10/18/11

Parks & Occupation: a call for work

First, production of the next full issue (this one titled ‘Lithic’) has not been abandoned. Production has been slow or on hold, but by no means stopped. 

In the meantime, Whiskey & Fox is going to take up the torch of its earlier hasty mode of production, making haste on a series of very short issues in a special series dispatched specifically for the various radical occupations currently underway. What is meant by “for the occupations” is not “in tribute to,” perhaps not even “in solidarity with,” but as a foxing of theory and poetry/poetics into the occupations/as part of the occupations. See the specific call for work below.

A series of very short (4-6 pages) issues will go out over the next couple months. They will of course be made available as PDF downloads, as well as by distribution of hard-copies to as many of the now growing libraries of the occupations as Whiskey & Fox can coordinate (of increasing importance as a research resource and a source of intellectual energy as the occupiers evolve their horizontal governing structures, planning and theorizing for the future). Distribution to the Occupation of Zucotti park in NYC is already coordinated. If there is an occupation or any particular hub of related activity to which you would like to help distribute hard copies, please contact the editors at editors [at] whiskeyandfox [dot] org. 

So, now, Whiskey & Fox issues its own call to intellectual labor, hoping to provoke the kind of “short raids on the chicken ‘coup’ and snacks on the state” which constituted the early issues: pointed and productive paragraph-long essays, poems, images, etc. 

Please consider the call for work. Make haste! Occupy Language. Language language for democratic dwelling, for cosmicity. 

Download the nice-looking PDF of the call for work here in order to circulate it, or just see below:

Parks & Occupation: a call for work
Vol. 5, Special series (dedicated to Denise Levertov & Robert Duncan)


Writing as the Office for Soft Architecture, Canadian poet Lisa Robertson asks, “what shall our new ornaments be? How shall we adorn mortality now?”—insisting that “this is a serious political question.” Whiskey & Fox wishes to provisionally believe this and calls for work that will function to ornamentally elaborate the current occupations of parks, squares, etc.

An editorial in the second issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal states, “For Wall Street and Washington, the demand is not on them to give us something that isn’t theirs to give. It’s ours. It’s on us. We aren’t going anywhere. We just got here.” But where are we; and how are we going to think, elaborate, and decorate this place? It is no surprise that the spaces currently occupied are parks. Park space in particular already ornaments, articulates the interfaces of our human affects with countless non-human ecologies. This is not a matter of aesthetic surplus. How we decorate a new kind of a public space will matter; it will determine the variability of its surfaces. As we continue to witness capitalism collapse in on itself it will become more and more urgent to elaborate parkspace, even in small hasty bursts; to decorate the spaces we already occupy as parks with/as the ornaments that will articulate the spaces of a new democracy. But how to decorate the new park? How does poetry occupy such a park? For example, is there room for the intimacy of the coterie in the new park, or must the ‘public’ projects of Duncan and Olson dominate?


Whiskey & Fox asks for paragraph-long essays, poems, images, et alia, to publish in a special series which will return to our short format issues (roughly 6 pages an issue). For this series the ‘Fox again requests hasty writing and will proceed with hasty publication of very brief issues to facilitate hard copy distribution. The libraries accumulating at the public occupations are of increasing importance and in need of, among other contributions, those pertinent to issues of the queer sexual politics which inhere in Whiskey & Fox’s function as a journal of poetry, theory, and queer-heterotopoi.


Whiskey & Fox asks you to ‘language Language for democratic dwelling,’ Make haste! Decorate the new democracy. Send contributions to parksandoccupation [at] whiskeyandfox [dot] org.
 

The fox “raids the chicken ‘coup’ and snacks on the state.”