Pier Paolo Pasolini's In Danger
In collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco, last November City Lights Bookstore welcomed Jack Hirschman with Susanna Bonetti and Jonathan Richman to celebrate the life and work of Pier Paolo Pasolini and the release of In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology edited by Hirschman.
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was a major cultural figure in post-WW2 Italy, well known as a poet, novelist, communist intellectual, and filmmaker. In Danger is the first anthology in English devoted to his political and literary essays, and includes a generous selection of his poetry. Against the backdrop of post-war Italy, and continuing through the mid-’70s, Pasolini’s writings provide a fascinating portrait of a Europe in which fascists and communists violently clashed for power and journalists ran great risks. The controversial and openly gay Pasolini was murdered at fifty-three; In Danger includes his final interview, conducted hours before his death, as well as the cryptic litany “What Is This Coup? I Know,” which many suspect motivated his murder. Here also are Pasolini’s essays on cultural topics like hippies and Zen buddhism, literary discussions of writers like Italo Calvino, Marianne Moore, and Costantine Cavafy, and even a 1967 interview between Pasolini and Ezra Pound concerning Pound’s relationship to the contemporary Italian avant-garde. The poetry ranges from early works written in the Friulan dialect through his later lyric blasts against fascism.
In Danger is edited and introduced by internationally renowned poet Jack Hirschman, who also edited the enduring City Lights classic Artaud Anthology. Translated by several hands, including Hirschman and well-known rocker Jonathan Richman, In Danger is essential reading for anyone interested in Pasolini’s brave lyricism and critical insight.
Jack Hirschman is a San Francisco poet, translator, and editor. His powerfully eloquent voice set the tone for political poetry in this country many years ago. Since leaving a teaching career in the ’60s, Hirschman has taken the free exchange of poetry and politics into the streets where he is, in the words of poet Luke Breit, “America’s most important living poet.” He is the author of numerous books of poetry, plus some 45 translations from a half a dozen languages, as well as the editor of anthologies and journals. Among his many volumes of poetry are Endless Threshold, The Xibalba Arcane, and Lyripol (City Lights, 1976).
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December 15th,2011
Literature in Translation |
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On Tuesday, November 15, 2011, City Lights author
Ben Ehrenreich sat down with Stacey Lewis to discuss his new novel
Ether.
Ben Ehrenreich is an award-winning journalist and fiction writer. His fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, Bomb, and Black Clock, among other publications. His novel, The Suitors, was published by Counterpoint in 2006 and received widespread critical attention. Ether is his second novel.
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A bearded man in a badly soiled suit known only as The Stranger wanders into an apocalyptic landscape on the fringes of a dying metropolis, looking for a way to “get back on top.” Thwarted and rejected at every turn by old friends and strangers alike–even by the author of this novel, whom he visits repeatedly in unsuccessful attempts to determine his own narrative–his impotence and rage are expressed in acts of seemingly senseless violence. The various characters he encounters on his journey–a pack of sadistic boys, skinheads who beat him senseless, a deaf-mute woman who tries to heal him, a sidewalk preacher and a deranged man who identify him as The One–avoid him or abuse him, or attempt to follow him.
Entertaining, disturbing and wildly intelligent, written with sinister humor and great compassion, Ether reflects on the possibilities and consequences of forgiveness, the problems of faith and the trials of creation.
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December 13th,2011
Literature |
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Noted historian Thaddeus Russell dropped by City Lights Bookstore to read from his new book, A Renegade History of the United States. The book tells a new and surprising story about the origins of American freedom. Rather than crediting the standard textbook icons, Russell demonstrates that it was those on the fringes of society whose subversive lifestyles helped legitimize the taboo and made America the land of the free.
In vivid portraits of renegades and their “respectable” adversaries, Russell shows that the nation’s history has been driven by clashes between those interested in preserving social order and those more interested in pursuing their own desires—insiders versus outsiders, good citizens versus bad. The more these accidental revolutionaries existed, resisted, and persevered, the more receptive society became to change.
Russell brilliantly and vibrantly argues that it was history’s iconoclasts who established many of our most cherished liberties. Russell finds these pioneers of personal freedom in the places that usually go unexamined—saloons and speakeasies, brothels and gambling halls, and even behind the Iron Curtain. He introduces a fascinating array of antiheroes: drunken workers who created the weekend; prostitutes who set the precedent for women’s liberation, including “Diamond Jessie” Hayman, a madam who owned her own land, used her own guns, provided her employees with clothes on the cutting-edge of fashion, and gave food and shelter to the thousands left homeless by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; there are also the criminals who pioneered racial integration, unassimilated immigrants who gave us birth control, and brazen homosexuals who broke open America’s sexual culture.
Among Russell’s most controversial points is his argument that the enemies of the renegade freedoms we now hold dear are the very heroes of our history books— he not only takes on traditional idols like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, but he also shows that some of the most famous and revered abolitionists, progressive activists, and leaders of the feminist, civil rights, and gay rights movements worked to suppress the vibrant energies of working-class women, immigrants, African Americans, and the drag queens who founded Gay Liberation.
This is not history that can be found in textbooks— it is a highly original and provocative portrayal of the American past as it has never been written before.
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On Tuesday, November 15, 2011, City Lights author
Ben Ehrenreich joined us for a reading from his new novel
Ether.
A bearded man in a badly soiled suit known only as The Stranger wanders into an apocalyptic landscape on the fringes of a dying metropolis, looking for a way to “get back on top.” Thwarted and rejected at every turn by old friends and strangers alike–even by the author of this novel, whom he visits repeatedly in unsuccessful attempts to determine his own narrative–his impotence and rage are expressed in acts of seemingly senseless violence. The various characters he encounters on his journey–a pack of sadistic boys, skinheads who beat him senseless, a deaf-mute woman who tries to heal him, a sidewalk preacher and a deranged man who identify him as The One–avoid him or abuse him, or attempt to follow him.
Entertaining, disturbing and wildly intelligent, written with sinister humor and great compassion, Ether reflects on the possibilities and consequences of forgiveness, the problems of faith and the trials of creation.
Ben Ehrenreich is an award-winning journalist and fiction writer. His fiction has been published in McSweeney’s, Bomb, and Black Clock, among other publications. His novel, The Suitors, was published by Counterpoint in 2006 and received widespread critical attention. Ether is his second novel.
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December 6th,2011
Literature |
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Daniel Ellsberg, the man responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, stopped by City Lights Bookstore to read from historian Howard Zinn’s The Bomb (published by City Lights).
Imagine how nuclear weapons would be viewed today if Germany had used them in World War II. Because they would not have changed the outcome of the war, Ellsberg claims they would be branded “criminal, murderous” tools of Nazi desperation.
This excerpt is taken from a discussion on Howard Zinn’s The Bomb, featuring Daniel Ellsberg, recorded at City Lights Bookstore, on September 29, 2010.
As an active WWII bombardier returning from the end of the war in Europe and preparing for combat in Japan, Howard Zinn read the headline Atomic Bomb Dropped on Japan and was glad—the war would be over. “Like other Americans,” writes Zinn, “I had no idea what was going on at the higher levels, and had no idea what that ‘atomic bomb’ had done to men, women, children in Hiroshima, any more than I ever really understood what the bombs I dropped on European cities were doing to human flesh and blood.”
During the war, Zinn had taken part in the aerial bombing of Royan, France, and in 1966, he went to Hiroshima, where he was invited to a “house of rest” where survivors of the bombing gathered. In this short and powerful book, the backstory of the making and use of the bomb, Zinn offers his deep personal reflections and political analysis of these events, and the profound influence they had in transforming him from an order-taking combat soldier to one of our greatest anti-authoritarian, anti-war historians. – City Lights
Daniel Ellsberg is a former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of US government decision-making about the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers.
Howard Zinn (1922 –2010) was raised in a working-class family in Brooklyn, and flew bombing missions for the United States in World War II, an experience he now points to in shaping his opposition to war. Under the GI Bill he went to college and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. In 1956, he became a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, a school for black women, where he soon became involved in the civil rights movement, which he participated in as an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and chronicled, in his book SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Zinn collaborated with historian Staughton Lynd and mentored a young student named Alice Walker. When he was fired in 1963 for insubordination related to his protest work, he moved to Boston University, where he became a leading critic of the Vietnam War.
In his liftetime, Zinn received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. He is perhaps best known for A People’s History of the United States. City Lights previously published his essay collection A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.
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On Wednesday, November 9, 2011, Tav Falco, Erik Morse and Jello Biafra stopped by the Fiction Room at City Lights Bookstore to celebrate the release of Mondo Memphis (published by Creation Books).
Mondo Memphis is a dual, 450-page encyclopedic history and psychogeography of the city of Memphis, written by legendary performer Tav Falco and cultural critic Erik Morse. Mondo Memphis is both an original history of the gothic South and an intertext of the urban legends, rural fables and literary clichés that have made the Bluff City simultaneously a metropolis of dreams and a necropolis of terrors. Mondo Memphis is a major work on American history and culture.
What has been said about Mondo Memphis:”Mondo Memphis, the singular hybrid that is Morse & Falco’s roman noir/history of Memphis, steeps the reader in the most occult nectars of a place, a city evoked in line after tumescent line of haunted prose. Southern gothic ghosts scramble across each rippling page in mad dashes, hurtling across corrugations of text swollen with the satiety of its subject’s past, redolent corrugations tilled up out of a soil engorged with lust, madness, music and febrile civic histories. Plunge into this wealthy and eccentric masterpiece and dissolve yourself for delicious eternities in mythic Memphis.”
–Guy Maddin, film director
“this book is the bible of dixie fried rockabilly psychosis & memphis beat art underground true crime history myth. jam packed with a cast of shamanic visionary heroic characters like alex chilton, james luther dickinson, william eggleston and charlie feathers, tav falco brings to life an alternative history of the bluff city, memphis tennessee, birth place of rock and roll. read it and scream for hell”
–Bobby Gillespie, Primal Scream
Tav Falco is an American-born musician/performer, film-maker, and photographer. He has led the psychedelic rock-and-roll group Tav Falco’s Panther Burns since 1979. Their first LP, “Behind The Magnolia Curtain” (1980), featuring Alex Chilton, is now regarded as a rock and roll classic. Panther Burns still tour the world and release records regularly. Memphis has long been Falco’s adopted home town and spiritual sanctuary.
Erik Morse is a renowned American underground author, rock writer and journalist. He is a contributing writer for Frieze, The Believer, Bookforum and Modern Painters, and the author of “Dreamweapon – Spacemen 3 and the Birth of Spiritualized“.
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November 29th,2011
Literature,
Music,
Noir |
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The Queer Art Of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.
Judith Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (NYU Press), as well as Female Masculinity and Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, both also published by Duke University Press.
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Paul La Farge stopped by City Lights Bookstore on Thursday, October 27, 2011 to read from his new novel,
Luminous Airplanes (
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Afterward, he was joined by
McSweeney’s editor
Eli Horowitz for conversation.
Paul La Farge's new novel Luminous Airplanes
A decade after the publication of Haussmann, or the Distinction, his acclaimed novel about nineteenth-century Paris, Paul La Farge turns his imagination to America at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
In September 2000, a young programmer comes home from a festival in the Nevada desert and learns that his grandfather has died, and that he has to return to Thebes, a town which is so isolated that its inhabitants have their own language, in order to clean out the house where his family lived for five generations. While he’s there, he runs into Yesim, a Turkish American woman whom he loved as a child, and begins a romance in which past and present are dangerously confused. At the same time, he remembers San Francisco in the wild years of the Internet boom, and mourns the loss of Swan, a madman who may have been the only person to understand what was happening to the city, and to the world.
Luminous Airplanes has a singular form: the novel, complete in itself, is accompanied by an online “immersive text,” which continues the story and complements it. Nearly ten years in the making, La Farge’s ambitious new work considers large worlds and small ones, love, memory, family, flying machines, dance music, and the end of the world.
Paul La Farge
Paul La Farge is the author of two novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter. His short stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Harper’s Magazine, Fence, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. His nonfiction appears in The Believer, Bookforum, Playboy, and Cabinet. He lives in upstate New York.
visit: http://paullafarge.com/
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November 17th,2011
Literature |
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Peter Dale Scott reads from American War Machine
Russ Baker & Peter Dale Scott dropped by City Lights Bookstore last December in celebration of the release of American War Machine: Deep Politics, the Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (by Peter Dale Scott) published by Rowman & Littlefield.
Why, even with the transfer of power from a conservative Republican to a liberal-moderate Democrat, does substantive change remain so elusive? And how is it possible that so soon after the catastrophic George W. Bush administration, Bush family fortunes already seem to be reviving—with Jeb Bush touted as a 2012 presidential aspirant? Russ Baker and Peter Dale Scott, two of America’s most thoughtful investigators of American history and politics, discuss of some of the biggest unanswered questions of our time.
Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative journalist, author of Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years, and editor-in-chief of the news site, www.whowhatwhy.com.
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He is the author of: Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire and the Future of America, and many others.
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Joshua Mohr's Damascus
On Thursday, October 20, 2011, San Francisco author Joshua Mohr visited City Lights Bookstore to read from his new novel, Damascus (2 Dollar Radio).
About Damascus.
It’s 2003 and the country is divided evenly for and against the Iraq War. Damascus, a dive bar in San Francisco’s Mission District, becomes the unlikely setting for a showdown between the opposing sides.
Tensions come to a boil when Owen, the bar’s proprietor who has recently taken to wearing a Santa suit full-time, agrees to host the joint’s first (and only) art show by Sylvia Suture, an ambitious young artist who longs to take her act to the dramatic precipice of the high-wire by nailing live fish to the walls as a political statement.
An incredibly creative and fully-rendered cast of characters orbit the bar. There’s No Eyebrows, a cancer patient who has come to the Mission to die anonymously; Shambles, the patron saint of the hand job; Revv, a lead-singer who acts too much like a lead-singer; and Owen, donning his Santa costume to mask the most unfortunate birthmark imaginable.
Joshua Mohr is the critically acclaimed author of Some Things That Meant the World to Me and Termite Parade. He lives in San Francisco and teaches fiction writing.
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November 10th,2011
Literature,
San Francisco |
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