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For this episode of rile*, books podcast we are excited to release the recording of Ariana's reading at rile*, which took place on October 28 2023. Ariana Reines read from her yet unpublished poetry collection The Rose and from her latest book A Sand Book. The reading was accompanied by a conversation with performing artist and writer Stefa Govaart, and a closing q&a with the audience.

Find more information about the book here.

About Ariana Reines
Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, Obie-winning playwright, performing artist, and translator. Ariana’s books include 'A Sand Book', winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Prize & long-listed for the National Book Award, 'The Cow', winner of the Alberta Prize, 'Coeur De Lion', 'Mercury', and 'The Origin Of The World'. In 2012 she created 'Ancient Evenings', an innovative platform generating creative writing through ancient texts, as well as 'Lazy Eye Haver,' an astrology practice through which she pioneered new forms of arts and consciousness pedagogy. In March 2020, she created Invisible College, a hub for poetry, art, & sacred study online. Recent performance & teaching projects include 'Divine Justice' (2022), a 25-hour durational performance inspired by Medea at Performance Space New York, and 'Gnostic Poetics', a unique seminar/workshop on the Nag Hammadi library held at Scripps College in 2022. Reines has taught at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, Tufts University, and the University of Pittsburgh, among others. She lives in Queens, New York.

About Stefa Govaart
Stefa Govaart works across dance, performance and text. They have worked with and for choreographers and visual artists across Europe, co-organize the artists' gathering Spring Meeting at Performing Arts Forum (St. Erme, FR), and are a founding member of the research group Sex Negativity at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. With Marija Cetinić, they are working on an ongoing epistolary project. They teach at P.A.R.T.S., and live in Brussels. 

Credits
Edited and mixed by Ros Del Olmo
Intro and outro by Chloe Chignell
Recording by rile* team
Music sample from "Flaxen" by Dean Blunt

For this episode of rile*, books podcast we are thrilled to release the recording of Alice Notley's reading at rile*, which took place on September 13 2023. Alice Notley read from her recent publication, her six book epic The Speak Angel Series, published by Fonograf Editions in 2023. Marija Cetinić joined in conversation with Alice Notley, opening questions around the genre of the epic, feminism and disobiedence; followed by a closing q&a with the audience.

Further Reading and Links
You can find more information about Alice Notley's books here on our website.

About the book
The Speak Angel Series is composed of six full-length books in various forms but towards the achievement of a unifying epic narrative in which the poet, as character, leads all the souls of all the living and dead to a point zero where the remaking of the cosmos can be performed. As this is being done, the official public world takes place in Paris, France and the United States, and new “characters” are incorporated from the news and from the poet’s life. The forms include a long-line narrative broken by lyric stand-alones, an operatic form designed to make the reader chant if reading aloud, two spiritual sequels to the author’s book The Descent of Alette, written in the same stanzaic form, a book that is simply a collection of different kinds of poems, a book formed by literary collaging, and a final, long book that is the volume’s ultimate culmination. The Speak Angel Series took years to accomplish but is finally ready; it is meant to be read for plot, pleasure, musical experience, wisdom and truth. Why not? The books present something like a cosmology in the philosophical sense, a reading of existence and of death. The dead are very close-by and available in the series, which is a work of stunning ambition.

About Alice Notley
Alice Notley was born in Bisbee, Arizona in 1945 and grew up in Needles, California in the Mojave Desert. She was educated in the Needles public schools, Barnard College, and The Writer’s Workshop, University of Iowa. She has lived most extensively in Needles, in New York, and since 1992 in Paris, France. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, and of essays and talks on poetry, and has edited and co-edited books by Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver.  She edited the magazine CHICAGO in the 70s and co-edited with Oliver the magazines SCARLET and Gare du Nord in the 90s. She is the recipient of the Los Angeles TimesBook Award, the Griffin Prize, the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, and the  Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize, a lifetime achievement award.  Notley may be most widely known for her epic poem The Descent of Alette. Recent books include Eurynome’s Sandals, Certain Magical Acts,Benediction, and For the Ride. Notley is also a collagist, cover artist, and maker of hybrid art objects. An art book, Runes and Chords, is forthcoming or has already appeared.

About Marija Cetinić
Marija Cetinić is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She is coordinator of the MA Comparative Literature program and founding member of the research group Sex Negativity. At Sandberg Instituut, she works as thesis supervisor and writing instructor in the MA Critical Studies program. Since 2022, she is part of the programming collective at Perdu, center for poetry and experiment. With Stefa Govaart, she is involved in an ongoing epistolary project.

Credits
Edited and mixed by Ros Del Olmo
Intro and outro by Chloe Chignell
Recording by rile* team
Music sample from "Borders" by Carmen Villain and Jenny Hval

For this episode of rile* , books podcast we are joined by Allison Grimaldi Donahue and Giulia Crispiani to talk about the first English translation of Carla Lonzi’s book Self-Portrait which was translated by Allison herself, with editorial assistance from Giulia. The book was published by Divided Publishing in 2021.

Recorded and transcribed throughout the 1960s, Carla Lonzi’s Self-portrait ruptures the narration of post-war modern art in Italy and beyond. Artmaking struck Lonzi as an invitation to be together in a ‘humanly satisfying way’, and this experiment in art-historical writing is a testament to her belief. Lonzi abolishes the role of the critic, her own, seeking change over self-preservation by theorising against the act of theorising.

The life and work of Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) is inseparable from the cultural, political, and social history of Italy in the decades following the Second World War; she occupies a singular position, which today merits reevaluation. A reputed art critic of the 1960s artistic scene, both friend and collaborator of such figures as Carla Accardi, Luciano Fabro, Giulio Paolini, and Jannis Kounellis, she wrote “Autoportrait” in 1969, a “love letter” to the artists and to creation, but also a farewell chorus to art criticism and the art world. The following year she founded Rivolta Femminile, an active feminist collective, thus becoming the central figure of Italian feminism.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue is an American poet, writer and translator currently based in Bologna. She teaches creative writing, translation, and literature at John Cabot University in Rome and Middlebury College Florence and Rome. She is the author of BODY MINERAL (2016) and the co-author of On Endings (2019). Her writing and translations have appeared in The brooklyn Rail, Words without Borders, Flash Art, BOMB and NERO.

Giulia Crispiani is an italian artist and writer living in Rome, where she works as an editor of Nero Editions. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and holds an MA in Art Praxis at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem. Her work has been presented at Center for Book Arts, Centrale Fies and FramerFramed among others. She is the author of: What if Every Farewell Would Be Followed by a Love Letter (Union Editions 2020),  and What if I can’t say goodbye (Union Editions 2021).

Further Reading and Links

Self-Portrait, in our webshop

Auto-Portrait, the French translation of the book

Deculturalize, an exhibition about Carla Lonzi

Divided Publishing, their website

Credits

Edited and mixed by Sven Dehens
Intro and outro by Chloe Chignell
Recording by both
Music sample from "I'm Following You" by Félicia Atkinson

Welcome to this episode of our rile* books podcast series, featuring Cinderella's Diaries, a project by Brussels based artist and researcher Sina Seifee, with readings by Bryana Fritz. Over the last few years Sina has been working on fairy tales, zoologies and the participation of animals in texts. More recently Sina started to work with the figure of Cinderella, thinking with her about the human-animal modes of imagination.

From this Sina started to develop a series of texts called Cinderella's Diaries. In this podcast Sina will introduce us to this research and writing practice. Born in Iran, Sina looks at the changes the Farsi dubbed version brought to Cinderella's character. Further Sina looks at Cinderella's position, living in an impossible house, locked in an attic surrounded by animals as her companions. The second half of the episode features readings from the first two diaries, read by dancer, performance-maker and text-worker Bryana Fritz.

Edited by Sven Dehens.

[ Transcript ]

Introduction by Sina Seifee:

"Hello, welcome rile* books podcast, my name is Sina Seifee, I am artist and researcher based in Brussels. Over the last few years I have been working on fairy tales, zoologies and the participation of animals in texts. I have been working with the figure of Cinderella for some time, thinking with her about the human animal modes of imagination.

"Cinderella is part of my imaginary and my heritage, especially the Walt Disney version of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which was dubbed masterfully before the Iranian revolution. Cinderella’s voice in Farsi, which was the continuum of an actor-training that originated in Tehrani cabaret voice-performances, has a completely different tonality than its English original. Her articulation sounds much more adult and sexy while the mice speak more “childish.” From a different archetype of a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt, she is now part of the older regimes of moral narratives, almost abject with no pedagogical significance unless she is totally refashioned. Disney didn’t change the story so much but made the choice to make the animals the real protagonist of the story. It is hard to imagine that anyone would want to raise their children (regardless of gender) to be like Cinderella, weak.

"From whom should we inherit our practices and how? I prefer Cinderella to be my ancestor. Cinderella is not liberated, but she is also not not-free. She lives in an impossible house with an impossibly terrible family. Why doesn't she become a psycho? Why doesn't she become estranged? Cinderella is circumscribed in all sorts of ways, yet she exercises a radical form of freedom that allows her to know more about the animals she lives with. Our imagination, as the audience of the story, depends on her animals. Cinderella incorporates a form of trans-humanity that lies in the way she is inhabiting and composing with a place that she cannot escape. Can we think of Cinderella as an amateur ethologist? Amateur, meaning the one who develops an expertise in taste. And ethologist, meaning a practical mode of attention to animals, for whom the ways that attention is addressed matters. From Cinderella one can learn cross-species politeness and exploring ways of learning what animals are capable of doing with and because of her labour. With her we can make a move from emancipatory critical analysis to pragmatism. Learning pragmatism from Cinderella is about how to think and act with her evil sisters (biological or adopted).

"In writing Cinderella’s diaries I was interested in getting to know more about how the story changes when the investigator becomes a biographer. And try to think in the rhythms of daily living in Cinderella’s mansion, including the receiving of insult upon insult, pleasure of mending spiderwebs, cutting cat bullshit, feeding illegal mice, and routines of schizo-affective hallucinating with talking animals. I was also thinking about contemporary Eur

Welcome to this episode of our rile* books podcast series featuring a conversation between Tessel Veneboer and Mckenzie Wark about her new book 'Philosophy for Spiders, on the Low Theory of Kathy Acker' published september 2021 by duke university press.

Tessel is a phd researcher at the university of ghent, her research ‘The queer potential of fragmentation: sexuality and identity in Kathy Acker’s work’ couldn’t be a better frame to talk to our guest, scholar and writer, Mckenzie Wark. Mckenzie is Professor of Media and Culture at Eugene Lang College at The New School and author of several books, including Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century, Reverse Cowgirl, and Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Her correspondence with Kathy Acker was published as I’m Very Into You. 

Quoting her: “The book contains elements of memoir and criticism, but is neither.” Instead, offering a comprehensive reading of Kathy Aker’s published and archived works, Mckenzie finds in Acker not just an inventive writer of fiction who pressed against the boundaries of gender, but a theorist whose comprehensive philosophy of life brings a conceptual intelligence to the everyday life of those usually excluded from philosophy’s purview. 

There are feminist Ackers, punk ackers, queer ackers, kink ackers, avant-gard ackers. In the conversation, they talk about Mckenzie’s proposal to add a Trans Acker to this web as well. Furthermore they talk about the intentions of the book, the why of the low theory, trans-lit, and what Sarah Schulmann calls the growing my-Kathy genre.

The episode features sound from Useless Movement (dub version), a track by Terre Taemlitz and Laurence Rassel, as well as readings by Mckenzie from the book. You can get a copy of the book at www.rile.space, or at our Brussels based store from the end of september on.

Sometime before all closed down last year, Rachel Levitsky came by rile*. We ended up recording a reading from her poetry collection Neighbor (2020, 2009 - Ugly Duckling Press). The second part of the show is a remote recording by Adrian Bridget from his self-published novel Treatment (2019). The novel consists of around 40 Treatments as chapters. Here's a few of them.


Rachel Levitsky came out as a Lesbian in 1984 and as a poet in 1994. In between those two events, she wrote fact sheets and polemic for street actions demonstrating for LGBT and Women’s Liberation, Women’s Health, and against the state negligence of the AIDS epidemic. Since becoming a poet, she’s published three book length collections, Under the Sun (Futurepoem, 2003), NEIGHBOR (UDP, 2009, 2020) and the poetic novella, The Story of My Accident is Ours (Futurepoem, 2013). In 1999, she founded Belladonna* which is now Belladonna Collaborative, a matrix of literary action promoting the writers and writing of the contemporary feminist avant-garde.


Adrian Bridget is a writer and publisher. He is the author of the collection TEXTS THAT SHOULDN’T BE READ OUT LOUD. His first novel — Treatment — was published in 2019. He lives and works in London.


Music clips by O Yuki Conjugate. Edited by Sven Dehens.