What’s the Point of a Creative Writing Workshop?

Writing and resistance in the Age of Trump

Two days after the 2016 election, people arrived in my writing workshop talking non-stop. Their disbelief, grief, anger, and guilt at not ‘having done enough,’ ricocheted around the room. It was a challenge for them to focus on the page. In the weeks that followed, this scene repeated itself over ...
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Will Trump Defund Culture?

History Says No

It doesn't surprise me that the first Trump budget proposes to eliminate all federal cultural and public broadcast funding. It's the same script we have been seeing for almost forty years. First, the amounts of federal money devoted to arts and culture are infinitesimal, particularly when you compare them to ...
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A Pure Solar World

Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism by Paul Youngquist

One of my favorite moments of personal cognitive dissonance goes back to my time at Michigan State in the mid-1970s when at brunch at IHOP one Sunday morning I looked over to see John Gilmore, June Tyson, and Marshall Allen seated a couple of tables over from me. They were ...
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A Pure Solar World

Sunday Readings: Texts and Commentary

The Left is very good at both recrimination and self-recrimination.  While salutary, both can be carried to extremes, and thus become self-defeating. Public protest about the election of Trump is both understandable and righteous – after all, he has publically and I assume sincerely expressed contempt for the norms and ...
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Sunday Readings: Texts and Commentary

Category Anxiety: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

It’s been a weird year (the weirdest I can remember at least), and Thursday morning’s announcement that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature made it weirder still. But, overall, it is weird in a welcome way.

Pre-announcement speculation centered on the possibility that the prize might be awarded to an ...

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Category Anxiety: Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize

At The Beginning Was The Imagination

At the beginning was the imagination, with its capricious subversive nature. But then a charming guy called "capitalism" arrived on the scene and promised to bring bread to everybody. People believed him, although it was soon evident that he was more interested in actually enriching somebody. But, most of all, ...
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At The Beginning Was The Imagination

RetroDada Manifesto

The RetroDada Manifesto was written at the invitation of Anita Hugi and David Dufresne for an event at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, 4 & 5 March 2016, to celebrate the Dada centenary, in there place where it all began. For more information on that event, and related projects see http://dada-data.net/en/  Below ...
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RetroDada Manifesto