Towards a Physiological Novel. # 7. Title: Paul, you are neglecting your shoes / Wednesday 29 June, 7pm

‘Towards a Physiological Novel’
# 7. Title: Paul, you are neglecting your shoes.
Speaker: Paul Buck.
Wednesday 29th of June at 7pm.

If I say it’s a novel, it’s a novel. A urinal has been art for many years. Silence too. Noise is integrated. The list extends through the disciplines. Yet the novel, and indeed other categories of writing, come under the authority of the thought police. If we pirouette it is towards oblivion. Somersaults risk limb removal. Why can’t literature move without theory dragged as the carcass on the piano? Like other arts, literature’s concern is to respond to life lived now. Writing as research only survives if it can be controlled. Stamped and filed. The real question is what is life lived now? Where do you place your shoes?

Paul Buck maintains no CV. He recalls his first book was Pimot (1968), and whilst he holds a fondness for all his books, he could note re/qui/re(qui)re (1975), Lust (1976), Violations (1979), No title (1991), Walking into Myself (1995), Lisbon (2002), Spread Wide (2006)… along with his editing of Curtains through the 1970s and his divertimenti in film, theatre and music. Currently preparing A Public Intimacy (BookWorks) for publication, and writing Performance, a biography of the Cammell/Roeg film.

>>>
LAST TALK: ‘Towards a Physiological Novel’. Speaker: Mark Von Schlegell

#8. ONEIRON
(or how a dream machine works exactly)
Speaker: Mark Von Schlegell
Please note the new date of the final talk in the series:
Tuesday 5th of July at 7pm.

“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it.  Is there any other way?” – Emily Dickinson asks and we answer no. We go on to ask, however, what then is the way to know the novel, the genius of narrative prose, per se? “Good as is discourse, silence is better, and shames it,” answers Ralph Waldo Emerson. So in this phantasm we’ll only remark on thirteen things….

Mark von Schlegell is author of the novels Venusia (2005, Semiotexte), Mercury Station (2009, Semiotexte) and New Dystopia (2011, Sternberg Press), as well as the critical works Realometer: American Romance (Merve Verlag, 2009) and Dreaming the Mainstream (Merve Verlag, forthcoming 2011). His weird theory and scientifiction appear regularly in periodicals like Artforum, Parkett, The Rambler and Art/Text and in numerous art books the world over.

‘Towards a Physiological Novel’ is a series of 8 bi-weekly talks and screenings initiated by Sidsel Meineche Hansen on the subject of communication and Angst, and the production of noise and nervousness in an electronic era. The talks will operate as a mode of research for a physiological novel that examines how information circulates – how it, in physiological terms, is embodied, and consumed in society. The series will bring together a diverse range of theoreticians, historians, artists and fiction writers whose works’ provide a flexible foundation for dealing with these ideas. The events are free.

Contact: Sidselmeineche@gmail.com
Bibliography and more details:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Towards-a-Physiological-Novel/125129260897993?ref=ts
http://bokship.org/topn.html

210 / 3 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ
 http://bokship.org