Film by James Bell and music by Paul Deuth (a.k.a. Meteorologeist)
Runtime approx 1 hr.
Date: Saturday, November 19th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $5
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

“No Computer Is An Island” is a silent movie animated entirely in PowerPoint and accompanied by electronic music, mixed live during the presentation. Utilizing inventive music and limited animation presets, a depressing world of office life, shallow relationships and adult responsibility is presented in 256 colors. The presentation follows a day in the life of one workflow shape, appropriately named Bubbles, as he goes about the business of being a detached thought bubble. Other workflow characters overlap and interrupt his story, creating images that exploit the constraints of PowerPoint as an animation tool by using the conventions of silent film. “No Computer Is An Island” engages the timeless need for narrative, inviting the viewer to create meaning slide by slide.

James E. P. Bell regularly makes PowerPoint presentations in an office building in midtown Manhattan. A founding member of the interactive performance group PowerPoint, James has explored the aesthetic potential of MicroSoft Office applications in productions such as “Introduction to Change Management” (1999), “Violence in the Workplace” (2003), and now “No Computer Is An Island” (2010).

Paul Deuth is an electronic musician/composer/producer (A.K.A. Meteorologeist) and director of photography. With an extensive career in television, Paul most enjoys expressing himself in multi-media artistic ventures including projects with PowerPoint, Fire and Ice, Hold Please, and the Prospects. You can experience some of Paul’s music at http://www.myspace.com/meteorologeist

A class with Kathy Biehl
Date: Sunday, November 20th
Time: 2-4pm
Admission: $40 (You must RSVP to phantasmaphile [at] gmail.com if you’d like to attend, as class size is limited)
Presented by: Phantasmaphile

Kathy Biehl uses the symbolism of the Tarot and astrology to help her clients understand themselves, their options and the people in their lives. Her connection to the Tarot began in her mid-teens, when her mother unexpectedly gave her a deck after an otherwise ordinary day of high school. Since then she has been an avid collector and professional reader and developed a distinctive methodology that she has has been teaching for more than 25 years. In a parallel life she is an attorney and author.  Her website is Empowerment Unlimited.

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A class facilitated by Jonathan Basile
Date: Sunday, November 13
Time: 6 PM
Admission: free, but please donate $5 if you can!
Presented by The Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

What is death? How does our being mortal shape the possibilities of our cognition and our desire? How should we live in order to come to terms with the term of life, and how does our orientation towards a good death become an art of living?

How does the history of thinking about death shape our understanding of these possibilities, and how do the cultural and other differences surrounding the treatment of death play a part in constituting those very differences—the demarcations of ethnicities, nations, religions, genders, etc.—all the lines drawn on this side of the division between life and death? What does thinking about death in general reveal to us about death in our culture—about our medical industry, about our political furor over “death panels,” about a culture industry obsessed with the equation of youth and beauty, for example?

We will discuss these themes as they are developed in two of Derrida’s major works on death: The Gift of Death and Aporias. In all of our thinking about life in this world, about responsibility, authenticity, temporality, finitude, or mortality, for example, it seems that we always surreptitiously introduce some infinite beyond into the constitution of the here-below, a transcendence that may be utterly unknowable despite our complete reliance
on it.

It has gone by many names throughout history: the Form of the Good, God, the unnameable possibility of the name, the Unconditioned, the Inverted World, Being, Differance, or the secret; we will consider what it would mean to nickname it “Death.”

Reading Assignment:
The Gift of Death, Chapter 3 (p. 53-81)

Recommended Additional Reading:
The Gift of Death, Chapter 4
Aporias

Jonathan Basile is a volunteer with the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, visiting hospice patients and their families. He currently studies at Brooklyn College, working towards an MFA in Creative Writing. This past summer he organized a series of discussions on death in Western philosophy through The Public School New York, focusing on the work of Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida.

Writing Assignment

Most every representation of death throughout Western thought has sought to offer a vision of death that could be incorporated into one’s sense of responsibility in this life, into one’s sense of being a free agent, accountable for one’s own decisions and their consequences up to death and beyond. Such representations present certain paradoxes for human beings laboring under them, not the least of which would be the attempt to bring death under our control as something we could actively will and take responsibility for, despite it’s seeming to always take us by surprise, unawares.

For example, the Christian representation of death as a final judgment and afterlife as an infinite reward or punishment for actions in this life attempts to make sense of the infinite responsibility the Christian adherent feels as a result of her original sin, and offers a death that is a complement to the life of sacrifice she should lead (storing up her treasures in heaven, knowing all the while that a Father who sees in secret will reward her).

Try to write your own representation of death or the afterlife. Keep in mind what sort of an idea of life or the individual human your particular representation is reinforcing.

(Bonus points to anyone who offers a vision of death or the afterlife that undoes the patriarchal bias of the Platonic and Judeo-Christian representations. This tendency is best exemplified by Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac—in order to prove his adherence to his absolute duty towards God, Abraham must renounce everything he holds dear in this world, to show that he is completely dedicated to its beyond. To make this infinite renunciation requires proving his willingness to kill his own son, without saying a word about it to his wife. It seems that the vision of individuality that one receives from this tradition of thinking about death is uniquely masculine or patriarchal.)

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The Para-Academia Series
Ongoing workshops co-produced by the Public School New York and the Hollow Earth Society

A Shadow Genealogy of the Ivory Tower/Producing the Unwriteable

Manifesto:

The para is the “alongside,” that which comments on the official or normative. While academics debate the finer points of Shakespeare and Kant, para-academics aggregate around shadow-commentators whose works do not so much categorize (striate) and enlighten (bring light into) difficult terrain, but produce that terrain, creating obscure spaces and nebulous discourses that are immune to traditional academic approaches.

Blogs, speculative medievalisms, Cyclonopedia, Charles Fort, teratology, Deleuzean-everything, print-on-demand—these and other tentacles of a polycephalic (many-headed) para-academia have entwined to produce an addendum and, finally, an ultimatum to established disciplines and practices.

The Public School New York and the Hollow Earth Society will explore these emerging ideas and modes of expression through a series of discussions and writing workshops, with audio available after each session.

El Jarabe en Ultratumba (The Folk Dance Beyond the Grave), Jose Guadalupe Posada

Date: Saturday, October 22
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $12
Presented by Morbid Anatomy and Borderline Projects

Please join us on Saturday, October 22 for a Halloween/Day of the Dead costume party featuring brand new episodes of Ghoul A Go-Go and The Midnight Archive, as well as burlesque, music, piñata, food, beverages, sugar skulls, a costume contest, and more! Please, please (!!!) come in costume! All costumes welcomed!

The night’s amusements will include:

ENTERTAINMENT!

• Ghoul a Go Go: Premiere of a brand new episode
• The Midnight Archive: Two new episodes of The Midnight Archive, Ronni Thomas’ new web series based on Observatory
• Music: Wavy gravy Halloween music for the all night dance party
• Burlesque: A creepy Burlesque performance by Lil’ Miss Lixx
  

FOOD AND DRINK!

• Traditional Food and Drink Specials throughout the evening
  

COSTUME CONTEST!

• Prizes for costumes inspired by either Vlad, Creighton, The Invisible Man, or any of the clips featured on Ghoul a Go Go

TRADITIONAL DAY OF THE DEAD ATTRACTIONS!

• Day of the Dead Altar: Altar de Muertos, an installation by Rebeca and Salvador Olguin celebrating Mexico and its past, history and culture
• Face painting: Have the Kiss of Death painted on your face by La Catrina
• Pan de Muerto: Indulge in this traditional dessert called Bread of Death
• Piñata: Dash death to smithereens with our annual death piñata!
• Sugar skulls: Decorate and eat or bring home your own Day of the Dead sugar skull
• Offerings to the Departed: In some places in Mexico, people leave small, coffin-like figures out for the souls of the departed. Guests are invited to leave their own offering; they will be available at the installation

Hope to see you there.

A class facilitated by Ben Woodard
Date: Saturday, September 17
Time: 1 PM
Admission: free, but please donate $5 if you can!
Presented by The Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

SPECIAL NOTE: You must enter through the blue front doors on Union Street. Push buzzer #1E.

This course will explore the Geo-philosophical earth as theory-fictional node for explaining a cosmicism/universalism in which the outside is continuously advancing upon all purportedly firm grounds and solid bodies. Weirdness, as in the weird of weird fiction and the darkness of dark romanticism and the crumble of the gothic, will be explored as the intrusion of the non-local upon the local, arguing that all stability is in fact subject to continuous degradation, shift, and collapse.

The first half of the course will be a lecture and the second will be a discussion. To help in facilitating discussion please write a 1-2 page response to any/all of the readings with the relation of the geological to thinking in mind.

Required Reading:

“The Festival” by HP Lovecraft http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/f.asp
“A Bit of the Dark World” by Fritz Leiber
“The Metamorphosis of the Earth,” by Clark Ashton Smith http://www.donaldcorrell.com/cas/63.html

Cyclonopedia by Reza Negarestani. In particular these selections:
Machines are Digging 41-68
Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards the Sun I Solar Rattle 145-153
Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards the Sun II The Core 161-166

Suggested Reading:

“The Last Feast of the Harlequin” by Thomas Ligotti
“Solar Inferno and The Earthbound Abyss” – Reza Negarestani
“Triebkrieg” by Reza Negarestani
“Drafting the Inhuman” by Reza Negarestani in The Speculative Turn

Further Suggested Reading:
Edgar Huntly by William Brockden Brown
Collapse v VI ed. Robin Mackay

Ben Woodard is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His work focuses on the concept of Nature in German Idealism, philosophies of becoming, contemporary philosophy, as well as in Weird and Speculative fiction. In addition to On an Ungrounded Earth, his book Slime Dynamics: Generation, Mutation, and the Creep of Life is forthcoming from Zer0 books. He blogs at Speculative Heresy and Naught Thought.

Plant Medicine: An Initiation into an Alchemist’s Art
with Intuitive Herbalist Kate Temple-West
Date: Sunday, September 18th
Time: 2:00–4:30 PM
Admission: $40 cash
Presented by Phantasmaphile
***You must email phantasmaphile [at] gmail dot com to register for this event, as we have a limited class size.

For millennia people have made medicine for the body and psyche through direct relationship with nature. This knowledge is our birthright. Awakening our senses to the energetics of healing is something we can access with intention and creativity. In this class we will look at the history, myth, science, and art of magical herbal preparations. We will experience first hand local shamanic plants and learn to make our own tincture for creativity and enhanced intuition. Our work with plants will open us to further transformational healing and connection to the natural world.

*Please bring a towel or small blanket to sit on, as we will be working on the floor.

Kate Temple-West is an NYC-based herbal practitioner. She trained extensively with acclaimed herbalist Robin Rose Bennett in her 4 year apprenticeship program, as well as an additional two years in her clinical practice program. She was also a student of Matthew Wood, and an apprentice of renowned herbalist Lata Cheitri Kennedy at Flower Power Herbs and Roots in Manhattan’s East Village. She is a member of the American Herbalist’s Guild, and a certified permaculture designer who strongly believes that we have the ability to adjust our habits and technologies to comfortably live in a way that no longer harms the earth, but instead promotes regeneration. Please visit http://www.friendlyherbalist.com/ for more information.

A class facilitated by Bradley Sands
Date: Friday, September 2
Time: 8 PM
Admission: free, but please donate $5 if you can!
Presented by The Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

INTRODUCTION TO BIZARRO FICTION: READING IT, UNDERSTANDING IT, WRITING IT

Bizarro is a genre of fiction that is often considered the literary equivalent to the movies in the cult section of a video store. The simplest way to describe it is fiction that focuses primarily on weirdness. Despite the diversity of the books and that the individual titles can be categorized under almost every fiction genre in the publishing industry, there are a few components that bizarro books tend to share. These include black humor, absurdism, surrealism, occurrences of the unreal, and shock value.

In this class, we will read and discuss work written by authors currently associated with the bizarro movement. In addition, we will examine their influences (or the proto-bizarro authors who came before them). In regards to our own writing, we will write bizarro fiction by participating in in-class writing exercises. One short assigned writing exercise will be due the second session. Each student’s assignment will be discussed as a class. If you would like more detailed information on the bizarro genre, read its Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bizarro_fiction or go to www.bizarrocentral.com.

Bradley Sands is an author and editor of the bizarro journal, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens (he was also its former publisher). He holds an MFA in Writing and Poetics (with a concentration in prose) from Naropa University. He became involved with the bizarro movement a few years before the term was coined. His books include It Came from Below the Belt (Afterbirth Books), My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes! (Raw Dog Screaming Press), Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy (Lazy Fascist Press: an imprint of Eraserhead Press), and Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You. Forthcoming books include Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face, two additional books through Lazy Fascist Press that are currently untitled, and TV Snorted My Brain(LegumeMan Books). His novella, “Cheesequake Smash-up” was included in the second edition of The Bizarro Starter Kit (Blue). Visit him at www.bradleysands.com, although the protagonist from his most recent book (Rico Slade) has taken control over it and refuses to give it back until the end of July.

Recommended reading for the second session (no need to have attended the firts!): Matthew Revert’s pieces in the purple edition of the Bizarro Starter Kit – http://ifile.it/r0i8gsw

Recommended reading: Russell Edson’s prose poem’s in the the purple edition of the Bizarro Starter Kit

Optional reading:

The three volumes of The Bizarro Starter Kit. These include:

The rest of the Orange edition of the Bizarro Starter Kit

The Bizarro Starter Kit (Blue): http://www.amazon.com/Bizarro-Starter-Kit-blue/dp/1933929626

The Bizarro Starter Kit (Purple):
http://www.amazon.com/Bizarro-Starter-Kit-purple/dp/1936383209

And two free issues of Bradley’s literary journal, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens. These are PDFs that are available here: http://www.absurdistjournal.com/downloads.htm. The two issues are Issue Y’aing’ngah and Issue 7.

Thank you to everyone who came out to the first, Hurricane Irene edition of the class!

A class facilitated by Bradley Sands
Date: Friday, August 26
Time: 8 PM
Admission: free, but please donate $5 if you can!
Presented by The Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

INTRODUCTION TO BIZARRO FICTION: READING IT, UNDERSTANDING IT, WRITING IT

Bizarro is a genre of fiction that is often considered the literary equivalent to the movies in the cult section of a video store. The simplest way to describe it is fiction that focuses primarily on weirdness. Despite the diversity of the books and that the individual titles can be categorized under almost every fiction genre in the publishing industry, there are a few components that bizarro books tend to share. These include black humor, absurdism, surrealism, occurrences of the unreal, and shock value.

In this class, we will read and discuss work written by authors currently associated with the bizarro movement. In addition, we will examine their influences (or the proto-bizarro authors who came before them). In regards to our own writing, we will write bizarro fiction by participating in in-class writing exercises. One short assigned writing exercise will be due the second session. Each student’s assignment will be discussed as a class. If you would like more detailed information on the bizarro genre, read its Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bizarro_fiction or go to www.bizarrocentral.com.

Bradley Sands is an author and editor of the bizarro journal, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens (he was also its former publisher). He holds an MFA in Writing and Poetics (with a concentration in prose) from Naropa University. He became involved with the bizarro movement a few years before the term was coined. His books include It Came from Below the Belt (Afterbirth Books), My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes! (Raw Dog Screaming Press), Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy (Lazy Fascist Press: an imprint of Eraserhead Press), and Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You. Forthcoming books include Please Do Not Shoot Me in the Face, two additional books through Lazy Fascist Press that are currently untitled, and TV Snorted My Brain (LegumeMan Books). His novella, “Cheesequake Smash-up” was included in the second edition of The Bizarro Starter Kit (Blue). Visit him at www.bradleysands.com, although the protagonist from his most recent book (Rico Slade) has taken control over it and refuses to give it back until the end of July.

Recommended reading for the first session: D. Harlan Wilson’s stories from The Bizarro Starter Kit (Orange edition). It is available for purchase here: http://www.amazon.com/Bizarro-Starter-Kit-Orange/dp/1933929006. If you would like a free PDF of the book, contact Bradley at bradleysands@gmail.com and he will send it to you via email.

Optional reading:

The three volumes of The Bizarro Starter Kit. These include:

The rest of the Orange edition of the Bizarro Starter Kit

The Bizarro Starter Kit (Blue): http://www.amazon.com/Bizarro-Starter-Kit-blue/dp/1933929626

The Bizarro Starter Kit (Purple):
http://www.amazon.com/Bizarro-Starter-Kit-purple/dp/1936383209

And two free issues of Bradley’s literary journal, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens. These are PDFs that are available here: http://www.absurdistjournal.com/downloads.htm. The two issues are Issue Y’aing’ngah and Issue 7.

A class facilitated by Stephen Aubrey
Date: Tuesday, August 23
Time: 8 PM
Admission: free, but please donate $5 if you can!
Presented by The Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977) is perhaps most famous for Lolita and Pale Fire, novels of startling linguistic and literary playfulness. But as his wife, Vera, wrote in a foreword to a collection of his poetry in 1979, the true watermark of Nabokov’s work is the concept of “potustoronnost” or otherwordliness. Though much of Nabokov’s work may seem straightforward and realist, lurking underneath his fiction is an entire pantheon of ghosts, shades, demons and devils that comprise the true world of Nabokov’s writings.

READING ASSIGNMENT

Please read the following short stories by Nabokov: “Signs and Symbols” and “The Vane Sisters.” They can be found here.

WRITING ASSIGNMENT

In his famous letter to Katharine A. White, the chief editor of The New Yorker, while explaining the intricate riddle‐like structure of “The Vane Sisters,” which had been rejected by the magazine, Nabokov mentioned that some of his stories are composed according to the same system “wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.” This second story was frequently mystical or supernatural making his stories a collaboration between this world and the next.

Try and write your own text (story, poem, dialogue) where the real and supernatural worlds collaborate.

*

Stephen Aubrey descends from hardy New England stock. He is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, dramaturg, lecturer, storyteller and recovering medievalist. His writing has appeared in Publishing Genius, Commonweal, The Brooklyn Review, Pomp & Circumstance, Forté and The Outlet. He inexplicably holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Hollow Earth Society and is an instructor of English at Brooklyn College.

He is also a co-founder and the resident dramaturg and playwright of The Assembly Theater Company. His plays have been produced at The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Flea Theater, The Collapsable Hole, The Brick Theater, Symphony Space, the Abingdon Theater Complex, UNDER St Marks, The Philly Fringe and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where his original play, We Can’t Reach You, Hartford, was nominated for a 2006 Fringe First Award.

He has an MFA from Brooklyn College where he received the Himan Brown Prize and the Ross Feld Writing Award and a BA with Honors from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University.

He is—for the record—not a Christian singer-songwriter. He does, however, hold the dubious distinction of having coined the word “playlistism” in 2003.

Codex Buranus (Carmina Burana) Wheel of Fortune (Schicksalsrad) Source: Wikipedia

Date: Monday, July 18th
Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $8
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana-full title Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanæ cantoribus et choris cantandæ comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis (”Songs of Beuern: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magic images”)-was written not in the depths of the dark ages as one might assume, but in Nazi-era Germany, premiering to great acclaim in 1937 Frankfurt. The piece sets to music a selection of poems drawn from a subversive medieval manuscript of the same name which had been discovered at a Bavarian Benedictine monastery in 1803; primary themes include the popular medieval trope of the Wheel of Fortune (a literal example of which controls much of the action), the ephemerality of life, and the allure and peril of drinking, gambling, gluttony and lust.

Carl Orff ’s original conception for Carmina Burana incorporated orchestral music, acting, dance, masks, costumes, and sets in a kind of “Theatrum Mundi” in which music, movement, and speech were equal and essential pieces of the whole. The few contemporary performances that have staged the production according to Orff’s original conception have a fascinatingly uncanny, unsettling, Hieronymus Bosch-ian feel, as if something deep in our collective past were attempting to speak to us in a symbolic language beyond the reach of reason. By turns epic, bawdy, surrealistic, monstrous, bizarre and sublime-and always utterly compelling-these are very special productions not to be missed.

Tonight, join us for a screening of just such a production; The piece is performed in the original Latin but includes English subtitles, and will be broadcast over our astoundingly great new PA system.