If you’re in Jacksonville, Florida this Thursday, make sure to check out Dr. A. Samuel Kimball’s talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I’ll let the flier speak for itself, but I will add that Dr. Kimball’s talks are always enlightening and inspirational.
For the next week, October 1st-7th 2009, the folks who brought you Patrick Alexander’s guide to Marcel Proust, Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time will host a series of 140-character “lectures” about Proust’s oeuvre on Twitter. The course will repeat on the week of the 8th. The press release includes the following grading component:
We’re pretty sure the grading plan is fairly tongue in cheek, but the lectures might be fun, and perhaps might contain something a bit more substantial than the average, uh, tweet (ugh). More at Proust Guide. There’s also a chance to win free Proust stuff for those who participate in the Proust Questionnaire on Facebook, so check that out too. In the meantime, we got a kick out of this “Shocking Things You Didn’t Know about Marcel Proust” flier that came with the press release:
There are some great downloads available at Naropa University’s Internet Archive, including some lucid-but-still-weird lectures from William Burroughs. We highly recommend Burroughs’s 1979 lecture on creative reading, where he dissects Conrad and Gysin among others, waxes on heroic tropes, and talks about assassins. Also good is a 1980 forum on public discourse (Ginsberg introduces and sticks around). Good stuff.
Readers in Northeast Florida may be interested in catching Azar Nafisi speak at the University Center of the University of North Florida at 7:30PM on Monday, March 3rd. Nafisi’s bestselling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran recounts the Western literature course that Nafisi taught in secret to a small group of Iranian women in her house in the late 90s, and engages the events of the Islamic Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and the conservative cultural revolution that led to the necessity of keeping such a course on the down-low. My wife didn’t finish the book; I didn’t start it. My wife said it was good though; she told me she can’t remember why she quit reading it. How’s that for a book review? (I highly recommend Hamid Dabashi’s highly-critical and thoroughly engrossing critique of the book, “Native informers and the making of the American empire,” in which he refers to Reading Lolita in Tehran as “the locus classicus of the ideological foregrounding of the US imperial domination at home and abroad” — read the whole essay here.)
Nafisi’s lecture, “The Republic of the Imagination,” is part of UNF’s ongoing “Distinguished Voices” series (great name, by the way, guys. Lot of thought and creativity put into that one). The next speaker in the series is pretty-boy news analyst and frequent Daily Show guest Fareed Zakaria. Get free tickets for any of the lectures in the series here.
American philosopher and noted writer Alphonso Lingis will deliver a talk on “War and Splendor” at the University of North Florida, in Jacksonville, Florida, at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, October 3rd. Dr. Lingis is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University; his writing lyrically bridges the gaps between the liberal arts of anthropology and philosophy. Dr. Lingis’s current work, including his latest book, The First Person Singular, has focused on his travels to developing nations in Africa, South America, and Asia. By all accounts, Dr. Lingis is a fascinating speaker whose use of costumes, make-up, and music during his “lectures” creates an air of performance art. You can read more about Alphonso Lingis here. If you have the time, I highly recommend checking out Lingis’s paper “Our Uncertain Compassion.” Go here to reserve free tickets to see Dr. Lingis speak (your receipt will also provide directions. This promises to be both enlightening and entertaining–don’t miss it!
Jacksonville readers can look forward to more engaging speakers at UNF over the month of October, including resident genius Dr. Samuel Kimball and PBS documentary maker Ken Burns. Updates and info forthcoming.
Biblioklept 