'A series of accidents has brought you this book. You may think of it not as a book, but as a library, an elevator, an amateur performance in a nearby theatre. Open it to the table of contents.  Turn to the page that sounds the most interesting to you. Read a sentence or two. Repeat the process.  Read this book as a creative act, and feel encouraged.' 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance is a collection of miniature stories, parables, musings and thinkpieces on the nature of reading, writing, art, collaboration, performance, life, death, the universe and everything. It is a unique and moving document for our times, full of curiosity and wonder, thoughtfulness and pain. Matthew Goulish, founder member of performance group Goat Island, meditates on these and other diverse themes, proving, along the way, that the boundaries between poetry and criticism, and between creativity and theory, are a lot less fixed than they may seem. The book is revelatory, solemn yet at times hilarious, and genuinely written to inspire - or perhaps provoke - creativity and thought.

39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance

Arts & Photography

Goulish, Matthew

Performing Arts

Routledge

'A series of accidents has brought you this book. You may think of it not as a book, but as a library, an elevator, an amateur performance in a nearby theatre. Open it to the table of contents. Turn to the page that sounds the most interesting to you. Read a sentence or two. Repeat the process. Read this book as a creative act, and feel encouraged.' 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance is a collection of miniature stories, parables, musings and thinkpieces on the nature of reading, writing, art, collaboration, performance, life, death, the universe and everything. It is a unique and moving document for our times, full of curiosity and wonder, thoughtfulness and pain. Matthew Goulish, founder member of performance group Goat Island, meditates on these and other diverse themes, proving, along the way, that the boundaries between poetry and criticism, and between creativity and theory, are a lot less fixed than they may seem. The book is revelatory, solemn yet at times hilarious, and genuinely written to inspire - or perhaps provoke - creativity and thought.

39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance

Humor & Entertainment

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Introduction by Jane Blocker. 2nd Edition. THE BRIGHTEST THING IN THE WORLD: 3 LECTURES FROM THE INSTITUTE OF FAILURE is a collection of essays that touch on seating strategies, Dick Cheney, cuckoo clocks, the Fibonacci series, butterflies and old friends. These threads weave together like a tapestry and by their accumulated resonance create an impression of loss and longing. As in Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, the reader passes through an associative experience. These are the essays of a poet; like a performance of words, each verb is as active as a muscle. While every sentence tends to its end, the reader resists its inevitable conclusion. Layout and design by Sonnenzimmer.

The Brightest Thing in the World: 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Green Lantern Press

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Dan Beachy-Quick and Matthew Goulish set up a room in Marcel Proust's house of memory in which poetry and prose could enact a dialogue, structured as a parallel weave, on several subjects from Proust's novel, as a way of extending their experience of reading. They selected three aspects or elements from Proust's work and wrote in response to them, on alternating pages that also responded to what the other had written. These were the first book, Swann's Way; the in/famous "long sentence" in Sodom and Gomorrah; and the idea/concept of captivity as marked in the moment in The Captive when the narrator watches Albertine as she sleeps. The result, on face-to-face pages, asks the reader to figure out what to privilege in the reading, a work that requires both memory and audacity (how return, how move forward, to read everything, or to privilege one form over another)."I will recall passages from this book like the stanzas of songs I heard on the radio during my childhood, word for word at the most unexpected times. Or, I will forget the words of this book entirely only to experience what the book describes—all of my faculties working together simultaneously unaware that they are each part of a cosmos. Let us navigate this multi-verse by appending the names of favorite authors to newly discovered constellations. Let us imagine that each book we've read is the same book, one read to us long ago by a beloved caretaker who satisfied our every need before we could recite the alphabet. This book."—Gregg Bordowitz

Work from Memory: In Response to In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

Beachy-Quick, Dan

History & Criticism

Ahsahta Press

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