Twitter Updates for 2009-10-04

  • Quimby's free events this week:

    October 5th, 7 p.m. : Punch Buggy Tour! The cross-country zine and comics tour… http://bit.ly/jW77L #

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Stephen Elliott and Joe Meno

Nov ’09
1
3:00 pm

Don’t miss Stephen Elliott Reading From The Adderall Diaries, with  Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps.

In the spring of 2007, a brilliant computer programmer named Hans Reiser stands accused of murdering his estranged wife, Nina. Despite a mountain of circumstantial evidence against him, he proclaims his innocence. The case takes a twist when Nina’s former lover, and Hans’s former best friend, Sean Sturgeon, confesses to eight unrelated murders that no one has ever heard of.

At the time of Sturgeon’s confession, Stephen Elliot is paralyzed by writer’s block, in the thrall of Adderall dependency, and despondent over the state of his romantic life. But he is fascinated by Sturgeon, whose path he has often crossed in San Francisco’s underground S&M scene. What kind of person, he wonders, confesses to a murder he likely did not commit? One answer is, perhaps, a man like Elliott’s own father.

So begins a riveting journey through a neon landscape of false confessions, self-medication, and torturous sex. Set against the backdrop of a nation at war, in the declining years of the Silicon Valley tech boom and the dawn of Paris Hilton’s celebrity, The Adderall Diaries is at once a gripping account of a murder trial and a scorching investigation of the self. Tough, tender, and unflinchingly honest, it is the breakout book by one of the most daring writers of his generation. For more info: www.stephenelliott.com

Reading with Stephen Elliott is local author Joe Meno.

“Meno’s distinctively imaginative and compassionate fiction is forged at the intersection of ordinariness and astonishment. In this tragicomic family drama, his fifth novel, [The Great Perhaps], he creates a topsy-turvy household. Jonathan and Madeline Casper, timid and insular, are scientists at the University of Chicago. He is devoted to the elusive giant squid and prone to seizures at the sight of a cloud; she is conducting a bizarrely disastrous lab experiment involving pigeons. Amelia, the older of their two teen daughters, is suspended for writing inflammatory editorials in the school paper, while Thisbe has taken to ardent prayer. With anxiety running high over the Iraq War and the 2004 election, Madeline takes off in pursuit of a strange man-shaped cloud; Jonathan hides in a child’s fort of sheet-draped furniture; their valiant, neglected daughters run amok, and Henry, Jonathan’s ailing father, escapes from the nursing home. As Meno masterfully, and meaningfully, conflates the fantastic with the everyday, he reaches back to Henry’s broken childhood and a stint in a World War II internment camp for German Americans. Tender, funny, spooky, and gripping, Meno’s novel encompasses a subtle yet devastating critique of war; sensitively traces the ripple effect of a dark legacy of nebulousness, guilt, and fear; and evokes both heartache and wonder.” –Booklist

Twitter Updates for 2009-10-02

  • Free Jack Chick Tracts for the first person tomorrow @hideoutchicago who asks Kot & DeRo 'sup with them QUINCY M.E. album dissections?! #

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Twitter Updates for 2009-10-01

  • RT @chicagocomics: Larry Marder signing! Today! 6-8! Free foods with the word "Bean" in them!! Free toys! 10% off all Beanworld books! AHH!! #

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Nadine Nakanishi of Sonnenzimmer Reads From Formal Additive Programs

Oct ’09
29
7:00 pm

This is not another portfolio book by an artist… or at least it’s trying not to be. Formal Additive Programs, Nadine Nakanishi’s first release is an attempt to provide insight into a daily art practice and process, while focusing on the commonalities of figurative and abstract images. Formal Additive Programs offers 18 simple instructions to help the reader expand upon a singular idea, a practice that aids Nakanishi in her art-making everyday.

This book release party will also feature Dakota Brown and Nick Butcher. Brown, who wrote the poetic preface to the book, will be reading from his work. Butcher (www.nickbutcher.net) is to follow with a musical set, interpreting the 18 steps of instruction that make up the books content. The audience is encouraged to draw along with the instructions and the music.

Can a set of instructions be so beautifully imbricated as to occlude their own identity as instructions? Can rules for drawing be expressed in a language that eschews the visual, a language more attuned to the patterns of acoustic space and kinesthetics? Nadine Nakanishi’s Formal Additive Programs answers these questions with an enthusiastic, quiet, unpretentious ‘yes’. The title indicates that these are programs for constructing patterns. With these programs, Nakanishi demonstrates how suggestions, rules, axioms, can allow emergent creative processes to thrive. The familiar paradox is that creativity can perhaps best be conceptualized in terms of limits. The particular can find its horizon in the infinite, as long as contingency is allowed to breathe life into the project. Formal Additive Programs builds bit-by-bit, but this is something very different from deductively-arranged building blocks.  These aren’t building blocks at all. To keep things aural: these are more like building tones.— Dave Park, Associate Professor of Communication, Lake Forest College

Formal Additive Programs
Format, 7” x 9.75”,
Cover and Interior, 2-pms colors / Interior, 28 pages
Hand-printed silk-screen dust jacket – First printing, limited Edition 250

For more info about the author go to: www.yoneko.net, or www.sonnenzimmer.com