Writer’s Blöc

Tuesday 2 April 2013, 7 – 9pm
Launch of Failure, A Writer’s Life by Joe Milutus, Published by Zero Books
7.30pm Talk by Joe Milutus

Failure, A Writer’s Life is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds.

“The unfinished, unreadable, unpublishable — the scribbled and illegible, the too slowly published, the countless unpublished, all that does not seem to count at all… here lie all manner of ruins. From Marguerite Duras to Google Maps, Henri Bergson to H.P. Lovecraft, Orson Welles to Walter Benjamin to a host of literary ambulance drivers (not to mention the FBI, UFOs, and UbuWeb), _Failure, A Writer’s Life_ charts empty spaces and occupied libraries, searches databases bereft of filters, files spam and porn and weather reports into their respective _konvoluts_, and realizes the full potential of cultural inscription. In a series of snapshots concatenated in the best surrealist mode, Milutis has curated a catalogue of curiosities as essential to understanding our current cultural condition as they are eccentric. With Nietzschean _witz_ and self-reflexive bravura, he teases out the occult links between heterogeneities in the tradition of Allen S. Weiss and Greil Marcus. In the process, Milutis redefines the ‘virtual’ as something much broader and more interesting than digital simulacra: as the unmanageable storehouse of memory and the inevitable expanse of forgetfulness. Here, in all its glamorous success, is the horizon of failure.” Craig Dworkin

http://www.o-books.com/books/failure-a-writers-life

Saturday 6 April 2013, 6 – 9pm
Broken Dimanche Press are Publishers of the Month at X Marks the Bökship
7.30pm Reading from Seven Potential BDP Books by John Holten

For the first time Berlin based BDP will present their work in the United Kingdom at X Marks the Bökship in London. It is with great pleasure that BDP will offer a carefully chosen selection of their publications, artworks and limited editions, ranging from the ephemeral and handmade, to the mass-produced on the occasion of being publisher of the month, April 2013.

BDP started in 2009 as a vehicle for international publishing endeavours, focusing on considered experimental literature, contemporary art and social-democratic social sciences all channeled through the haptic nature of the book and the visual experience of tactile arts. It strives to work beyond language regions and commercial niches and in this manner hopes to offer a progressive, internationalist art book publishing platform for its writers, artists, curators, thinkers and other collaborators in an effort to excavate avant-garde traditions.

At X Mark the Bökship BDP will present some of its titles, book-objects and editions, many of which have been designed by its partner FUK Laboratoties. Co-editor and novelist John Holten will read from his latest project of potential books.

http://www.brokendimanche.eu

Wednesday 10 April 2013, 7 – 9pm at X Marks the Bökship
Publishing Forum Reading Group, Reading The Social Life of The Book
SLOB #02 Moyra Davey, The Wet and the Dry & SLOB # 03 Lois Luthi, Infant A

The Social Life of the Book is a collection of commissionned texts dealing with books, and how they engage with the circulation of ideas and the agency of social situations. It brings together artists, publishers, writers, designers, booksellers, etc. who consider books less as finished objects or forms but for their disruptive potential and their ability to produce new relationships, new publics and new meanings.

The Publishing Forum: Reading Group is a joint reading group with Banner Repeater, X Marks the Bokship, and Arnaud Desjardin from The Everday Press, with a specific focus on publishing. Continuing with our enquiry into publishing, past, present and future.

http://castillocorrales.fr/?p=1763
http://publishingforum.wordpress.com

Saturday 13 April 2013, 6 – 9pm
Launch of Young Fresh and Relevant, Issue 3

On the back of a toilet door in a pub in New Cross, London, the advertising blurb of a listings poster promises that, in an evening of short story readings, the readers will all be ‘Young, Fresh & Relevant’. Young, Fresh and Relevant is a new ongoing journal of art writing that has no interest in any of the previous adjectives.

http://www.youngfreshrelevant.com

Thursday 18 April 2013, 7pm
‘I’ve Never Read Her’ Book Club of Short fiction and Essays by Women.
Reading Pussy, King of the Pirates by Kathy Acker,1996.

Kathy Acker was a major figure in postmodern literature for many years. Pussy, King of the Pirates takes her original, experimental style one step further, marking the apex of Acker’s abilities as a hypnotic and daring storyteller.

Loosely related to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Treasure Island, Pussy, King of the Pirates is a grrrl pirate story that journeys from the most famous whorehouse in Alexandria though an unidentified, crumbling city that may or may not be sometime in the future, to Brighton Town, England, and, finally, to a ship headed toward Pirate Island, where the stories converge and the vision ends.

http://iveneverreadher.wordpress.com

Thursday 25 April 2013, 8pm
The Erotic Book Club: Erotica Imitating Art

April’s book club will mark our 4 YEAR ANNIVERSARY! As usual, for our birthday we will be turning the tables and asking you to write your own piece of erotic fiction. This years theme is Erotica Imitating Art. Inspired by last month’s exploration of VENUS IN FURS and Severins infactuation with Titan’s painting Venus with a Mirror, we would like you all to write something that has been inspired by an image – be it a painting, photo, film etc.

http://www.theeroticbookclub.org

Friday 26 April 2013, 4 – 5pm, Arnolfini, Bristol
David Berridge and Eleanor Vonne Brown in conversation

A conversation around a selection of publications presented by X Marks the Bökship with David Berridge (VerySmallKitchen) and Eleanor Vonne Brown (X Marks the Bökship).

Saturday 27 April 2013, 6 – 9pm
Launch of NOOO by Nathan Witt
Edited by Lucy Mercer
Introduction and essay by Federico Campagna
Permacultures Commission [SPACE] Studios

An eBook of new writing from Nathan Witt exploring the cloying existence of life as an artist today.

Nathan Witt is not a writer. He is not a man. He is not Nathan Witt. He is Alvaro de Campos, when he writes “I am nothing./ I shall always be nothing./ I can only want to be nothing./ Apart from this, I have in me all the dreams in the world.” What is nothing? It is everything when it does not speak. It is a bank-robber with his face concealed by a mask. It is a prisoner being questioned. It is a writer, a man, Nathan Witt, when we don’t have enough time to share his silence and his noise. Federico Campagna

 

Writers in Residence at X Marks the Bökship

During the month of April we will be releasing extracts from David Berridge’s forthcoming book Man Aarg! on Poetry, Essay and Art Practice.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen will be working on a project at the fantastic London Centre for Book Arts designing a series of printing blocks unique to their letterpress made out of forms instead of letters. http://londonbookarts.tumblr.com

Rory Macbeth will be working on the final installment of his novel ‘The Wanderer by Franz Kafka’.

X Marks the Bökship
210/ Unit 3 Cambridge Heath Road
London E2 9NQ
UK