Past Events

Archive 2004-2005

September 20

DJ Spooky (Paul Miller)
Cultural Recycling and The Remix
Co-sponsored with the Georgetown University Humanities Institute
Seminar, ICC 462, 5:30 p.m. • Reading, Copley Formal Lounge, 8 p.m.

Creator of “illbient” music, a hybrid of hip-hop, jazz, techno, and ambient music, DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, a.k.a. Paul D. Miller, is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician of extraordinary range. Miller’s work has appeared in a wide variety of contexts: the Whitney Biennial; the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany; The Village Voice, The Source, and a host of other periodicals. His most recent albums are Optometry, Modern Mantra, and Dubtometry. Miller’s first collection of essays, Rhythm Science, was published in 2004.

October 18

Etal Adnan with Ammiel Alcalay
Lannan Distinguished Writing Series
Seminar: Conversation between Etel Adnan and Ammiel Alcalay
ICC Auditorium, 5:30 p.m.
Reading: Etel Adnan, introduced by Ammiel Alcalay
ICC Auditorium, 8 p.m.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon and is a painter as well as a poet and fiction writer. Sitt Marie Rose, her novel set during the Lebanese civil war, is considered a classic of Middle Eastern literature. Adnan's works often combine Arabic calligraphy with the written word, a style used to brilliant effect in her volume of poetry, The Arab Apocalypse. Other books include Paris, When It's Naked and Of Cities and Women: Letters to Fawwaz. Etel Adnan is the Lannan Distinguished Reader at Georgetown for 2004-2005.

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet and scholar. He has translated many works from Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, and Serbo-Croatian and is the editor of the collection of Middle Eastern Jewish writing, Keys to the Garden. His own books include the ground-breaking study After Jews and Arabs; a collection of essays, Memories of Our Future; and From the Warring Factions, a prose collage.

Novemeber 10

Charles Amirkhanian and Jaap Blonk
The Sound of Text
Seminar: ICC 462, 5:30 p.m.
Reading: ICC Auditorium, 8 p.m.

Composer, percussionist, sound poet, and radio producer, Charles Amirkhanian is a leading practitioner of electroacoustic music and text-sound composition. In his recent works, Amirkhanian incorporates environmental sounds and musically pitched sounds. He is currently Executive & Artistic Director of the new music organization Other Minds, Inc. in San Francisco.

World-renowned Dutch sound poet Jaap Blonk is a composer and voice performer of remarkable ingenuity and power. Working in the tradition of early twentieth century Dada, Blonk explores the rich common ground between poetry and music through combinations and patterns of voiced sound. Blonk is the founder and leader of Splinks, a 15-piece orchestra and BRAAXTAAL, an avant-rock trio.

February 3

Leslie Scalapino and Ron Silliman
Poetic Language and the Real?
Leslie Scalapino, author of twenty-three published books of poetry, fiction, essays, and plays, is known for deeply perceptive and rhythmic writing, a writing that speaks to an emotional and intellectual reality that is often both before and beyond the real. Many of her recent books explore writing as a practice of Buddhism and are influenced by her travels in Mongolia, Tibet, India, and Japan. Scalapino teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and is editor, designer, and publisher of O Books.

A prominent figure in the Language movement, Ron Silliman has written and edited 25 books, including the just-republished anthology In the American Tree. Silliman has been writing a poem entitled The Alphabet since 1979 in a style that is unfoldingly rich, surprising, and often earthy in its worldly accuracy. Volumes published thus far have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, ®, Toner, What, and Xing. He lives in Pennsylvania and works as a market analyst in the computer industry.

March 3

Brian Kim Stefans, Ambroise Barras, and Giselle Beiguelman
Digital Poetics: The Cultural Response
Seminar, ICC 462, 5:30 p.m.
Reading, ICC Auditorium 8 p.m.

Poet Brian Kim Stefans works in a range of genres in both electronic and print media. He has published several books and chapbooks, including Jai-lai for Autocrats, Poem Formerly Known As "Terrorism," and other poems, and Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics, a collection of interviews, poems, and poetics.

Concerned primarily with new modes of aesthetic perception in digital texts, Ambroise Barras explores the limits and overlappings of material and immaterial forms and interfaces. He is the founder and director of the Swiss digital art and literary group Infolipo. Barras teaches at the University of Geneva.

Giselle Beiguelman is a new media artist and a professor at the Catholic University of São Paulo. Her work includes The Book after the Book and egoscope. A creative pioneer, she is the author of one of the first poetic pieces for mobile phones, a project that explores reading and reception in wireless and networked environments.

March 31

Ann Lauterbach and Jennifer Moxley
A Lyric Sensibility
Susan Schultz has called Ann Lauterbach a "contemporary anomaly, the pure lyric poet," who "uses sound as a springboard to investigations more suggestive than concrete, more ethereal than earthy, more sung than said." Lauterbach is the author of five collections of poetry, including If in Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000. She is Director of Writing in the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

How should one speak and write in a world that is full of possibility, but also history? Jennifer Moxley asks and answers such questions as she deftly reconciles time and poetic form. Moxley is the author of The Sense Record and other poems, Imagination Verses, and several chapbooks. She lives in Orono, Maine and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maine.

April 13th, 14th & 15th

Black Archipelago: A Festival of the Written and Performed Word from the African Diaspora
Lannan Literary Festival & Symposium, 2005

Occurring over three days, the 2005 festival and symposium will bring together writers from the US, UK, Canada, and the West Indies and will feature fiction, poetry, and play writing, as well as informal symposia (conversations) on the writing of the African Diaspora.