Vanessa Place

Contemporary Los Angeles. A trucker and his wife, a nine-year-old saxophonist, an ice cream vendor, a sex worker, and a corpse, among others--are borderless selves in a borderless city, a city impossible to contain.

La Medusa

Caroline Bergvall

Teresa Carmody

Laynie Browne

Poetry. Fiction. Women's Studies. Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody, and Vanessa Place, the book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries. Contributors respond to the question: What is conceptual writing? I'LL DROWN MY BOOK offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon. Contributors are Kathy Acker, Oana Avasilichioaei and Erin Moure, Dodie Bellamy, Lee Ann Brown, Angela Carr, Mónica de la Torre, Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Jen Hofer, Bernadette Mayer, Sharon Mesmer, Laura Mullen, Harryette Mullen, Deborah Richards, Juliana Spahr, Cecilia Vicuña, Wendy Walker, Jen Bervin, Inger Christiansen, Marcella Durand, Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Jennifer Karmin, Mette Moestrup, Yedda Morrison, Anne Portugal, Joan Retallack, Cia Rinne, giovanni singleton, Anne Tardos, Hannah Weiner, Christine Wertheim, Norma Cole, Debra Di Blasi, Stacy Doris and Lisa Robertson, Sarah Dowling, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Laura Moriarty, Redell Olsen, Chus Pato, Julie Patton, Kristin Prevallet, a.rawlings, Ryoko Seikiguchi, Susan M. Schultz, Rosmarie Waldrop, Renee Angle, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tina Darragh, Judith Goldman, Susan Howe, Maryrose Larkin, Tracie Morris, Sawako Nakayasu, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jena Osman, kathryn l. pringle, Frances Richard, Kim Rosenfeld, and Rachel Zolf.

Conceptual Writing by Women

I'll Drown My Book

Robert Fitterman

Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. "In NOTES ON CONCEPTUALISMS, Place and Fitterman erect the first critical framework toward the understanding of conceptual writing, an emergent early twenty-first century literary movement. Elegantly parsed and carefully dissected, this work fleshes out many of the missing details proposed thus far regarding the methodologies and strategies of how to proceed with innovative writing. Both direct and oblique, NOTES is itself a self-reflexive work of conceptual writing in the guise of theory; or is it a work of theory in the guise of conceptual writing? By smartly straddling the creative and the critical, this book does twice the work toward our understanding of what it means to be contemporary"--Kenneth Goldsmith.

Notes on Conceptualisms

Medusa

Scott Wilson

William Pawlett

Edia Connole

Gary Shipley

Stuart Kendall

Karmen MacKendrick

Jacquelynn Baas

Martin Bladh

Karolina Urbaniak

Featuring the first English translation of Jean Bruno's "Illumination Techniques of Georges Bataille" (1963), this edited collection brings together an internationally renowned and interdisciplinary group of scholars to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the inaugural issue of the French interwar avant-garde journal founded by Bataille, Acéphale: Religion, Sociologie, Philosophie (June 24 1936). In so doing, it also broaches the "ferociously religious" esoteric activity of the eponymous secret society, as well as the "sacred sociology" of the Acéphale-affiliated Collège de Sociologie. The Acéphale conjuncture--everything written, acted, drawn or imagined around André Masson's excessively iconic figure of the headless man for the "secret society" and journal founded by Georges Bataille in the 1930s, and everything that proliferated among the loose community around Bataille in those years--continues to demand responses, and to insist on them. Connole and Shipley's volume isn't the last word, but proposes a heterogeneous plethora of words, in varying modes, in this direction. It is also a form of response to the event of Nietzsche, which Bataille and friends reiterated, creating an event of their own; in this vein, the volume refuses the division of life and thought and pushes the forms of "discursive hybridity" to excess. The volume is both erudite and visceral, it comprises historical and biographical knowledge, illuminating the Acéphale conjuncture through research and interpretative, intertextual connectivities, and it is raw, it lives with its material; it asks us to both respect and transgress the orthodox modes of "scholarly" endeavour, to see both as complementary and necessary, in alignment with Bataille's proposition that: "We need the system and the excess." --Patrick ffrench is Professor of French at King's College London (UK), and author of After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community, and Roland Barthes and Film there is much poetry and laughter amid the poly-swarm-cephalic headlessness of this volume, along with irreverently astute scholarship and canny theological mything, all enjoyed in gloriously bad company [(masson, bataille, laure, klossowski, caillois, weil, blanchot, nietzsche and sade).] [read it and shit.] [read it and scream.] [read it and die.] --Fred Botting is Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University (UK), award-winning author of numerous works on horror fiction, and co-editor, with Scott Wilson, of The Bataille Reader 85 years after the release of the first issue of Acéphale, and the birth of the eponymous secret society, this volume enters inside the sanctuary to invite us on a crazy, labyrinthine journey punctuated by five "stations" where--under the joint sign of Nietzsche and expenditure--thought ceases to be separated from passion and madness, and writing is transformed into a process of self-sacrifice, "acéphale-graphy." --Marina Galletti is Professor of French Literature at Università Roma Tre (Italy) and co-editor, with Alastair Brotchie, of The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology

Responses to the Nietzsche Event

Acéphale and Autobiographical Philosophy in the 21st Century

Blake Butler

Christopher Higgs

Fiction. By Blake Butler and Vanessa Place. Assembled by Christopher Higgs. From the room inside the room, from the house inside the house memories of a one-legged father and various acts of jurisprudence haunt the mysterious creature who writhes in somatic isolation from one waking nightmare to another. Here, two writers have produced textual bodies, one speaking for the interior and the other describing the exterior, while a third writer has assembled these two bodies into a single grotesque symphony of chimerical language. A hitherto unprecedented collaborative experiment, ONE defies categorization and heralds a new approach to exploring the boundaries of authorship and narrative.

A Sentence

Dies

SCUM Manifesto

Eileen Myles

Bhanu Kapil Rider

(a Poem-essay, Or Precursor: NOTES : for a Novel : Ban en Banlieues)

An English court in 1736 described rape as an accusation “easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, though never so innocent. ”To prove the crime, the law required a woman to physically resist, to put up a “hue and cry,” as evidence of her unwillingness. Beginning in the 1970s, however, feminist and victim-advocacy groups began changing attitudes toward rape so the crime is now seen as violent in itself: the legal definition of rape now includes everything from the sadistic serial rapist to the eighteen-year-old who has consensual sex with a fourteen-year-old. This inclusiveness means there are now more rapists among us. And more of rape’s camp followers: the prison-makers, the community watchdogs, law-and-order politicians, and the real-crime/real-time entertainment industry. Vanessa Place examines the ambiguity of rape law by presenting cases where guilt lies, but lies uneasily, and leads into larger ethical questions of what defines guilt, what is justice, and what is considered just punishment. Assuming a society can and must be judged by the way it treats its most despicable members, The Guilt Project looks at the way the American legal system defines, prosecutes, and punishes sex offenders, how this Dateline NBC justice has transformed our conception of who is guilty and how they ought to be treated, and how this has come to undo our deeper humanity

Rape, Morality, and Law

The Guilt Project

This book is a text version of Vanessa Place's live performance I've got this really great joke about rape, in which the artist recites rape jokes for 45 minutes to a seated audience in a gallery or from a small stage. It is art performance, not stand-up comedy. Many of the jokes were found on various English-language websites dedicated to offensive jokes; inspired by the form, the artist has improved some of the jokes, and written some herself. Place decided to work with rape jokes several years ago after various stand-up comics were rebuked for making rape jokes on and off-stage; the gist of the criticism being that "rape jokes aren't funny," and that a rape joke is tantamount to rape itself. But Place's work shows that rape jokes aren't rape and considers why rape jokes are very funny to very many people, and persistently so. As Place's audiences have demonstrated, those categorically opposed to the rape joke tend to find themselves straining not to laugh, just as those usually thrilled by such raw language find themselves gagging on something hard to swallow. What then proves interesting is the activation of art: the when, why, and how of such charged words being funny, being revolting, becoming sound, fashioning suspense. To experience this language that hangs thick in the air; to see where, in each of us, the joke sticks.

Rape Jokes

You Had to Be There

Vanessa Place

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