night with live jazz in Arts in the Alley at South Campus Gateway, High Street at 10th. The Arts Initiative space presents Mathematic Abstraction, new works by Carly Witmer (above), curated by Kate Dowell; the Shoebox gallery hosts a show of Columbus images called Iconic Columbus; and the Ohio Art League presents Open House, works by Allison Buenger and Colin McDonald, curated by Amy Koenig. Opening receptions are 6-9 pm. Live music from jazz quintet The Truth will add to the festive atmosphere. Drawing inspiration from Miles Davis to Pablo Picasso, The Truth is a band fueled by the works of masters of all modern art. Led by composer/saxophonist Joe Graziosi (left), it features some of the brightest, upcoming musicians in Columbus. For information, call 247-7050.
Secrecy, Magic, and the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers seeks to rescue the plays of seven black women, Marita Bonner, Mary P. Burrill, Thelma Duncan, Shirley Graham, Zora Neale Hurston, Georgia Douglas Johnson, May Miller, and Eulalie Spence, from obscurity. This volume is the first book-length treatment to address these plays and their authors exclusively rather than as part of a discussion of other African American playwrights from different eras. It is also one of the few to carry out an extensive discussion of secrecy’s role in both literary representation and social interaction.
Exploring secrecy from the standpoints of poststructuralist language theory and game theory as well as dramatic performance, Taylor Hagood argues that the secret—a thing visible for its very invisibility—is a fundamental cog in the machinery of society, employed as a tool for both oppression and subversion. The many facets of secrecy have been particularly salient in African American culture, informing everything from the Underground Railroad to the subtle coding of Signifying. Most devastatingly, people on both sides of the color line are caught within a web of secrecy that is the result of centuries of distrust, doubt, and fear, a fact that is powerfully manifest not only in these one-act plays but in the reader’s/spectator’s interactions with them.
Over the weekend, more than 600 people played Couchfire Collective's mini golf course created by 18 groups of artists at South Campus Gateway. From the Price is Right set and a Big Bird to a farmyard -- complete with "cow pile" hazards and farm-tool putters, the 18-hole course was a fun fundraiser and a chance for the artists to showcase their creativity.
One of the Arts Initiative's objectives is to support individual emerging artists in central Ohio, and an event last Friday helped do just that. OSU President E Gordon Gee (below) generously 
hosted a "salon and conversation" at the University Residence for artists and local business and arts leaders. Reps from City Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, Experience Columbus and other local leaders mingled with and discussed the state of the arts in Columbus with 30 emerging visual and performing artists. The conversation focused on how to build on the already-dynamic independent arts community here. Above, David Barker of Experience Columbus chats with artists Lisa McLymont (left) and Amandda Graham.
Two OSU tap dance classes -- taught by Jenai Cutcher -- produced, presented and performed a "tap informance" for an appreciative crowd that gathered at the Arts Initiative space (above) on Weds, March 10.
The Other Paper published a review of two Arts in the Alley exhibitions in last Thursday's paper -- ARTillery's exhibition of print works by Bobby Rosenstock (above) and the Ohio Art League show of works by Larissa Mellor. Read it here.
Christine Brooke-Rose is a writer, critic, and narrative theorist whose extraordinarily varied body of work tests the relationship between twentieth-century theory and fiction in unparalleled ways. As they rupture “the relics of nineteenth-century ideologies,” Brooke-Rose’s fictional experiments offer new ways to theorize life and formulate conduct in the new world orders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Specifically addressing the loss of our ability to differentiate reality from what she calls “the unreal,” her novels mime the various “deaths” and absences described in contemporary literary theory, registering these absences technically, ontologically, and emotionally in linguistic and grammatical “constraints.” Rather than melancholy or self-enclosed exercises, however, her writing draws creative vitality out of the loss and limitation it examines. Deploying twentieth-century discourses drawn from technology, literary theory, astronomy, evolutionary biology, and popular culture, her vital, often humorous, fictions offer survival strategies for the genre of the novel. They offer new forms for telling the human story within the unreality of contemporary life.
In Techniques for Living: Fiction and Theory in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose, Karen R. Lawrence explains how Brooke-Rose’s career invites revision of contemporary literary histories and theories of postmodernism. With her highly original narrative forms, Brooke-Rose significantly contributes to the radical evolution of narrative in modernism’s wake. In its singular focus on the lively and prolific experiments of this writer/critic/theorist, Techniques for Living lays the groundwork for further challenges to our generalized versions of postmodernism, as it also provides a fascinating reading of a highly original writer.
Scholars and critics have long recognized the need for ethical criticism to address not only the idea-content but also the morphological aspects of narrative, yet the search continues for ways to study the ethics of narrative form. In Towards the Ethics of Form in Fiction: Narratives of Cultural Remission, Leona Toker suggests a method of linking formal features of narratives with the types of moral vision that they represent.
Toker is especially interested in cultural remissions such as the carnivalesque—that is, the inverting of standard cultural hierarchies or the blurring of boundaries between normally separated social groups, actors and audiences, self and other. She argues that cultural remissions have the potential not simply to provide a break from the determinacies of our quotidian existence but also to return us to that existence with some alteration of our perceptions, beliefs, and values. Toker contends that the ethical consequences of reading fiction result from features of its aesthetics, particularly what she calls, following the semiotician Louis Hjemslev, “the form of the content”—the patterns arising from the artistic deployment of narrative details. In addition to addressing the carnivalesque discourse of Bakhtin as well as the theory of oppositionality developed by de Certeau and Chambers, she puts theory into practice through detailed analyses of canonical texts by Fielding, Sterne, Austen, Hawthorne, Dickens, Conrad, Joyce, and other writers.
Imagine 18 groups of creative local artists dreaming up and crafting 18 unique putt putt golf holes. That's the idea behind an artist-built mini golf course -- dubbed A-Holes by its organizers, Couchfire Collective. It's open to the public March 19-21 in the Gateway Film Center Lobby at South Campus Gateway (High Street at 10th). Cost is $8 for a round of golf, with coupons good for discount movie tickets included and snacks and beverages close by. Hours are 5 pm-midnight Friday, noon-midnight Saturday and noon-5 pm Sunday. Artist groups include Artillery, Wild Goose Creative, Crafty Cotillion, Junctionview Studios, Primary Colours, Cow Brow, F.A.D., Super Collider Theater, 13 E. Tulane, Zen Genius, Idea Foundry, CAW, CCAD, Cloud Haus, Etsy Team Columbus, Skylab, Mother Artists at Work and Couchfire Collective. For more, go to www.thecouchfire.org.
Gateway. Admission is $3. The play combines the elements of science, English and theatre, and follows the exploits of a young Wells as he examines questions of scientific morality, the future of mankind and his place in a wildly imaginative universe of possibilities. The play was developed to tour to schools.
City Radio station was featured last week in the Lantern. Read about it here. The weekly feature, which airs twice a day on Fridays, also is available on the station's website. A new group of emerging artists in town -- including theatre artist Chris Roche, jazz musician Joe Graziosi (left), theatre artist Emily Bach and visual artist Helma Groot -- were interviewed by host Karen Bell last week; their pieces will be up on the website shortly.
With an unusually broad scope encompassing how Europeans taught and learned reading and writing at all levels, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe provides a synoptic picture of medieval and early modern instruction in rhetoric, poetics, and composition theory and practice. As Marjorie Curry Woods convincingly argues, the decision of Geoffrey of Vinsauf (fl. 1200) to write his rhetorical treatise in verse resulted in a unique combination of rhetorical doctrine, poetic examples, and creative exercises that proved malleable enough to inspire teachers for three centuries.
Based on decades of research, this book excerpts, translates, and analyzes teachers’ notes and commentaries in the more than two hundred extant manuscripts of the text. We learn the reasons for the popularity of the Poetria nova among medieval and early Renaissance teachers, how prose as well as verse genres were taught, why the Poetria nova was a required text in central European universities, its attractions for early modern scholars and historians, and how we might still learn from it today. Woods’ monumental achievement will allow modern scholars to see the Poetria nova as earlier Europeans did: a witty and perennially popular text central to the experience of almost every student.