New from University of Chicago Press: paper, cloth, e-book, and audiobook. 

Bernstein’s first poetry collection in five years, Near/Miss is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance. The book opens with a rollicking satire of difficult poetry and moves deftly on to the stuff of contrarian pop culture—full of malaprops, non-sequiturs, translations of translations, and a hilarious yet sinister feed of blog comments. Political protest rubs up against epic collage through poems exploring the unexpected intimacies and continuities of “our united fates.” Grounded in a politics of multiplicity and dissent and replete with both sharp edges and subtle lament, Near/Miss is full of close encounters of every kind.

“The term for two words in different languages that appear the same but have completely disparate meanings is a ‘false friend.’ Flip to any page in Charles Bernstein’s mercilessly brilliant, no-holds-barred new collection and you will encounter a friend you thought you knew, but this phrase, quotation, proverb, equation, cameo, bit of received language will have been evacuated and filled again by the poet’s constructions and reorientations. Bernstein puts words and their groupings, associations, and connotations ‘through the wringer,’ submitting them to a kind of durability test, so that when we emerge from the theater of one of his poems, rubbing our eyes to adjust to the light, our ossified relationship to the language we use has been pleasantly, productively obliterated. In the genius of Bernstein, a word is a whirl is a world.”
—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen: An American Lyric 

“‘Nothing can be truly interesting except the exhaustive,’ Thomas Mann wrote a long time ago. Many of these poems suggest a return to that spirit, in a poetry of wit, ideas, and exploration, with both ease and elegance. These are poems you want to put down and pick up again. And when you do, you find something you hadn’t seen last time. It’s a book I’m glad to have. You’ll be glad you have it, too.”
—Samuel R. Delany, author of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

“A major poet for our time — & then some – Charles Bernstein has emerged as a principal voice –maybe the best we have – for an international avant-garde now in its second century of visions & revisions.”
– Jerome Rothenberg, editor of Technicians of the Sacred

Near/Miss launches in New York, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Chicago:
•Wednesday, Nov. 7, 7pm,  McNally Jackson Books, with Amy Sillman, Tracie Morris, and Felix Bernstein, 52 Prince Street, New York, NY 10012. (Facebook event page.)
•Monday, Nov. 12, 8pm, Bridge Street Books, 2814 Pensylvania Ave NW , Washington, DC 20007
•Wednesday. Nov. 14, 6pm, Penn Book Center, 130 S. 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (FB event page)
•Thursday, Nov. 29, 7:30pm (TBA),  Books Are Magic, with Peter Straub, 225 Smith Street, Brooklyn NY  11231
•Sunday, Jan, 6. 3pm, 57th Street Books, 301 E. 57th St., Chicago, IL 60637

Review of Near/Miss by Feng Yi: “Entanglement of Echoes in Near/Miss,” JELL (Journal of English Language and Literature): pdf

Cover image by Susan Bee, Pickpocket (2013, 20″ x 24″, oil on canvas)

A paperback edition of Recalculating was recently published by Chicago.
The audiobook of Near/Miss will be available soon from Audible and from Chicago.

 

The annual 2018 boundary 2 conference from November 1-3 at University of Pittsburgh is on the subject of “Does Attention to Language Matter?”

Philology, criticism, and translation are three techniques that reveal the constant importance of language to all forms of humanistic activity and artistic creativity.  This conference is a reminder of the risks that come from forgetting the realities of language and an important reminder of these disciplines’ vital role in regulating the relation between meaning and word, between power and value.

The event schedule is listed below. Events are free to the public and in the Cathedral of Learning, Room 501. Nuruddin Farah’s talk on November 1st will be at City of Asylum and is free with an online RSVP.

November 1

7:00 PM Nuruddin Farah, reading and Q&A at City of Asylum

November 2

1:00 PM Jeffrey Sacks (UC Riverside), “The Philological Thesis: Language Without Ends”

2:00 PM Anita Starosta (Penn State University), “We Are All Migrants! / Migrants Go Home!”

3:00 PM David Golumbia (Virginia Commonwealth University), “The Deconstruction of Philology”

November 3

10:00 AM Leah Feldman (University of Chicago), “Embodying Philology: Theater Adaptation in Post-Soviet Central Asia”

11:00 AM Annette Lienau (Harvard University), “Between Pride and Scorn: The Conceptual Limits of the ‘Arabophone’ and Its Challenge to (post)-Orientalist Philologies”

2:00 PM Howard Eiland (MIT), “No Getting Around It”

3:00 PM Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh), “Ways of Working with Language”

4:00 PM Susan Gillespie (Bard College), “The Possibility of Translation”

 

Nuruddin Farah, a member of the b2 editorial board, writes,

Of the half dozen South African struggle icons that have died since the beginning of the year, I was personally closest to Poet-Laureate Willie Kgositsile and Musician Hugh Masakela. After having attended their funerals in Johannesburg, where they died, and observed that Bra Hugh received more far-reaching tributes from his colleagues in the music field, I felt that it was necessary to organize a special literary tribute in Cape Town. And I did so thanks to several others friends, including poets Antjie Krog, Ingrid de Kok and Harry Garuba and novelist Mandla Langa, to honour our loving memory of Kgositsile – the great human being and the formidable poet, whom we will all miss.

boundary 2 editor Nancy Condee is director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies (REES) at the University of Pittsburgh. Recently, REES announced that Sean’s Russia Blog has become a major addition to the center’s resources and electronic presence. Hosted by Sean Guillory, Digital Scholarship Curator at REES, Sean’s Russia Blog is an invaluable web source that features interviews with writers, filmmakers, academics, and policy figures from Russia, the US, and elsewhere. It joins such US web resources as NYU Jordan Center’s All the Russias blog, David Johnson’s Johnson’s Russia List at GWU’s Elliott School, or Maxim Trudolyubov’s The Russia File at the Kennan Institute (Wilson Center).

Sean’s Russia Blog provides hour-long interviews ranging from Russian LGBTQ and New Left Activism to The Early Russian Empire and Reforging Roma into New Soviet Gypsies. Subscribers will find something for any vector of curiosity: interested in Russian Punk Rock? The Stillbirth of the Soviet Internet?  The Political Life of Vodka? Gangs in Russia? To subscribe, search Sean’s Russia Blog in your favorite podcast app or go directly to seansrussiablog.org.

All of the talks from b2‘s recent conference, “Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski”, are now posted on our YouTube channel!

Talks include:

Philip Mirowski: Hell Is Truth Seen Too Late

Bruce Robbins: Liberal Elites

Chris Connery: China, Neoliberal Constellations and the Left

Professor Robbins and Professor Connery’s post-talk Q&A panel can be found here.

Frank Pasquale: Rethinking the Knowledge Problem: Preserving Professional Judgment in an Era of Metric Power

Leah Feldman: Post-Soviet, Neoliberal, New Right Formations

Christian Thorne: The Paleo-Neo and the New New: Periodizing Liberalism

Professor Feldman and Professor Thorne’s post-talk Q&A panel can be found here.

David Golumbia: Mirowski As Critic of the Digital

Annie McClanahan: Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject

Donald E. Pease: The Cultural Fantasy-Work of Neoliberalism

James Livingston: Fuck Work

LIVESTREAMING NOW: WATCH HERE

boundary 2 is pleased to announce Neoliberalism, Its Ontology and Genealogy: The Work and Context of Philip Mirowski, a conference at the University of Pittsburgh. All talks will appear on boundary 2’s YouTube channel after the conference.

Schedule

Friday, March 17, 2017

1:30pm EST – Panel: Bruce Robbins and Chris Connery

Liberal Elites – Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

China: Neoliberal Constellations and the Left – Chris Connery, Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz

3:00pm EST – Rethinking the Knowledge Problem: Preserving Professional Judgment in an Era of Metric Power – Frank Pasquale, Professor of Law, Francis King Carey School of Law, University of Maryland

4:30pm EST – Keynote: Hell is Truth Seen Too Late – Philip Mirowski, Carl E. Koch Professor of Economics and Policy Studies and the History of the Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame

Saturday, March 18, 2017

9:00am EST – Panel: Leah Feldman and Christian Thorne

Post-Soviet, Neoliberal, New Right Formations – Leah Feldman, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Chicago

The Paleo-Neo and the New New: Periodizing Liberalism – Christian Thorne, Professor of English, Williams College

10:45am EST – Mirowski as Critic of the Digital – David Golumbia, Associate Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University

1:30pm EST – The Cultural Fantasy-Work of Neoliberalism – Donald E. Pease, Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, Dartmouth College

3:00pm EST – Serious Crises: Rethinking the Neoliberal Subject – Annie McClanahan, Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Irvine

4:30pm EST – Fuck Work – James Livingston, Professor of History, Rutgers

 

boundary 2 sponsored a conference at the University of Pittsburgh on November 7-9 2013 on the life and work of Edward W. Said”.  We fmet to discuss his writings and his influence under the title, “Legacies of the Future.” Said was an important figure in boundary 2 from the 1970s. Some of us studied with or worked with him. We all learned from and argued with him. Rather than collect a set of talks from the conference, we decided to publicize our interactions by creating a bibliography of our written engagements with his work.