UCLA Professors Ursula Heise in the department of English and John Christensen of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability in the Department of History and editor of the journal Boom: A California Journal, gave presentations at the Digital Environmental Humanities workshop that took place Sept. 7-8th in Montreal.
One of my favorite programs at UCLA is the UCLA Game Lab started by game theorist and designer Eddo Stern of UCLA’s Design and Media Art department. They do a fabulous yearly games festival at the Hammer Museum which is not to be missed.
“We are an experimental research and development lab that fosters the production of computer games and game-related research. The lab supports exploration of these areas of focus: Game Aesthetics through experimentation in the look, sound, language and tactility of games; Game Context through development of games that involve the body, new interfaces, physical space and performance in new ways; and Game Genres through examination of the socio-historic-political discourse around games and the development of new game genres that challenge the presently accepted boundaries of what games are about.
The UCLA Game Lab differs from more traditional game development contexts through an emphasis on conceptual risk-taking and development of new modes of expression and form through gaming. The lab supports projects that will establish new paradigms for gaming that emphasize the self-reliance and personal expression of the gaming artist.
The UCLA Game Lab’s primary function is as a research and production space for collaborative teams to pursue focused work on gaming projects, while benefiting from the technological infrastructure and expertise provided by the lab staff and faculty. This type of incubation space creates a context of community, interdisciplinary exchange, privacy, focus and continuity that is vitally conducive toward the completion of ambitious game projects.”
The Los Angeles arts journal East of Borneo published this great article about Bertolt Brecht’s poetry written while he lived in LA during the 40s. Certainly worth a read if you’re interested in the poetic history of the city.
“Los Angeles has long been an urban dialectic par excellence, with its discordant melodies and apparent contradictions; its extreme polarities of nature, of culture, of economics, of politics. The metaphors come easily—the tropical flower abloom in a desert basin, the city of illusions, etc.—and Bertolt Brecht employed them acidly and exactingly in the poems he wrote during his LA exile in the 1940s. Indeed, at no time, perhaps, was the city’s surreal admixture of improbable light and equally improbable darkness (sunshine and noir, in other words) more startling than during that very time, the thirties and forties, when hundreds, perhaps thousands of Weimar-era German-speaking exiles (Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Alfred Döblin, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg and Salka Viertel, among them) fled the killing fields of World War II Europe and found themselves in a city of angels nestled along the cerulean pool of the Pacific.”
The UCLA graduates have manuscripts in the free-for-download international poetry publication project Poetry Will Be Made By All. They are Laura V. Rivera (Apartment Complex), AJ Urquidi (The Patterned Fragment), Jake Eisenmann (Unforgeable Poems) and Stefan Karlsson (No Nothing).
“Poetry will be made by all! is an evolving exhibition that will publish and disperse one thousand new books of expanded writing and poetry over two months by authors from over fifty countries and spanning six continents. Poets-in-residence will work with visitors and a global network of writers from within an installation by Atelier Bow Wow. As part of the ongoing research project 89plus, this exhibition investigates the significance of poetry and poetic practices for the generation born in or after 1989.”
Peter Gizzi is the author of Threshold Songs, The Outernationale, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum. His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships in poetry from the Fund for Poetry, The Rex Foundation, Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
This series of readings is organized and hosted by Stephen Yenser, poet and professor at UCLA and author of A Boundless Field: American Poetry at Large and Blue Guide.
Links:
Peter Gizzi’s website
Interview with Peter Gizzi by Robert N. Casper
ALL HAMMER PUBLIC PROGRAMS ARE FREE.
Parking is available under the museum for a flat fee of $3 after 6PM.
Poetry is supported, in part, by the UCLA Department of English and Friends of English.
All Hammer public programs are free and made possible by a major gift from the Dream Fund at UCLA.
Generous support is also provided by Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy, the Simms/Mann Family Foundation, The Brotman Foundation of California, Good Works Foundation and Laura Donnelley, and all Hammer members.
UCLA poet and professor Harryette Mullen, whose last full-length book of poems, Sleeping With the Dictionary, was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, has just released a new book of poems.
David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times picked it as a top book of the fall, and reviews of the book appear here, here and here. An excerpt appears here.
From the publisher’s website:
“Urban Tumbleweed is the poet Harryette Mullen’s exploration of spaces where the city and the natural world collide. Written out of a daily practice of walking, Mullen’s stanzas adapt the traditional Japanese tanka, a poetic form suited for recording fleeting impressions, describing environmental transitions, and contemplating the human being’s place in the natural world. But, as she writes in her preface, “What is natural about being human? What to make of a city dweller taking a ‘nature walk’ in a public park while listening to a podcast with ear-bud headphones?”
Mullen’s The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews appeared in 2012.
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS: An installation/performance by Peiyi Wong at Automata Arts.
A multi-media installation / performance that attempts to examine the many ways we have of looking, in hopes of uncovering the ideal way forward.
We will be presenting the latest research and findings of an anonymous amateur archeologist-explorer who remains inexplicably drawn to the ruins of Llano del Rio, a failed socialist utopian commune built on the edge of the Mojave Desert.
Written, directed, and performed by Peiyi Wong
Acclaimed scholar and poet Fred Moten will be speaking on Thursday, March 20, 2014, 8:30pm at REDCAT.
Presented in association with the Master’s Program in Aesthetics & Politics at CalArts.
Known as a compelling and brilliant speaker and performer, Fred Moten works at the intersection of performance, poetry and critical theory. In his lecture “The Sustain: Blackness and Poetry,” Moten discusses instances of black poetic inscription in visual, plastic and performance art. These inscriptions are by black artists, implying that there is such a thing as black poetic inscription and that many non-black artists engage in it. Through this talk, he seeks to shed light on some recent debates in the poetry world regarding race, politics, conceptualism and the form/purpose of the anthology. Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, Moten is Theorist in Residence this spring in the CalArts Program in Aesthetics and Politics.
Poet Douglas Kearney is on hand to lead a post-lecture Q&A.
UCLA English faculty member Michael North has just published a new book, Novelty: A History of the New, with the University of Chicago Press. You can read long excerpts here and here and a few glowing reviews here and here and, finally, an interview with North here.
Continue reading Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New
Our very first M/ELT presenter was UCLA graduate student Jacquelyn Ardam who went on to publish her paper, ”Too Old for Children and Too Young for Grown-ups”: Gertrude Stein’s To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays, in the journal Modernism/modernity.
Unfortunately, it’s behind a firewall (academic subscribers can get access to it through ProjectMUSE where an excerpt is available to non-subscribers). I’m sure we can find a way to get you this if you are really interested.
