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Technoculture (ISSN 1938-0526) is an independent annual peer-reviewed journal. Publishing both critical and creative works that explore the ways in which technology impacts this (or any) society, with a broad definition of technology.

Technoculture seek creative works that use new media and/or are on the subject of technology, and essays from a broad a range of academic disciplines that focus on cultural studies of technology. Essays published examine the topic “technology and society,” or, perhaps,“technologies and societies.”

For Volume 3 (2013), The Retro Issue, the editors are particularly seeking essays and creative works that focus on lost, ancient, old or dead technologies, technologies that no one uses, or very few people still employ. Topics could include depictions of technologies that treat a wide range of subjects related to the social sciences and humanities. These subjects might include:

• technologies once popular that are no longer used, such as 8-track tape
• film and television as technologies (especially in the early days of television and film)
• celebrities’ use of technology in a given historical moment, such as the early days of television or the heyday of radio
• politics and technology, especially historical approaches
• music production and dissemination, especially historical approaches (such as Listz’ transcriptions of entire Wagner operas and Beethoven symphonies)
• visual artists and their use of (or flight from) given technologies, especially historical approaches
• literary depictions of technologies (especially in works from other decades than our own)
• computer/video gaming (older games, rather than newer games)
• the dissemination of the arts via technology to broad or to specialized audiences in particular historical moments
• the disappearance of a given technology or technologies and what that disappearance/disappearances means/mean for the archival issues that surround the humanities.
• sports and sports figures of the past
• memorabilia and collectibles from the past

In particular, the editors are interested in a conception of “technology” and the “humanist impulse” that pushes beyond contemporary American culture and its fascination with computers; they seek papers that deal with any technology or technologies in any number of historical periods from any relevant theoretical perspective with a particular focus on old, dead and lost technologies for this issue.

Technocluture is not interested in “how to” pedagogical papers that deal with the use of technology in the classroom.

Technoculture will publish scholarly/critical papers in the latest MLA citation style, but also creative works including poetry and creative non-fiction are of interest to us. They will publish art work and especially media designed for display/dissemination on a computer monitor including still images, video or audio.

Submissions for Volume 3 (2013) accepted until 31 August 2013.

The Posen Foundation is proud to announce a unique international fellowship for junior scholars and emerging fiction writers. Each member of the Posen Society of Fellows receives a two-year, $40,000 award, as well as a special opportunity to collaborate with peers and learn from seasoned scholars and writers.

Eligible scholars should be completing a doctoral dissertation on a topic related to modern Jewish history or culture. Eligible fiction writers should be working on a Jewish-themed novel or short story collection, and should not yet have published their first book.

The inaugural class of Fellows will include six scholars and two fiction writers, who will convene each summer to share work, discuss progress, participate in workshops, and attend lectures by senior scholars and writers. The first gathering of Fellows will take place August 11–13, 2013, in Berkeley. Each Fellow will be expected to attend two annual gatherings, and, later on, to submit a report on their progress and adapt their work for a public audience.

To be considered for the Society, scholars must submit a dissertation prospectus, a writing sample of no more than 15 pages, a letter of recommendation from a major advisor, and a curriculum vitae. Scholars must have completed their comprehensive exams or have commenced writing their dissertations by April 1, 2013.

Writers should submit a writing sample (for novelists: 30-40 pages of prose; for short story writers: two or three completed stories), curriculum vitae, a description of the work in progress, and an explanation of how the writing sample fits into the larger work.

The Posen Society of Fellows is not restricted to any religion or nationality. Participants from outside North America should be in possession of valid visas.

In an article for Publishers Weekly, Robert Atwan, the founder of The Best American Essays series, picks the 10 best essays of the postwar period. Six of the essays are available to read full-text online, and one via subscription (New Yorker).

Tin House Books and Octopus Books have announced a new collaborative poetry series. Acquiring titles in the new line will be Matthew Dickman, poetry editor of Tin House magazine, and Zachary Schomburg, editor at Octopus Books. First in the series will be Brandon Shimoda’s Portuguese. The two editors discuss the reasons for the new collaboration in their editors’ note:

“We represent two different types of small presses, with two different aesthetics, and two different audiences, but we’re both based in a city [Portland, Ore.] that has a palpable collaborative energy that is proving itself every day. And at a time when many larger presses are thinning their poetry rosters, we wonder if publishing collaboratively is a model that presses are missing out on, a model that smaller independent presses are capable of, because there is nothing to lose in teaming up to publish books for a multiplied and overlapped audience. This is a model that is necessary for a new kind of conversation to begin, not to see how we can meet in the middle, but how we can meet at the edges.”

Portuguese will be published by Tin House Books and Octopus Books on March 12, 2013 and distributed by Publishers Group West. Shimoda is the author of three previous books of poetry and is currently coediting, with poet Thom Donovan, a retrospective collection of writing by Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan (Nightboat Books, forthcoming).

In 2014, Tin House and Octopus will again collaborate to publish Bianca Stone’s new collection, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows.

“I often wish [poetry] was more didactic. I like it to mean things, I confess.”

Juliana Spahr talks to Full Stop about historicized reading in the classroom, academic labor, and Meaning as part of the series Teaching in the Margins. With Teaching in the Margins, Full Stop looks to poets, novelists, educators and academics to survey the state of the humanities and explore the relationship between innovative writing and pedagogy.

You can find the interview here.

Washington Post article on the new common reading core in K-12:

Excerpts:

The Common Core State Standards in English, which have been adopted in 46 states and the District, call for public schools to ramp up nonfiction so that by 12th grade students will be reading mostly “informational text” instead of fictional literature.
…
English teacher J.D. Wilson agrees with much of what the standards aim to accomplish. But he is disturbed by the subtle shift the new standards are already causing in his classroom at Wareham High School in Wareham, Mass. “Reading for information makes you knowledgeable — you learn stuff,” Wilson said. “But reading literature makes you wise.” Wilson has wrestled with which poems to cut from his lesson plans and which nonfiction to teach instead. And then he hit upon an idea. This fall, he has taught “Literature Is Not Data: Against Digital Humanities,” “Shakespeare, a Poet Who Is Still Making Our History” and “Who Killed the Liberal Arts?” They are all essays that emphasize the value of literature.

All Paul Dry Books 30% off until December 15 and shipping is free. Buy 3 or more books and they’ll throw in a free copy of either A Russian Schoolboy or Up in the Hills. (Tell them your pick in the “Notes” section of the order form.) Enter the coupon code HOLIDAY-2012 during checkout to receive this discount.

A new collection of the poetry of Louise Glück was released last month from Ecco and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Poems 1962 – 2012, at 628 pages, is a clearly comprehensive look at the ouevre of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet.

Beginning with Glück’s Firstborn, published in 1968, Poems gathers 11 of her titles in total, ending with 2009’s A Village Life. Included are The Wild Iris (1992), which earned Glück the Pulitzer; Ararat (1990), for which she earned the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress; and 1985’s The Triumph of Achilles, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Kane Award. Her list of additional awards is extensive.

Glück’s poetry is devoid of frills, of cloying layers of too-heavy imagery. Instead, her language is sparse and plain, though no less descriptive in its detail:

     I look out over the sterile snow.
     Under the white birch tree, a wheelbarrow.
     The fence behind it mended. On the picnic table,
     mounded snow, like the inverted contents of a bowl
     whose dome the wind shapes. The wind,
     with its impulse to build.

     Late December: my father and I
     are going to New York, to the circus.
     He holds me
     on his shoulders in the bitter wind:
     scraps of whitepaper
     blow over the railroad ties.

     My father liked
     to stand like this, to hold me
     so he couldn’t see me.

With poetry like this, there is little need for allegory or other traditional techniques. Which is not to say Glück does not use them: 2006’s Averno draws its name from a crater lake near Naples that was regarded by ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld, and the 18 poems in the book retell the Persephone myth. But regardless of the devices used, Glück’s work remains simple, beautiful, almost hauntingly so; as she says, “I am prepared now to force / clarity upon you.”