2/27/11

friends of the fox: Punctum Books!

Friends of the fox the BABEL Working group has announced the full unveiling within the next few weeks of a new books series to be called "Punctum Books" So far, their blog announces what promises to be an exciting press, in tune with the devices both of the Whiskey and of the Fox:
The BABEL Working Group is excited to announce the launching of Punctum Books, a new open-access and print-on-demand book series, directed by Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) and Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College, CUNY), that aims to promote radically creative modes of writing and inquiry across a whimsical para-humanities-assemblage. Spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion are encouraged. Vision statement, editorial board, forthcoming titles, and website currently under construction. Stay tuned.
On the In The Middle medieval studies group blog, Eileen Joy announces that a full vision statement, editorial board, and first forthcoming titles will be announced in the next 2-3 weeks. Keep watch for PUNCTUM.  

2/22/11

Look out for LITHIC and a Chicken Coup Raid Review

The next Whiskey & Fox is actually coming together presently, although it will again have been at the one-a-year schedule that this next issue will come out.  But we're promising some great stuff.  This time around again a funky editors' preface, an afterwords by Medievalist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (whose current project is on the sex life of stones), a host of poems from a host of poets seen and not seen before in the likes of this journal, a score for music--as in yes, a poetry journal publishing a musical score, a nice essay, some lovely images, and possibly a neat surprise from the American Natural History Museum of New York City. The issue will be lithic.  The journal will take its stand too with the lithic.  Will like and lick the lithic.  After all, it is the lithic which will teach us how to, in swaying, to hold sway and see the wall of the city Charles Olson proposes is built out of sound to arise from nothing more than a short cliff, a little ledge of rock.  The poesis of heterotopic architecture in earthscience, geology, seismology, petrology, crystallography, lithography.


Keep a close watch here and we'll update you as to when the Whiskey wakes and the Fox pours out again--very, very soon.  
So, to offer that little review, or raid...


On 'Pipe Dope' by Jon Witmer, at the Danger Digest
A report from the woods near the lair of the fox, regarding one of our past, early, and future contributors (although you will have to wait for the issue after this one mentioned above for his next offering): Jon Witmer--whose Comics blog over at Danger Digest has been great for a while--is drawing and writing a really stunning one-panel-every-weekday comic for the duration of a year.  The thing is called  Pipe Dope: Mostly True Stories About: David J. Witmer, General T. Dog, and many, many more. It's still only just started, so there's plenty of time to catch up and start keeping up.  Its already really elegant.  One is easily taken in especially by the textures insinuated by the simple edges of surfaces, which otherwise, indicated only by a bit of a black fill or a white  zap-line (as in the shine of hair) might appear only flat. Witmer is giving us a tactilely fully textured world whose being is ready for the kind of nuanced sensory encounter that will multiply our pleasures, which, within the eddies of time pulled around by this variability of surface in each single panel, offer affectively substantial sites of texture to help elaborate our world  heterotopically, radically, even perhaps--in those odd twists of black suggesting a comic character's hair-wisp--against the overly detexturizing and time-homogenizing operations of capital and the anthropo-hetero-normative logics of its erotics and its states. And after all, as the back of our very first issue suggested, as it appeared intentionally, not as a typo and with puns fully intended, "the fox raids the chicken coup and snacks on the state."  Go read it at the Danger Digest.