WGXC-90.7 FM
Saturday Afternoon Show: Failure, A Writer’s Life: book launch, lecture and discussion
Sep 15, 2012: 4pm - 5pm
free103point9 Online Radio
Brooklyn (2003 - 2004) | Acra (2005 - 2015), NY
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440 Warren St. | Hudson, NY 12534 | 518-671-6006
http://www.thespottydog.com/
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Webstream of Spotty Dog Books & Ale performances provided by WGXC.
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Hosted by Tom Roe.
Joe Milutis will introduce his new book Failure, A Writer’s Life, a catalogue of literary monstrosities, in-person at The Spotty Dog Books and Ale in Hudson and live on WGXC 90.7-FM during the Saturday Afternoon Show. Failure addresses the ways in which unpublished works, textual noise, and the data fall-out of the web have created what he calls “virtual literature.” By arraying loosely connected stories of literary failure, interspersed with theoretical speculation on the future of the literary work, Milutis’s book performs as much as interrogates the problem of the literary as it vies with its own virtuality. Milutis will give an overview of the book, followed by an open discussion.
"The unfinished, unreadable, unpublishable — the scribbled and illegible,
the too slowly published, the countless unpublished, all that does not seem
to count at all.... here lie all manner of ruins. From Marguerite Duras to
Google Maps, Henri Bergson to HP Lovecraft, Orson Welles to Walter Benjamin
to a host of literary ambulance drivers (not to mention the FBI, UFOs, and
UbuWeb), Failure charts empty spaces and occupied libraries, searches
databases bereft of filters, files spam and porn and weather reports into
their respective konvoluts, and realizes the full potential of cultural
inscription. In a series of snapshots concatenated in the best surrealist
mode, Milutis has curated a catalogue of curiosities as essential to
understanding our current cultural condition as they are eccentric. With
Nietzschean witz and self-reflexive bravura, he teases out the occult links
between heterogeneities in the tradition of Allen S. Weiss and Greil Marcus.
In the process, Milutis redefines the 'virtual' as something much broader
and more interesting than digital simulacra: as the unmanageable storehouse
of memory and the inevitable expanse of forgetfulness. Here, in all its
glamorous success, is the horizon of failure." --Craig Dworkin