—Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother’s death?
Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said:
—What? Where? I can’t remember anything. I remember only ideas and sensations.
— Ulysses, James Joyce
The Anhoek School’s FEMINIST READ-A-THON: WHAT IS FEMINIST LITERATURE? (February 2011).
The Feminist Read-A-Thon is part fundraiser/ part class of The Anhoek School. We are attempting to begin answering the question ‘WHAT IS FEMINIST LITERATURE?’ Readers will make their own selections of ‘feminist literature.’ The only guidelines are that the books should be:
- Fiction
- Books that you (the reader) has never read before
Our reasons are both practical and scholarly. A READ-A-THON as fundraiser retains the possibilities of conversation and transmission: each reader potentially discusses what they have read and why with their sponsors and fellow readers. Because the cultural relevancy of books, feminists, and fictions is intermittently under fire, we take this opportunity to investigate. And, more than answers, we hope to discover an even more vexed space in which we can try to talk about feminisms.
The Anhoek School is a nomadic and experimental school currently based out of Brooklyn with small classes (a limit of seven students per class), and teachers who are invested in challenging the power structures inherent in how and what people are taught. We aim to offer these classes free of cost to the students but still pay the teachers fairly for their labor.
You can volunteer to be a reader or to sponsor a reader.
If you have any questions or are interested in being a reader or sponsoring a reader, please contact us at feministreadathon@gmail.com
For more information see: http://www.anhoekschool.org/readathon.html
Don’t ask me how many of them I’ve read or will read or will even ever crack open and flip through in search of something, I beg you. Don’t ask me how well I remember or understand the ones I have read. Just don’t go there. The answers will reflect poorly on all involved. The shame of the high books-bought-to-books-read ratio is of course comfortingly widespread among us of the book-nerd persuasion. Let’s just round down and say I haven’t read any of them. I don’t want to read them. I just want them around. I require them in my home. And I must have more.
— Scott David Herman on amassing a collection of books in excess of a thousand. (via caseyagollan)
(via caseyagollan)
…since by books we do not now mean the materials of which they are made.
— Richard de Bury Philobiblon (1345)
But in truth we wanted manuscripts not moneyscripts; we loved codices more than florins, and preferred slender pamphlets to pampered palfreys.
— Richard de Bury Philobiblon (1345)
As meat is to the body, such is reading to the soul.
— Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) from the 8th ed. (1676) on books and reading.
For as mastication is to meat, so is meditation on that which we read.
— from an 8th ed. (1671) of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Burton is quoting Saint Heirom.
The books I’d like to take back to school with me:
From the top:
Ex Libris. Ann Fadiman.
Natural History. Wood. (Late 19th C, I bought it for the wood engravings)
The Time Machine. H. G. Wells (yes, it is the Work of Art version…)
Gender Trouble. Judith Butler.
Germinal. Emilé Zola.
Bible Talks in Simple Language. Jesus. (Best Jesus wood engravings ever.)
Ficciones. Jorge Luis Borges.
Nausea. Jean Paul Sartre.
The Anxiety of Influence. Harold Bloom.
The Nature of Photographs. Stephen Shore.
Writing to Learn. William Zinnser.
The Foucault Reader.
On Photography. Susan Sontag.
What Painting Is. James Elkins.
Camera Lucida. Roland Barthes.
McSweeney’s 15.
Swann’s Way. Marcel Proust.
The Odyssey. Fitzgerald translation.
Teen Cuisine: A beginner’s guide to french cooking. Illustrated AWESOMELY by Peter Max.
Creative Darkroom Techniques. Got this a LONG time ago for like $2, lots of interesting ideas.
Art and Objecthood. Michael Fried. sddfff
The Magic of the Book. William Dana Orcutt. (1st ed.)
First issue of October Magazine from spring 1976 with essays from Rosalind Krauss and Foucault.
Art School: Propositions for the 21st Century. Steven Henry Madoff.
After the End of Art. Arthur Danto.
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Cabinet Magazine issue 37 on Bubbles.
The Anatomy of Bibliomania.
Dan Walsh: Paintings.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking. (Vols. I and II)
Diane Arbus. (Aperture monograph)
Esopus magazine issues 10, 11, 12 and 13.
Women: A pictorial archive from nineteenth-century sources. (SUCH GOOD CLIPART).
Amy Sillman: Drawings. Text by Wayne Koestenbaum.
Camera Obscura. Abelardo Morell.
The Complete Engravings, etchings and drypoints of albrecht durer.
Louvre. (a ‘best of’ publication)
Uffizi. (a ‘best of’ publication)
Edward Hopper.
The Complete Woodcuts of Albrecht Durer.
The Art of Peter Max.
Niagra. Alec Soth.
Joe. photographs by Hiroshi Sugimoto with text by Jonathan Saffran Foer.
If a visitor from the past arrived today in our civilized societies…[he] would find a host of readers: on park benches, in the subway, on buses and trams and trains, in apartments and houses. everywhere. Our visitor could be excused if he supposed that ours was a literate society.
On the contrary. Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading — once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive — is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
—
Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night) (via teachingliteracy) (via therewascake)
Just finished reading this.
Even such simple sentences as ‘he fell down or he picked himself up,’ you can’t do in Spanish. You have to say ‘he got up the best he could’ or some lame paraphrase.
—
You see what he’s doing there? He’s so smart like that.
Borges interviewed by Artful Dodge http://www3.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/borges.htm
I’m merely a dreamer, and then a writer, and my happiest moments are when I’m a reader.
— Jorge Luis Borges, interviewed by Daniel Bourne and Stephen Cape http://www3.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/borges.htm
When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.
— Jorge Luis Borges, interviewed by Daniel Bourne and Stephen Cape http://www3.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/borges.htm
