LIVE! From City Lights

Catherine Flynn celebrating the release of "James Joyce and the Matter of Paris," published by Cambridge University Press, in conversation with fellow UC Berkeley professor Kent Puckett. In James Joyce and the Matter of Paris, Catherine Flynn recovers the paradigmatic city of European urban modernity as the foundational context of Joyce's imaginative consciousness. Beginning with Joyce's underexamined first exile in 1902–03, she shows the significance for his writing of the time he spent in Paris and of a range of French authors whose works inflected his experience of that city. In response to the pressures of Parisian consumer capitalism, Joyce drew on French literature to conceive a somatic aesthetic, in which the philosophically disparaged senses of taste, touch, and smell as well as the porous, digestive body resist capitalism's efforts to manage and instrumentalize desire. This book re-situates the most canonical of Irish modernists in a European avant-garde context while revealing important links between Anglophone modernism and critical theory. Catherine Flynn works on British and Irish modernist literature in a European avant-garde context. She joined the Department of English at the University of California at Berkeley in 2012. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University's Introduction to the Humanities Program from 2009 to 2012. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University in 2009 and her B.A. in English and Philosophy from University College Cork in 2000. Previously, she practiced as an architect in Ireland and in Vienna, Austria; she has a B.Arch from University College Dublin. She is an Affiliate of the Program in Critical Theory and currently also serves as Director of Berkeley Connect in English and as Associate Director of Irish Studies.

Isabella Tree discussing the subject of her new book, Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm, from New York Review Books with an introduction by Eric Schlosser. For many years Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell struggled to make a go as farmers, doing everything they could to make the heavy clay soils of their farm at Knepp in West Sussex as productive as possible, while rarely succeeding in making a profit. By 2000, facing bankruptcy, the couple decided they would try something new. They would hand their 3,500 acres, farmed for centuries, even millennia, back to nature. They would let it go wild. Isabella Tree is an award-winning author, travel writer, and manager of the the Knepp Wildland Project, together with her husband Charlie. She has contributed writing to National Geographic, Granta, The Sunday Times, and The Observer, and her articles have been chosen for The Best American Travel Writing and Reader’s Digest Today’s Best Non-Fiction. Tree is the author of several books, including The Living Goddess and The Bird Man. She lives in England. Author photo: Francesco Guidicini.

RE/Search celebrates the release of Issue 19: UNDERGROUND LIVING with V. Vale and special guest Rudy Rucker. V. Vale has traversed the major global underground movements of the past century (including Beatniks, Hippies, Punk, Industrial, kitsch, retro-styles, surrealism, situationism, queer, incredibly strange films and music, performance art, feminism, zines—and more). Along the way, he documented it all, taking over 100,000 photos. Here, for the first time in book form, are 80 "personal" images of underground living, selected from the depths of Vale's vast photographic archive. UNDERGROUND LIVING Includes more than 75 color photos featuring the early Ramones shows, Henry Rollins, Lydia Lunch, John Waters, Genesis P-Orridge, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Kathy Acker, Survival Research Labs, and many more! Rudy Rucker is a mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which both won Philip K. Dick Awards. His most recent book is "Million Mile Roadtrip" published by Nightshade Books. He wrote the inroduction for RE/Search 19 UNDERGROUND LIVING.

(From May 2017)China Miéville reads from October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, published by Verso Books. On the centenary of the Russian Revolution, China Miéville tells the extraordinary story of this pivotal moment in history. China Miéville is the multi-award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction includes The City and the City, Embassytown and This Census-Taker. He has won the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Arthur C. Clarke awards. His non-fiction includes the photo-illustrated essay London’s Overthrow and Between Equal Rights, a study of international law. He has written for various publications, including the New York Times, Guardian, Conjunctions and Granta, and he is a founding editor of the quarterly Salvage.

Anna Merlan discussing the subject of her new book, Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power, published by Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co. A riveting tour through the landscape and meaning of modern conspiracy theories, exploring the causes and tenacity of this American malady, from Birthers to Pizzagate and beyond. Anna Merlan is a journalist specializing in politics, crime, religion, subcultures, and women's lives. Merlan is a senior staff writer at Vice features. She was previously a senior reporter at Jezebel and staff writer at the Village Voice and the Dallas Observer. Republic of Lies is her first book. She lives in New York.

(From January 2018) Jenn Pelly and Greil Marcus celebrating a new edition in the 33 & 1/3 series, The Raincoats, by Jenn Pelly and published by Bloomsbury Academic. Co-presented by the Rock and Roll Book Club of San Francisco. In this short book – the first on the Raincoats – author Jenn Pelly tells the story of the group's audacious debut album, which Kurt Cobain once called "wonderfully classic scripture." Pelly builds on rare archival materials and extensive interviews with members of the Raincoats, Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Hole, Scritti Politti, Gang of Four, and more. She draws formal inspiration from the collage-like The Raincoats itself to explore this album's magic, vulnerability, and strength. Jenn Pelly is an editor at Pitchfork. Her writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, SPIN, The Wire, and The Village Voice. Pelly's book on feminist punk band The Raincoats was published in October 2017 as part of Bloomsbury's 33 ⅓ series. Greil Marcus is a music journalist, cultural critic, and author of numerous notable books. He is the author of Mystery Train, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, and many others. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine, The Beleiver, Village Voice, Art Forum, Pitchfoirk, Creem, and numerous others.

Ramesh Srinivasan and Shahid Buttar discussing Ramesh's new book, Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow, published by The MIT Press. How to repair the disconnect between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us: toward a more democratic internet. Ramesh Srinivasan is Professor of Information Studies and Design Media Arts at UCLA. He makes regular appearances on NPR, The Young Turks, MSNBC, and Public Radio International, and his writings have been published in the Washington Post, Quartz, Huffington Post, CNN, and elsewhere.

(From February 2014) Jeff VanderMeer reads from his novel Annihilation, part one of the Southern Reach Trilogy, published in 2014 by FSG. (Includes a very interesting snapshot of City Lights c. 2014 with Peter Maravelis's intro of upcoming readings at the time..!).

Savannah Shange in conversation with Patrick Camangian discussing the subject of Savannah Shange's new book, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco, published by Duke University Press. In Progressive Dystopia, Savannah Shange explores the potential for reconciling the school's marginalization of Black students with its sincere pursuit of multiracial uplift and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and six years of experience teaching at the school, Shange outlines how the school fails its students and the community because it operates within a space predicated on antiblackness. Seeing San Francisco as a social laboratory for how Black communities survive the end of their worlds, Shange argues for abolition over either revolution or progressive reform as the needed path toward Black freedom. Savannah Shange is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and principal faculty in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Patrick Camangian is an associate professor in the Teacher Education Department at the University of San Francisco. He has been an English teacher since 1999, beginning in the Los Angeles Unified School District where he was awarded "Most Inspirational Teacher" by former mayor Richard Riordan and the school's student body. Professor Camangian currently volunteers in the Oakland Unified School District teaching English. He has collaborated with groups such as California's People's Education Movement, the Education for Liberation national network, and San Francisco's Teachers 4 Social Justice.

(From May 2015) Peaches in conversation with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens discussing the book, What Else Is in the Teaches of Peaches, a photograph book chronicling her life and performances with text from Peaches, Yoko Ono, Ellen Page, and Michael Stipe, published by Akashic Books.