Call for Submissions: Divergence

***CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS***

You are invited to submit to the first issue of Divergence, an electronic publication of text/image/sound/video. We are interested in receiving poetry, articles, essays, text-art, animated text, as well as hybrids and paratexts (poetics, sketches, works-in-progress, rewritings), etc. Divergence aims to be a critical and creative platform/forum for work that is variously referred to as, and encompasses, 'innovative', 'experimental', 'avant-garde', 'post-avant', etc. We encourage debate, manifestos, commentary, notes and reactions which look at the present and to the future, not the past.

Divergence will be international in scope, with an editorial board composed of significant practitioners and academics in the field, including Robert Sheppard, John Hall, Geof Huth, David Miller, Jeff Hilson, and others. It is edited by Keith Jebb and Kevin Doran out of the University of Bedfordshire, and supported by the Research Institute for Media, Art and Design.

All correspondence and submissions should be sent to divergence@beds.ac.uk; we welcome proposals. The deadline for submissions is 15 September, 2009. Enquire at this address if hardcopy submissions are absolutely necessary.

Please forward this to any interested parties.

We're working on the website (well, the web developer is), which will feature more specific guidelines, and suggestions for work/s. For example, the last line of the first paragraph has a subtext of 1) 'less academic' (not that we're not open to academic work/s) and more 'conversational'/'informal', and 2) documentation of things (readings, events, chapbooks, people) which are in the now. One of the things i'd like to see is submissions on what is little written about: that reading series, that micropress, that poet who lives in the sticks who few know about; i'm interested in seeing a light brought to the interstices (creative or otherwise).

29/6/09: Send us a statement of your poetics.

2/7/09: Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/uob_divergence.

25/9/09: There's a rumour that we're accepting late submissions till the end of the month, if you want to try squeeze through the door.

Daryl Palumbo: 'Glassjaw EP is Done.'

From Daryl's Twitter last night:

Beck and I are sitting in his car listening to the new Glassjaw EP that we've just completed. Shit SLAMS.

He later added that he wasn't joking. Ladies and gents, the next Glassjaw record is finally finished. No name or release date as yet; however, [insert ecstatic hyperbole here].

With the Head Automatica album being finished end of May, i'm wondering how much, if at all, that process has influenced the new record.

B:FEST Poetry Readings

Fri 29 May, 7 p.m., Waterstone's (36 George St, Luton)
Gavin Selerie
Lee Harwood
£5/£3

Sat 30 May, 1.30 p.m., The Green Room (33-39 Manchester St)
Frances Kruk
Jow Lindsay
Sophie Robinson
Sean Bonney

4 p.m.
David Miller
Johan de Wit
Giles Goodland
Jeff Hilson
£4/£3

7.30 p.m., Luton Library (adjacent to The Green Room)
Caroline Bergvall
Redell Olsen
£5/£3

Basically, if you buy a festival pass on any one of the doors, all the above poetry readings are then £7.50/£5 (concs); and, this will allow free or discounted entry into other poetry readings and events. See the festival website for more info.

The Blue Bus

The first Blue Bus in Luton, Wednesday, 29 April, 7.30 p.m. Featuring:

• Laurie Duggan
• Frances Presley

at The Green Room, 33-39 Manchester Street.

£5/£3 concs.

Be there or eat derrière.

18/5/09: Laurie accounts:

[...] It was the first of an ‘out of town’ series nominally connected to Holborn’s Blue Bus events. Not a large turnout but they stayed, they listened, and they bought a few books. We walked back to the station through a dystopian landscape that the late JG Ballard might well have used as a set.

[I just decided i'd add something to this, but it's late, so i will tomorrow.]

Chi Cheng Update

One Love For Chi, a fundraising website to help with Chi's medical costs (unpaid thus far, $750,000), posted a comment from his mother, Jeanne, updating on his condition. Partly:

[...] There are so many special people to thank for so many kindnesses. Jeff Irwin from Will Haven asked me about doing some benefit shows. He and his wife, Alice, along with many great bands shared their time, energy and talent. In response to the questions of why a rock star would need benefit show money, let me say that not all successful people are rich and even rich doesn't always last forever. When Chi is fully awake, we hope that he won't care that his dream home went back to the bank, his dog got given away, his health insurance (AFTRA Insurance) quit paying for hospital care after a month and a half and life might take much more effort and some relearning. We in his family think that he will have some challenges and a lot of new insight and stories to share.

It is pretty clear that he goes in and out of his coma. Many days he seems just tired or maybe sad. Other days he will open his eyes, looking around startled, seeming not to know where he is, then finally after we talk to him, he relaxes and goes back to sleep or just looks at us. He has said "mom" to me several times. That is a huge thing. It means that he can see and recognize me, he remembers, he can think of the word that matches the image, and can verbalize it properly. It actually takes so many steps for the brain to do that simple thing.

[...] There has been insurance to fight with. There has been a rude legal battle to win the right to make medical and care decisions for Chi until he is fully awake. Thankfully, other than another move, all of my energy can go where it should again. [...]

They've had one hundred donations so far and already raised $2,000.

This is a perfect time to mention-- oh, well i was gonna use the prominence of the above to draw attention to the situation of Hollis Hawthorne, but it looks like she's received the help she needed. Awesome news. From Meredith Yayanos at Coilhouse:

Late last month, Hollis was traveling by motor scooter in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, India when something terrible happened. Some sort of freak hit-and-run accident that wasn’t her fault left her bleeding out on the side of the road with her boyfriend Harrison frantically performing CPR for 20 minutes before a van of German tourists picked them up and drove them to a hospital. According to her best pal Eliza, Hollis was wearing her helmet and driving very slowly at the time of the accident. I’ll spare you the gory details, but it sounds really bad. Now she’s in a coma in a rural hospital with a serious brain stem injury. (You know, that part of the brain that controls, um, everything?)

According to Harrison, who has been with her from the moment it happened, “there are huge rats scurrying around on the [hospital] floor. I am sleeping on the ant-covered floor outside her room as I am not allowed in and the water they have used for many procedures is not even purified.” When Hollis’ mom flew in from Tennessee a couple of days ago with emergency support from the US consulate to see her own daughter, the orderlies were dismissive and curt. “They are not observing her brain pressure and have done nothing to alleviate the swelling in her brain. These are things that can make or break her early on in her recovery and healing process.”

Through a series of fortuitous connections, Hollis’s case has been reviewed and accepted by Stanford Medical; one of the best hospitals in the world. As a charity case, even. (Just like me and most other starving artsy fartsies I know, Hollis has no insurance.)

I'd been meaning to post about this since i read about it a couple weeks ago. The cost of flying her to the hospital from India, plus medical costs, was/is $200,000. I tried to make a donation through PayPal, but wasn't able to, and guess it'll be the same situation with the set-up for Chi.

I'm coming ever nearer to deleting everything on this blog. The 180 or so posts i've removed so far isn't doing it for me.

22/2/09: If it wasn't already obvious, i don't think i'm gonna write in this blog anymore, at least for a while. I know every other time i've said this i've written something a few days later, but not this time. There are about half a dozen reasons for this, which are too long and/or complex to go into, and i wouldn't anyway even if they weren't.

I think i'm over the mass deletion thing now, but who knows... Fuck, mullets were 'fashionable' a few years ago (?!).

xxx

26/2/09: Keep an eye on me over at Twitter, instead, if you wish to keep an eye on me.

B:Fest Poetry Readings, 2009

29+30 May:

• Caroline Bergvall
• Sean Bonney
• Giles Goodland
• Lee Harwood
  
• Jeff Hilson
• Frances Kruk
• Jow Lindsay
• David Miller
• Redell Olsen
• Sophie Robinson
• Gavin Selerie
• Johan de Wit