The Making of the Pré

On Saturday, Cabinet Magazine will host “Untitled New York,” an all day festival of experimental writing at their Event and Exhibition Space in Brooklyn. The event is a continuation of “Untitled: Speculations on the Expanded Field of Writing,” a Cal Arts sponsored showcase from last October that featured many of the same writers and themes.
That West Coast event was similarly organized by Christine Wertheim and Matias Viegener, the two intrepid editors/impresarios responsible for the 2005 L.A. conference on the legacy of the French math and linguistics club, the Oulipo. That get-together yielded the dizzying Noulipian Analects anthology, featuring Harryette Mullen, Bernadette Mayer, Doug Nufer, Harry Matthews, Johanna Drucker and plenty of others enacting and/or reminiscing.
(A thoughtful review here, and another here).
Saturday’s event begins at 1:30 with a panel of writers—including Vanessa Place, Steven McCaffrey, Kenneth Goldsmith, and Julie Patton—discussing literary appropriation in contemporary works, a topic which is sure to touch on such perennial Harriet hits as “Flarf vs. Conceptual,”, the the Pirate Poetry Anthology, and, perhaps, Barry Bonds.
Then at 4pm, Wertheim, Latasha Diggs, Rob Fitterman, and Shanxing Wang will discuss writers the use of “non-linguistic elements” and "invented literary systems" in contemporary writing for a panel called “Litterality,” which may or may not touch on D.A. Powell's Conceputal Poetics: A Practicum
Finally, at 8pm Chritine Wertheim and Matias Viegener will host a reading of works by all participants, which is sure to be a studied vacation from normative reading practices.
The event is free and open to the public. For more information email untitled.writing@gmail.com.