Events, People, Publications, and Collections in September
Events
On September 19th we welcome back Place Talks! Place Talks longtime hosts and Library collaborators Nicole Lavelle and Charlie Macquarie return to the opening mic, and the overwhelmingly popular forum for artist-made talks about place continues through 2020. Arrive early, seating is very limited.
The 26th of September we welcome Eric Theise who will performatively present his creative cartographic work: Maps that behave like experimental films, and touch interfaces for real time cartography. Eric’s talk at Cornell is available at https://youtu.be/PXijK_q13do
Also in September the Library offers 12 open days (and off-hours events such as university class field trips). On Sunday the 29th, Folsom Street Fair goers and anyone ready to enjoy the Fair long enough to reach the building will find the Library open for quarterly Sunday hours.
People
The Library welcomes an intensive weeklong residency the 16th through the 23rd of September with Asa Wilder and Kendell Harbin, who will be investigating: “What is the correlation between queer identity — as brought to the forefront by the gay liberation movement from 1970 to 1990 — and the increased accessibility of home video technology?”
Publications
A free PDF of the new book, Archives, containing a series of essays by Andrew Lison, Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, and Library co-founder Rick Prelinger can be downloaded from Meson Press or purchased from The University of Minnesota Press. From the Meson Press page: “Archives have become a nexus in the wake of the digital turn. This book sets out to show how expanded archival practices can challenge contemporary conceptions and inform the redistribution of power and resources. Calling for the necessity to reimagine the potentials of archives in practice, the three contributions ask: Can archives fulfill their paradoxical potential as utopian sites in which the analog and the digital, the past and future, and remembrance and forgetting commingle?” https://archivefutures.com/2019/08/24/new-open-access-book-archives/
Collections
Many books come in over the summer, but here we want to highlight Spectator, a sex news newspaper from the 90s and early 2000s. Spectator drew audiences of both straight men and queer women, and its explicit pages were edited and photographed by many queer women and others dedicated to issues of sex worker advocacy, queer visibility, trans-emergence, and the visibility of mainstream fetish scenes (Folsom Street Fair!) as well as marginal fetish scenes and related hobbies such as tattoo art. Its news column was written by the radical writer Pat Califia (now Patrick). Spectator is a recent gift from legendary sex workers and sex-education activists Carol Queen and Annie Sprinkle and Annie’s husband Beth Stephens. Both Carol and Annie were involved in the production of the newspaper. The Library is retaining two copies of each issue but the gift runs to ten or more copies of each issue in places, leaving nine boxes of quality giveaways — all available for browsing and takeaway on the blue cart.
See you in the Stacks!