Elders and youngers

Al Filreis

Belladonna Books has just published the fourth in a series called The Belladonna Elders Series, featuring Susan Bee, Marjorie Perloff, and the late Emma Bee Bernstein (with an introduction by Johanna Drucker). You can buy a copy of the book here. This is Belladonna’s bio on Emma:

Emma Bee Bernstein was born in 1985 and grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan. She graduated in June 2007 from the University of Chicago with a BA with honors in Visual Arts & Art History. She wrote her senior thesis on feminism and fashion in contemporary photography, and showed her Masquerade series as part of her senior thesis show. She also exhibited her photographs at A.I.R. Gallery in NYC, the Smart Museum in Chicago, and in numerous student exhibitions at the University of Chicago. She was featured in the New York Times for her work in Vita Excolatur, a University of Chicago erotica magazine and wrote an article on feminist art for M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online #4. Emma was the star of the film Emma's Dilemma, directed by Henry Hills, in which she interviews dozens of artists from the downtown NYC scene. She worked as a curatorial assistant in the Photography, Contemporary Art, and Prints & Drawings departments at the Art Institute of Chicago, at the Renaissance Society, and was a docent at the Smart Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. She worked as a Teaching Artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and was an involved mentor and teacher for Step Up Women’s Network. With Nona Willis Aronowitz, Emma conceived the GIRLdrive project: a cross-country trip to interview and photograph a multitude of diverse women, reflecting on the present state of feminism and social activism. GIRLdrive has a blog and is a forthcoming book from Seal Press. Emma died in December 2008 at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, where she had an internship. Emma is survived by her parents Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein and her brother Felix.

Earlier related entries: 1 2

February 20, 2009

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.