On 2 December Emmanuelle Waeckerlé will read /perform from  her book A direction out there, readwalking (with) Thoreau at the Architectural Association in London, as  part of the public programme of their Ursula K Le Guin exhibition.

We have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. ~ Ursula K Le Guin

This evening of readings takes its cue from  Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction – which reimagines narrative not as a linear arc of conquest but a container to gather and ‘hold things that bear meanings and enable relationships’.

The gathering functions as a kind of ‘carrier bag’ – a vessel for holding voices, fragments, and temporalities. The event unfolds through a series of short readings that resist closure and invite collective engagement. Voice becomes continuous with what it reads, while also altering it – construing a space of communication, resonance, and shared knowledge. Through conversational exchange and the labour of reading, the event explores acts of being with others through words.

If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely, please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk

Read Richard Marshall’s lovely essay about Bridget Penney’s SONIA’S BOOK here.
[...] A pressed flower in a family book is close to the language of affection, yet here the book does not turn the object into a token of affection. It keeps to the surface, and by doing so it stays with a different intimacy, the intimacy of pressure. Leaves and petals are held between papers. Tape is pressed and lifted and pressed again. Fingers leave a logic of spacing that another hand can later follow. The writing reproduces that logic. It does not draw conclusions about the life behind it. It recognises that the act of keeping is the life that matters for the purposes of the present book. If there is an eros here, it is the eros of touch that does not consume. It is the persistence of contact without possession, a sustained nearness that maintains distance as its condition.

Read  Sal Randolph’s superb essay on Sean Ashton’s MASSIVE MASSIVE OIL SLICK here. [...]  Suppose is like a reality that parallels and investigates our own (“Suppose there is more rain. Suppose there is more snow”). Expect is darker, with a sense of something impending (“Expect delays. Expect major delays and minor delays: three-mile tailbacks, slow-moving traffic.”). Avoid is the spiky voice of negative advice (“Avoid cider. Avoid dry cider and sweet cider.”). Reading Massive Massive Oil Slick feels like encountering an oracle muttering continuously in the back of a cave. Any time I enter, I find something that speaks to my personal moment, a diagnosis of sorts, maybe a guide. Today it tells me to expect more dictatorship, and naturally I’m feeling it. There’s another “No Kings” march coming up, and you’ll find me in the crowd. 

Read Michael Hampton’s superb review of Sean Ashton’s MASSIVE MASSIVE OIL SLICK here.
[...] MMOS is an unrelenting catalogue of the faded, dead and dying, pop culture piledriven hard into the highbrow. Another of his anchor points is the lament ‘all over, all over, all over’, as if Michel de Montaigne had been reincarnated and was attempting elegiacally, under the influence of Kenneth Goldsmith’s rigid ploys, to grasp the complexity and sheer bulk of digital data in cyberspace; for a lot of this para novel emanates from the online world, meaning it is truly a warped dystopian vision; although its literary antecedents could plausibly include St Augustine’s Confessions, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. Yet this strangely gripping, Hudibrastic text, poses some serious questions about traditional form (especially how it has been altered beyond recognition by formatting), and more importantly even the bothersome need to conjure up or devise the imaginary—fiction in other words—when the nature of contemporary reality is so disturbing, grotesque and comical?