Archive for June 2009
Jem Goulding
Hippies Lie
This heart was safe wrapped up in ice
Until you reached into my sky
And melt it with your zenith
I wish I wanted to break this beautiful curse
Be free of the love you cast out so willingly, like a spell
But every minute in your light is like medicine
Living therapy
You
I feel like this forest you’ve taken me to
Whose trees would fall without you
Humming through their leaves
Like if you untangle our limbs
You’ll uproot a lifeline and I’ll cease to be
Guitar cradled in both arms
Your blood starts to spill and for a while it’s sacred
Especially when we pretend you only play like this for me
These serenades are threads I want to tug at
Unmask the thespian
But don’t in case they snap altogether
And I’m left alone with only echoes of us
Sometimes I think you hear my heart beat and strum away in time
Then I admit it’s my veins pulsing to your strings
A metaphor for our dynamic
Disguised in your performance
Your peace makes me want war
I want to pull the pin on your golden grenade
See your soul dowse these walls
Hurl your poetry promises across the floor like marbles
Watch them shatter in pain
But they won’t
They’ll bounce out a melody that sounds of last summer
Though you’ve no need for chimes to solstice
These are your picnic days
And it never rains in your realm
Stop with your magic for a minute
Your wizardry makes me mortal
The next time you tell me what I want to hear
I’ll dash a fatal blow to that angel face
Only you’ve already closed your eyes
Falling back through the air
Arms out stretched
Landing on my sheets in that irresistible crucifix
Can’t help but take your photograph
And climb your waist
I want to breathe you in now
Play yin and yang
So I stare past your glistening neck
Fixate with blurred vision on your ceiling
Try to dissolve into the same trance you’re in
Don’t leave me behind
My stars could implode
But I can’t purge the fear of losing you
Even here
I’m petrified with doubt Until the poncho we lay under falls away and I’m lost in your oasis
Even after all the midnights of naked laughter
All the hazy breakfasts and smoke misted noons
There’s a stranger in my bed again
I’m wearing his T-shirt
And I gave up keeping up with your head when I realized
You are not of this earth
My heartbreaking, breathtaking alien.
Tomorrow when we’re out in the world
The masses
They will swarm and fall
And I remember
It’ll always be this way for you
Everyone loves a smiler.
The agony is that I know who I have to be
To keep you
But can’t reverse the supernova
That person got lost behind the moon
The day you danced into my sky.
The Erotic Book Club
Thursday 25th June, 8pm
Reading: Wetlands by Charlotte Roche
Wetlands is the disarmingly explicit, unflinching, and very funny, story of a heroine both pleasure-seeking and vulnerable, who voices what others do not even dare think. Courageous, radical and sure to create debate.
Hosted by Robin and Fanny and held on the last Thursday of the month, the Erotic Book Club is a small gathering to devour and discuss the naughty masterpieces of literature. We shall be savouring both modern and classic filth. Erotic fiction and personal memoirs, by male and female authors…
http://www.theeroticbookclub.org
210 / Unit 3 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ
Launch of ‘On And On Is How We Are’ by Bo Christian Larsson
Sunday 21st June, 6.30pm – 9pm
Swedish-born Hamburg based artist Bo Christian Larssonʻs first extensive
monograph includes drawings and objects made over the past years as well as
photographs of his performances and installations. His works center on the inner
visions of the individual and the dialogue taking place between internal and external
worlds. His imagery delves into fantastic forests, utopian cities, gloomy creatures and
blinding lights. The book contains an essay by Adina Popescu and an interview with
Birgit Sonna, along with a brief introduction to Larssonʼs drawings by Caroline Dowling.
Birgit Sonna, along with a brief introduction to Larssonʼs drawings by Caroline Dowling.
This launch coincides with Larsson’s group exhibition Walking In My Mind at The Hayward Gallery, Tuesday 23 June 2009 – Sunday 6 September 2009.
Price £24.99
Published by Argo Books
http://www.argobooks.de
210 / Unit 3 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ
Talk and Book Signing: Eduardo Kac meets Joanna Zylinska
Saturday 20th June, 6pm
Eduardo Kac meets Joanna Zylinska in discussion
A talk and book signing will take place on Saturday the 20th June, 6pm. Introducing their work and sharing ideas on bio art and new species, the talk will be followed by a book signing by Eduardo Kac on his book Life Extreme.
Eduardo Kac is an artist who has pioneered telepresence and bio art. Kac opened at the dawn of the twenty-first century a new direction for contemporary art—first with a groundbreaking transgenic work entitled Genesis (1999), which included an “artist’s gene” he invented, and then with his “GFP Bunny”, in which he created a fluorescent rabbit called Alba (2000). Equally concerned with the aesthetic and the social aspects of verbal and non-verbal interaction, in his work Kac examines linguistic systems, dialogic exchanges, and interspecies communication. His books include Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots and Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond.
Joanna Zylinska is a cultural theorist writing on new technologies, ethics, cultural studies and feminist theory. Her research interests focus on new technologies and new media; debates around subjectivity and the body, including the discourses of the ‘cyborg’ and the ‘post-human’; digital art and bioart; photography in the digital age; the ethical implications of new technologies; the relationship between culture, ethics and politics. Joanna Zylinska is reader in New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of On Spiders, Cyborgs, and Being Scared: The Feminine and the Sublime; The Ethics of Cultural Studies and the recently published Bioethics in the Age of New Media.
Life Extreme – the book
Humankind has imagined and depicted fantastical creatures since the formation of the first societies. Beasts such as the Chimera, the Golem, the Minotaur and Galatea could be said to be culturally symptomatic. Today, in the twenty-first century, we witness the emergence of a new class of beings: organisms that are first imagined and then–through the agency of biotechnologies–brought to life. What used to be a myth has now become a reality. In Life Extreme, Eduardo Kac, the pioneer of “bio art” who is internationally recognized for celebrated works such as “Genesis” and the fluorescent green “GFP Bunny,” has selected 36 new organism, presented alongside excerpts from Ovid to Andy Warhol. The book, published in Dis Voir’s new Encounters series, is prefaced by Kac’s “Anthroduction” and includes a whimsical taxonomy of taxonomies, offering a unique classification method for future species.
Published by Dis Voir
http://www.disvoir.com/an/fo/a/176.html
http://www.ekac.org/
http://www.joannazylinska.net/
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11759
210 / Unit 3 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ
Jem Goulding
Jem Goulding is the current Poet in Residence at the Bokship
Pretending to Sleep
It doesn’t matter how shut tight
Your trembling eyelids seem to be,
I know your senses are all right
Because in the dim shadows I can see,
That you are pretending to sleep.
We secret voyeurs insist on this fight
Playing dead on the mattress half-innocently
To spy on each other thus extending the night
And peek through still lashes in sick ecstasy,
For the thrill of pretending to sleep.
Perhaps we’re better as one in this light
Despite the fact it appears that we
Have a strange little game here, and fun oversight
Of the problems that lovers, the he, and the she
Can avoid by pretending to sleep.
Poetry Might…
Monday 8th June at 7pm.
Small discussion group for people who want to talk about poetry. Bring along a poem by a poet who you like to read to the rest of the group – we will then talk about these poems and poets.
Work in Progress
Submissions wanted for new publication of short stories called ‘Work in progress’.
Please send short stories from 1,000 – 5,000 words by 1st August 2009 to Tony Collins at eelzine@yahoo.com.uk
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