VERSAL Magazine 11 WANTS YOU!

Last chance to send your work to Versal 11!

Amsterdam's acclaimed literary & arts journal, Versal, is now reading for its 11th edition. Its editors are looking for excellent prose, poetry, art and the declassified "inbetween".

Guidelines and submissions here: http://www.versaljournal.org/guidelines. A $2 submission fee applies--BUT: Pre-order Versal 11 when you submit and we’ll waive the fee. FYI: that fee goes to paying authors and keeping Versal afloat.

For a close look at Versal's tastes, purchase the current no. 10 or a back issue: http://www.versaljournal.org/order. The review is GORGEOUS and packed with excellent prose, poetry and artwork.

The deadline for submissions to Versal 11 is January 15, 2013.

Also--feel free to LIKE us on FACEBOOK--where you can also see pictures of the Versal editors drawing, pasting and all around making CIRCLES in issue 10 (me included!)  https://www.facebook.com/versaljournal?ref=ts&fref=ts

Photo from Versal FB page

 Also--follow the VERSAL BLOG at  http://versaljournal.blogspot.fr/

Check out also the lovely VERSAL 10--the gold issue--video!  http://www.wordsinhere.com/versalten.html

Lex-ICON: new blog with calls for work on text and image

Seeking University presentations, authors, visual artists, publishers, curators and MORE for the conference that I am co-organizing which will be hosted at UHA in June of 2012. I know, I took a little bit too long to get out the word, but it is now OUT, so PLEASE do go and visit our blog and respond to our CFP and pass on the info: http://lex-icon21.blogspot.com/ here it is:

Lex-ICON :
treating text as image and image as text

International interdisciplinary conference
7 - 9 June 2012
Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse, France.

Co-organised by Jennifer K Dick (UHA/ILLE),  Didier Girard (UHA/Ille), Océane Delleaux (UHA/CREM/Edith), Eric Suchère (École Supérieure d'Art et Design de Saint-Étienne) and Fréderique Toudoire-Surlapierre (UHA/Ille).

Multidisciplinary conference on text and image creation, use and reception in ultra-contemporary literature and visual art (works created in the 21st century).


« The sum of human wisdom is not contained
in any one language, and no single language is
CAPABLE of expressing all forms and degrees
of human comprehension. »
                                                — Ezra Pound

As Pierre Garnier wrote almost 50 years ago, « la nouvelle poésie s’alimente, quant à son origine, dans les langages typiques d’autres arts, en particulier celui des arts plastiques, qui lui permettent d’atteindre la dimension d’objet récusant la “lecture”. » Since then, many movements have given a central place to the use of the word rather than that of any other visual form. As Johanna Drucker wrote, by the beginning of the 1960s « artistic activity […] had dissolved the boundaries between disciplines which had rigidly distinguished high modern visuality from high modern literariness at mid-century […] the experimental innovation had inbred so successfully with other artistic sources […that] current work actually blends visual and verbal elements into what is an increasingly synthetic unity ».

Is it emphatic attention to the physical substance of language that draws authors and visual artists together today? Or are there very different modes of representation and conceptual creation engendering cultural upheavals in artistic and literary practice?

This conference will unite researchers from varied disciplines in order to begin formulating a new criticism for the 21st century’s authors and visual artists who are given to making texts to see as if they were geometric forms, or forms to read, colors and visual sequences whose nature it had once been to reach spectators and their perceptions with an inherent immediacy.

In particular, Lex-ICON will focus on the reception of hybrid works, asking whether language and words are necessary to say or communicate things and ideas or even to think. Can one simply feel thought through the gaze without ever really having the words, the grammar and thus language itself to describe it? Is a process of translation from the visual to linguistic necessary for thought to take place? The fluid nature of articulation emerges at this time when language has taken center stage in visual art and where graphic gestures dominate literary works. The debates which have surrounded the treatment, classification, teaching, economy and reception of such works are not new, but they are increasingly becoming the motifs of ultra-contemporary art and literature. The theories on lexiconographic work have long lived in separate ponds, but the idea is to unify them and seek a common cross-disciplinary discourse.

The goal is therefore to contribute to the development of theoretical reflection regarding the effect produced by the intersemioticity of verbo-visual practices. Discussions and panels will be joined by a series of artistic and literary presentations and performances during and around the conference in the region of Alsace and the city of Mulhouse.

Potential presentation topics include :
-    The use and novelties of visual protocols (typographic plays, scribbling, collages, importation of images, etc.) in ultra-contemporary literature.
-    The borders of the visual form of letters in books and out.
-    The multimediality of the page as a space for redefinition.
-    The stakes and the modality of an image-rhetoric in the context of emerging screen cultures.
-    Textual processes which lead to “unreadable” readings, to illegible texts.
-    Art for art: metafiction within verbo-visual artwork.
-    The genre of the rebus as narrative rediscovery (hommages to Magritte).
-    Emergent modes of lexiconographic reading..
-    The new relationship to languages—perhaps “a corollary to travel and to the planetarization of culture” (Edeline)?
-    The phenomena of simplification of complex thought or of complexification of reading image and text as applied to the creation of lexiconographic works.
-    Identity (and the interrogation of identity) of the author-artist by these verbo-visual creative practices.
-    New narrative forms in lexiconographic work.
-    The Lyricisms of a lexiconographic text or piece of art.

Artists to study ? :
Works created since the year 2000 by lexiconographic artists and authors such as Rosaire Appel, Julien Blaine, Marcel Broodthaers, Sophie Calle, Amélie Dubois, Brendan Fernandes, Kathleen Fraser, Jenny Holzer, Susan Howe, Vannina Maestri, Jacques Sivan, Nico Vassilakis, Lawrence Weiner,  or, among those who showed language-based artworks at the Art Basel 2011 expo : Vito Acconci, Kader Attia, Martin Boyce, Tacita Dean, Matias Faldbaklen, Claire Fontaine, Doria Garcia, Ryan Gander, Liam Gillick, Philip Goldbach, Leon Golub, Shilpa Gupta, On Kawara, William Kentridge, Sean Landers, Mark Leckey, Fabian Marti, Sara Morris, Michael Müller, Yoshitomo Nara, Jack Pierson, Jaume Plensa, Richard Prince, Allen Ruppersburg, David Shrigley, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Barthélémy Toguo and others.

Paper proposals (250-300 words) in French or English should be emailed before the 25th of February 2012. They should be sent to both Jennifer K Dick (jennifer-kay.dick@uha.fr or fragment3@yahoo.com) and to Océane Delleaux (oceane.delleaux@wanadoo.fr).

The organizers will confirm the final programme by the  15th of March 2012.

All of the information concerning this conference will be posted on our blog at :
http://lex-icon21.blogspot.com/

CFP Station to Station: Colloque International et Nomade, UHA Mulhouse 2011

CFP: STATION to STATION

Didier Girard, Frédérique Toudoire-surlapierre and I would like you to consider submitting papers for our nomadic conference which will be held ON TRAINS next December 2011!

Please consider sending a proposal in ENGLISH, FRENCH, ITALIAN, SPANISH or GERMAN, and help us get the word out about this new CFP and conference blogsite I just put up! See the call below in its French version, and go to the new blogsite for the ENGLISH and other versions http://station2stationcolloquenomade.blogspot.com/ Thanks so so so much--and plase send contributions, pass the word, etc etc

Station to Station:
Colloque international et nomade
- 1, 2 et 3 décembre 2011 –

Colloque organisé par les centres de recherches ILLE, CRESAT (UHA, Mulhouse) et le doctorat international Cultural Studies in Literary Interzones (coord. Bergame, Italie).

Appel à contributions. (version française)
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Sommes-nous tout à fait nous-mêmes ou tout à fait autres lorsque nous nous installons dans un train ou lorsque nous entrons en gare? Ou ne serait-ce là qu’une sensation factice, produit d’une consommation excessive de mythes romantiques ou modernistes éculés? Ces lieux, espaces relativement réduits et stables, qui existent aussi par leur atemporalité alors qu’ils n’auraient pas de sens sans la vitesse et les trajectoires qui les traversent et qui les portent, ont-ils un pouvoir singulier sur les comportements et les imaginaires individuels ? Un recul épistémologique permettrait sans doute aux philosophes comme aux historiens de positionner – ou de questionner le positionnement – de tels espaces dans la vie urbaine et en termes plus généraux, il s'agit de considérer la valeur de témoignage, de trace urbaine, mais aussi d'étudier le patrimoine immatériel qu'ils aident à constituer.
La gare, le wagon, le train sont-ils architectoniques ?

En nous permettant de perdre un peu de la gravité qui nous plombe, que ce soit dans une réalité high tech virtuelle, dans les chansons de David Bowie ou dans des temps pré-machiniques (le poète Milton ne disait-il pas déjà “The planets in their station list'ning stood.” Paradise Lost , VII, 563 ?), la station, comme le train, invite à la décélération des affects. La gare devient alors un de ces lieux de flux et de transit, de mémoire autant que d’oubli, point de fuite ou point d'entrée dans la ville, lieu de déplacements des individus, des marchandises et des populations, une archive des traces de nos rages passagères.

Phénomènes éminemment européens ( ?) occidentaux ( ?) - le débat reste largement ouvert pour les historiens – la gare et le chemin de fer, s’ils sont si constitutifs de nos cultures comme phénomènes économiques, architecturaux, politiques et esthétiques, invitent aussi à des voyages immobiles ou à l’envers, plutôt qu’à ceux qui nous mènent au bout, à destination, au bout de nos désirs, au bout de la nuit. Nous voudrions tout d’abord dans ce colloque en Humanités consacré à la gare et au wagon, les reconsidérer d’abord pour ce qu’ils sont, des interzones : lieux clos sans l’être vraiment, lieux sans frontière ou aux frontières mouvantes et instables, où la loi et la société interrompent leurs propres règles, où s’établit tout un jeu d’indifférenciations totalement artificiel, parfois obscène par l’intimisme exacerbé qui s’y recrée. La gare peut en effet être un espace de désordre, d'hétérogénéité mais aussi de brassage et de communications.
La gare c’est d’abord, dans la ville, une enclave ; et le wagon, dans nos vies, un fantasme d’annihilation de l’Autre.

Nous invitons nos futurs conférenciers à étudier la gare et le wagon (en littérature, en histoire, dans les arts visuels, et pourquoi pas également en empruntant les rails de la philosophie) comme vecteurs culturels et artistiques de l’obsolescence programmée de l’innovation technologique à l’occasion de l’événement que représente l’arrivée de la ligne TGV à Mulhouse Gare Centrale cet hiver. Pour les historiens, ce sera l'occasion de les considérer dans leur rôle prépondérant dans l'évolution des aménagements urbains

Et afin de joindre l’acte à la parole, ce colloque sera nomade et privilégiera des propositions de performances universitaires. Mis à part quelques interventions qui se feront sous les élégants lambris de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse (à quelques pas de la Gare) les ateliers, dans leur grande majorité, se dérouleront principalement à bord d’un train. Et il nous faudra emprunter des gares, des stations et des arrêts, sans itinéraire précis, juste une destination incertaine à la recherche de nous-mêmes, pour des allers-retours sans fin.

Mulhouse Terminus, mais personne ne descend !

--Le comité organisateur.

Date limite de dépôt des propositions: 15 juin 2011. : Merci d’adresser vos propositions à Didier Girard (didier.girard [at] uha.fr ou drgeere [at] free.fr) Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre (frederique.toudoire [at] uha.fr) et Jennifer K. Dick (jennifer-kay.dick [at] uha.fr) avant le 15 juin 2011. Pour plus: http://station2stationcolloquenomade.blogspot.com/

Pour assister aux débats et réserver votre billet : contacter Jeannine Schneider jeannine.schneider [at] uha.fr + 33 (0)3 89336381.

Versal Magazine Special Pre-Order Offer!

As many of you know, I work with the wonderful staff on VERSAL MAGAZINE out of Amsterdam. This literary review is jam packed with amazing writing, but is also a fabulous example of lit mag design, with artwork and also excellent layout throughout. An object to delight the eye and mind!! (see our website for lots of info: http://www.wordsinhere.com/)

So, I am writing a little post here to ask that you consider preordering the next issue and thus both supporting the continuation of the review while also getting for yourself a great book of prose, poetry and artwork!!!! What's more, your order gets you TWO copies--the newest issue plus a backissue!

Click here to order your 2 issues!:

http://www.wordsinhere.com/preorder.html

The issue launches at the end of April, so do ORDER NOW to benefit from this fab offer, and to help us with the costs of the future issue.

Also, if anyone is in Amsterdam at the end of April, do attend the newest issue's launch!
Which is LITERARY DEATH MATCH, AMSTERDAM with Opium

http://www.literarydeathmatch.com/upcoming-events/april-28-2011.html

See the website for full info on that! April 28th 2011!!!

Feel free to pass this info on to everyone you know!!!

Also, for those of you who have yet to submit work to Versal, we will be accepting new work next fall! So get your copies now to get an idea of what we are looking for, then send us work next fall!!!!

Versal is OPEN for submissions!!!

Versal magazine's official call for submissions for issue 8 has gone out! I am very proud to be joining the Versal poetry staff in Amsterdam this year, along with Matthew Saddler in NYC. We will be two of many readers who will peruse your poems! There are also an exciting handful of careful, excited fiction readers impatiently awaiting YOUR texts! So, if you have slaved away this summer, it was not for naught--check out the guidelines and send your work into Versal:

Versal wants your poetry, prose, and art for its eighth issue due out in May 2010. Internationally acclaimed literary annual published in Amsterdam, bringing together the world's urgent, involved & unexpected.

See website for guidelines and to submit:
http://versal.wordsinhere.com

Inquiries (only) can be directed to: versal@wordsinhere.com

Deadline: January 15, 2010

Please feel free to forward & post this call into your networks. Versal looks forward to reading your work!