McKenzie Wark with Anne Lesley Selcer in an evening of reading and discussion
City Lights celebrates the following books
Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir – by McKenzie Wark – published by Verso
and
Raving – by McKenzie Wark – published by Duke University Press
Purchase Books Hereand
Sun Cycle – by Anne Lesley Selcer – Published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center
Purchase Book HereAbout Love and Money
After a successful career, a twenty-year marriage, and two kids, McKenzie Wark has an acute midlife crisis: coming out as a trans woman. Changing both social role and bodily form recasts her relation to the world. Transition changes what, and how, she remembers. She makes fresh sense of her past and of history by writing to key figures in her life about the big themes that haunt us all—love and money, sex and death.
About Raving
What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world? In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York’s thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them. Extending the rave’s sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.
About Anne Lesley Selcer’s Sun Cycle
Poetry. California Interest. Women’s Studies. Art. Film. Written from inside its own formal conundrum, SUN CYCLE deals with representation, value, power, gender and the aesthetic. Influenced by 80’s film theory updated for 24-hour access screen time, it is obsessed with images and is named for the star that makes vision possible. These poems shift deftly from treatise to entreaty, casting form and finance as corollary particulates in the air surrounding art-making. Selcer’s work creates a complicated critique of appearance and visuality, claiming: You are carefully surviving what needs to be destroyed. I need you to language otherwise.
Purchase Sun Cycle HereMcKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto, The Beach beneath the Street, The Spectacle of Disintegration, Molecular Red, Capital Is Dead, as well as the popular introductions to contemporary thought General Intellects and Sensoria. More recently, she is also the authors of Reverse Cowgirl and Raving, and a work that combines memoir and literary criticism about Kathy Acker, Philosophy for Spiders. She teaches at Eugene Lang College, the New School.
Anne Lesley Selcer’s books include Sun Cycle, an investigation into visual beauty, and Blank Sign Book, a collection of essays on art + politics, as well as the limited editions Banlieusard, (Untitled) A Treatise on Form, and from A Book of Poems on Beauty. Writing can be found in Annulet, Jacket2, and The Chicago Review and others, as well as in anthologies and exhibition catalogs. They work the expanded field of language as a poet and artist. Moving image and performance work has appeared at International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, The Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, The Berkeley Art Museum and Krowswork and online Criterion Channel, including several other spaces. Their work has been awarded the CSU Poetry Center Book Prize and The Gazing Grain Prize. New work is forthcoming in Writing on Raving.
This event is made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.