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Lone Glen; Utter Assemblage with Brian Ang, Aditya Bahl, and David Lau

  • 3036 24th Street San Francisco, CA 94110 USA (map)

Join us at 7:00 pm on Wednesday February 15th at San Francisco’s Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore for a special Lone Glen edition. This event will celebrate work from writers Brian Ang, Aditya Bahl, and David Lau. All of these writers approach their work with an ear for the aesthetics and politics of assemblage, whether in their linguistic countering of social and economic assemblies, or in their surrender to a poetics that reassemble the structures they interrogate. Of Brian Ang’s daring in The Totality Cantos, publisher Lyn Hejinian has written, “I would propose that The Totality Cantos is a prolonged and indefatigable act of rebellion, carried out in the sphere of aesthetics . . . informed by ideas closer to anarchism than to, say, revolution, which virtually always culminates in the formation of a powerful and usually autocratic state.” Aditya Bahl’s Mukt is meanwhile praised as “an epic poem in progress. Building on the work of G.M. Muktibodh, the foremost Indian Marxist poet and thinker of the twentieth century, Aditya Bahl assembles a startling new poetics that fuses Marx and Mira, the Indian epic and the workers’ inquiry, the Avant-Garde and the Third World . . . Mukt unfolds each phrase of Muktibodh’s poem into lines that range from lyric response to homophonic translation, along the way incorporating archival histories, reportage, workers’ newspapers, oral epics, and  fragments from Bahl’s diary.” And of the proclivities in David Lau’s collection of selected poems, Still Dirty (2016), Brian Ang explains, “Still Dirty combines communist and ethnic political knowledge, dialect and economic language, blurring their dichotomies among ideologies of poetry in the present.” Commune Editions lauds this vision: “Linguistically daring, full of exigency, these poems are as damaged as life, still dirty.”

This will be a masked event; Medicine for Nightmares requires masks in-store. Lone Glen readings are also donation based: $10-15 suggested but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

 ABOUT THE WRITERS:

BRIAN ANG wrote The Totality Cantos (Atelos 2022). totalitycantos.net includes the complete text and a generator that randomizes assemblages of its one thousand sections. His recent prose is "Assemblage Poetics" and his current poetic project is A Thousand Records, open to the totality of music.

ADITYA BAHL is the author of four chapbooks of poetry including MUKT (NYC: Organism for Poetic Research, 2021) and NAME AMEN (Malmö: Timglaset, 2018). He has written about art, literature, and politics for The Nation, New Left Review, The New Inquiry, The Caravan, Himal, and other publications. He is a PhD candidate in English at Johns Hopkins University.

DAVID LAU is a poet and essayist. His books are Virgil and the Mountain Cat, Bad Opposites, and Still Dirty. He is co-editor of the literary journal Lana Turner. His poetry and essays have appeared in Boston Review, New Left Review, Bookforum, and Literary Hub. Recent poems have been published by Ariadne Magazine and Trilobite.

ABOUT THE SERIES:

LONE GLEN is a quarterly reading and performance series dedicated to cultivating a down-to-earth, inclusive creative community among makers of all forms. In December 2021, Lone Glen celebrated its decade birthday with authors from Nightboat Books. Lone Glen will continue to host events in-person, for as long as that remains possible.

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February 14

The Romantic Violin Experience with Rose Crelli

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Speaking Axolotl