Evergreen Course Blog | Spring 2011 | Reclaiming Public Spaces

The March for a Fair Budget and the Coalition’s Capital Action Festival is on Tuesday April 5th. March begins 10AM at Rafah Mural at State and Capital Way. Music starts at noon on Capital steps. Jim Page, the famous folk singer from Seattle, Danny Kelly our local legendary troubadour, the Citizens Band together again, hiphop by Thought Crime Collective, more love from Collective Love Unlimited and fun covers from the Olympia Free Choir. Also political theater! The Backbone’s Wheel of Fortune or Misfortune will let you choose how we spend our taxes and your attendance is required to stop the theatrical marriage ceremony of the corporation and government. Throughout all of this will be short speeches by real people not politicians or pundits on how we can take our government back!

The gloves are off. Don’t let the music and fun fool you. We mean serious business and we want you to come and participate in actions that we hope will begin the long struggle towards a better future for us and our children. Like Wisconsin our state is changing and who comes out on top is either the corporations or the people. We say the people lead and the leaders follow! We need people on the steps and engaged and to keep coming back over and over again! That is how our democracy will regain it’s vibrancy!

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=134108203328679

All this is part of a week of action APRIL 2-8. Mark your calendars for these events and make plans to join us as we demand that the bankers and billionaires — and their politician handmaidens in government — stop the attacks on working people and that they share in the sacrifice as our nation struggles to recover from the economic havoc their greed and malfeasance has caused.

SATURDAY, APRIL 2 — 2 p.m. at Peace Arch Park in Blaine — This International Solidarity Event will bring together unionists, students, activists from Canada,Washington and Oregon to extend hands across the border in solidarity with all workers. This event will be co-sponsored by the British Columbia Federation of Labour; the Washington State Labor Council, AFL-CIO; and the Oregon AFL-CIO. Please email Lori Province from the WSLC about mobilization efforts.

SUNDAY, APRIL 3 — 6:30 p.m. at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle — Join IATSE Local 15 for Solidarity Night at “Billy Elliott: The Musical.” Living in a coal mining town in Northern England, young Billy Elliot doesn’t take to boxing lessons and is instead drawn to ballet. His father and brother, striking miners, struggle to understand and support his passion for dance. This is a Union production. Actors are members of Actors Equity; stagehands, IATSE Local 15; hair and makeup, IATSE Local 488; and wardrobe, IATSE Local 887; and musicians, AFM 76-493 and other locals. No-host bar begins at 5:30 p.m. and the show starts at 6:30 p.m. Tickets range from $26.30 to $56.90. For tickets or information, contact IATSE Local 15 at 206-441-1515 ext. 225 orstagerep@ia15.org. Tickets at these group rates are limited, so please get in touch now!

MONDAY, APRIL 4 — 5:30 – 7 p.m. at MLK Memorial Park in Seattle — The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at 6:01 p.m. in Memphis, Tenn., where he was standing with sanitation workers demanding their dream of a better life. Today, the right to bargain collectively for a voice at work and a middle-class life are under attack as never before. Join in this National Call to Action on April 4 and stand with other civil and human rights activists, union members and supporters, Latinos, Asians and immigrants, religious supporters, environmental, student and women’s groups against a political agenda that is attacking working families, their human rights and their dignity. This event, sponsored by the Communications Workers of America, will be at 2200 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Seattle.

TUESDAY, APRIL 5TH – March begins 10 am at the Olympia/Rafah Solidarity Mural at State Avenue and Capital Way. Then on the Capital Steps:
11:45-12: Speaker
12-12:30 Danny Kelly
12:30-1 Speaker
1-1:30 Collective Love Unlimited
1:30-1:45 Wheel of Fortune
1:45-2:30 Jim Page
2:30-3 Marriage Ceremony between Corporations and Government
3-3:45 Citizens Band
3:45-4 Open Mic
4-4:30 Thought Crime COLLECTIVE
4:30-5 Speakers
5-6 Olympia Free Choir
6-7 March around the capital campus!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6 — Noon at the Capitol (exact location TBA) — Washington Community Action Network will bring hundreds of community activists and students to Olympia in an attempt to find the sacrifices that the Legislature will make the bankers and billionaires pay to get us out of the economic crisis.

THURSDAY, APRIL 7 — Time/precise location TBA — Health care unions, led by SEIU District 1199NW, will mobilize health care workers in Olympia to demand that the Legislature fix the deficit problems and to look into the faces of the victims.

FRIDAY, APRIL 8 — Noon at the Capitol Steps – This is the big one: a major Labor Rally at the Capitol in Olympia. Washington’s working families are tired of being blamed and punished for the damage done by Wall Street banks and corporations. Join thousands of public- and private-sector workers from all trades as we stand together as one and demand that lawmakers PUT PEOPLE FIRST! We want good jobs, we want our rights, and we want them NOW!
http://olycoforfairbudget.wordpress.com/
http://wearewashington.wordpress.com/

Hi All,

[READING BELOW--MARX--PLUS SCHEDULE FOR SAT, AND REMINDER: CLASS ON SAT IS IN THE SAME ROOM, C2109, and STARTS 4PM]

I have excerpts of 2 poems that I’ll hand out for us to workshop in-class with the Marx short excerpt below. In addition we’ll do some creative writing (text arts) for the first time this quarter on Saturday. I also hope to begin to get to know one-another during this “language lab” day–so a busy day. One major thing is to at least begin to discuss Marx’s Capital via this small excerpt (continuing with Marx–and the poems–in lecture/discussion on Weds eve). So, please remember to have read this very short excerpt of Marx’s Capital, Section 4 on “Commodity Fetishism,” by the time class begins on Saturday:

Link is HERE

Remember that only this week will we have readings to do FOR Saturday (due for Sat). Usually any assigned readings  will be due for lecture-discussions on Weds and writing/experimenting with texts (language lab) reserved for Saturdays. This week since we are just starting out, having not made any text arts of our own yet, will be the exception. So, this reading is VERY short–since we’ll also come back to Marx when we have more context under our belts.

Enjoy this. Take note of questions, observations, critique–whatever interests or puzzles you.

Last, remember, for those who did get the chance to write a paragraph on what “reclaiming public space” means for you and what text arts and aesthetic production generally may or may not have to do with reclaiming public space–remember to bring these paragraph responses with you to class.

See you then!

In Solidarity,

david

Dear All,

Welcome to your course, Experiments in Text: Reclaiming Public Spaces! This should be a fun, but socially-politically and aesthetically generative (and urgent) quarter. I’m looking forward to getting started.

Class is located in Sem II C2109 – both days, Weds at 5pm and on Sat at 4pm.

There are no readings or writings due for the first day. Rather, we’ll spend some time discussing major themes of the quarter, logistics, and writing processes, spending some time responding to any questions. We’ll likely get out a little early that first day. For future, however, I’ll be emailing everyone links to weekly readings (or attaching pdfs when necessary), as well as putting up these readings on our course blog. The blog will also be a place for announcements and the occasional extrapolation on ideas / materials covered in class. So, please bookmark this blog address (note that the name will change to reflect this quarter’s course, but note too that you’ll have at your fingertips resources of all short courses I’ve taught since 2007):

http://blogs.evergreen.edu/wolachd/

I also have a public blog that is worth putting in your virtual back pocket, since I write on contemporary issues in poetics and politics here, thus making that blog potentially useful, though non-required, as resource:

http://davidwolach.blogspot.com/

The readings posted to the first link above will be very short and will serve to give us context and models to play with, work off, discuss. They’ll range from works of poetry to multi-media artworks, to, again, short critical writing. I am mindful that this is a 4 credit course, so will keep workload at a level appropriate for 4 credits. It’s the quality of work we do with one another that I’m interested in, not quantity or breadth. And so with such little time to play with, primacy will be given to the work each of you do, individually and collaboratively, over assigned readings. We’ll spend a good amount of time outside the classroom this quarter.

Anyhow, I’m really looking forward to learning from and with you this quarter. And to getting to know those of you I have yet to meet/work with.

See you Wednesday,

In Solidarity,

david wolach

Experiments in Text: Spring 2011

Great conversation on Armies by Stecopoulos and beginning of a discussion on The Book of Frank by Conrad! Terms/themes that kept coming up re TOB are below. And below that is the Kate Bornstein info. See you all at her talk. And then see you for an optional debrief on her talk in our normal classroom promptly at 7pm. First, on The Book of Frank so far:

–”blank”

–”Primary Frank” (the larger “narrative” arc of the poems as they pile up, forming a character-like entity, the normative or even cis-gendered life of which is in contradiction, or maybe subjugates, all the “little Franks” — the small uses of this name, standing in for people, animals, things, families, etc., living in “unlivable” conditions)

–Embodied poems, yet “Frank,” “Mother” etc as social constructions, as both social bodies and as “bodyless” in the corporeal sense….

–”Metamorphosis” — discussion of Ovid, of Kafka, of “haiku disfigured.”

–What is not on the page as what is (equally) important: what we cannot see, those we cannot describe. Can we touch what is not there? What is implied? Or what is omitted? [The magic between in the cracks between words, between circumstances made visceral...]

–”Allegory”

–”Narrative poetry”

–”Transformation and Trans-gendered” in relation to “narrative”

–”Pervasive social violence” in the poems in relation to the inclusive love implicit in them, as well as juxtaposed to love as expressed by Conrad in his activist and other writings: “it’s easy to die transgressing out there.”

–Frank as “hole” or “site” around which things or systems or feelings collect, thus only visible by way of what collects around a constantly shape-shifting (again) “blank.”

–

Hey everybody,

In case you haven’t heard, Kate Bornstein will be on campus (in Lecture Hall 1) on Saturday, March 5th at 3pm. In case you don’t know, Kate is an author, playwright and performance artist whose work to date has been in service to sex positivity, gender anarchy, and to building a coalition of those who live on cultural margins. Kate’s book, “Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives To Suicide For Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws,” was published in 2007. Her ground-breaking books “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us” and “My Gender Workbook” are taught in over 150 colleges around the world. A new anthology, “Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation,” co-edited with S. Bear Bergman, recently hit bookstores. Her memoir, “Kate Bornstein Is A Queer and Pleasant Danger” is due out before the end of 2011.

Hope to see you there!
The Evergreen Queer Alliance