!
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society

Please join the Hollow Earth Society to celebrate the release of their latest book, a comic-sized full-color exploration of animal-kind.

Licensed from our Australian cable television partners over at EnviroChan, Suspicious Zoology: Pet Gazette No. 1 (Uncommon “Friends”) is a wild—and possibly totally spurious—exploration of the animal kingdom!

Take a wild ride through the exciting (and often dangerous!) world of animals with this very special catalogue of uncommon “friends”—(sort of) written by TV’s own Sebastian “Bass” Knobloch, host of EnviroChan’s hit show, Whoooa there, don’t pick ‘er up by that, she looks—OH, YEAH—RADICAL ANIMALS!!

This event will feature readings from the book, puppets, original art, bad Australian adventuring accents, and lots of wine.

The animals detailed in SZ #1 (Uncommon “Friends”) include:

  • The Rollerbeest
  • The Hollermite
  • The Yam Whale
  • The Soft Sell Crab
  • The Daxovore
  • The Pinball Lizard
  • The Mangonel Ant
  • The Dusk Girdle
  • The Elephance

About the creators:

Stephen Aubrey (editor, co-author) is a writer, editor, dramaturg and recovering medievalist currently living in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in Publishing Genius, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He has an MFA from Brooklyn College where he received the Himan Brown Prize and the Ross Feld Writing Award. He is currently an instructor of English at Brooklyn College.

Grace Baxter (artist, designer) is a painter, scenic artist, and jewelry designer. You can see her latest, steampunk-influenced creations at http://www.etsy.com/shop/hollowearthsociety.

Ethan Gould (illustrator, co-author) is an artist and writer in Brooklyn, NY whose work in drawing, focuses on experiencing the occluded and the unknown. A graduate of the University of Rochester, he has lived and studied in Florence, Italy. As a co-founder of the Hollow Earth Society with Wythe Marschall, he is also a co-recipient of the 2012 Elsewhere residency and a curator for the Observatory.

Wythe Marschall (author, designer) is a writer and a lecturer for the English department of Brooklyn College. Wythe’s stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and elsewhere. With artist Ethan Gould, Wythe is the co-founder of the Hollow Earth Society and an artist-curator for Observatory. The Society’s first book is Suspicious Anatomy, currently available online (suspiciousanatomy.com) and at fine bookstores in New York City.

A Terrier... From the Future!

A Terrier... From the Future!